It seems to us, therefore, that a great deal of unnecessary pity has been thrown away upon old age.  We begin at school reading Cicero’s treatise, hearing Cato talk with Scipio and Laelius; we hear much about poor old men; we are taught to admire the vigor, quickness, and capacity of youth and manhood.  We lose sight of the wisdom which age brings even to the most foolish.  We think that a circumscribed sphere must necessarily be an unhappy one.  It is not always so.  What one abandons in growing old is, perhaps, after all not worth having.  The chief part of youth is but excitement; often both unwise and unhealthy.  The same pen which has written, with a morbid feeling, that “there is a class of beings who do not grow old in their youth and die ere middle age,” tells us also that “the best of life is but intoxication.”  That passes away.  The man who has grown old does not care about it.  The author at that period has no feverish excitement about seeing himself in print; he does not hunt newspapers for reviews and notices.  He is content to wait; he knows what fame is worth.  The obscure man of science, who has been wishing to make the world better and wiser; the struggling curate, the poor and hard-tried man of God; the enthusiastic reformer, who has watched the sadly slow dawning of progress and liberty; the artist, whose dream of beauty slowly fades before his dim eyes—­all lay down their feverish wishes as they advance in life, forget the bright ideal which they can not reach, and embrace the more imperfect real.  We speak not here of the assured Christian.  He, from the noblest pinnacle of faith, beholds a promised land, and is eager to reach it; he prays “to be delivered from the body of this death;” but we write of those humbler, perhaps more human souls, with whom increasing age each day treads down an illusion.  All feverish wishes, raw and inconclusive desires, have died down, and a calm beauty and peace survive; passions are dead, temptations weakened or conquered; experience has been won; selfish interests are widened into universal ones; vain, idle hopes, have merged into a firmer faith or a complete knowledge; and more light has broken in upon the soul’s dark cottage, battered and decayed, “through chinks which Time has made.”

Again, old men are valuable, not only as relics of the past, but as guides and prophets for the future.  They know the pattern of every turn of life’s kaleidoscope.  The colors merely fall into new shapes; the ground-work is just the same.  The good which a calm, kind, and cheerful old man can do is incalculable.  And whilst he does good to others, he enjoys himself.  He looks not unnaturally to that which should accompany old age—­honor, love, obedience, troops of friends; and he plays his part in the comedy or tragedy of life with as much gusto as any one else.  Old Montague, or Capulet, and old Polonius, that wise maxim-man, enjoy themselves quite as well as the moody Hamlet, the perturbed Laertes,