So hollow-eyed and haggard-cheeked.”
Mr. Trollope’s Captain Cutwater is the representative of a large constituency in at least this one salient particular, that he “had no idea that he was an old man. He had lived for so many years among men of his own stamp, who had grown gray and bald and rickety and weak alongside of him,” that when he moved into a younger circle, and settled there, he ignored the disparity of ages. In Juvenal’s emphatic phrase, old age steals upon us unawares,—unperceived, unrecognised: obrepit non intellecta senectus. This stealthy in-coming, or on-coming, of old age is an iterated topic in the classics. Cicero, indeed, had been beforehand with Juvenal, almost word for word: non intelligitur quando obrepit senectus. There is Ovid, again, with his “stealthy lapse” of age, beguiling as it wears away: labitur occulte, fallitque volubilis ætas; and with his elsewhere reminder, that time glides on, and with noiseless years we grow older till we grow old: Tempora labuntur, tacitisque senescimus annis. Without, as Hazlitt says, our in the least suspecting it, the mists are at our feet, and the shadows of age encompass us. Leigh Hunt somewhere comments feelingly on the difficulty of learning how narrow and dim a boundary separates mature from old age; and quoting his own personal experience, says, that a single illness made the line of demarcation clear to him. So M. de Ste.-Beuve: Rien n’est pénible à démêler comme les confins des ages: il faut souvent que quelque chose vienne du dehors et coupe court.
There is all the more force in the kindly wish of Mr. Tennyson’s Will Waterproof, that the plump object of it may live long, ere from his topmost head the thickset hazel dies; long, ere the hateful crow shall tread the corners of his eyes; all the more force as coming from one who has to own of himself—
“For I had hope, by something rare,
To prove myself a poet;
But, while I plan, and plan, my hair
Is gray before I know it.”
RESTRAINED ANGER.
Proverbs xvi. 32.