No man can reach an advanced age without thinking of that great change to which, in the course of nature, he must be so near.  It has been remarked that the sterner beliefs of rigid theologians are apt to soften in their later years.  All reflecting persons, even those whose minds have been half palsied by the deadly dogmas which have done all they could to disorganize their thinking powers,—­all reflecting persons, I say, must recognize, in looking back over a long life, how largely their creeds, their course of life, their wisdom and unwisdom, their whole characters, were shaped by the conditions which surrounded them.  Little children they came from the hands of the Father of all; little children in their helplessness, their ignorance, they are going back to Him.  They cannot help feeling that they are to be transferred from the rude embrace of the boisterous elements to arms that will receive them tenderly.  Poor planetary foundlings, they have known hard treatment at the hands of the brute forces of nature, from the control of which they are soon to be set free.  There are some old pessimists, it is true, who believe that they and a few others are on a raft, and that the ship which they have quitted, holding the rest of mankind, is going down with all on board.  It is no wonder that there should be such when we remember what have been the teachings of the priesthood through long series of ignorant centuries.  Every age has to shape the Divine image it worships over again,—­the present age and our own country are busily engaged in the task at this time.  We unmake Presidents and make new ones.  This is an apprenticeship for a higher task.  Our doctrinal teachers are unmaking the Deity of the Westminster Catechism and trying to model a new one, with more of modern humanity and less of ancient barbarism in his composition.  If Jonathan Edwards had lived long enough, I have no doubt his creed would have softened into a kindly, humanized belief.

Some twenty or thirty years ago, I said to Longfellow that certain statistical tables I had seen went to show that poets were not a long-lived race.  He doubted whether there was anything to prove they were particularly short-lived.  Soon after this, he handed me a list he had drawn up.  I cannot lay my hand upon it at this moment, but I remember that Metastasio was the oldest of them all.  He died at the age of eighty-four.  I have had some tables made out, which I have every reason to believe are correct so far as they go.  From these, it appears that twenty English poets lived to the average age of fifty-six years and a little over.  The eight American poets on the list averaged seventy-three and a half, nearly, and they are not all dead yet.  The list including Greek, Latin, Italian, and German poets, with American and English, gave an average of a little over sixty-two years.  Our young poets need not be alarmed.  They can remember that Bryant lived to be eighty-three years old, that Longfellow reached seventy-five and Halleck seventy-seven, while Whittier is living at the age of nearly eighty-two.  Tennyson is still writing at eighty, and Browning reached the age of seventy-seven.