[OLD AGE.—Theodore Parker.]
The old man loves the sunshine and fire—the arm-chair and the shady nook. A rude wind would jostle the full-grown apple from its bough, full ripe, full colored, too. The internal characteristics correspond. General activity is less. Salient love of new things and of persons, which hit 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 gadfly is no more buzzing in his ears.
Madame de Stael finds compensation in silence for the decay of the passion that once fired her blood; heathen Socrates, seventy years old, thanks the gods that he is now free from that "ravenous beast" which has disturbed his philosophic meditations for many years. 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 old man loves to recall the old time, to review his favorite old men—no new ones half so fair. So in Homer, Nestor, who is the oldest of the Greeks, is always talking of the olden times, before the grandfathers of the men then living had come into being; "not such as living had degenerate days." Verse-loving John Quincy Adams turns off from Byron and Shelley, and Wieland and Goethe, and returns to Pope. * * * Elder Brewster expects to hear St. Martin's and Old Hundred chanted in heaven. To him heaven comes in the long-used musical tradition.
The middle-aged man looks around at the present; he hopes less and works more. The old man looks back on the field he has trod: "this is the tree I planted—this is my footstep;" and he loves his old home, 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 lay couched at his feet, in the genial sun. The autumn winds played in the old man's venerable hairs. Above him on the wall, purpling in the sunlight, hung the full clusters of the grapes, ripening and maturing yet more. The two were just alike—the wind stirred the vine-leaves and they fell, stirred the old man's hairs and they 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 long the shadows lie in the setting sun—the steeples, 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.