Time is, indeed, the theatre and seat of illusion.  Nothing is so ductile and elastic.  The mind stretches an hour to a century, and dwarfs an age to an hour.  Saadi found in a mosque at Damascus an old Persian of a hundred and fifty years who was dying, and was saying to himself, “I said, coming into the world by birth, ‘I will enjoy myself for a few moments.’  Alas! at the variegated table of life I partook of a few mouthfuls, and the Fates said, ‘Enough!’” That which does not decay is so central and controlling in us, that, as long as one is alone by himself, he is not sensible of the inroads of time, which always begin at the surface-edges.  If, on a 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,