lasped in one
another's arms, and silent in a last embrace.' There is not one
halfpenny's worth of sentiment about it in the Englishman's case,
nor are any such thoughts bred in his brain while youth is in him.
It is in our midway days, with old age touching us here and there,
as autumn 'lays its fiery finger on the leaves' and withers them,
that we first think of it. When the weight of anxiety and care is
growing on us, while the shoulders are becoming bowed (not in
resignation, but in weakness) which have to bear it; when our pains
are more and more constant, our pleasures few and fading, and when
whatever happens, we know, must needs be for the worse--then it is
that the praise of the silver hair and length of days becomes a
mockery indeed.

Was it the prescience of such a state of thought, I wonder (for it
certainly did not exist in their time), that caused good men of old
to extol old age; as though anything could reconcile the mind of
man to the time when the very sun is darkened to him, and 'the
clouds return after the rain?' There is a noble passage in
'Hyperion' which has always seemed to me to repeat that sentiment
in Ecclesiastes; it speaks of an expression in a man's face:

'As though the vanward clouds of evil days
Had spent their malice, and the sullen rear
Was with its storied thunder labouring up.'

This is why poor Paterfamilias, sitting in the family pew, is not
so enamoured of that idea of accomplishing those threescore years
and ten which the young parson, fresh from Cambridge, is describing
as such a lucky number in life's lottery. The attempt to paint it
so is well-meaning, no doubt, 'the vacant chaff well meant for
grain;' and it is touching to see how men generally (knowing that
they themselves have to go through with it) are wont to portray it
in cheerful colours.

A modern philosopher even goes so far as to say that our memories
in old age are always grateful to us. Our pleasures are remembered,
but our pains are forgotten; 'if we try to recall a physical pain,'
she writes (for it is a female), 'we find it to be impossible,'
From which I gather only this for certain, that that woman never
had the gout.

The folks who come my way, indeed, seem to remember their physical
ailments very distinctly, to judge by the way they talk of them;
and are exceedingly apprehensive of their recurrence. Nay, it is
curio