but to help the young soul, add energy, inspire hope, and blow the coals into a useful flame; to redeem defeat by new thought, by firm action, that is not easy, that is the work of divine men. We live on different planes or platforms. There an external life, which is educated at school, taught to read, write, cipher, and trade; taught to grasp all the boy can get, urging him to put himself forward, to make himself useful and agreeable in the world, to ride, run, argue, and contend, unfold his talents, shine, conquer, and possess. But the inner life sits at home, and does not learn to do things, nor value these feats at all. 'Tis a quiet, wise perception. It loves truth, because it is itself real; it loves right, it knows nothing else; but it makes no progress; was as wise in our first memory of it as now; is just the same now in maturity, and hereafter in age, it was in youth. We have grown to manhood and womanhood; we have powers, connection, children, reputations, professions: this makes no account of them all. It lives in the great present; it makes the present great. This tranquil, well-founded, wide-seeing soul is no express-rider, no attorney, no magistrate: it lies in the sun, and broods on the world. A person of this temper once said to a man of much activity, "I will pardon you that you do so much, and you me that I do nothing." And Euripides says that Zeus hates busybodies and those who do too much.' OLD AGE. ON the anniversary of the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge, in 1861, the venerable President Quincy, senior member of the Society, as well as senior alumnus of the University, was received at the dinner with peculiar demonstrations of respect. He replied to these compliments in a speech, and, gracefully claiming the privileges of a literary society, entered at some length into an Apology for Old Age, and, aiding himself by notes in his hand, made a sort of running commentary on Cicero's chapter "De Senectute.' The character of the speaker, the transparent good faith of his praise and blame, and the naïveté of his eager preference of Cicero's opinions to King David's, gave unusual interest to the College festival. It was a discourse full of dignity, honouring him who spoke and those who heard. " The speech led me to look over at home an easy task-Cicero's famous essay, charming by its uniform rhetorical merit; heroic with Stoical precepts; with a Roman eye to the claims of the State; happiest, perhaps, in his praise of life on the farm; and rising at the conclusion to a lofty strain. But he does not exhaust the subject; rather invites the attempt to add traits to the picture from our broader modern life. Cicero makes no reference to the illusions which cling to the element of time, and in which Nature delights. Wellington, in speaking of military men, said, What masks are these uniforms to hide cowards!" I have often detected the like deception in the cloth shoe, wadded pelisse, wig, spectacles, and padded chair of Age. Nature lends herself to these illusions, and adds dim sight, deafness, cracked voice, snowy hair, short memory and sleep. These also are masks, and all is not Age that wears them. Whilst we yet call ourselves young, and our mates are yet youths with even boyish remains, one good fellow in the set prematurely sports a gray or a bald head, which does not impose on us who know how innocent of sanctity or of Platonism he is, but does deceive his juniors and the public, who presently distinguish him with a most amusing respect; and this lets us into the secret, that the venerable forms that so awed our childhood were just such impostors. Nature is full of freaks, and now puts an old head on young shoulders, and then a young heart beating under fourscore winters. For if the essence of age is not present, these signs, whether of Art or Nature, are counterfeit and ridiculous: and the essence of age is intellect. Wherever that appears, we call it old. If we look into the eyes of the youngest person, we sometimes discover that here is one who knows already what you would go about with much pains to teach him; there is that in him which is the ancestor of all around him: which fact the Indian Vedas express when they say, "He that can discriminate is the father of his father." And in our old British legends of Arthur and the Round Table, his friend and counseller, Merlin the Wise, is a babe found exposed in a basket by the river-side, and, though an infant of only a few days, speaks articulately to those who discover him, tells his name and history, and presently foretells the fate of the bystanders. Wherever there is power, there is age. Don't be deceived by dimples and curls. I tell you that babe is a thousand years old. Time is, indeed, the theatre and seat of illusion: nothing is so ductile and elastic. The mind stretches an hour to a century, and dwarfs an age to an hour. Saadi found in a mosque at Damascus an old Persian of a hundred and fifty years who was dying, and was saying to himself, "I said, coming into the world by birth, 'I will enjoy myself for a few moments. Alas! at the variegated table of life I