material for it is a tour-de-force of enumeration applied to symptoms of senile decay and death. It is highly instructive, in the discussion of imagery and symbolism, to put side by side two treatments of the same theme, one by a great Elizabethan poet, the other in the oriental style of Ecclesiastes. Sackville places in his underworld an image of Old Age: the necessities of the situation lead him to an extreme of imagery and other devices of realistic effect.

And next in order sad Old Age we found,

His beard all hoar, his eyes hollow and blind;
With drooping cheer still poring on the ground,
As on the place where nature him assigned
To rest, when that the sisters had untwined
His vital thread, and ended with their knife
The fleeting course of fast declining life.

But who had seen him, sobbing how he stood
Unto himself, and how he would bemoan
His youth forpast, as though it wrought him good
To talk of youth, all were his youth foregone:
He would have mused, and marvelled much, whereon
This wretched age should life desire so fain,
And knows full well life doth but length his pain.

Crookback'd he was, tooth shaken, and blear-eyed:
Went on three feet, and sometimes crept on four;
With old lame bones that rattled by his side,

His scalp all pill'd, and he with eld forlore;
His wither'd fist still knocking at death's door;
Tumbling and drivelling as he draws his breath:
For brief, the shape and messenger of death.1

With this compare the Biblical sonnet.

Remember also thy Creator in the days of thy youth:

Or ever the evil days come,

And the years draw nigh

When thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them.

1 From Sackville's Induction to the Mirror for Magistrates.

Or ever the sun,

And the light,

And the moon,

And the stars,

Be darkened,

And the clouds return after the rain;

In the day when the keepers of the house shall tremble,
And the strong men shall bow themselves,

And the grinders cease because they are few,

And those that look out of the windows be darkened,

And the doors shall be shut in the street;

When the sound of the grinding is low,

And one shall rise up at the voice of a bird,

And all the daughters of music shall be brought low;

Yea, they shall be afraid of that which is high,

And terrors shall be in the way;

And the almond tree shall blossom,

And the grasshopper shall be a burden,
And the caper-berry shall burst:

Because man goeth to his long home,
And the mourners go about the streets.

Or ever the silver cord be loosed,

Or the golden bowl be broken,

Or the pitcher be broken at the fountain,
Or the wheel broken at the cistern:

And the dust return to the earth,

As it was;

And the spirit return unto God

Who gave it.

In the powerful vision of Sackville every detail paints a picture; the sonnet introduces ideas which have no visible resemblance to the spectacle of old age, and yet the comparison they call for stirs a melancholy pleasure. Light fitly symbolises the joy of mere existence the darkening of sun and moon and stars recalls the gradual loss of pleasure in life for its own sake. Youth with its

troubles and quick rallying knows only the summer showers: when the rallying power is gone, "the clouds return after the rain." The "wither'd fist still knocking at death's door" stamps the picture of the infirmity upon the imagination: the shaking hands. recede into the distance when, with a whole group of like infirmities, they are represented by the elements of panic in a citytrembling keepers, strong men bowed down, grinders ceasing to work and spectators to look out of windows, while every door is made fast. Similar dim symbols just touch the loss of appetite, of sleep, of voice; the timid and uncertain gait; the sparse hairs of age, its feeble strength. The sudden bursting of the caperberry that has been long shrivelling up marks the transition to the reality that is being symbolised:

Man goeth to his long home,

And the mourners go about the streets.

For the actual death that puts a period to the gradual decay other apt symbols follow: the house lamp of gold that has been secretly straining its silver chain now suddenly dropped and extinguished; the pitcher that has gone daily to the fountain, the cistern wheel that so long has mechanically turned, at last broken and useless. A long string of life's dull infirmities, from all of which realistic imagery must shrink as things unlovely, has been transformed into a thing of enduring beauty by casting over it the softening veil of symbolism.