“Dear little, flitting, pleasing sprite,
   The body’s comrade and its guest.”

How like the language of Catullus to Lesbia’s sparrow!

More and more the old man finds his pleasures in memory, as the present becomes unreal and dreamlike, and the vista of his earthly future narrows and closes in upon him.  At last, if he live long enough, life comes to be little more than a gentle and peaceful delirium of pleasing recollections.  To say, as Dante says, that there is no greater grief than to remember past happiness in the hour of misery is not giving the whole truth.  In the midst of the misery, as many would call it, of extreme old age, there is often a divine consolation in recalling the happy moments and days and years of times long past.  So beautiful are the visions of bygone delight that one could hardly wish them to become real, lest they should lose their ineffable charm.  I can almost conceive of a dozing and dreamy centenarian saying to one he loves, “Go, darling, go!  Spread your wings and leave me.  So shall you enter that world of memory where all is lovely.  I shall not hear the sound of your footsteps any more, but you will float before me, an aerial presence.  I shall not hear any word from your lips, but I shall have a deeper sense of your nearness to me than speech can give.  I shall feel, in my still solitude, as the Ancient Mariner felt when the seraph band gathered before him: 

  “’No voice did they impart
   No voice; but oh! the silence sank
   Like music on my heart.’”

I said that the lenient way in which the old look at the failings of others naturally leads them to judge themselves more charitably.  They find an apology for their short-comings and wrong-doings in another consideration.  They know very well that they are not the same persons as the middle-aged individuals, the young men, the boys, the children, that bore their names, and whose lives were continuous with theirs.  Here is an old man who can remember the first time he was allowed to go shooting.  What a remorseless young destroyer he was, to be sure!  Wherever he saw a feather, wherever a poor little squirrel showed his bushy tail, bang! went the old “king’s arm,” and the feathers or the fur were set flying like so much chaff.  Now that same old man,—­the mortal that was called by his name and has passed for the same person for some scores of years,—­is considered absurdly sentimental by kind-hearted women, because he opens the fly-trap and sets all its captives free,—­out-of-doors, of course, but the dear souls all insisting, meanwhile, that the flies will, every one of them, be back again in the house before the day is over.  Do you suppose that venerable sinner expects to be rigorously called to account for the want of feeling he showed in those early years, when the instinct of destruction, derived from his forest-roaming ancestors, led him to acts which he now looks upon with pain and aversion?