r that he was unhappy. If the
stage darkens as the curtain falls, certain it also is that the senses
grow duller and more blunted. "Don't cry for me, my dear," said an old
lady undergoing an operation; "I do not feel it."

It seems to us, therefore, that a great deal of unnecessary pity has
been thrown away upon old age. We begin at school reading Cicero's
treatise, hearing Cato talk with Scipio and Laelius; we hear much about
poor old men; we are taught to admire the vigor, quickness, and capacity
of youth and manhood. We lose sight of the wisdom which age brings even
to the most foolish. We think that a circumscribed sphere must
necessarily be an unhappy one. It is not always so. What one abandons in
growing old is, perhaps, after all not worth having. The chief part of
youth is but excitement; often both unwise and unhealthy. The same pen
which has written, with a morbid feeling, that "there is a class of
beings who do not grow old in their youth and die ere middle age," tells
us also that "the best of life is but intoxication." That passes away.
The man who has grown old does not care about it. The author at that
period has no feverish excitement about seeing himself in print; he does
not hunt newspapers for reviews and notices. He is content to wait; he
knows what fame is worth. The obscure man of science, who has been
wishing to make the world better and wiser; the struggling curate, the
poor and hard-tried man of God; the enthusiastic reformer, who has
watched the sadly slow dawning of progress and liberty; the artist,
whose dream of beauty slowly fades before his dim eyes--all lay down
their feverish wishes as they advance in life, forget the bright ideal
which they can not reach, and embrace the more imperfect real. We speak
not here of the assured Christian. He, from the noblest pinnacle of
faith, beholds a promised land, and is eager to reach it; he prays "to
be delivered from the body of this death;" but we write of those
humbler, perhaps more human souls, with whom increasing age each day
treads down an illusion. All feverish wishes, raw and inconclusive
desires, have died down, and a calm beauty and peace survive; passions
are dead, temptations weakened or conquered; experience has been won;
selfish interests are widened into universal ones; vain, idle hopes,
have merged into a firmer faith or a complete knowledge; and more light
has broken in upon the soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed,
"through ch