f only being, as you
insist, somewhat hard of hearing? I was a little over twenty years old
when I wrote the lines which some of you may have met with, for they
have been often reprinted:

The mossy marbles rest
On the lips that he has prest
In their bloom,
And the names he loved to hear
Have been carved for many a year
On the tomb.

The world was a garden to me then; it is a churchyard now.

"I thought you were one of those who looked upon old age cheerfully, and
welcomed it as a season of peace and contented enjoyment."

I am one of those who so regard it. Those are not bitter or scalding
tears that fall from my eyes upon "the mossy marbles." The young
who left my side early in my life's journey are still with me in the
unchanged freshness and beauty of youth. Those who have long kept
company with me live on after their seeming departure, were it only by
the mere force of habit; their images are all around me, as if every
surface had been a sensitive film that photographed them; their voices
echo about me, as if they had been recorded on those unforgetting
cylinders which bring back to us the tones and accents that have
imprinted them, as the hardened sands show us the tracks of extinct
animals. The melancholy of old age has a divine tenderness in it, which
only the sad experiences of life can lend a human soul. But there is a
lower level,--that of tranquil contentment and easy acquiescence in the
conditions in which we find ourselves; a lower level, in which old age
trudges patiently when it is not using its wings. I say its wings,
for no period of life is so imaginative as that which looks to younger
people the most prosaic. The atmosphere of memory is one in which
imagination flies more easily and feels itself more at home than in
the thinner ether of youthful anticipation. I have told you some of the
drawbacks of age; I would not have you forget its privileges. When it
comes down from its aerial excursions, it has much left to enjoy on
the humble plane of being. And so you think you would like to become
an octogenarian? "I should," said the Counsellor, now a man in the high
noon of bodily and mental vigor. "Four more--yes, five more--decades
would not be too much, I think. And how much I should live to see in
that time! I am glad you have laid down some rules by which a man may
reasonably expect to leap the eight barred gate. I won't promise to obey
them all, though."