Friar Lawrence,
who is a good old man, is perhaps the happiest of all in the _dramatis
personae_--unless we take the gossiping, garrulous old nurse, with her
sunny recollections of maturity and youth. The great thing is to have
the mind well employed, to work whilst it is yet day. The precise Duke
of Wellington, answering every letter with "F.M. presents his
compliments;" the wondrous worker Humboldt with his orders of
knighthood, stars, and ribbons, lying dusty in his drawer, still
contemplating _Cosmos_, and answering his thirty letters a day--were
both men in exceedingly enviable, happy positions; they had reached the
top of the hill, and could look back quietly over the rough road which
they had traveled. We are not all Humboldts or Wellingtons; but we can
all be busy and good. Experience must teach us all a great deal; and if
it only teaches us not to fear the future, not to cast a maundering
regret over the past, we can be as happy in old age--ay, and far more
so--than we were in youth. We are no longer the fools of time and error.
We are leaving by slow degrees the old world; we stand upon the
threshold of the new; not without hope, but without fear, in an
exceedingly natural position, with nothing strange or dreadful about it;
with our domain drawn within a narrow circle, but equal to our power.
Muscular strength, organic instincts, are all gone; but what then? We do
not want them; we are getting ready for the great change, one which is
just as necessary as it was to be born; and to a little child perhaps
one is not a whit more painful--perhaps not so painful as the other.
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