Are you quite sure that you wish to live to be threescore and twenty years old?

“Most certainly I do.  Don’t they say that Theophrastus lived to his hundred and seventh year, and did n’t he complain of the shortness of life?  At eighty a man has had just about time to get warmly settled in his nest.  Do you suppose he doesn’t enjoy the quiet of that resting-place?  No more haggard responsibility to keep him awake nights,—­unless he prefers to retain his hold on offices and duties from which he can be excused if he chooses.  No more goading ambitions,—­he knows he has done his best.  No more jealousies, if he were weak enough to feel such ignoble stirrings in his more active season.  An octogenarian with a good record, and free from annoying or distressing infirmities, ought to be the happiest of men.  Everybody treats him with deference.  Everybody wants to help him.  He is the ward of the generations that have grown up since he was in the vigor of maturity.  Yes, let me live to be fourscore years, and then I will tell you whether I should like a few more years or not.”

You carry the feelings of middle age, I said, in imagination, over into the period of senility, and then reason and dream about it as if its whole mode of being were like that of the earlier period of life.  But how many things there are in old age which you must live into if you would expect to have any “realizing sense” of their significance!  In the first place, you have no coevals, or next to none.  At fifty, your vessel is stanch, and you are on deck with the rest, in all weathers.  At sixty, the vessel still floats, and you are in the cabin.  At seventy, you, with a few fellow-passengers, are on a raft.  At eighty, you are on a spars to which, possibly, one, or two, or three friends of about your own age are still clinging.  After that, you must expect soon to find yourself alone, if you are still floating, with only a life-preserver to keep your old white-bearded chin above the water.

Kindness?  Yes, pitying kindness, which is a bitter sweet in which the amiable ingredient can hardly be said to predominate.  How pleasant do you think it is to have an arm offered to you when you are walking on a level surface, where there is no chance to trip?  How agreeable do you suppose it is to have your well-meaning friends shout and screech at you, as if you were deaf as an adder, instead of only being, as you insist, somewhat hard of hearing?  I was a little over twenty years old when I wrote the lines which some of you may have met with, for they have been often reprinted: 

     The mossy marbles rest
     On the lips that he has prest
        In their bloom,
     And the names he loved to hear
     Have been carved for many a year
        On the tomb.

The world was a garden to me then; it is a churchyard now.

“I thought you were one of those who looked upon old age cheerfully, and welcomed it as a season of peace and contented enjoyment.”