This touching letter, my boy, I recommend to your most prayerful consideration, as a paternal outpouring of shirt-collared old age.
Old age! how beautiful art thou in the glory of thy spectacles, and the sublime largeness of thy stomach and manner. And yet, would you believe it, my boy? I am sometimes possessed of great doubtings as to the genuineness of that majesty which makes a continually-looming Venerable Shape such a great blessing to an imperiled land. Sometimes there comes to me a rickety vision of:
AGE BLUNTLY CONSIDERED.
As Age advances, ails and aches attend,
Backs builded broadest burdensomely bend;
Cuttingly cruel comes consuming Care,
Dealing delusions, drivelry, despair.
Empty endeavor enervately ends,
Fancy forlornly feigns forgotten friends;
Gout, grimly griping, gluttonously great,
Hasten's humanity's hard-hearted hate.
Intentions imbecile invent ideas
Justly jocunding jolly jokers' jeers:
Knowledge—keen kingdom knurlyably known—
Lingers, lamenting life's long lasting loan,
Mammonly mumming, magnifying motes,
Nurtures numb Nature's narrowest nursery notes,
Opens old age's odious offering out—
Peevish punctilio, parrot-pining pout.
Qualmishly querrying, quarrelsomely quaint,
Rousing rife ridicules' repealed restraint;
Speaking soft silliness—such shallow show
That tottering toysters, tickled, titter too.
Useless, ungainly unbeloved, unblest,
Virtue's vague visor, vice's veiling vest,
Wheezingly whimpering, wanting wisdom, wit,
Xistence, Xigent, Xclaims—Xit!