Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 3.djvu/107

94 shortens as the cartilages become thin and dry. The hair whitens and falls away. The frame stoops, the bones become smaller, feebler, have less animal and more mere earthy matter. The senses decay, slowly and handsomely. The eye is not so sharp, and while it penetrates further into space, it has less power clearly to define the outline of what it sees. The ear is dull; the appetite less. Bodily heat is lower; the breath produces less carbonic acid than before. The old man consumes less food, water, air. The hands grasp less strongly ; the feet less firmly tread. The lungs suck the breast of heaven with less powerful collapse. The eye and ear take not so strong a hold upon the world;

The animal life is making ready to go out, The very old man loves the sunshine and the fire, the arm-chair and the shady nook. A rude wind would jostle the full-grown apple from its bough, full ripe, full coloured too. The internal characteristics correspond. General activity is less. Salient love of new things and of new persons, which bit 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 gad-fly is no more buzzing in his ears. Madame de Stael finds compensation in Science for the decay of the passion that once fired her blood; but Heathen Socrates, seventy years old, thanks the gods that he is now free from that "ravenous beast," which had disturbed his philosophic meditations for many a year. 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 venerable man loves to recall the old times, to revive his favourite old men,—no new ones half so fair. So in Homer, Nestor, who is the oldest of the Greeks, is always talking of the old times, before the grandfathers of men then living had come into being; "not such as live in these degenerate days." Verse-loving