* * * * *

LIV.

OLD AGE AND USEFULNESS

THE GLORY OF BRAVE MEN AND WOMEN.

    Dear Lord!  I thank thee for a life of use;
    Dear Lord!  I do not pine for any truce. 
    Peace, peace has always come from duty done;
    Peace, peace will so until the end be won. 
    Thanks, thanks! a thankful heart is my reward;
    Thanks, thanks befit the children of the Lord. 
    Wind, wind! the peaceful reel must still go round;
    Wind, wind! the thread of life will soon be wound. 
    The worker has no dread of growing old;
    First, years of toil, and then the age of gold! 
    For lo! he hopes to bear his flag unfurled
    Beyond the threshold of another world.

John Foster, he who sprang into celebrity from one essay, Popular Ignorance, had a diseased feeling against growing old, which seems to us to be very prevalent.  He was sorry to lose every parting hour.  “I have seen a fearful sight to-day,” he would say—­“I have seen a buttercup.”  To others the sight would only give visions of the coming Spring and future Summer; to him it told of the past year, the last Christmas, the days which would never come again—­the so many days nearer the grave.  Thackeray continually expressed the same feeling.  He reverts to the merry old time when George the Third was king.  He looks back with a regretful mind to his own youth.  The black Care constantly rides, behind his chariot.  “Ah, my friends,” he says, “how beautiful was youth!  We are growing old.  Spring-time and Summer are past.  We near the Winter of our days.  We shall never feel as we have felt.  We approach the inevitable grave.”  Few men, indeed, know how to grow old gracefully, as Madame de Stael very truly observed.  There is an unmanly sadness at leaving off the old follies and the old games.  We all hate fogyism.  Dr. Johnson, great and good as he was, had a touch of this regret, and we may pardon him for the feeling.  A youth spent in poverty and neglect, a manhood consumed in unceasing struggle, are not preparatives to growing old in peace.  We fancy that, after a stormy morning and a lowering day, the evening should have a sunset glow, and, when the night sets in, look back with regret at the “gusty, babbling, and remorseless day;” but, if we do so, we miss the supporting faith of the Christian and the manly cheerfulness of the heathen.  To grow old is quite natural; being natural, it is beautiful; and if we grumble at it, we miss the lesson, and lose all the beauty.