The Collected Works of Theodore Parker/Volume 03/Discourse 05
A SERMON OF OLD AGE.
PREACHED AT THE MUSIC HALL, ON SUNDAY, JANUARY 29, 1864.
As the clear light is upon the holy candlestick; so is the beauty of the face in ripe age.—Ecclesiasticus xxvi. 17.
I have often been asked to preach a Sermon of Old Age; and hitherto have declined, on the ground that I could not speak exactly from internal experience, but only from outward observation ; and I hope to be able at some future time to speak on the theme : certainly, if I live, I may correct this present infirmity. To-day, I will try,—only asking all old persons to forgive the imperfections of this discourse ; for they know what I only see. But as I was born into the arms of a father then one-and-fifty years old, who lived to add yet another quarter of a century thereunto; and as my cradle was rocked by a grandmother who had more than fourscore years at my birth, and nearly a hundred when she ceased to be mortal; and as my first "Christian ministry" was attending upon old age,—I think I know something about the character of men and women whom time makes venerable.
There is a period when the apple-tree blossoms with its fellows of the wood and field. How fair a time it is! All nature is woosome and winning; the material world celebrates its vegetable loves; and the flower-bells, touched by the winds of Spring, usher in the universal marriage of Nature. Beast, bird, insect, reptile, fish, plant, lichen, with their prophetic colours spread, all float forward on the tide of new life. Then comes the Summer. Many a blossom falls fruitless to the ground, littering the earth with beauty, never to be used. Thick leaves bide the process of creation, which first blushed public in the flowers, and now unseen goes on. For so life's most deep and fruitful hours are hid in mystery. Apples are growing on every tree; all Summer long they grow, and in early Autumn. At length the fruit is fully formed; the leaves begin to fall, letting the sun approach more near. The apple hangs there yet; not to grow, only to ripen. Weeks long it clings to the tree; it gains nothing in size and weight. Externally, there is increase of beauty. Having finished the form from within, Nature brings out the added grace of colour. It is not a tricksy fashion painted on; but an expression which of itself comes out;—a fragrance and a loveliness of the apple's innermost. Within, at the same time, the component elements are changing. The apple grows mild and pleasant. It softens, sweetens; in one word, it mellows. Some night, the vital forces of the tree get drowsy, and the Autumn, with gentle breath, just shakes the bough; the expectant fruit lets go its hold, full-grown, full ripe, full coloured too, and with plump and happy sound the apple falls into the Autumn's lap; and the Spring's marriage promise is complete.
Such is the natural process which each fruit goes through, blooming, growing, ripening.
The same divine law is appropriate for every kind of animal, from the lowest reptile up to imperial man. It is very beautiful. The parts of the process are perfect; the whole is complete. Birth is human blossom; youth, manhood, they are our summer growth; old age is ripeness. The hands let go the mortal bough; that is natural death. It is a dear, good God who orders all for the apple-tree, and for mankind. Yea, his ark shelters the spider and the toad, the wolf, and the lizard, and the snake;—for He is Father and Mother to all the world.
I cannot tell where childhood ends, and manhood begins; nor where manhood ends, and old age begins. It is a wavering and uncertain line, not straight and definite, which borders betwixt the two. But the outward characteristics of old age are obvious enough. The weight diminishes. Man is commonly heaviest at forty, woman at fifty. After that, the body shrinks a little; the height shortens as the cartilages become thin and dry. The hair whitens and falls away. The frame stoops, the bones become smaller, feebler, have less animal and more mere earthy matter. The senses decay, slowly and handsomely. The eye is not so sharp, and while it penetrates further into space, it has less power clearly to define the outline of what it sees. The ear is dull; the appetite less. Bodily heat is lower; the breath produces less carbonic acid than before. The old man consumes less food, water, air. The hands grasp less strongly ; the feet less firmly tread. The lungs suck the breast of heaven with less powerful collapse. The eye and ear take not so strong a hold upon the world;
"And the big manly voice,
Turning again to childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound."
