on a new
occasion, rise quite beyond his mark, and do somewhat extraordinary and
great, that, of course, would instantly tell; but he may go below his mark
with impunity, and people will say, "Oh, he had headache," or, "He lost
his sleep for two nights." What a lust of appearance, what a load of
anxieties that once degraded him, he is thus rid of! Every one is sensible
of this cumulative advantage in living. All the good days behind him are
sponsors, who speak for him when he is silent, pay for him when he has no
money, introduce him where he has no letters, and work for him when he
sleeps.

A third felicity of age is, that it has found expression. Youth suffers
not only from ungratified desires, but from powers untried, and from a
picture in his mind of a career which has, as yet, no outward reality. He
is tormented with the want of correspondence between things and thoughts.
Michel Angelo's head is full of masculine and gigantic figures as gods
walking, which make him savage until his furious chisel can render them
into marble; and of architectural dreams, until a hundred stone-masons can
lay them in courses of travertine. There is the like tempest in every good
head in which some great benefit for the world is planted. The throes
continue until the child is born. Every faculty new to each man thus goads
him and drives him out into doleful deserts, until it finds proper vent.
All the functions of human duty irritate and lash him forward, bemoaning
and chiding, until they are performed. He wants friends, employment,
knowledge, power, house and land, wife and children, honor and fame; he
has religious wants, aesthetic wants, domestic, civil, humane wants. One
by one, day after day, he learns to coin his wishes into facts. He has his
calling, homestead, social connection, and personal power, and thus, at
the end of fifty years, his soul is appeased by seeing some sort of
correspondence between his wish and his possession. This makes the value
of age, the satisfaction it slowly offers to every craving. He is serene
who does not feel himself pinched and wronged, but whose condition, in
particular and in general, allows the utterance of his mind. In old
persons, when thus fully expressed, we often observe a fair, plump,
perennial, waxen complexion, which indicates that all the ferment of
earlier days has subsided into serenity of thought and behavior.

For a fourth benefit, age sets its house in order, and finishes its wor