Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 3.djvu/109

96 He took his father's sword in hand and swore to conquer him "houses and lands by the sea." He also is a Viking. He has been all over the Mediterranean coast, and conquered him "houses and lands by the sea;" now, in his old age, his palace in Byzantium is a weariness to him, and he longs for the little cottage of his mother. He dreams of the goats; all day the kids bleat for him. He enters a little barque; he sails for the Scandinavian coast, and goes to the very cottage too narrow for his childhood, and eats again the barken bread of Sweden, and drinks its bitter beer; bares his forehead to the storm ; sits on the rocks, and there he dies. "Bury me not, I pray thee, in Egypt," said old Jacob, "*but I will lie with my fathers: bury me in their burying-place."

Then the scholar becomes an antiquary; he likes not young men unless he knew their grandfathers before. The young woman looks in the newspaper for the marriages, the old man for the deaths. The young man's eye looks forward; the world is "all before him, where to choose." It is a hard world; he does not know it: he works little, and hopes much. The middle-aged man looks around at the present; he has found out that it is a hard world: he hopes less, and works more. The old man looks back on the fields he has trod;" this is the tree I planted; this is my footprint;" and he loves his old house, his old carriage, cat, dog, staff, and friend. In lands where the vine grows, I have seen an old man sit all day long, a sunny autumn day, before his cottage door, in a great arm-chair, his old dog couched at his feet, in the genial sun. The autumn wind played with the old man's venerable hairs; above him on the wall, purpling in the sunlight, hung the full clusters of the grape, ripening and maturing yet more. The two were just alike; the wind stirred the vine leaves, and they fell ; stirred the old man's hair, and it whitened yet more. Both were waiting for the spirit in them to be fully ripe. The young man looks forward; the old man looks back. How far-extended the shadows lie in the setting sun; the steeple a mile long reaching across the plain, as the sun stretches out the hills in grotesque dimensions. So are the events of life in the old man's consciousness.