Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 3.djvu/114

Rh struments of his appetite are dull, broken, worn out. He recollects the wine and the debauch once rejoiced in; now they have lost their relish; his costly meat turns to gall in him. He remembers nothing but his feasting, and his riot, and his debauch. He has had his skin-full of animal gluttony, nothing more. He thinks of the time when the flesh was strong about him. So the Hebrews, whom Moses led out of thraldom, remembered the leeks and the onions and the garlic which they did eat in Egypt freely, and said, "Carry us back to Egypt, that we may serve false gods, and be full." He dreams of his old life: some night of sickness, when opium has drugged him to sleep, it comes up once more. His old fellow-sinners have risen from the dead; they prepare the feast; they pour the wine; they sing the filthy, ribald song; the lewd woman comes in his dream;—alas! it is only a dream; he wakes with his gout and his chagrin. Let us leave him with his bottle and his bloat, his recollection and his gout. Poor old man!—his grey hairs not venerable, but stained with drunkenness and lust. So have I seen, in other lands, the snows of winter fall on what was once a mountain that spouted cataracts of fire. Now all is cold, and the volcano's crater is but a bowl of ice, which no mortal summer can melt; and underneath it there are the scoriae and the lava which the volcano threw up in its heat — cold, barren, ugly to look on. young man ! young maid ! would you be buried alive, to die of rot, in such a grave as that?

Here is an old man who loved nothing but money. Instead of a conscience, heart, and soul, he had only a three- headed greedy-worm, which longed for money—copper, silver, gold. In youth, he minted his passion into current coin, courting an estate; in manhood, he was ambitious only for gold; in old age, he has his money, the passion and ambition therefor; the triple greedy-worm, three times more covetous than before. As the powers of the body fail, his lust for gold grows fiercer in that decay:

How afraid he is of the assessor! In youth avarice was a passion; in manhood calculation; but now the passion