ich is
superannuated, while its "muddy vesture of decay" is in very tolerable
repair. His natural man is still comparatively young, and lives on in
the long, long thoughts of youth; but his supernatural man has aged,
with certain moral effects which alarm his doubts of the pleasures he
once predicated of eternity. "If it is going to be like _this_ with me!"
he says to himself, and shrinks from supplying the responsive clause of
his conditional.

But mainly his mind turns upon itself in contemplation of its earthly
metamorphoses, in which it hardly knows itself for the mind of the same
man. Its apprehensions are for the time when, having exhausted all the
differences, it shall care for none; but meanwhile it is interested in
noting the absurdity of that conventional view of age as the period of
fixed ideals. It may be the period of fixed habits, of those helpless
iterances which imply no intentions or purposes; but it is not the
period in which the mind continues in this or that desire and strives
for its fulfilment. The same poet who sang at second hand those words of
the Lapland song,

"The thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts,"

erred, to our friend's sense, in singing of

"The young heart hot and restless,
And the old subdued and slow."

He believes the reverse would rightly characterize the heart of youth
and the heart of age. Age is not slow in its mental motions; it is
hurried and anxious, with that awful mystical apprehension of the
swift-coming moment when time shall be no more and nothing but eternity
shall be left. It is not subdued; its heart is hot with rebellion
against the inevitable. But for youth there is no inevitable; there is
no conclusion, no catastrophe, which it may not hope to escape; and, so
it is patient of chances, it is glad of them. Its heart is not restless;
it is quite at peace in the bosom which is secure of all the time there
is.

Our friend believes that a variety of popular superstitions will fall at
the recognition of the truth in this matter, and none more finally than
that which attributes to the junior partner the unhappiness of those
marriages in which youth and crabbed age try to live together. In such
hazardous unions the junior partner is, for some unexplained reason, of
the sex which has the repute of a generic fickleness as well as the
supposed volatility of its fewer years. Probably repute wrongs it as
much in one respect as in the other, but our friend