At the best, our days pass as in the dim
swiftness of a dream. The young man suddenly thinks, "It is but
yesterday that I was a child;" the middle-aged man finds the gray
hairs streaking his head before he has realised that his youth is
gone; the old man lives so completely in the past that he is taken
only by a gentle shock of surprise when he finds that the end is upon
him. Swiftly, like some wild hunt of shadows, the generations fleet
away--nothing stays their frantic speed; and to the true observer no
fictitious flight of spirits on the Brocken could be half so weird as
the passage of one generation of the children of men. As we grow old,
the appalling brevity of time impresses itself more and more on the
consciousness of calm and thoughtful men; yet nine-tenths of our race
spend the best part of their days in trying to make their ghostly
sweeping flight from eternity to eternity seem more rapid than it
really is. That hot and fevered youth who stands in the betting-ring
and nervously pencils his race-card never thinks that the time of
weakness and sadness and weariness is coming on; that gray and
tremulous old man who bends over the roulette-table never thinks that
he will speedily drop into a profundity deeper than ever plummet
sounded.
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