tween apprehension and hope; the emaciation; the hæmorrhages; the peculiarly interesting traits which often irradiate the countenance; the ultimate difficulty of respiration; the final extinction of the breath; are but too well known, and too often witnessed. Of those who are thus removed, and who form by far the largest number of victims of any one disease, as reckoned in our statistical tables, many are in the bloom of youth or of early manhood. For this cause, they have less often attained celebrity than those whose path has been closed by other maladies. Still, the bright signs of precocious genius have frequently blazed up, only to be extinguished by consumption. So, at sixteen, died that young Josiah of England, Edward the Sixth; so, even earlier, the sweet songstresses, Lucretia and Maria Davidson; so, at twenty-one, Henry Kirke White; so Baratier, a prodigy of youthful learning.

But the venerable Bede expired also under an asthmatic consumption; it exhausted the bodily endurance, but not the inward patience, of Donne and Scougal, of Bishop Davenant and Kettlewell, of Bishop Bagot and of Henry Thornton; it ended the days of Spinosa and of Bayle, and withered the laurels of Bürger, of the tender and profound Novalis, of the brilliant Keats in all his promise, and of our affectionate Brainard.

Those deep, internal maladies, which have their seat in the whole system of the circulation, or which plant decay in some particular organ, are met, it may be, for a time, and baffled by the resources of skill and experience. The body may partially, perhaps almost entirely, fulfil its work, even when its powers have become imperfect. With uneasiness and pain, however, in some of its functions, it bears up against the obstruction. The progress of the chronic disease is

sometimes imperceptible, and sometimes interrupted; but the vital organization is ever like a besieged city. Barrier after barrier yields, till the citadel itself is assailed. The powers of life offer there their last resistance; but it has become feebler after so many losses; and at length the breath ceases, and the pulse throbs

no more.

XXVII.

Death from Old Age.

"Like a shadow thrown

Softly and lightly from a passing cloud,

Death fell upon him."

WORDSWORTH.

IF no violence interrupt the life of man; if he escape the diseases incident to infancy, youth, and manhood; if his frame be complete, and be preserved from all occasional perils, or preserved through them all; if no particular portion of his system yield to a premature decay, he may live on to old age, the survivor of most of his contemporaries. Death finds him at last, through some lighter attack, which at an earlier period would hardly have seemed a sickness; or through a general cessation of all the wheels of life, as if they were merely brought to a stand by the exhaustion of the original force which had impelled their motion. This is the death of old age, when no other cause, or no other cause of importance, except old age itself, can be assigned for the general dissolution of physical

nature.

A nervous fever cut off, with little violence, the life of the aged Kosciusko. Bishop Hurd, having lived to a great age, much beyond fourscore, and having passed his closing years in a dignified and devout seclusion, fell asleep one night and never awoke. The still more venerable Bishop Barrington, at ninety-two, read the (137)

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Sunday lessons to his household, told them it would be for the last time, and a few days after expired, almost imperceptibly to his attendants. In like manner, Archbishop Harcourt, who died at ninety, had worshipped at York minster on the Sunday before his death, and ceased to live as if through mere exhaustion. The death of the elder Adams and of Jefferson on the same day; and that day the anniversary, and the fiftieth anniversary, of the most memorable event of their lives, the Declaration of American Independence, is to be explained, no doubt, by their extremely weak hold on life-a hold so slight that it was relaxed by the excitement of the occasion and its recollections.

Paul, the first

The ancient hermits and anchorets, after lingering through an austere and solitary life, often, in the extreme of old age, dropped gently into the grave. Even Simeon the Stylite became an old man upon his pillar, from which he descended only to die. monk, was found dead upon his knees. Anthony, his successor, surrounded by his disciples, stretched himself out and expired. In a milder retirement and later age, Thomas à Kempis passed beyond his ninetieth year. Huet, the learned Bishop of Avranches, survived as long. Bishop Leslie was much more than a hundred years old when he died, and Bishop Wilson at ninety-two, Sir Christopher Wren at ninety-one, and General Oglethorpe, the founder of Georgia, at ninetyseven, flickered and went out, like the last lights of their generation. Yet the gay and frivolous Ninon de l'Enclos faded away also at more than ninety.

So the mortal frame may remain till its very organization is dissolved by its own natural, unavoidable decay. The decline is very often attended by a loss of much of that intercourse with the external world which

is carried on through the senses and the memory. Much of the beauty, as well as of the vigour of the form, has long since departed. The eye has lost its brightness, the skin its bloom, the hair has fallen from the hoary head, the teeth are seen no more, the step is weak and trembling; and every thing tells that man goeth to his long home. There is much of peace in this spectacle of death, when death arrives merely in the latest and easiest form of gentle, gradual, natural decline. But it is still a solemn fulfilment of that great sentence, which, in so many forms, is executed upon the race of men; thinning the ranks of a generation, and enfeebling more and more the few who linger behind, till at length they lie down and sleep, as if weary with watching.