The animal life is making ready to go out, The very old man loves the sunshine and the fire, the arm-chair and the shady nook. A rude wind would jostle the full-grown apple from its bough, full ripe, full coloured too. The internal characteristics correspond. General activity is less. Salient love of new things and of new persons, which bit the young man's heart, fades away. He thinks the old is better. He is not venturesome; he keeps at home. Passion once stung him into quickened life; now that gad-fly is no more buzzing in his ears. Madame de Stael finds compensation in Science for the decay of the passion that once fired her blood; but Heathen Socrates, seventy years old, thanks the gods that he is now free from that "ravenous beast," which had disturbed his philosophic meditations for many a year. Romance is the child of Passion and Imagination;—the sudden father that, the long-protracting mother this. Old age has little romance. Only some rare man, like Wilhelm Von Humboldt, keeps it still fresh in his bosom.
In intellectual matters the venerable man loves to recall the old times, to revive his favourite old men,—no new ones half so fair. So in Homer, Nestor, who is the oldest of the Greeks, is always talking of the old times, before the grandfathers of men then living had come into being; "not such as live in these degenerate days." Verse-loving John Quincy Adams turns off from Byron and Shelley and Wieland and Goethe, and returns to Pope,
"Who pleased his childhood and informed his youth."
The pleasure of hope is smaller; that of memory greater. It is exceeding beautiful that it is so. The venerable man loves to set recollection to beat the roll-call, and summon up from the grave the old time, "the good old time, the old places, old friends, old games, old talk; nay, to his ear the old familiar tunes are sweeter than anything that Mendelssohn, or Strauss, or Rossini can bring to pass. Elder Brewster expects to hear St Martin's and Old Hundred chanted in heaven. Why not? To him heaven comes in the long-used musical tradition, not in the neologies of sweet sound.
He loves the old doctrines. The Christian of the fourth century, who in manhood went through fire for Christianity's sake, and confessed Jesus in the jail and on the rack, in his old age goes back to the castle of Dame Venus, whom in his heady youth he had forsworn. He loves the temples and statues of his father's religion, and rebuilds the faith which once he destroyed. The Protestant who stood by Luther's doctrine in all his manly days, now that he is old thinks of the Madonna of his childhood, and dies with the once hated wafer in his lips. The Unitarian woman at her Thursday lecture, who in her prime, with Ware and Channing, endured the reproach of thinking for herself, and bore the common Church's scoff and scorn, now fans her faded cheek with denunciations of all who doubt a miracle; deals "damnation round the land;" getting old and cold-blooded, she goes back to Orthodoxy, and wants a chance to warm her shrivelled limbs and poor thin blood at the fire of eternal torment. An old Poem of the North tells of a brave boy, who in his earlier days found his mother's cottage too narrow, mourned at tending the goats on the mountain-side, and felt his heart swell in him like a brook from the melting of the snow, when he saw a ship shoot like an arrow into the bay. He ran from his mother and the goats. The Viking took him on board. The wind swelled the sails. He saw the hill-top sink in the blue deep, and was riotously glad. He took his father's sword in hand and swore to conquer him "houses and lands by the sea." He also is a Viking. He has been all over the Mediterranean coast, and conquered him "houses and lands by the sea;" now, in his old age, his palace in Byzantium is a weariness to him, and he longs for the little cottage of his mother. He dreams of the goats; all day the kids bleat for him. He enters a little barque; he sails for the Scandinavian coast, and goes to the very cottage too narrow for his childhood, and eats again the barken bread of Sweden, and drinks its bitter beer; bares his forehead to the storm ; sits on the rocks, and there he dies. "Bury me not, I pray thee, in Egypt," said old Jacob, "*but I will lie with my fathers: bury me in their burying-place."
