NEW TEAK'S EVE.

Press, Volume XLV, Issue 7242, 31 December 1888, Page 3

NEW TEAK'S EVE.

Bt Georob William Ctnrns.

In Germany on Sylvesterabend- the e*e of Saint- Sylvester, the last night of the year—you shall wake and hear a chorus ol voices singing hymns, like the English waits at Christmas or the Italian jrifferari.

In the deep silence, and to ono awakening, the music has a penetrating and indefinable pathos, the pathos that Rlchter remarked in all music, and which our own Parsons has hinted delicately—

Strango was tho tmwic that over mo stolo. For'twas born of old sadness that lives in nij soul.

There is something of the same feeling in the melody of college songs jheard at a little distance on awakening in the night before Commencement. The songe are familiar, but they have an appealing melancholy unknown before. Their dying cadences murmur like a mufflod peal heralding t he visionary procession that is passing out of the enchanted realm of youth forever. So the voices of Sylvester's Eve chant the requiem of the year that Iβ dead. So much more of life, of opportunity, of achievement, passed; so much nearer age, decline, the mystery of the end. The music swells in rich and lingering strains. It is a moment of exaltation, of purification. The chords are dying ; the hymn is ending; it ends. The voices are stilled. It is the benediction of Sain* Sylvester. " She died and loft to m 0.... Tho memory of what has boon And nevermore will bs." But this is the midnight refrain—The Kins; is dead! With tho earliest ray o* daylight the exulting strain Ixsgins—Live the King! Tho bells are ringing ; tho children are shouting; there are gifts and greetings, good wishes and gladness* " Happy New Year ! happy New Year!" It is the day of hope and fresh beginning. Old debts shall bo forgiven : old feuds for. gotten ; old friendships revived. To-day shall be better than yesterday. The good vows shall be. kept. A blessing shall be wrung from tho fleet angel Opportunity. There shall be more patience, more courage, more faith; the dream shall become life. to-day shall wear tho glamour of to! morrow. King out the old, ring in the new. Charles Lamb says that no ono ever regarded the first of January with indifference ; no one, ths.t is to say. of tho now style. But a fellow-pilgrim of the old s tyle, before Pope Gregory retrenched those ten days in October, 300 years ago» or the British Parliament those eleven days in September, 135 years ago, took no thought of the first of January. It was. a date of no significance. To have mused and moralised upon that day more than upon any other would have exposed him to the mischance against which Rufua Choate asked his daughter to defend him at the opera : " Tell mc, my dear, when to applaud, lest unwittingly I dilate with the wrong emotion." The Pope and the Parliament played havoc with the date ot the proper annual emotion. Moreover, it a man should happen to think of it, every day is a New Year's Day. IE we proposes prospect or a retrospect we can stand tiptoe on the top of every day, yeß, and of every hour, in the year. Good morning Is but a daily greeting of Happy New Year.

But these smooth generalizations and truisms do not disturb the charm of regularly recurring times and seasons. That the sth of October, or any day in any month, actually begins a new year, doea not give to that date tho significance and the feeling of the Ist of January. Our fellow-pilgrim of the old style must look out for himself. He may have begun his year in March, and a blustcrine birth ib was. But we are children of the new style, and the first of January Is our New Year. That is our day of remembrance, our feast of hope, the first page of our fresh calendar of good resolutions, the day of underscoring and • emphafcis of ' the swift lapse of life. " A few more of them 9 and then—" whispers the mentor, who is not deceived by the jolly compliments of the season, and the sober significance of the whisper is plain enough. " Eheu I Posthume," sang the old Roman. " This world and the next, and all's over I" said airy Tom Lackwlt to the afflicted widow.

The relentless puncutality.the unwearied urgency, of old Time, who turns his hour* glass with such a sonorous ring on NewYear's Day, seems sometimes a little, wanting in the best breeding. I| furnishes so unnecessary a register. The slow wnitening and thinning of tho hair j the gradual incision of wrinkles; the queer antic 3of the sight, which holds the newspaper at farther and farther removes, until at last it is forced to succumb to glasses ; the abated pace of walking; th° dexterous avoidance of stone walls Iα country rambles; the harmless frauds lurking in the expressed reason for frequent pauses in climbing a hill to turn and see the landscape—frauds which the tears of my Uncle Toby's good angel promptly wash away; the general and gradual adjustment to greater respose, all these surely adequate reminders and signs of the sovereignty of Time. Why should he be greedy of more? "Why thump and rattle at the door, as it wore, on the flrsb of January, and bawl out to the- whole world that we are a year older, and that* makes—!

makes —l The worst of it is that It is positive interference with the just play of the fundamental truth that age is not justly measurable by the more lapeo of time* Some people are never young, otUers defy age. This, indeed, is due to temperament. But that is not all. Those gray hairs and wrinkles, that eyesight of less keenness, that disinclination to leap walls, and thosa fraudulent halts to. survey the rearward, landscape, are enemies whose assaults areby no means regular. They come at very different times to different peopleAdolphus at sixty despises apeetaclesr Triptolemus at thirty is bald. The hair of Horatius at sixty-five is as affluent as Hyperion's, and as dark without unguenta as the raven's plume. Let facts speak fc a candid world. "Why should that gray* beard Paul Fry called Time blare through a speaking-trumpet that the bray* Valentine— , , , / / "As wild his thougUW and gay of wing As Edon's garden bird"— is just aa old as old toothless, tottering decrepit Orson ? Every well-regulated citizen of the world is interested, and; more vitally Interested* with every closing year, that upon the point of age all men shall be left to their merits, and shall not be measured arbitrarily by that Procrustean standard of years. It is notorious that men grow wiser every year, and it S» observable that the more years th.ey have, the more they look with dqubt and questioning upon th e Family Keeord. Those leaves of births following the doubtful books of Scripture* registered with such painful and needless particularity of dates, partake of the doubt' fulness of their neighbourhood. They are mere intercalations, new books of the Ajjeerypha. "Set they often cause young fellows of seventy to be accused and«onvicted of being old men. > Since, thnp, we cannot stop the flight of Tirade, let htm pass. But he must not calumniate as he passes. Be must not be allowed to stigmatize vigour and health and freshness of feeling and the young heart and tfw agile foot as old merely because oof a. certain number of years. This \a the season of good resolutions. The. «ew year begins in a snow-storm of white, YQWa, So be it. But let our whiteejb tow be, after that for a whiter life, that age-, shall no longer be by this arbitrary . standard of yeaje, and that those; deceitful and octogenarians ot thirty shall n,pfc escape as young merelsr because., tfeoy* have not yet shorn* the strength to carry threescore and ten with jocund elasticity.

Then Happy New Tear ehall not mean Good-night, but Good-morrow.