the most beautiful and touching of all he has written,--he sets before
his friend, in melancholy contrast, the return of the seasons, and of
the moon renewed in brightness, with the end of man, who sinks into the
endless dark, leaving nothing save ashes and shadows. He then, in the
true spirit of his philosophy, urges Torquatus to give his present hour
and wealth to pleasures and delights, as he had no assurance of
to-morrow."

"In something of the same strain," said I, "Moschus moralizes on the
death of Bion:--

Our trees and plants revive; the rose
In annual youth of beauty glows;
But when the pride of Nature dies,
Man, who alone is great and wise,
No more he rises into light,
The wakeless sleeper of eternal night.'"

"It reminds me," said Elder Staples, "of the sad burden of
Ecclesiastes, the mournfulest book of Scripture; because, while the
preacher dwells with earnestness upon the vanity and uncertainty of the
things of time and sense, he has no apparent hope of immortality to
relieve the dark picture. Like Horace, he sees nothing better than to
eat his bread with joy and drink his wine with a merry heart. It seems
to me the wise man might have gone farther in his enumeration of the
folly and emptiness of life, and pronounced his own prescription for the
evil vanity also. What is it but plucking flowers on the banks of the
stream which hurries us over the cataract, or feasting on the thin crust
of a volcano upon delicate meats prepared over the fires which are soon
to ingulf us? Oh, what a glorious contrast to this is the gospel of Him