Then the scholar becomes an antiquary; he likes not young men unless he knew their grandfathers before. The young woman looks in the newspaper for the marriages, the old man for the deaths. The young man's eye looks forward; the world is "all before him, where to choose." It is a hard world; he does not know it: he works little, and hopes much. The middle-aged man looks around at the present; he has found out that it is a hard world: he hopes less, and works more. The old man looks back on the fields he has trod;" this is the tree I planted; this is my footprint;" and he loves his old house, his old carriage, cat, dog, staff, and friend. In lands where the vine grows, I have seen an old man sit all day long, a sunny autumn day, before his cottage door, in a great arm-chair, his old dog couched at his feet, in the genial sun. The autumn wind played with the old man's venerable hairs; above him on the wall, purpling in the sunlight, hung the full clusters of the grape, ripening and maturing yet more. The two were just alike; the wind stirred the vine leaves, and they fell ; stirred the old man's hair, and it whitened yet more. Both were waiting for the spirit in them to be fully ripe. The young man looks forward; the old man looks back. How far-extended the shadows lie in the setting sun; the steeple a mile long reaching across the plain, as the sun stretches out the hills in grotesque dimensions. So are the events of life in the old man's consciousness. I spoke the other day of the Dangers of early Manhood; and again of those of later Manhood; of the period of passion, and the period of calculation. This, I take it,—I say it with reverence, and under correction,—is the danger of old age:—that the man should be querulous; should slight the needful and appropriate joys of youth and manhood; that he should be timid of all things which are new, consult with his fear, and not his hope, and look backwards and not forth. These, it seems to me, are the special dangers of the old man. Pardon me, venerable persons, if I mistake! I read from only without; you can answer from within. It is said that men seldom get a new idea after five and forty. It is perhaps true; but it has also been my fortune to know men and women who in their old age had a long Indian Summer, in which the grass grew fresh again, and the landscape had a richness, a mellowness of outline and of tint; yea! and a beauty, too, which it had lacked in earlier years. What has been exceptional in my observation, may perhaps be instantial, and belong to the nature of old men.
Divers diseases invade the flesh in old age, which, most of them, it seems to me, come from our general ignorance, or the violation of Nature's laws. Childhood is unnatural. Half the human race is cradled in the arms of death. The pains we cause at birth, the pains we bear, are alike unnatural. So are many of the pains of old age. The old lion, buffalo, eagle, elephant, dies as the apple falls from the tree, with little pain. So have I seen a pine-tree in the woods, old, dry at its root, weak in its limbs, capped with age-resembling snow; it stood there, and seemed like to stand; but a little touch of wind drove it headlong, and it fell with long-resounding crash. The next morning the woodsman is astonished that the old tree lies prostrate on the ground. This is a natural death, for the old tree, and the venerable man. But our cradle and couch are haunted now with disease, which I doubt not wisdom, knowledge of Nature's laws, and the true religion of the flesh, will one day enable us to avoid. Now sickness attends our rising up and our lying down. These infirmities I pass by.
The man reaps in his old age as he sowed in his youth and his manhood. He ripens what he grew. The quantity and the quality of his life are the result of all his time. If he has been faithful to his better nature, true to his conscience, and his heart, and his soul,—in his old age he often reaps a most abundant reward in the richest delight of his own quiet consciousness. Private selfishness is less now than ever before. He loves the Eternal Justice of God, the great Higher Law. Once his hot blood tempted him, and he broke perhaps that law ; now he thinks thereof with grief at the wrong he made others suffer: though he clasps his hands and thanks God for the lesson he has learned even from his sin. He heeds now the great attraction whereby all things gravitate towards God. He knows there is a swift Justice for nations and for men, and he says to the youth: "Rejoice, young man, in thy youth! Let thy heart cheer thee I But know thou that for all these things God will bring thee into account. Hear the sum of the whole matter: Love God and keep His commandments, for this is the whole of man."
In the old saint, perhaps instinctive conscience, like his natural eye and ear, has grown more feeble. But yet the well-developed moral sense, strengthened by inward and outward observation, and enforced by the momentum which long habit gives, endows him with greater moral power than he ever had before;
"And old experience doth attain
To something like prophetic strain."
You cannot swerve him from the right. What bribe could make old Washington unjust, or Franklin false to his love for the slave, the sick, the poor, for all men? In long time, our good old man has got a great estate of righteousness, which no genius could have accumulated in a short period.