partook of a few mouthfuls, and the Fates said, 'Enough!'" That which does not decay is so central and controlling in us, that, as long as one is alone by himself, he is not sensible of the inroads of time, which always begin at the surfaceedges. If, on a winter day, you should stand within a bell-glass, the face and colour of the afternoon clouds would not indicate whether it were June or January; and if we did not find the reflection of ourselves in the eyes of the young people, we could not know that the century-clock had struck seventy instead of twenty. How many men habitually believe that each chance passenger with whom they converse is of their own age, and presently find it was his father, and not his brother, whom they knew! But not to press too hard on these deceits and illusions of Nature, which are inseparable from our condition, and looking at age under an aspect more conformed to the common sense, if the question be the felicity of age, I fear the first popular judgments will be unfavourable. From the point of sensuous experience, seen from the streets and markets and the haunts of pleasure and gain, the estimate of age is low, melancholy, and sceptical. Frankly face the facts, and see the result. Tobacco, coffee, alcohol, hashish, prussic acid, strychnine, are weak dilutions the surest poison is time. This cup, which Nature puts to our lips, has a wonderful virtue, surpassing that of any other draught. It opens the senses, adds power, fills us with exalted dreams, which we call hope, love, ambition, science: especially, it creates a craving for larger draughts of itself. But they who take the larger draughts are drunk with it, lose their stature, strength, beauty, and senses, and end in folly and delirium. We postpone our literary work until we have more ripeness and skill to write, and we one day discover that our literary talent was a youthful effervescence which we have now lost. We had a judge in Massachusetts who at sixty proposed to resign, alleging that he perceived a certain decay in his faculties; he was dissuaded by his friends, on account of the public convenience at that time. At seventy it was hinted to him that it was time to retire; but he now replied, that he thought his judgment as robust, and all his faculties as good as ever they were. But besides the self-deception, the strong and hasty labourers of the street do not work well with the chronic valetudinarian. Youth is everywhere in place. Age, like woman, requires fit surroundings. Age is comely in coaches, in churches, in chairs of state, and ceremony, in council-chambers, in courts of justice, and historical societies. Age is becoming in the country. But in the rush and uproar of Broadway, if you look into the faces of the passengers, there is dejection or indignation in the seniors, a certain concealed sense of injury, and the lip made up with a heroic determination not to mind it. Few envy the consideration enjoyed by the oldest inhabitant. We do not count a man's years, until he has nothing else to count. The vast inconvenience of animal immortality was told in the fable of Tithonus. In short, the creed of the street is, Old Age is not disgraceful, but immensely disadvantageous. Life is well enough, but we shall all be glad to get out of it, and they will all be glad to have us. This is odious on the face of it. Universal convictions are not to be shaken by the whimseys of overfed butchers and firemen, or by the sentimental fears of girls who would keep the infantile bloom on their cheeks. We know the value of experience. Life and art are cumulative; and he who has accomplished something in any department alone deserves to be heard on that subject. A man of great employments and excellent performance used to assure me that he did not think a man worth anything until he was sixty; although this smacks a little of the resolution of a certain “ Young Men's Republican Club," that all men should be held eligible who were under seventy. But in all governments, the councils of power were held by the old; and patricians or patres, senate or senes, seigneurs or seniors, gerousia, the senate of Sparta, the presbytery of the Church, and the like, all signify simply old men. The cynical creed or lampoon of the market is refuted by the universal prayer for long life, which is the verdict of Nature, and justified by all history. We have, it is true, examples of an accelerated pace by which young men achieved grand works; as in the Macedonian Alexander, in Raffaelle, Shakspeare, Pascal, Burns, and Byron; but these are rare exceptions. Nature, in the main, vindicates her law. Skill to do comes of doing; knowledge comes by eyes always open, and working hands; and there is no knowledge that is not power. Béranger said, Almost all the good workmen live long." And if the life be true and noble, we have quite another sort of seniors than the frowzy, timorous, peevish dotards who are falsely old,-namely, the men who fear no city, but by whom cities stand; who of the constitution; but if you are enfeebled appearing in any street, the people mpty by any cause, some of these sleeping seeds