in death, which Sir Thomas Browne has
called "the very disgrace and ignominy of our natures."

My lady's cheek can boast no more
The cranberry white and pink it wore;
And where her shining locks divide,
The parting line is all too wide----

No, no,--this will never do. Talk about men, if you will, but spare the
poor women.

We have a brief description of seven stages of life by a remarkably good
observer. It is very presumptuous to attempt to add to it, yet I have
been struck with the fact that life admits of a natural analysis into no
less than fifteen distinct periods. Taking the five primary divisions,
infancy, childhood, youth, manhood, old age, each of these has its
own three periods of immaturity, complete development, and decline. I
recognize an _old_ baby at once,--with its "pipe and mug," (a stick of
candy and a porringer,)--so does everybody; and an old child shedding
its milk-teeth is only a little prototype of the old man shedding his
permanent ones. Fifty or thereabouts is only the childhood, as it were,
of old age; the graybeard youngster must be weaned from his late suppers
now. So you will see that you have to make fifteen stages at any rate,
and that it would not be hard to make twenty-five; five primary, each
with five secondary divisions.

The infancy and childhood of commencing old age have the same ingenuous
simplicity and delightful unconsciousness about them that the first
stage of the earlier periods of life shows. The great delusion of
mankind is in supposing that to be individual and exceptional which is
universal and according to law. A person is always startled when he
hears himself seriously called an old man for the first time.

Nature gets us out of youth into manhood, as sailors are hurried on
board of vessels,--in a state of intoxication. We are hustled into
maturity reeling with our passions and imaginations, and we have drifted
far away from port before we awake out of our illusions. But to carry us
out of maturity into old age, without our knowing where we are going,
she drugs us with strong opiates, and so we stagger along with wide open
eyes that see nothing until snow enough has fallen on our heads to rouse
our comatose brains out of their stupid trances.

There is one mark of age that strikes me more than any of the physical
ones;--I mean the formation of _Habits_. An old man who shrinks into
himself falls into ways that become as positive and as much beyond the
r