His affections now are greater than before; yet it is not the mere power of instinctive affection—the connubial instinct which loves a mate, or the parental instinct which loves a child; but a general human, reflective, volitional love, not sharpened by animal desire, not narrowed by affiliated bounds, but coming of his freedom, not his bondage. Of mere instinctive affection he has perhaps less than before. That fades with the age which needs it, &a the blossoth falls when the fruit is set, and the leaves when it has grown. With this pure human affection, he loves his venerable wife better than before ; she him: they have been rising in love these sixty or seventy summers. Once, in their spring of life, their connubial love bloomed passion-red; then it grew to summer beauty; now it is autumn ripe, it is all affection; there is no romance; passion is gone. It is affection ripened by half a hundred years of use and wont; a gradual marriage sloping up to a complete wedlock of the man and woman. Now the two are one ; dualism is unified in a long life. This unity and its joy—that is God's benediction on a true marriage, fifty years a-making. All the wife's spiritual womanhood is his; all the spiritual manhood of the husband is hers. Neither has lost; both have won; each has gained the whole value of what was exchanged in this matrimonial barter.
The old grandfather loves his grandchild better than once he loved his new-born boy or girl; with less instinctive fire of paternity, but with more general human love; for his character has grown more and more. Once his love was the fiery particle drawn from a voltaic pile of only five and twenty years; now it gathers power front the combination of eighty several summers and winters. He loves with all that added force. He no longer limits his love to his family; it has not the intensity of instinct, nor its narrow bound. His heart Went to school in his early passionate love. Marriage, paternity, brought new education to his affections. His babies taught him. Early his affection rode on the shoulders of his wife; then on the backs of his boy and girl; now it overtakes all men-friends, countrymen; yea, all whom God's love broods over in the world's wide nest.
Once, when hot blood was in him,, he said, Aha among the trumpets, smelling the battle afar off, and he loved war; now he hates strife, loves peace. And so he honours the gentle deeds of charity, benevolence, and piety. General Jacksons, and Nelsons, and Napoleons, and Wellingtons, are not heroes of his: the good Samaritans are his beloved; not the great soldiers, with their innumerable trains of artillery and baggage-wagons, and their famous "great victories;" it is the good maiden, the angel of mercy in the neighbouring street; it is the kind man, whose wise heart goes out as medicine to the sick, the old, the feeble, the poor,—these are his heroes. The heroism of hate he has trod under-foot; the heroism of love—he looks up and thanks God for that.
His religion is deeper, more inward than before. It is not doctrine alone, nor mere form. There is little rapture; he is still, and knows that God is Father and Mother of the world. His religion is love of God ; faith and trust in Him; rest, tranquillity, peace for his soul. From the wide field of time, deeply laboured for eighty years, he reaps a great harvest of life, and now his sheaves are with him; the eternal riches of heaven are poured into his lap. He fears nothing; he loves. His hope for this world is something small; for his immortal future he knows no bounds. The farmer tills his ground for the annual harvest, but his good tillage fertilizes the soil; and without his thinking of it, his farm grows richer and his estate larger. And just so it is with the true, good man : as the years go by him, his estate of religion greatens, and becomes more and more. The little flowers of humanity — a warm spring day calls them out, where there is no deepness of earth: but to raise the great oak-trees of human righteousness, you want a deep, rich soil, and threescore, fourscore, fivescore summers and winters, for the tree to grow in, broadly buttressed below, broad-branched above, to wrestle with the winds, and take the sunshine of God's heaven on its top. And that is the value of long life—it is an opportunity to grow great and ripen through. It is out of Time and Nature that man makes life; long time is needed, as well as noble nature, for a great life.
Alas for the man who has lived meanly! his old age is a sad and wintry day, whereunto the spring offers no promise. He sowed the wind: it is the storm he reaps.