their houses to gaze at and obey them as start and open. Meantime, at every stage at "My Cid, with the fleecy beard," in we lose a foe. At fifty years, 'tis said, Toledo; or Bruce, as Barbour reports him; afflicted citizens lose their sick-headaches. as blind old Dandolo, elected Doge at eighty- I hope this hegira is not as movable a feast four years, storming Constantinople at as that one I annually look for, when the ninety-four, and after the revolt again vic- horticulturists assure me that the rose-bugs torious, and elected at the age of ninety-six in our gardens disappear on the tenth of to the throne o the Eastern Empire, which July; they stay a fortnight later in mine. he declined, and died Doge.at ninety-seven. But be it as it may with the sick-headache, We still feel the force of Socrates, "whom 'tis certain that graver headaches and well-advised the oracle pronounced wisest of heartaches are lulled once for all, as we men"; of Archimedes, holding Syracuse come up with certain goals of time. The against the Romans by his wit, and himself passions have answered their purpose: that better than all their nation; of Michel slight but dread overweight, with which, in Angelo, wearing the four crowns of archi- each instance, Nature secures the execution tecture, sculpture, painting, and poetry; of of her aim, drops off. To keep man in the Galileo, of whose blindness Castelli said, planet, she impresses the terror of death. "The noblest eye is darkened that Nature To perfect the commissariat, she implants in ever made,—an eye that hath seen more than each a certain rapacity to get the supply, all that went before him, and hath opened and a little oversupply, of his wants. the eyes of all that shall come after him"; of insure the existence of the race, she reinNewton, who made an important discovery forces the sexual instinct, at the risk of disfor every one of his eighty-five years; of order, grief, and pain. To secure strength, Bacon, "who took all knowledge to be his she plants cruel hunger and thirst, which so province"; of Fontenelle, "that precious easily overdo their office, and invite disease. porcelain vase laid up in the centre of But these temporary stays and shifts for the France to be guarded with the utmost care protection of the young animal are shed as for a hundred years"; of Franklin, Jefferson, fast as they can be replaced by nobler reand Adams, the wise and heroic statesmen; sources. We live in youth amidst this rabble of Washington, the perfect citizen; of Wel- of passions, quite too tender, quite too lington, the perfect soldier; of Goethe, the hungry and irritable. Later, the interiors all-knowing poet; of Humboldt, the encyclo- of mind and heart open, and supply grander pædia of science. motives. We learn the fatal compensations that wait on every act. Then,-one after another, this riotous time-destroying crew disappear. Under the general assertion of the wellbeing of age, we can easily count particular benefits of that condition. It has weathered the perilous capes and shoals in the sea whereon we sail, and the chief evil of life is taken away in removing the grounds of fear. The insurance of a ship expires as she enters the harbour at home. It were strange, if a man should turn his sixtieth year without a feeling of immense relief from the number of dangers he has escaped. When the old wife says, Take care of that tumour in your shoulder, perhaps it is cancerous,' he replies, "I am yielding to a surer decomposition." The humorous thief who drank a pot of beer at the gallows blew off the froth because he had heard it was unhealthy; but it will not add a pang to the prisoner marched out to be shot, to assure him that the pain in his knee threatens mortification. When the pleuro-pneumonia of the cows raged, the butchers said, that, though the acute degree was novel, there never was a time when this disease did not occur among cattle. All men carry seeds of all distempers through life latent, and we die without developing them; such is the affirmative force Το I count it another capital advantage of age, this, that a success more or less signifies nothing. Little by little, it has amassed such a fund of merit, that it can very well afford to go on its credit when it will. When I chanced to meet the poet Wordsworth, then sixty-three years old, he told me," that he had just had a fall and lost a tooth, and, when his companions were much concerned for the mischance, he had replied, that he was glad it had not happened forty years before." Well, Nature takes care that we shall not lose our organs forty years too soon. A lawyer argued a cause yesterday in the Supreme Court, and I was struck with a certain air of levity and defiance which vastly became him. Thirty years ago it was a serious concern to him whether his pleading was good and effective. Now it is of importance to his client, but of none to himself. It has been long already fixed what he can do and cannot do, and his reputation does not gain or suffer from one or a dozen new performances. If he should, on a new occasion; rise quite beyond his mark, and achieve somewhat great and