man persuades himself that he will not live long, or that his prospects
in this world or the next are gloomy; or he takes views as absurdly far-
reaching as those of the spinsters in the old tale, who wept over the
hypothetical fate of the child one of them might have had if she had been
married. Now, there is a certain melancholy not unbecoming a man;
indeed, to be without it is hardly to be human. Here we do find
ourselves, indeed, like the shipwrecked mariner on the isle of Pascal's
apologue; all around us are the unknown seas, all about us are the
indomitable and eternal processes of generation and corruption. "We come
like water, and like wind we go." Life is, indeed, as the great Persian
says--

"A moment's halt, a momentary taste
Of being from the well beside the waste."

These just causes of melancholy and of awe have presented themselves to
all reflective men at all times. They deeply affect the thought, so
wholesome and so human, of Homer. They express themselves in that old
English pagan's allegory of the bird that flies from the dark into the
warm and lighted hall, and from the hall into the dark again. Not to be
capable of these reflections is to be incapable of tasting the noblest
poetry. Such thoughts actually give zest to our days, and sharpen our
enjoyment of that which we have only a brief moment to enjoy. Such
thoughts add their own sweetness and sadness to the song of the
nightingale, to the fall of the leaves, to the coming of the spring. Were
we "exempt from eld and age," this noble melancholy could never be ours,
and we, like the ancient classical gods, would be incapable of tears.
What Prometheus says in Mr. Bridge's poem is true--

"Not in heaven,