e appeared for thirty or forty
or fifty years, it would be interesting to watch the gradual changes of
aspect from the age of twenty, or even of thirty or forty, to that of
threescore and ten. The face might be an uninteresting one; still,
as sharing the inevitable changes wrought by time, it would be worth
looking at as it passed through the curve of life,--the vital parabola,
which betrays itself in the symbolic changes of the features. An
inscription is the same thing, whether we read it on slate-stone, or
granite, or marble. To watch the lights and shades, the reliefs and
hollows, of a countenance through a lifetime, or a large part of it, by
the aid of a continuous series of photographs would not only be curious;
it would teach us much more about the laws of physiognomy than we could
get from casual and unconnected observations.

The same kind of interest, without any assumption of merit to be found
in them, I would claim for a series of annual poems, beginning in middle
life and continued to what many of my correspondents are pleased to
remind me--as if I required to have the fact brought to my knowledge--is
no longer youth. Here is the latest of a series of annual poems
read during the last thirty-four years. There seems to have been one
interruption, but there may have been other poems not recorded or
remembered. This, the latest poem of the series, was listened to by the
scanty remnant of what was a large and brilliant circle of classmates
and friends when the first of the long series was read before them, then
in the flush of ardent manhood:--

THE OLD SONG.

The minstrel of the classic lay
Of love and wine who sings
Still found the fingers run astray
That touched the rebel strings.

Of Cadmus he would fair have sung,
Of Atreus and his line;
But all the jocund echoes rung
With songs of love and wine.

Ah, brothers! I would fair have caught
Some fresher fancy's gleam;
My truant accents find, unsought,
The old familiar theme.

Love, Love! but not the sportive child
With shaft and twanging bow,
Whose random arrows drove us wild
Some threescore years ago;

Not Eros, with his joyous laugh,
The urchin blind and bare,
But Love, with spectacles and staff,
And scanty, silvered hair.

Our heads with frosted locks are white,
Our roofs are thatched with snow,
But red, in chilling winter's spite,
Our hearts and hearthstones glow