extraordinary, that, of course, would instantly tell; but he may go below his mark with impunity, and people will say, "O, he had headache," or, "He lost his sleep for two nights." What a lust of appearance, what a load of anxieties that once degraded him, he is thus rid of! Every one is sensible of this cumulative advantage in living. All the good days behind him are sponsors, who speak for him when he is silent, pay for him when he has no money, introduce him where he has no letters, and work for him when he sleeps. are recorded in his mind. What to the youth is only a guess or a hope, is in the veteran a digested statute. He beholds the feats of the juniors with complacency, but as one who, having long ago known these games, has refined them into results and morals. The Indian Red Jacket, when the young braves were boasting their deeds, said, "But the sixties have all the twenties and forties in them." For a fourth benefit, age sets its house in order, and finishes its works, which to every artist is a supreme pleasure. Youth has an access of sensibility, before which every A third felicity of age is, that it has found object glitters and attracts. We leave one expression. The youth suffers not only from pursuit for another, and the young man's ungratified desires, but from powers untried, year is a heap of beginnings. At the end and from a picture in his mind of a career of a twelvemonth, he has nothing to show which has, as yet, no outward reality. He for it,-not one completed work. But the is tormented with the want of correspond-time is not lost. Our instincts drove us to ence between things and thoughts. Michel hive innumerable experiences, that are yet of Angelo's head is full of masculine and gigan- no visible value, and which we may keep tic figures as gods walking, which make for twice seven years before they shall be him savage until his furious chisel can render wanted. The best things are of secular them into marble; and of architectural growth. The instinct of classifying marks dreams, until a hundred stone-masons can the wise and healthy mind. Linnæus prolay them in courses of travertine. There is jects his system, and lays out his twenty-four the like tempest in every good head in which classes of plants, before yet he has found in some great benefit for the world is planted. Nature a single plant to justify certain of The throes continue until the child is born. his classes. His seventh class has not one. Every faculty new to each man thus goads In process of time, he finds with delight the him and drives him out into doleful deserts, little white Trientalis, the only plant with until it finds proper vent. All the functions seven petals and sometimes seven stamens, of human duty irritate and lash him for- which constitutes a seventh class in conward, bemoaning and chiding, until they are formity with his system. The conchologist performed. He wants friends, employment, builds his cabinet whilst as yet he has few knowledge, power, house and land, wife shells. He labels shelves for classes, cells for and children, honour and fame; he has re- species: all but a few are empty. But every ligious wants, æsthetic wants, domestic, year fills some blanks, and with accelerating civil, humane wants. One by one, day after speed as he becomes knowing and known. day, he learns to coin his wishes into facts. An old scholar finds keen delight in verifying He has his calling, homestead, social con- the impressive anecdotes and citations he nection, and personal power, and thus, at has met with in miscellaneous reading and the end of fifty years, his soul is appeased hearing, in all the years of youth. We carry by seeing some sort of correspondence in memory important anecdotes, and have between his wish and his possession. This lost all clew to the author from whom we had makes the value of age, the satisfaction it them. We have a heroic speech from Rome slowly offers to every craving. He is serene or Greece, but cannot fix it on the man who who does not feel himself pinched and said it. We have an admirable line worthy wronged, but whose condition, in particular of Horace, ever and anon resounding in and in general, allows the utterance of his ou mind's ear, but have searched all promind. In old persons, when thus fully ex- bable and improbable books for it in vain. pressed, we often observe a fair, plump, We consult the reading men: but, strangely perennial, waxen complexion, which indi- enough, they who know everything know cates that all the ferment of earlier days has not this. But especially we have a certain subsided into serenity of thought and be- insulated thought, which haunts us, but rehaviour. mains insulated and barren. Well, there is nothing for all this but patience and time. Time, yes, that is the finder, the unweariable explorer, not subject to casualties, omniscient at last. The day comes when the hidden author of our story is found; when The compensations of Nature play in age as in youth. In a world so charged and sparkling with power, a man does not live long and actively without costly additions of experience, which, though not