Here is an old sensualist. In his youth he threw the reins on the neck of every lust which wars against the soul, and so went through the period of instinctive Passion. In his graver years, his Calculation was only for the appetites of the flesh, ambition for sensual delight. Now he is old, his desire has become habit; but the in struments of his appetite are dull, broken, worn out. He recollects the wine and the debauch once rejoiced in; now they have lost their relish; his costly meat turns to gall in him. He remembers nothing but his feasting, and his riot, and his debauch. He has had his skin-full of animal gluttony, nothing more. He thinks of the time when the flesh was strong about him. So the Hebrews, whom Moses led out of thraldom, remembered the leeks and the onions and the garlic which they did eat in Egypt freely, and said, "Carry us back to Egypt, that we may serve false gods, and be full." He dreams of his old life: some night of sickness, when opium has drugged him to sleep, it comes up once more. His old fellow-sinners have risen from the dead; they prepare the feast; they pour the wine; they sing the filthy, ribald song; the lewd woman comes in his dream;—alas! it is only a dream; he wakes with his gout and his chagrin. Let us leave him with his bottle and his bloat, his recollection and his gout. Poor old man!—his grey hairs not venerable, but stained with drunkenness and lust. So have I seen, in other lands, the snows of winter fall on what was once a mountain that spouted cataracts of fire. Now all is cold, and the volcano's crater is but a bowl of ice, which no mortal summer can melt; and underneath it there are the scoriae and the lava which the volcano threw up in its heat — cold, barren, ugly to look on. young man ! young maid ! would you be buried alive, to die of rot, in such a grave as that?
Here is an old man who loved nothing but money. Instead of a conscience, heart, and soul, he had only a three- headed greedy-worm, which longed for money—copper, silver, gold. In youth, he minted his passion into current coin, courting an estate; in manhood, he was ambitious only for gold; in old age, he has his money, the passion and ambition therefor; the triple greedy-worm, three times more covetous than before. As the powers of the body fail, his lust for gold grows fiercer in that decay:
"——the interest table is his creed,
His paternoster, and his decalogue."
How afraid he is of the assessor! In youth avarice was a passion; in manhood calculation; but now the passion is stronger, the calculation more intense, and there is the habit of covetousness, eighty years old. The accumulated fall of eighty winters gives his covetousness such a momentum as carries him with swiftly accelerated speed down into the bottomless pit of hunkerism. He has no care for right and justice: no love for mankind; none for God. Mammon is his sole divinity, that Godhead a trinity of coin. What an end of what a life! His grey hairs cover only an estate ; he is worth nothing.
Did you ever see the old age of a covetous man who for eighty years had gathered gold, and nothing more? I have seen more than one such. It is the sin of New England. I spoke of poverty the other day ; of want which I saw in the cellars of Broad Street and Burgess Alley, in the attics of the North End Block. There is no want so squalid, no misery of poverty so desperate, as the consciousness of an old miser, in his old age of covetousness. Pass him by.
Here is an old man who in his long time has sought only power and place, and thence-accruing fame. His passion was all ambition, his calculation only for place and name. With strange fire he sacrificed youth and manhood on this unholy altar. He has not yet won the place he longs for, nor never will. He sets his hungry eye on it, and grows more reckless in the means that seem to lead thereto, "for he knoweth that his time is short," Nothing stands between him and what he aims at. Friendship is nothing; his plighted word is only the oath of a dicer who throws for place. His past life is nothing; he will eat his own words, though hard as cannon-shot. His conscience is nothing; his affections nothing ; his soul nothing; and his God—that is a word to swear by, and beguile the people with. He knows no Higher Law—only the passion of the many, the ambition of the few.
I have seen the old age of such; I remember their faces the face of a volcano, rent with hidden fires, scarred and streaked with the ruin they had thrown out from their own ambition! God save you from such an end, and me!
Look around you and see men conspicuous in American politics to-day—men whose passions of the flesh time has cooled, and tamed, and chilled, and frozen through; but the passion for place wars still in their members; and yet more against the soul. Old men, they mock at conscience; they pimp and pander to every vice of America. "Give us place," say they, "and you shall have Cuba and Mexico for your Slavery; yea, the bloodhounds of America shall bark from the Mexique Bay to the British line, and the tide of Slavery shall break over the Rocky Mountains' top!"
Would you wish such an old age? Look at the Senate of the United States to-day; at the aspirants for the presidency, I know not how many of them. Nay, look in less eminent places, for the ambition of obscurer men, and pee how it eats out the heart of such as time has spared.
