Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 137.djvu/696

690 with pleasure, being delivered, by very reason of their slight hold upon life, from life's weaknesses, – from the need of slumber, and food, and rest, which the more substantial require! More than one such can we see, in our mind's eye, poised upon the furthest boundary of time, with one foot, not in the grave, as the harsh critic says, but on some cloud that limits the visible, and is the way to heaven. Old but fair, with those softest, pearly, ashy tints, which betray what is not so much decay as change into something more ethereal than ordinary flesh and blood – with long treasures of the past behind, remembering everybody one has heard of for the last half-century; but the door of her heart so lightly hung, so sensitive to every touch, that the youngest stranger may come in and find a tender welcome; never weary, never dull, never too much occupied with herself. Some such old ladies form the sweetest centres of society. You will see them under the trees as light, swift-moving, ready of interest, as any child: knowing everything, forgetting everything, with a grace which endears old age as it endears childhood, and nothing at all of that sense of judging, that quick and irritable criticism and comparison which so often separates middle age from youth. There is here and there an old man to be met with in society, who is nearly but not quite as charming, – who is a little retired by reason perhaps of some slight veil of infirmity which falls between him and the world – whose approval is more weighty, but whose sympathy perhaps is not so universal – who is more conscious of the gaps and emptiness in life than of its continual interest, yet who keeps still sufficient hold upon his fellow-creatures to love to see them, and take a little sympathetic share in their pleasures, and give them a sanction, a kind of benediction not in words, for his sense of humour is keen by his presence. Perhaps it is because we ask more of him that he is not so easy to describe or to appreciate as the old lady against whose sweet gaiety only a misanthropic monster could find a word to say.

We add with a whimsical sense of certain advantages and disadvantages which are beyond reason, which are most comical, yet not without a certain pathos, dear reader, that those delightsome old people are never – how shall we say it? We have already delicately hinted, by choice of adjectives, a fragility, a slightness, slimness, lightness, which are inseparable from the character. Alas! it is this – the old queen of society must not be – fat. We pronounce the word in a whisper, with a sense of running away after we have said it. And the English matron, as she grows old, does most usually develop somewhat largely – how innocently, in many cases, in defiance of all those laws which ought to restrain this too, too solid flesh, who does not know? But this is her fate, – those outlines that were so round and dimpled, get clogged with too much substance – the soft round of the chin goes into folds and double chins – the form so light and active, – ah me! why pursue the painful subject further? The careless, cruel world assigns cruel reasons, and suggests eating and drinking and over-ease, and exalts slightness of form into a moral quality. Substantial sisters, it is not so! – but still there is no reversal to be hoped for of that heartless judgment. We must brave it as we can. And in your ample robes, with draperies less severe than the girls delight in; with the