Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 3.djvu/118

Rh whom you and I have known! How proud were the last years of Washington; the old age of Franklin! How beautiful in his late autumn is Alexander Von Humboldt! The momentum of manliness bears on the venerable man beyond his four and eightieth year. There you see the value of time. It takes much to make a great life, as to make a great estate. No amount of genius that God ever gives a man could enable one to achieve at forty what Von Humboldt has only done at more than eighty. It was so with Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Leibnitz, every great man who has awed the world by the action of a mighty intellect, with corresponding culture.

These are men of high talent, station, genius perhaps. But the old age of a Quaker tailor in Philadelphia and New York was not a whit less fair. The philanthropy of Isaac Hopper blessed the land ; in his manhood it enriched the world; in his old age it beautified his own life, giving an added glory to his soul.

How many farmers, mechanics, traders, servants, how many mothers, wives, and aunts have you and I known, whose last days were a handsome finish to a handsome life ; the Christian ornament on the tall column of time! Their old age was the slow setting of the sun, which left Miss Kindly is aunt to everybody, and has been so long that none remember to the contrary. The little children love her; she helped their grandmothers to bridal ornaments, threescore years ago. Nay, this boy's grandfather found the way to college lay through her pocket. Generations not her own rise up and call her blessed. To this man's father her patient toil gave the first start in life. That great fortune—when it was a seed, she carried it in her hand. That wide river of reputation ran out of the; cup her bounty filled. Now she is old; very old. The little children, who cling about her, with open mouth, and great round eyes, wonder that anybody should ever be so old; or that Aunt Kindly ever had a mother to kiss her mouth. To them she is coeval with the sun, and like that, an institution of the country. At Christmas, they think she is the wife of Saint Nicholas himself, such an advent