Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 3.djvu/117

104 Here is a woman who has sought chiefly the admiration of the world, the praise of men. Her life is vanity long drawn out, the only frailty which joins her to mankind. Now she is an old woman of fashion—wearing still the garments of her earlier prime, which, short and scanty as they were, are yet a world too wide for shrunken age to fill. How ill those gaudy ruffles become the withered dew-lap that hangs beneath her chin! Her life has been a long cheat; she has had no calculation but for vanity, setting a trap to catch a compliment: it is fit her age should be a deceit. That colour—the painter did it; the plumpness—it is artificial; the hair—false; the teeth—are purchased at a shop; the hands—all glove and bone, and great big veins; the tongue—it was always artificial and false; it needs no other change. Yet she apes the tread of youth. Alas! poor fly! For this you have lived; nay, flirted!—it is not life. This, then, is the end of the waltzes, and polkas, and cracoviennes; this is the pay for he morning study over dress, the afternoon prattle about it, the evening spent in putting on this gaudy attire. Poor creature! in youth, a worm; in womanhood, "a butterfly; in old age, your wings all tattered, your plumage rent, a "fingered moth,"—old, shrivelled, sick, perching on nothing, and perishing into dust ; the laughter of the witty; the scorn of the thoughtless ; only the pity of the wise and good ! What a three-act drama is her life—youth, womanhood, age! Vanity sits- there in front of the stage, known but not seen, and prompts the play—the words, the grimace. What music it is! from the opera, the lewdest and the wildest, and from the Catholic Judgment-Hymn, mingled together in the same confusion which behind the scenes her toilet table brings to view, where you also find "puffs, powders, patches, Bibles, billet-doux." Now the audience is tired of her, and laughs at the hollow voice, the bleary eye, the spindle limbs. The curtain falls; the farce is at an end. Poor old butterfly! Death and Vanity carry her between them to fitting burial and the Mercy-Seat of the Infinite God.

What a beautiful thing is the old age which crowns a noble life, of rich or poor! How fair are the latter days of many a woman—wife, mother, sister, aunt, friend—