himself equally respectable in youth and in age, and therefore is
content to live and look forward to wrinkles and decrepitude in their
due season. It is far otherwise with the busy idlers of the world. I
was particularly liable to this torment, being a meditative person in
spite of my levity. The truth could not be concealed, nor the
contemplation of it avoided. With deep inquietude I became aware that
what was graceful now, and seemed appropriate enough to my age of
flowers, would be ridiculous in middle life; and that the world, so
indulgent to the fantastic youth, would scorn the bearded than, still
telling love-tales, loftily ambitious of a maiden's tears, and squeezing
out, as it were, with his brawny strength, the essence of roses. And in
his old age the sweet lyrics of Anacreon made the girls laugh at his
white hairs the more. With such sentiments, conscious that my part in
the drama of life was fit only for a youthful performer, I nourished a
regretful desire to be summoned early from the scene. I set a limit to
myself, the age of twenty-five, few years indeed, but too many to be
thrown away. Scarcely had I thus fixed the term of my mortal
pilgrimage, than the thought grew into a presentiment that, when the
space should be completed, the world would have one butterfly the less,
by my far flight.

"O, how fond I was of life, even while allotting, as my proper destiny,
an early death! I loved the world, its cities, its villages, its grassy
roadsides, its wild forests, its quiet scenes, its gay, warm, enlivening
bustle; in every aspect, I loved the world so long as I could behold it
with young eyes and dance through it with a young heart. The earth had
been made so beautiful, that I longed for no brighter sphere, but only
an ever-youthful eternity in this. I clung to earth as if my beginning
and ending were to be there, unable to imagine any but an earthly
happiness, and choosing such, with all its imperfections, rather than