The old age of the sensualist, the miser, of him who worships only place, and fame, and power—what a judgment it against the sin! I have of eloquence, simple power of speech, to paint in words the ghastly fact, There was once a man in America, of large talent and extraordinary culture, born also of a family venerable for the great men it had cradled in its bosom. In him, the discordant vices of passion and calculation seemed both to culminate. He was the favourite of a powerful party: thirty-five times did the Federalist delegates in Congress give their voice for him. They made him Vice-President of the nation. He was possessed of almost every loathly sin that human nature could hold, and yet hold together. He was more than eighty years old when he died. But the old age of Aaron Burr—would you wish worse punishment for the worst man that ever lived? The nation hated him, not without cause; for he turned a traitor to America. Within him all was rotten : he was a faithless friend; a subtle and merciless enemy ; a deceitful father who sought to sell the honour of his only daughter, and she a wife and mother too ! Some night in his last days, I when pain, most ignominiously got, kept him from sleep, perhaps conscience came and beat the reveillez in his heart and his memory gave up its dead ; the buried victims of his deceit rose before him, of his treason, his lust, his malice, his covetousness, and his revenge! Pass him by, only fit "to point a moral and adorn a tale,"—perhaps the worst great man Young America ever gendered in her bosom. Here is a woman who has sought chiefly the admiration of the world, the praise of men. Her life is vanity long drawn out, the only frailty which joins her to mankind. Now she is an old woman of fashion—wearing still the garments of her earlier prime, which, short and scanty as they were, are yet a world too wide for shrunken age to fill. How ill those gaudy ruffles become the withered dew-lap that hangs beneath her chin! Her life has been a long cheat; she has had no calculation but for vanity, setting a trap to catch a compliment: it is fit her age should be a deceit. That colour—the painter did it; the plumpness—it is artificial; the hair—false; the teeth—are purchased at a shop; the hands—all glove and bone, and great big veins; the tongue—it was always artificial and false; it needs no other change. Yet she apes the tread of youth. Alas! poor fly! For this you have lived; nay, flirted!—it is not life. This, then, is the end of the waltzes, and polkas, and cracoviennes; this is the pay for he morning study over dress, the afternoon prattle about it, the evening spent in putting on this gaudy attire. Poor creature! in youth, a worm; in womanhood, "a butterfly; in old age, your wings all tattered, your plumage rent, a "fingered moth,"—old, shrivelled, sick, perching on nothing, and perishing into dust ; the laughter of the witty; the scorn of the thoughtless ; only the pity of the wise and good ! What a three-act drama is her life—youth, womanhood, age! Vanity sits- there in front of the stage, known but not seen, and prompts the play—the words, the grimace. What music it is! from the opera, the lewdest and the wildest, and from the Catholic Judgment-Hymn, mingled together in the same confusion which behind the scenes her toilet table brings to view, where you also find "puffs, powders, patches, Bibles, billet-doux." Now the audience is tired of her, and laughs at the hollow voice, the bleary eye, the spindle limbs. The curtain falls; the farce is at an end. Poor old butterfly! Death and Vanity carry her between them to fitting burial and the Mercy-Seat of the Infinite God.
What a beautiful thing is the old age which crowns a noble life, of rich or poor! How fair are the latter days of many a woman—wife, mother, sister, aunt, friend— whom you and I have known! How proud were the last years of Washington; the old age of Franklin! How beautiful in his late autumn is Alexander Von Humboldt! The momentum of manliness bears on the venerable man beyond his four and eightieth year. There you see the value of time. It takes much to make a great life, as to make a great estate. No amount of genius that God ever gives a man could enable one to achieve at forty what Von Humboldt has only done at more than eighty. It was so with Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Leibnitz, every great man who has awed the world by the action of a mighty intellect, with corresponding culture.
These are men of high talent, station, genius perhaps. But the old age of a Quaker tailor in Philadelphia and New York was not a whit less fair. The philanthropy of Isaac Hopper blessed the land ; in his manhood it enriched the world; in his old age it beautified his own life, giving an added glory to his soul.