spoken, the brave speech returns straight to the hero who said it; when the admirable verse finds the poet to whom it belongs; and best of all, when the lonely thought, which seemed so wise, yet half-wise, half-thought, because it cast no light abroad, is suddenly matched in our mind by its twin, by its sequence, or next related analogy, which gives it instantly radiating power, and justifies the superstitious instinct with which we have hoarded it. We remember our old Greek Professor at Cambridge, an ancient bachelor, amid his folios, possessed by this hope of completing a task, with nothing to break his leisure after the three hours of his daily classes, yet ever restlessly stroking his leg, and assuring himself "he should retire from the University and read the authors." In Goethe's Romance, Makaria, the central figure for wisdom and influence, pleases herself with withdrawing into solitude to astronomy and epistolary correspondence. Goethe himself carried this completion of studies to the highest point. Many of his works hung on the easel from youth to age, and received a stroke in every month or year. A literary astrologer, he never applied himself to any task but at the happy moment when all the stars consented. Bentley thought himself likely to live till fourscore,-long enough to read everything that was worth reading,"Et tunc magna mei sub terris ibit imago." Much wider is spread the pleasure which old men take in completing their secular affairs, the inventor his inventions, the agriculturist his experiments, and all old men in finishing their houses, rounding their estates, clearing their titles, reducing tangled interests to order, reconciling enmities, and leaving all in the best posture for the future. It must be believed that there is a proportion between the designs of a man and the length of his life there is a calendar of his years, so of his performances. America is the country of young men, and too full of work hitherto for leisure and tranquillity; yet we have had robust centenarians, and examples of dignity and wisdom. I have lately found in an old notebook a record of a visit to ex-President John Adams, in 1825, soon after the election of his son to the Presidency. It is but a sketch, and nothing important passed in the conversation; but it reports a moment in the life of a heroic person, who, in extreme old age, appeared still erect and worthy of his fame. -, Feb., 1825. To-day, at Quincy, with my brother, by invitation of Mr. Adams's family. The old President sat in a large stuffed arm-chair, dressed in a blue coat, black small-clothes, white stockings; a cotton cap covered his bald head. We made our compliment, told him he must let us join our congratulations to those of the nation on the happiness of his house. He thanked us, and said: "I am rejoiced, because the nation is happy. The time of gratulation and congratulations is nearly over with me: I am astonished that I have lived to see and know of this event. I have lived now nearly a century; [he was ninety in the following October : a long, harassed, and distracted life."-I said, The world thinks a good deal of joy has been mixed with it.' The world does not know," he replied, "how much toil, anxiety, and sorrow I have suffered."-I asked if Mr. Adams's letter of acceptance had been read to him.-"Yes," he said, and added, "My son has more political prudence than any man that I know who has existed in my time; he never was put off his guard and I hope he will continue such; but what effect age may work in diminishing the power of his mind, I do not know; it has been very much on the stretch, ever since he was born. He has always been laborious, child and man, from infancy."-When Mr. J. Q. Adams's age was mentioned, he said, "He is now fiftyeight, or will be in July"; and remarked that : all the Presidents were of the same age: General Washington was about fifty-eight, and I was about fifty-eight, and Mr. Jefferson, and Mr. Madison, and Mr. Monroe." -We inquired when he expected to see Mr. Adams.-He said: "Never Mr. Adams will not come to Quincy but to my funeral. It would be a great satisfaction to me to see him, but I don't wish him to come on my account."-He spoke of Mr. Lechmere, whom he well remembered to have seen come down daily, at a great age, to walk in the old town-house,"-adding, "And I wish I could walk as weil as he did. He was Collector of the Customs for many years under the Royal Government."-E. said: "I suppose, sir, you would not have taken his place, even to walk as well as he."-"No," he replied, "that was not what I wanted."-He talked of Whitefield, and "remembered when he was a Freshman in College, to have come into town to the Old South church [I think], to hear him, but could not get into the house ;-I, however, saw him," he said, through a window, and distinctly heard all. He had a voice such as I never heard before or since. He cast it out so that you might hear it at the meeting-house [pointing towards the Quincy meeting-house], and he had the grace of a dancing-master, of an actor of plays. His voice and manner helped him more than his sermons. I went with |