grief, and pain.  To secure strength, she plants cruel hunger and thirst, which so easily overdo their office, and invite disease.  But these temporary stays and shifts for the protection of the young animal are shed as fast as they can be replaced by nobler resources.  We live in youth amidst this rabble of passions, quite too tender, quite too hungry and irritable.  Later, the interiors of mind and heart open, and supply grander motives.  We learn the fatal compensations that wait on every act.  Then,—­one mischief at a time,—­this riotous time-destroying crew disappear.

I count it another capital advantage of age, this, that a success more or less signifies nothing.  Little by little, it has amassed such a fund of merit, that it can very well afford to go on its credit when it will.  When I chanced to meet the poet Wordsworth, then sixty-three years old, he told me, “that he had just had a fall and lost a tooth, and, when his companions were much concerned for the mischance, he had replied, that he was glad it had not happened forty years before.”  Well, Nature takes care that we shall not lose our organs forty years too soon.  A lawyer argued a cause yesterday in the Supreme Court, and I was struck with a certain air of levity and defiance which vastly became him.  Thirty years ago it was a serious concern to him whether his pleading was good and effective.  Now it is of importance to his client, but of none to himself.  It is long already fixed what he can do and cannot do, and his reputation does not gain or suffer from one or a dozen new performances.  If he should, 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,