Non-Fiction > Books > London, 1887 - Virginibus Puerisque, and other papers

62 " Virginibus Puerisque "
of a few years. Indeed, it seems strange ;
but if we call to mind analogies, we can
hardly regard it as impossible.
. " The blind bow-boy," who smiles upon us
from the end of terraces in old Dutch gardens,
laughingly hails his bird-bolts among a fleet-
ing generation. But for as fast as ever he
shoots, the game dissolves and disappears
into eternity from under his falling arrows ;
this one is gone ere he is struck ; the other
has but time to make one gesture and give
one passionate cry ; and they are all the
things of a moment. When the generation
is gone, when the play is over, when the
thirty years' panorama has been withdrawn
in tatters from the stage of the world, we
may ask what has become of these great,
weighty, and undying loves, and the sweet-
hearts who despised mortal conditions in a
fine credulity ; and they can only show us a
few songs in a bygone taste, a few actions
worth remembering, and a few children who
have retained some happy stamp from the
disposition of their parents.