The preacher, whose text was Vanity of vanities, all is vanity, pictures in one section of his homily a man who has lived many years, “so that the days of his years be many,” but whose soul is not filled with good, but aches rather with a gnawing sense of emptiness, so that his many years, gloomy as they have been, are all too few. “Yea, though he live a thousand years twice told, yet hath he seen no good: do not all go to one place?” What more tedious than such a twice-told tale of years? Yet, to look back upon, how fleet their transit, how imperceptible their lapse, how petty the sum of them! That tale is soon told, even if told twice.

The days of our life are threescore years and ten, and though men be so strong that they come to fourscore years, yet is their strength then but labour and sorrow; nor do the fourscore seem longer to the retrospective reviewer than do to the sexagenarian his sixty years, or to the septuagenarian his threescore and ten. The most popular of contemporary authors describes a man of seventy-eight, of whom a loveless, sad-hearted questioner asks whether his seventy-eight years would not be seventy-eight heavy curses, if he could say to himself, as the questioner can, “I have secured to myself the love and attachment, the gratitude or respect, of no human creature; I have won myself a tender place in no regard; I have done nothing good or serviceable to be remembered by.” The Royal Preacher would apply context as well as text to such a retrospect, with an “I say, that an untimely birth is better than he. For he cometh in with vanity, and departeth in darkness, and his name shall be covered with darkness. Moreover he hath not seen the sun, nor known anything: this hath more rest than the other. Yea, though he live a thousand years twice told, yet hath he seen no good.”

The same questioner, already cited, asks the same old man if his childhood seems far off,—if the days when he sat at his mother’s knee seem days of very long ago? To which the experience of threescore and eighteen years gives this reply: “Twenty years back, yes: at this time of my life, no. For, as I draw closer and closer to the end, I travel in the circle, nearer and nearer to the beginning.” But he is not one to feel and say with the French cynic, “Mais enfin la vie se passe, et mourir après s’être amusé ou s’être ennuyé dix ou vingt ans, c’est la même chose.” He has not so learned life, and the meaning of life, and its purpose, and its end.

Infinite is the swiftness of time, says Seneca, as seen by those who are looking back at time past. Infinita est velocitas temporis, quæ magis apparet respicientibus. Looked forward to, it is another matter altogether. As Cowper has it, when retracing the windings of his way through many years,—

But as Cowper elsewhere draws the contrast, in the Latin motto he wrote for the king’s clock,—

(Slow comes the hour; its passing speed how great!—so Hayley Englished the line.) “Since this new epoch in my life,” writes Schleiermacher on a certain occasion, “time seems to fly twice as quickly as before, and I can quite fancy that when Jatte and I are grown old and grey, we shall still feel as if only a few days had gone by.” Moore was in his sixtieth year when Lord John Russell talked with him of the speed with which time seems to fly; and Moore records in his Diary the question he put, “If you find it so now, what will you say of it when you are as old as I am?” The “peculiar melancholy” of the answer given is emphasised in the same journal.

Another retrospective reviewer pictures our race as struggling ever onward, toiling up towards some air-built goal never to be attained—while the past crumbles instantly away behind our steps, like the staircase of the Epicurean, as we advance in our progress; and every step, which was of such magnitude when we passed it, is forgotten in the “collectiveness of retrospection,” insomuch that at times a passing thought would compass the events of years.

Few and evil the patriarch declares the days of the years of his pilgrimage to have been, when, in answer to Pharaoh’s “How old art thou?” the answer is, A hundred and thirty years. Man that is born of a woman is of few days, said another patriarch, and full of trouble. His days are swifter than a post, they flee away, they see no good. They are passed away as the swift ships; they are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle. Festinat enim decurrere velox Flosculus angustæ miseræque brevissima vitæ Portio. And thus in Juvenal’s pregnant phrase, obrepit non intellecta senectus. Or, as with the ageing subject of the Three Warnings,—

We bring our years to an end, as it were a tale that is told.

In one of his letters to his old friend Mrs. Hughes, Southey commences a paragraph with the truism, “The last twenty years, to you and me, are but as yesterday;” and he adds, that if we could but bring ourselves to feel, as truly as we know, that the next twenty years are but as to-morrow, that feeling, with a trust in God’s mercy, would be sufficient consolation under all sorrows. Half a year later we find him writing to her in the same strain: “It seems but as yesterday when I look back twenty, thirty, forty, and even more years; the end, therefore, of my mortal term would seem but as to-morrow if it were rightly looked on to. A little while, and we shall be young again, beyond all power of time and change, with those whom we love, and to continue with them for ever and ever.” Madame de Sévigné utters her pure French hélas! over the like retrospect of twenty years: “Hélas! est-il possible qu’il y ait vingt-un ans? il me esembleque ce fut l’année passée; mais je juge, par le peu que m’a duré ce temps, ce que me paraîtront les années qui viendront encore.” Home, straight home to every heart comes the homely moral of the bard addressing the busy, curious, thirsty fly he freely welcomed to his cup, and whose little life he compared with his longer yet little own:—

If for threescore we read fourscore, it would not mar the metre, or the rhyme or reason.

Man is never so deluded as when he dreams of his own duration, says Cowper; and he goes on to cite Jacob’s retrospective reviewal of years elapsed: “The answer of the old patriarch to Pharaoh may be adapted by every man at the close of the longest life. ‘Few and evil have been the days of the years of my pilgrimage.’ Whether we look back from fifty or from twice fifty, the past equally appears a dream; and we can only be said truly to have lived while we have been profitably employed.” And as the sovereign lady of French letter-writers has her Hélas! so one of the princes among English letter-writers has his Alas! to utter on this trite topic, “Alas, then, making the necessary deductions, how short is life!” Though the life be made up of a thousand years twice told, the tale is told so soon, and the teller seems to himself but as a dreamer, and his little life is rounded with a sleep; like as a dream when one awaketh.

The good emperor Marcus Antoninus, one of those whom a broad churchmanship is free and fain to recognise as Seekers after God, is taken to intimate that the difference between a so-called long and a short life is insignificant, in regard of Eternity, when he indites this aphorism, among his Meditations: “When frankincense is thrown upon the altar, one grain usually falls before another; but then the distance of time is of no moment.” The moments, so to speak, of difference, are not momentous. Do not all go to one place?

But in the issue, all depends on the using. Happy the few and evil years of a patriarch, if a patriarch indeed, of a pilgrim going home. Be they few and evil in one sense, or in another very many,—