A busy street, thus pictured, in that time, shows many Trol-lees rushing by, filled with merry people. Along the side-ways scores of passengers are seen, mounted on their ‘Sigh-kels, going in divers directions at full speed. The passengers present many aspects; for riding the ‘Sigh-kel was an art which had to be acquired; and by some this could not be done—at least not gracefully done. Many tried, but few were chosen. Two classes of people suffered much in this particular, namely, the very fat and the very bony. Those whom nature had favored in form and feature, and who had acquired the art of sitting upright, look well enough in these old pictures of a past age. But the clumsy and obese, the slender and angular people may well be laughed at even through the shadowy retrospect of four centuries.
One of the ‘Sigh-kel machines was made double; and an old cartoon which is now before me gives to this kind the name of Tan-doom. On this men and women frequently rode together, the woman going before, for that was the age in which the woman, becoming new, showed her newness by being forward.
Nor may we leave these reminiscences of a bygone age without reflecting upon the absurdities of our ancestors, who had not yet imagined the ease and excellence of our own method of locomotion by skimming at will the surface of the earth. The facile beauty and natural art with which we now rise from the ground and propel ourselves by our own thought and wish to any distance—thus vindicating our superiority to all other creatures in our method of excursion—are facts so obvious and ever-present that we fail to reflect upon the impediments and hardships of the people of Am-ri-ka and indeed of the whole world in the nineteenth century….
Thinking on these things I can but imagine that I have myself seen them in some previous epoch of my existence. The facts which I have recorded appear dimly, as if in memory of what I once beheld; but the vision of it is so obscure that I still doubt whether it be dream or reality. I have long imagined that we retain from one epoch of our existence to the next a vague recollection of our experiences in the remote ages of the past. I sometimes think that it is not impossible that I myself, in some forgotten avatar, used to sit alone at the window of my office, looking into the street of one of the old towns of Am-ri-ka where the Trol-lees were going one way and the By-sigh-kels the other way, crossing and darting hither and yon, according to the wills of the riders; but the vision is so dim that it looks like the fictions of sleep.
Vita Longa.
The question is not how long this bodily life may last, or how long the mind, so conditioned, can endure. It is not even how long the mind may continue to produce; for the mind, like a poor, half-exhausted field, urged with rain and fertilizers, may produce only potatoes, mullen, and cockle. The real question—the deep-down essence of it—is how long the mind, or soul, may retain the enthusiasm and passionate power of creation. That is the only true test of longevity; and when that ceases there is nothing left. The real duration of man-life is measured only by the persistency of creative power.
Longfellow, standing in the old pulpit, on the fiftieth anniversary of his class at Bowdoin, and saying to those who would introduce him, “I wish the desk were large enough to conceal me all,” makes a beautiful section of this theme by citing some of the most inspiring instances of the long life of the soul:
Cato learned Greek at eighty; Sophocles
Wrote his grand Œdipus, and Simonides