Youth, in fact, is not a physical affair at all, but an affair of the soul.  You may be spiritually bald-headed at twenty-five or a romping young blade at eighty.  Byron was only thirty-four when he wrote:—­

    I am ashes where once I was fire. 
      And the soul in my bosom is dead;
    What I loved I now merely admire,
      And my heart is as grey as my head.

Perhaps there was some affectation in this, for Byron was always dramatising himself.  But that he died an old man at thirty-six is as indisputable as that Browning died a young man at seventy-seven, with that triumphant envoi of Asolando as his last expression of the eternal youth of the soul.

In thinking of old age, the mistake is to assume that the spirit must decay with the body.  Of course, if the body is maltreated it will react on the spirit.  But the natural decline of the physical powers leaves the healthy spirit untouched with age, should indeed leave it strengthened—­glowing not with passion but with a steadier fire.  When we are young in years our eager spirit cries for the moon.

    We look before and after,
      And pine for what is not.

But as we get older we learn to be satisfied with something nearer than the moon.  The horizon of our hopes and ambitions narrows, but the sky above is not less deep, and we make the wonderful discovery that the things that matter are very near to us.  It is the homing of the spirit.  We have been avid of the “topless grandeurs” of life, and we return to find that the spiritual satisfactions we sought were all the time within very easy reach.  And in cultivating those satisfactions intensively we make another discovery.  We find that this is the true way to the “topless grandeurs” themselves, for those topless grandeurs are not without us but within.

But I am afraid I am sermonising, and I do not want to sermonise, though if ever a man may be allowed to sermonise it is when he is completing his half-century.  Let me as an antidote recall a little story which the present Bishop of Chester once told me over the dinner table, for it contains a practical recipe for keeping the heart young.  He was in his earlier days associated with Archdeacon Jones of Liverpool.  The Archdeacon, then over eighty, had been tutor to Gladstone, and one day the future Bishop turned the conversation into a reminiscent channel, and sought to evoke the Archdeacon’s memories of the long past.  Presently the Archdeacon abruptly changed the subject by asking, “What was the concert of the Philharmonic like last night?” And then, in answer to the obvious surprise which the question had aroused, he added, “Although I am an old man, I want to keep my heart young, and the best way of doing that is not to let one’s thoughts live in the past, but to keep them in tune with the life around one.”