Every stage of existence has its special trials and its special consolations.  Habits are the crutches of old age; by the aid of these we manage to hobble along after the mental joints are stiff and the muscles rheumatic, to speak metaphorically,—­that is to say, when every act of self-determination costs an effort and a pang.  We become more and more automatic as we grow older, and if we lived long enough we should come to be pieces of creaking machinery like Maelzel’s chess player,—­or what that seemed to be.

Emerson was sixty-three years old, the year I have referred to as that of the grand climacteric, when he read to his son the poem he called “Terminus,” beginning: 

     “It is time to be old,
     To take in sail. 
     The God of bounds,
     Who sets to seas a shore,
     Came to me in his fatal rounds
     And said, ‘No more!’”

It was early in life to feel that the productive stage was over, but he had received warning from within, and did not wish to wait for outside advices.  There is all the difference in the world in the mental as in the bodily constitution of different individuals.  Some must “take in sail” sooner, some later.  We can get a useful lesson from the American and the English elms on our Common.  The American elms are quite bare, and have been so for weeks.  They know very well that they are going to have storms to wrestle with; they have not forgotten the gales of September and the tempests of the late autumn and early winter.  It is a hard fight they are going to have, and they strip their coats off and roll up their shirt-sleeves, and show themselves bare-armed and ready for the contest.  The English elms are of a more robust build, and stand defiant, with all their summer clothing about their sturdy frames.  They may yet have to learn a lesson of their American cousins, for notwithstanding their compact and solid structure they go to pieces in the great winds just as ours do.  We must drop much of our foliage before winter is upon us.  We must take in sail and throw over cargo, if that is necessary, to keep us afloat.  We have to decide between our duties and our instinctive demand of rest.  I can believe that some have welcomed the decay of their active powers because it furnished them with peremptory reasons for sparing themselves during the few years that were left them.

Age brings other obvious changes besides the loss of active power.  The sensibilities are less keen, the intelligence is less lively, as we might expect under the influence of that narcotic which Nature administers.  But there is another effect of her “black drop” which is not so commonly recognized.  Old age is like an opium-dream.  Nothing seems real except what is unreal.  I am sure that the pictures painted by the imagination,—­the faded frescos on the walls of memory,—­come out in clearer and brighter colors than belonged to them many years earlier.  Nature has her special favors for her children of every age, and this is one which she reserves for our second childhood.