reads a sunshine
over the winter of their days. In the solitude and the night of human
life, they discover that unregarded kindness of nature, which has given
flowers that only open in the evening, and only bloom through the
night-season. NECKER perceived the influence of late studies in life; for
he tells us, that "the era of threescore and ten is an agreeable age for
writing; your mind has not lost its vigour, and envy leaves you in peace."

The opening of one of LA MOTHE LE VAYER'S Treatises is striking: "I
should but ill return the favours God has granted me in the eightieth year
of my age, should I allow myself to give way to that shameless want of
occupation which all my life I have condemned;" and the old man proceeds
with his "Observations on the Composition and Reading of Books." "If man
be a bubble of air, it is then time that I should hasten my task; for my
eightieth year admonishes me to get my baggage together ere I leave the
world," wrote VARBO, in opening his curious treatise _de Re Rustica_,
which the sage lived to finish, and which, after nearly two thousand
years, the world possesses. "My works are many, and I am old; yet I still
can fatigue and tire myself with writing more." says PETRARCH in his
"Epistle to Posterity." The literary character has been fully occupied in
the eightieth and the ninetieth year of life. ISAAC WALTON still glowed
while writing some of the most interesting biographies in his eighty-fifth
year, and in the ninetieth enriched the poetical world with the first
publication of a romantic tale by Chalkhill, "the friend of Spenser."
BODMER, beyond eighty, was occupied on Homer, and WIELAND on Cicero's
Letters.[A]

[Footnote A: See "Curiosities of Literature," on "The progress of old age
in new studies."]

But the delight of opening a new pursuit, or a new course of reading,
imparts the vivacity and novelty of youth even to old age. The revolutions
of modern chemistry kindled the curiosity of Dr. Reid to his latest days,
and he studied by various means to prevent the decay of his faculties, and
to remedy the deficiencies of one failing sense by the increased activity
of another. A late popular author, when advanced in life, discovered, in a
class of reading to which he had never been accustomed, a profuse supply
of fresh furniture for his mind. This felicity was the delightfulness of
the old age of GOETHE--literature, art, and science, formed his daily
inquiries; and this venerable