until it finds proper vent.  All the functions of human duty irritate and lash him forward, bemoaning and chiding, until they are performed.  He wants friends, employment, knowledge, power, house and land, wife and children, honor and fame; he has religious wants, aesthetic wants, domestic, civil, humane wants.  One by one, day after day, he learns to coin his wishes into facts.  He has his calling, homestead, social connection, and personal power, and thus, at the end of fifty years, his soul is appeased by seeing some sort of correspondence between his wish and his possession.  This makes the value of age, the satisfaction it slowly offers to every craving.  He is serene who does not feel himself pinched and wronged, but whose condition, in particular and in general, allows the utterance of his mind.  In old persons, when thus fully expressed, we often observe a fair, plump, perennial, waxen complexion, which indicates that all the ferment of earlier days has subsided into serenity of thought and behavior.

For a fourth benefit, age sets its house in order, and finishes its works, which to every artist is a supreme pleasure.  Youth has an excess of sensibility, to which every object glitters and attracts.  We leave one pursuit for another, and the young man’s year is a heap of beginnings.  At the end of a twelvemonth, he has nothing to show for it, not one completed work.  But the time is not lost.  Our instincts drove us to hive innumerable experiences, that are yet of no visible value, and which we may keep for twice seven years before they shall be wanted.  The best things are of secular growth.  The instinct of classifying marks the wise and healthy mind.  Linnaeus projects his system, and lays out his twenty-four classes of plants, before yet he has found in Nature a single plant to justify certain of his classes.  His seventh class has not one.  In process of time, he finds with delight the little white Trientalis, the only plant with seven petals and sometimes seven stamens, which constitutes a seventh class in conformity with his system.  The conchologist builds his cabinet whilst as yet he has few shells.  He labels shelves for classes, cells for species:  all but a few are empty.  But every year fills some blanks, and with accelerating speed as he becomes knowing and known.  An old scholar finds keen delight in verifying all the impressive anecdotes and citations he has met with in miscellaneous reading and hearing, in all the years of youth.  We carry in memory important anecdotes, and have lost all clue to the author from whom we had them.  We have a heroic speech from Rome or Greece, but cannot fix it on the man who said it.  We have an admirable line worthy of Horace, ever and anon resounding in our mind’s ear, but have searched all probable and improbable books for it in vain.  We consult the reading men:  but, strangely enough, they who know everything know not this.  But especially we have a certain insulated thought, which haunts us, but remains insulated and