contented
acceptance of the things that are possible to us. Do not suppose, young
fellow, that you are any younger than I am because you can jump five feet
eight and I have ceased to want to jump at all. The feeling of youth is
something much deeper and more enduring than the ability to jump five feet
eight. It may be as vigorous at eighty as it is at eighteen. It is only its
manner of expression which is changed. Holmes never admitted that he had
grown old. "I am eighty-three young to-day," he would say. And Johnson,
with his old age and his infirmities, still insisted that he was "a young
fellow"--as, indeed, he was, for where shall we find such freshness of
spirit, such a defiance of the tooth of Time as in that grand old boy?

Youth, in fact, is not a physical affair at all, but an affair of the soul.
You may be spiritually bald-headed at twenty-five or a romping young blade
at eighty. Byron was only thirty-four when he wrote:--

I am ashes where once I was fire.
And the soul in my bosom is dead;
What I loved I now merely admire,
And my heart is as grey as my head.

Perhaps there was some affectation in this, for Byron was always
dramatising himself. But that he died an old man at thirty-six is as
indisputable as that Browning died a young man at seventy-seven, with that
triumphant envoi of _Asolando_ as his last expression of the eternal youth
of the soul.

In thinking of old age, the mistake is to assume that the spirit must decay
with the body. Of course, if the body is maltreated it will react on the
spirit. But the natural decline of the physical powers leaves the healthy
spirit untouched with age, should indeed leave it strengthened--glowing not
with passion but with a steadier fire. When we are young in years our eager
spirit cries for the moon.

We look before and after,
And pine for what is not.

But as we get older we learn to be satisfied with something nearer than the
moon. The horizon of our hopes and ambitions narrows, but the sky above is
not less deep, and we make the wonderful discovery that the things that
matter are very near to us. It is the homing of the spirit. We have been
avid of the "topless grandeurs" of life, and we return to find that the
spiritual satisfactions we sought were all the time within very easy reach.
And in cultivating those satisfactions intensively we make another
discovery. We find that this is the true way to the "topless grandeurs"
t