winter
day, you should stand within a bell-glass, the face and color of the
afternoon clouds would not indicate whether it were June or January; and
if we did not find the reflection of ourselves in the eyes of the young
people, we could not know that the century-clock had struck seventy
instead of twenty. How many men habitually believe that each chance
passenger with whom they converse is of their own age, and presently find
it was his father, and not his brother, whom they knew!

But, not to press too hard on these deceits and illusions of Nature, which
are inseparable from our condition, and looking at age under an aspect
more conformed to the common sense, if the question be the felicity of
age, I fear the first popular judgments will be unfavorable. From the
point of sensuous experience, seen from the streets and markets and the
haunts of pleasure and gain, the estimate of age is low, melancholy, and
skeptical. Frankly face the facts, and see the result. Tobacco, coffee,
alcohol, hashish, prussic acid, strychnine, are weak dilutions: the surest
poison is time. This cup, which Nature puts to our lips, has a wonderful
virtue, surpassing that of any other draught. It opens the senses, adds
power, fills us with exalted dreams, which we call hope, love, ambition,
science: especially, it creates a craving for larger draughts of itself.
But they who take the larger draughts are drunk with it, lose their
stature, strength, beauty, and senses, and end in folly and delirium. We
postpone our literary work until we have more ripeness and skill to write,
and we one day discover that our literary talent was a youthful
effervescence which we have now lost. We had a judge in Massachusetts who
at sixty proposed to resign, alleging that he perceived a certain decay in
his faculties: he was dissuaded by his friends, on account of the public
convenience at that time. At seventy it was hinted to him that it was time
to retire; but he now replied, that he thought his judgment as robust, and
all his faculties as good as ever they were. But besides the
self-deception, the strong and hasty laborers of the street do not work
well with the chronic valetudinarian. Youth is everywhere in place. Age,
like woman, requires fit surroundings. Age is comely in coaches, in
churches, in chairs of state and ceremony, in council-chambers, in courts
of justice, and historical societies. Age is becoming in the country. But
in the rush and uproar of Broadw