s inevitable, we may as well sit down and reason it
out. Is it so dreadful to grow old? Does old age need its apologies and
its defenders? Is it a benefit or a calamity? Why should it be odious
and ridiculous? An old tree is picturesque, an old castle venerable, an
old cathedral inspires awe--why should man be worse than his works?

Let us, in the first place, see what youth is. Is it so blessed and
happy and flourishing as it seems to us? Schoolboys do not think so.
They always wish to be older. You cannot insult one of them more than by
telling him that he is a year or two younger than he is. He fires up at
once: "Twelve, did you say, sir? No, I'm fourteen." But men and women
who have reached twenty-eight do not thus add to their years. Amongst
schoolboys, notwithstanding the general tenor of those romancists who
see that every thing young bears a rose-colored blush, misery is
prevalent enough. Emerson, Coleridge, Wordsworth, were each and all
unhappy boys. They all had their rebuffs, and bitter, bitter troubles;
all the more bitter because their sensitiveness was so acute. Suicide is
not unknown amongst the young; fears prey upon them and terrify them;
ignorances and follies surround them. Arriving at manhood, we are little
better off. If we are poor, we mark the difference between the rich and
us; we see position gains all the day. If we are as clever as Hamlet, we
grow just as philosophically disappointed. If we love, we can only be
sure of a brief pleasure--an April day. Love has its bitterness. "It
is," says Ovid, an adept in the matter, "full of anxious fear." We fret
and fume at the authority of the wise heads; we have an intense idea of
our own talent. We believe calves of our own age to be as big and as
valuable as full-grown bulls; we envy whilst we jest at the old. We cry,
with the puffed-up hero of the _Patrician's Daughter_:

"It may be by the calendar of years
You are the elder man; but 'tis the sun
Of knowledge on the mind's dial shining bright,
And chronicling deeds and thoughts, that makes true time."

And yet withal life is very unhappy, whether we live amongst the
grumbling captains of the clubs, who are ever seeking and not finding
promotion; amongst the struggling authors and rising artists who never
rise; or among the young men who are full of riches, titles, places, and
honor, who have every wish fulfilled, and are miserable because they
have nothing to wish for. Thus th