Looking toward sunset

by Unknown

So it is with character. However we may talk about people being “not a whit altered,” “just the same as ever”; the fact is, not one of us is, or can be, for long together, exactly the same. The body we carry with us is not the identical body we were born with, or the one we supposed ours seven years ago; and our spiritual self, which inhabits it, also goes through perpetual change and renewal. In moral and mental, as well as in physical growth, it is impossible to remain stationary. If we do not advance, we retrograde. Talk of being “too late to improve,” “too old to learn”! A human being should be improving with every day of a lifetime; and will probably have to go on learning throughout all the ages of immortality.

One of the pleasures of growing old is, to know, to acquire, to find out, to be able to appreciate the causes of things; this gradually becomes a necessity and an exquisite delight. We are able to pass out of our own small daily sphere, and to take interest in the marvellous government of the universe; to see the grand workings of cause and effect; the educing of good out of apparent evil; the clearing away of the knots in tangled destinies, general or individual; the wonderful agency of time, change, and progress in ourselves, in those surrounding us, and in the world at large. In small minds, this feeling expends itself in meddling, gossiping, scandal-mongering; but such are merely abortive developments of a right noble quality, which, properly guided, results in benefits incalculable to the individual and to society. Undoubtedly the after-half of life is the best working-time. Beautiful is youth’s enthusiasm, and grand are its achievements; but the most solid and permanent good is done by the persistent strength and wide experience of middle age. Contentment rarely comes till then; not mere resignation, a passive acquiescence in what cannot be removed, but active contentment. This is a blessing cheaply bought by a personal share in that daily account of joy and pain, which the longer one lives the more one sees is pretty equally balanced in all lives. Young people enjoy “the top of life” ecstatically, either in prospect or fruition; but they are very seldom contented. It is not possible. Not till the cloudy maze is half travelled through, and we begin to see the object and purpose of it, can we be really content.

The doubtful question, to marry or not to marry, is by this time generally settled. A woman’s relations with the other sex imperceptibly change their character, or slowly decline. There are exceptions; old lovers who have become friends, or friends whom no new love could make swerve from the fealty of years; still it usually happens so. The society of honorable, well-informed gentlemen, who meet a lady on the easy neutral ground of mutual esteem, is undoubtedly pleasant, but the time has passed when any one of them is the one necessary to her happiness. If she wishes to retain influence over mankind, she must do it by means different from those employed in youth. Even then, be her wit ever so sparkling, her influence ever so pure and true, she will often find her listener preferring bright eyes to intellectual conversation, and the satisfaction of his heart to the improvement of his mind. And who can blame him? The only way for a woman to preserve the unfeigned respect of men, is to let them see that she can do without either their attention or their admiration. The waning coquette, the ancient beauty, as well as the ordinary woman, who has had her fair share of both love and liking, must show by her demeanor that she has learned this.

It is reckoned among the compensations of time that we suffer less as we grow older; that pain, like joy, becomes dulled by repetition, or by the callousness that comes with years. In one sense this is true. If there is no joy like the joy of youth, the rapture of a first love, the thrill of a first ambition, God’s great mercy has also granted that there is no anguish like youth’s pain; so total, so hopeless, blotting out earth and heaven, falling down upon the whole being like a stone. This never comes in after life; because the sufferer, if he or she have lived to any purpose at all, has learned that God never meant any human being to be crushed under any calamity, like a blind worm under a stone.

For lesser evils, the fact that our interests gradually take a wider range, allows more scope for the healing power of compensation. Also our loves, hates, sympathies, and prejudices, having assumed a more rational and softened shape, do not present so many angles for the rough attrition of the world. Likewise, with the eye of faith we have come to view life in its entireness, instead of puzzling over its disjointed parts, which were never meant to be made wholly clear to mortal eye. And that calm twilight, which, by nature’s kindly law, so soon begins to creep over the past, throws over all things a softened coloring, which transcends and forbids regret.

Another reason why woman has greater capacity for usefulness in middle life than in any previous portion of her existence, is her greater independence. She will have learned to understand herself, mentally and bodily; to be mistress over herself. Nor is this a small advantage; for it often takes years to comprehend, and to act upon when comprehended, the physical peculiarities of one’s own constitution. Much valetudinarianism among women arises from ignorance or neglect of the commonest sanitary laws; and from indifference to that grand preservative of a healthy body, a well-controlled and healthy mind. Both of these are more attainable in middle age than in youth; and therefore the sort of happiness they bring, a solid, useful, available happiness, is more in her power then than at any earlier period. And why? Because she has ceased to think principally of herself and her own pleasures; because happiness has itself become to her an accidental thing, which the good God may give or withhold, as He sees most fit for her, and most adapted to the work for which he means to use her in her generation. This conviction of being at once an active and a passive agent is surely consecration enough to form the peace, nay, the happiness, of any good woman’s life; enough, be it ever so solitary, to sustain it until the end. In what manner such a conviction should be carried out, no one individual can venture to advise. In this age, woman’s work is almost unlimited, when the woman herself so chooses. She alone can be a law unto herself; deciding and acting according to the circumstances in which her lot is placed. And have we not many who do so act? There are women of property, whose names are a proverb for generous and wide charities; whose riches, carefully guided, flow into innumerable channels, freshening the whole land. There are women of rank and influence, who use both, or lay aside both, in the simplest humility, for labors of love, which level all classes, or rather raise them all, to one common sphere of womanhood.

Many others, of whom the world knows nothing, have taken the wisest course that any unmarried woman can take; they have made themselves a home and a position; some, as the Ladies Bountiful of a country neighborhood; some, as elder sisters, on whom has fallen the bringing up of whole families, and to whom has been tacitly accorded the headship of the same, by the love and respect of more than one generation thereof. There are some who, as writers, painters, and professional women generally, make the most of whatever special gift is allotted to them; believing that, whether it be great or small, it is not theirs, either to lose or to waste, but that they must one day render up to the Master his own, with usury.

I will not deny that the approach of old age has its sad aspect to a woman who has never married; and who, when her own generation dies out, no longer retains, or can expect to retain, any flesh-and-blood claim upon a single human being. When all the downward ties, which give to the decline of life a rightful comfort, and the interest in the new generation which brightens it with a perpetual hope, are to her either unknown, or indulged in chiefly on one side. Of course there are exceptions, where an aunt has been almost like a mother, and where a loving and lovable great-aunt is as important a personage as any grandmother. But, generally speaking, a single woman must make up her mind that the close of her days will be more or less solitary.

Yet there is a solitude which old age feels to be as natural and satisfying as that rest which seems such an irksomeness to youth, but which gradually grows into the best blessing of our lives; and there is another solitude, so full of peace and hope, that it is like Jacob’s sleep in the wilderness, at the foot of the ladder of angels.

The extreme loneliness, which afar off appears sad, may prove to be but as the quiet, dreamy hour, “between the lights,” when the day’s work is done, and we lean back, closing our eyes, to think it all over before we finally go to rest, or to look forward, with faith and hope, unto the coming Morning.