How many farmers, mechanics, traders, servants, how many mothers, wives, and aunts have you and I known, whose last days were a handsome finish to a handsome life ; the Christian ornament on the tall column of time! Their old age was the slow setting of the sun, which left
"The smile of his departure spread
O'er the warm-coloured heaven and ruddy mountain-head."
Miss Kindly is aunt to everybody, and has been so long that none remember to the contrary. The little children love her; she helped their grandmothers to bridal ornaments, threescore years ago. Nay, this boy's grandfather found the way to college lay through her pocket. Generations not her own rise up and call her blessed. To this man's father her patient toil gave the first start in life. That great fortune—when it was a seed, she carried it in her hand. That wide river of reputation ran out of the; cup her bounty filled. Now she is old; very old. The little children, who cling about her, with open mouth, and great round eyes, wonder that anybody should ever be so old; or that Aunt Kindly ever had a mother to kiss her mouth. To them she is coeval with the sun, and like that, an institution of the country. At Christmas, they think she is the wife of Saint Nicholas himself, such an advent is there of blessings from her* hand. She ha& helped lay a Messiah in many a poor man's crib.
Her hands are thin; her voice feeble; her back is bent; she walks with a staff—the best limb of the three. She wears a cap of antique pattern, yet of her own nice make. She has great round spectacles, and holds her book away off the other side of the candle when she reads. For more than sixty years she has been a special providence to the family. How she used to go forth—the very charity of God—to soothe, and heal, and bless ! How industrious are her hands! how thoughtful and witty that fertile mind! Her heart has gathered power to love in all the. eighty-six years of her toilsome life. When the birth-angel came to a related house, she was there to be the mother's mother; ay, mother also to the new-born baby's soul. And when the wings of death flapped in the street, and shook a neighbour's door, she smoothed down the pillow for the fainting head; she soothed and cheered the spirit of the waiting man, opening the curtains of heaven that he might look through and see the welcoming race of the dear Infinite Mother : nay, she put the wings her own strong, experienced piety under him, and sought to bear him up.
Now, these things are passed by. No, they are not passed by; they are recollected in the memory of the dear God, and every good deed she has done is treasured in her own heart. The bulb shuts up the summer in its breast which in winter will come out a fragrant hyacinth. Stratum after stratum, her good works are laid up, imperishable, in the geology of her character.
It is near noon now. She is alone. She has been thoughtful all day, talking inwardly to herself. The family notice it, and say nothing. In her chamber, from a private drawer, she takes a little casket; and from thence a book, gilt-edged and clasped; but the clasp is worn, the gilding is old, the binding faded by long use. Her hands tremble as she opens it. First she reads her own name, on the fly-leaf; only her Christian name, "Agnes," and the date. Sixty-eight years ago this day it was written there, in a clear, youthful, clerkly hand—with a little tremble in it, as if the heart beat over-quick. It is very well worn, the dear old Bible, It opens of its own accord, at the fourteenth chapter of St John. There is a little folded piece of paper there: it touches the first verse and the twenty-seventh. She sees neither: she reads both out of her soul:—"Let not your heart be troubled; ye believe in God; believe also in me:" "Peace I leave with you. My peace I give unto you. Not as the world giveth, give I unto yon." She opens the paper. There is a little brown dust in it; perhaps the remnant of a flower. She takes the previous relic in her hand, made cold by emotion. She drops a tear on it, and the dust is transfigured before her eyes; it is a red rose of the spring, not quite half blown, dewy fresh. She is old no longer. It is not Aunt Kindly now; it is sweet Agnes, as the maiden of eighteen was, eight and sixty years ago, one day in May, when all nature was woosome and winning and every flower-bell rung in the marriage of the year. Her lover had just put that red rose of the spring into her hand, and the good God another in her cheek, not quite half-blown, dewy fresh.[1] The young man's arm is round her; her brown curls fall on his shoulder; she feels his breath on her face, his cheek on hers; their lips join, and like two morning dew-drops in that rose, their two loves rush into one. But the youth must wander to a far land. They will think of each other as they look at the North Star. She bids him take her Bible, He saw the North Star hang over the turrets of many a foreign town. His soul went to God—there is as straight a road from India as from any other spot—and his Bible came back to her—the Divine love in it, without the human lover, the leaf turned down at the blessed words of St John, first and twenty-seventh of the fourteenth chapter. She put the rose there to note the spot ; what marks the thought holds now the symbol of their youthful love. To-day her soul is with him, her maiden soul with his angel soul ; and one day the two, like two dew-drops, will rush into one immortal wedlock, and the old age of earth shall become eternal youth in the Kingdom of Heaven.
