266 FROM A NEW ENGLAND HILLSIDE. 



are gone, and imagination calls up pictures 

 of the joys of the past, a great longing takes 

 possession of the soul of the scholar to walk 

 again the pleasant paths of youth, and 

 Mephistopheles emerges from the studious 

 gloom, and in harmonious accents tenders 

 his uncanny services. 



How often, and in how many forms, the 

 story comes to us ! How to hold fast to life 

 and its joys ; how to turn the hour glass, 

 and see again the sands running gently from 

 the full to the empty bulb. In fact and in 

 fiction : Ponce de Leon in search of the 

 fountain of youth ; the alchemists and the 

 Rosicrucians ; Paracelsus ; Claude Frollo 

 in Victor Hugo s &quot; Hunchback of Notre 

 Dame&quot;; the Illuminati in George Sand s 

 &quot; Consuelo &quot; and &quot; Countess de Rudolstadt &quot; 

 and out of them : the famous French physi 

 cian of our own day, Brown-Sequard, with 

 his elixir of life. Life ! Life ! More life 

 and fuller is our cry, and we cling to the 

 receding years as one clings to a rope while 

 feeling himself drifting ever farther and 

 farther from shore upon an ebbing tide. 



But exert ourselves as we may, we are 

 only conscious that like one caught by a 

 devil-fish, whose every writhing tends but 

 to tighten upon him the monster s tentacles, 



