The Steam-Packet: A Tale of the River and the Ocean — page 239: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

182 THE STEAM PACKET. current of time winds slowly along, washing away the sands of life, and wasting the vigour of our greener years, like the stream that steals away the soil from the sapling upon its bank, we look with a kind of ‘melancholy joy at the decay of things around us. To see the trees under whose shade we sat-in our earlier years, and upon whose rinds we carved our names in the light-hearted gaiety of boyhood, as if these frail memorials of our existence would long survive us—to see these withering away like ourselves with the infirmities of age, excites within us mournful but pleasant feelings for the past; and prophetic ones for the future. The thoughts occasioned by these frail and perishing re- cords of our younger years, when the friends who are now lingering like ourselves upon the brink of the grave, or have long been asleep. in its quiet bosom, were around us, buoyant with the gaiety of youth- ful spirits, are fike the dark clouds when the storm is gone, tinged by: the farewell rays of the setting sun. In these recollections of former times, the past and the present meet together. We go back again into the valley of youth; we gaze upon the vestiges we left behind us then, and tread in the footsteps we trod in before. We recollect the thoughtlessness and hilarity, the summer and sunshine of boyhood, the hopes and fears, the aspirations and re- velries of youth; and we may remember, too, that those whose hearts were lightest and whose hopes the fairest, were sooner than others summoned away to the desolate and voiceless halls of death! Of those who were around us in the spring-time of life, and went hand in hand with us through the summer journey of youth, all perhaps have parted from us, each to pursue a separate path toward his own destination. This parting may have been the last time we beheld them, from whom we never before parted. We recollect the farewell pressure of the hand, the countenance of hope and sadness, and the melancholy voice,. whose tones we now think had something prophetic in them, that told us we were never to meet again! They had gone to foreign climes; become strangers in strange lands; felt the chastenings of adversity, and found rest from the cares and toils of the world i in the repose of the tomb. . When we hear of the death of friends; when we know that those who loved and were loved by us, have gone before us into the vale of death, and fallen asleep upon the bosom of the earth, never again to waken the thousand endearments and tendernesses which, wound un- noticed around our hearts, and strengthened with the lapse of years, have broken and withered away, though hardly without severing the chords of life with them, we call to mind their gentleness, their forgiv- ing kindness, and their benevolence toward us: and with these come : } : Gomicbooks:. co