TO-DAY. "The Past is all by death possess'd, FENTON. TO-DAY is like a child's pocket-money, which he never thinks of keeping in his pocket. Considering it bestowed upon us for the sole purpose of being expended as fast as possible in dainties, toys, and knickknacks, we should reproach ourselves for meanness of spirit were we to hoard it up, or appropriate it to any object of serious utility. It is the only part of life of which we are sure; yet we treat it as if it were the sole portion of existence beyond our control. We make sage reflections upon the past, and wise resolutions for the future, but no one ever forms an important determination for to-day. Whatever is urgent must be reserved for to-morrow; the present hour is a digression, an episode that belongs not to the main business of life; we may cut it out altogether, and the plot will not be the less complete. Every sun-dial on the church wall thrusts out his gnomon, as if he would enforce his dictum at the point of the bayonet, or drive wisdom down our throats, to inform us that eternity hangs from the present moment; but we revolt from the schooling of this iron ferula. Who would be made wise by compulsion, and what ignorance is poltroon enough to surrender at discretion ? Moral lessons may be too pertinaciously obtruded; we may be reminded till we forget to listen, or we may retain the words and not the sentiment, learning our task by rote rather than by head or heart. This is the fault of modern education, which teaches the sound rather than the sense of things. Children taken from the nursery and pinned down to Latin and Greek, are instructed to name an object in three or four different languages, not to analyse its nature,-a process which may often make them learned, but rarely wise; for as knowledge is not confined to names, a great linguist may be a great fool. It is an equal mistake to give children mental food which they cannot digest, and dangle aphorisms before their eyes from sun-dials and church-sides, which they learn so early to repeat, that they are sure never to feel their influence. What he who runs may read, nobody will stop to consider; which is probably the reason why this didactic handwriting on the wall has ever proved an unavailing warning. Besides, there are many of maturer age who above all things dislike an apophthegm, which, preventing the complacent exercise of their own faculties, deprives them of the merit of discovery; while there are others so paradoxically inclined, that they will admit any thing rather than a truism, and can never be brought to see that which is self-evident;Hartleys in morals, they deny matters-of-fact as sturdily as he did physical matter. In spite, however, of its being a truism, it must be admitted that to-day is a portion of our existence. Granted, exclaims the idler; but, after all, what is a single day? A question which is peevishly repeated three hundred and sixty-five times in a year, when we commence a new score of similar interrogatories; so that we might as well say at once, "What is a single life?" Short as the interval may be, and however indolently we may have passed it, to-day has not been altogether unimportant. Perched upon our goodly vehicle, the Earth, we have swung through space at a tolerably brisk rate in the performance of our annual rotation around the sun;-so many miles of life's journey have at all events brought us so much nearer to its end; they are struck off from our account; we shall never travel over them again. With every tick of our watch in that brief space of time, some hundreds or thousands have started from the great ante-natal infinite to light and life; while as many have returned into the darkness of the invisible world. And we ourselves, though we sometimes exclaim like the Emperor Titus, that we have lost a day, may be well assured that today has not lost sight of us. The footsteps of Time may not be heard when he treads upon roses, but his progress is not the less certain; we need not shake his hour-glass to make the sands of life flow faster; they keep perpetually diminishing; night and day, asleep or awake, grain by grain, our existence dribbles away. We call those happy moments, when Time flies most rapidly, forgetting that he is the only winged personage who cannot fly backwards, and that his speed is but hurrying us to the grave. The Hours, his courtiers and outriders, are at this instant hovering around us, busy as the Sylphs and Gnomes of the Rosicru cians, though we be not sensible of their ministry. Yet now that I strictly watch my sensations, methinks I feel one busy imp faintly tracing the outline of the abhorred crow's foot at the corner of my eye, which future urchins will gradually stamp in ineffaceable lines. Another is craftily indenting a wrinkle by the mouth, to be hereafter chiselled into a deep furrow; a third plucks out a single hair, the precursory theft to final baldness; a fourth is boring his gimblet through my most potential masticator-fatal prelude to tooth-ach and extraction! a fifth malignant, grinning spitefully in the consciousness of his superior powers of annoyance, is distilling the first drop of his bleaching liquid upon my whiskers; while a sixth yellow-faced tormentor, the master-devil of the whole pandemonium, has leaped clean down my throat, and is at this moment, with a ladle of melted butter in one hand and a drumstick of a goose in the other, concocting the ingredients of a bilious attack. Our face is a chronometer, revealing our age with a fearful punctuality. The hour-hand leaves its impress with every rotation; nay, the minute hand makes its mark, though it may not write legibly. Smiles and laughter turn up the ends of the lines and indentations, as melancholy drags them down, turning our sixes into nines, and so putting us forward fifty per cent. Can we desire a better argument for merriment ? Alas! these are not the worst pranks of the horal legion, some of whose more subtle members fly from one chamber of the brain to another, muddying the current of clear thought, dulling the imagination, and VOL. II. undermining the memory. One hoaxer, in particular, is ever prompting me to repeat the same joke which I have recounted to the same people twenty times before, and then bursts out a-laughing because nobody else does. And, lo! even now sits one of these mischievous spirits upon the top of my pen, mocking and mowing, and perforating the quill, that so the spirit of the goose, from whose wing it was plucked, may flow down to the nib. Hence, sensilising tribe! avaunt, ye piecemeal destroyers! Which of ye thus flutters at mine ear? Ah! your reproach is too true. I recall my words: pursue your tasks, most dainty dilapidators, for your successors will set to work with a still more unsparing hand. To-day has a triple claim to our consideration, for, besides its present appeal, it has been the future, and will be the past. He is wise, says an ancient philosopher, who lives to-day: he is wiser still, exclaims his commentator, who lived yesterday. But what is the best mode of life for the attainment of happiness? This question has puzzled the philosophers of all ages. Pyrrho, denying the existence of any beatitude, maintained that life and death were alike; and when asked why he did not seek the latter, since the former was so little attractive, replied, "Because they are both indifferent to me." Croesus placed the chief good in riches Periander of Corinth in honour; Socrates in knowledge; Plato in idea; Orpheus in beauty; Milo the Crotonian in bodily strength; Thales the Milesian in the union of prudence and knowledge; Pittacus in benevolence; Aristotle in the practice and |