Image 101 of Theo Brown Diaries, 1948

Brown, Theophilus

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Image 101 of Theo Brown Diaries, 1948

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He remembers too the kindly face of a cross-eyed girl school mare,whose name he has forgotten; and hemakes a pilgrim- age to wander once more in a neadow where used to be spread hay, and to look again into a stream with cool deep holes and a clear sandy bottom, where he had first watched the fishes. It is more than curious to observe how the thought of change and age and death underruns all this joy in existence. He "fears no evil," but every birthday startles hiim; after sixty he thinks such a matter "might as well be hushed up." The vanishing of familiar forms summons his mind from the happy present to the fading past and the mysterious future. The ticking of the clock when he is sixty four recalls the way he heard it tick in the little one story house at Seekonk, and the whole procession of events passes. "We exchange worlds many times before we have a funeral which appears in the street." He walks alone among trees which have grown up since his childhood: their shade seems deep and suggestive. He has many sober reflections about the meagre results of his own life; but is not sure that such a view shows the whole truth. We find him taking a sober look forward at forty. The time will come, perhaps when he shalll have to take shorter walks and give up his favorite places; when he shall "sit down slow and breathe hard," though he has only come in from the garden. This decay and falling in of the outward man he can comtemplate calmy, but he has anxiety about the state of his inward man when he shall be old: "The thought is not pleasant to me that I may grow conservative and hard,- have no faith, no aspirations, no faith in the possibilities of the soul and the possi- bility of that which can be proved impossible." But he wisely concludes "that surest way of being alive tomorrow is to live today"- a principle that kept him sweet and sound and bright and glad to the end an coverted his best memories into hopes. This from one of his later letters: "How fast we are going, mygriend, - so fast we may get out of breath! Well, we have had a good time. I am glad I was invited, and glad I came; and I am glad you came."In 1872 he writes: "It is con- soling to think that this matter of old age is not chronic, and that after a certain crisis, we may come out at young as any of them." It only remains for us to put together the

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