Grandfather is old. His back also is bent. In the street he sees crowds of men looking dreadfully young, and walking fearfully swift. He wonders, where all the old folks are. Once, when a boy, he could not find people young enough for him, and sidled up to any young stranger he met on Sundays, wondering why God made the world so old. Now he goes to Commencement to see his grandsons take their degree, and is astonished at the youth of the audience. "This is new," he says; "it did not use to be so fifty years before." At meeting, the minister seems surprisingly young, the audience young; and he looks round and is astonished that there are so few venerable heads. The audience seems not decorous; they come in late, and hurry off early, clapping the doors to after them with irreverent bang. But Grandfather is decorous, well-mannered, early in his seat: jostled, he jostles not again; elbowed, he returns it not; crowded, he thinks no evil. He is gentlemanly to the rude, obliging to the insolent and vulgar;—for Grandfather is a gentleman, not puffed up with mere money, but edified with well-grown manliness. Time has dignified his good-manners.
Now it is night. Grandfather sits by his old-fashioned fire. The family are all a-bed. He draws his old fashioned chair nearer to the hearth. On the stand which his mother gave him are the candlesticks, also of old time. The candles are three-quarters burnt down ; the fire on the hearth also is low. He has been thoughtful all day, talking half to himself, chanting a bit of verse, humming a snatch of an old tune. He kissed more tenderly than common his youngest grand-daughter, — the family pet,—before she went to bed. He takes out of his bosom a little locket: nobody ever sees it. Therein are two little twists of hair; common hair: it might be yours or mine. But as Grandfather looks at them, the outer twist of hair becomes a whole head of most ambrosial curls. He remembers the stolen interviews, the meetings by moonlight, and how sweet the evening star looked, and how he laid his hand on another's shoulder. "You are my evening star," quoth he. He remembers
"The fountain-heads, and pathless groves,
Places that pale Passion loves.'
He thinks of his bridal hour.
In the stillness of the great slumbering town, while life breaks only in a quiet ripple on all those hundred thousand lips, he hears no noise; but with wintry hands solemnly the church clock strikes the midnight hour. In his locket he looks again. This other twist is the hair of his firstborn son. At this same hour of midnight, once—it is now many years ago—when the long agony was over he knelt and prayed—"My God, I thank thee that I, though father, am still a husband too! O, what have I done! what am I, that unto me, thus a life should be given, and another spared! "Now he has children, and children's children—the joy of his old age. But for many a year his wife has looked to him from beyond the Evening Star; yea, still she is herself the Evening Star, yet more beautiful; a star that never sets; not mortal wife now, but angel; and he says, "How long, Lord? when lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, that mine eyes may see thy salvation?"
The last stick on his andirons snaps asunder, and falls outward. Two faintly smoking brands stand there. Grand- father lays them together, and they flame up; the two smokes are one united flame. "Even so let it be in heaven," says Grandfather.
Dr Priestly, when he was young, preached that old age was the happiest time of life; and when he was himself eighty he wrote, "I have found it so." But the old age of the glutton, the fop, the miser, the hunter after place, the bigot, the shrew, what would that be? Think of the old age of a Boston Kidnapper! It is only a noble, manly life, full of piety, which makes old age beautiful. Then we ripen for Eternity, and the dear God looks down from heaven, and lays his hand on the venerable head "Come, thou beloved, inherit the Kingdom prepared for thee."
- ↑ This image is borrowed from a popular story by Hans Christian Anderson.