Wanting to Appear as Young as Possible is Natural, but Weak "Whom, the gods love die "young." So said a Greek poet, and fon the whole ountrymien agreed with him.
'The Greeks led' very hardy and Hioalthy lives, and wore well. Soph-odes was nearly ninety when he wrote his last tragedy—a very fine One. But old age was no joke Defore the days of spectacles, false teeth, and ear-trumpts, the Greeks, though not er sympathy with weakness, 'We find' Greek erotic poet praying that he may die at sixty, when his sins will be threatening Greeks, though not cruel, had no mind to leave them. We find a war-poet extolling the lot young soldier falling in the five-front of the battle while fighting for his country. "He looks enutiful," he crics, "as he lies in the fighting' line not wait for old age, which, ho says with a genuinely Greo! shudder, puts the beautiful and the gly on the same level?
Wish We do not prize bodily beauty highly as the Greeks did; but many women, I suppost wished not to survive their good Jocks, and many men have dreaded the humiliations of decrepitude, and have wished to die in middle life. here is a common feeling in proud and independent natures tha: they wish to live only as long as they are efficient, and not to lag Buperfluous on the stage after they have played their part, or to umber the ground after they can bear fruit no longer.
Tt 90 happs most, of the human history have been the Work of men who died prematurely, Our Lord Himself ended His earthly at thirty-three; Alexander the died at the same og art, Raphael and Byron were ut off at thirty-six, Keats fhitty.." Shakespeare and Nap fon were fifty-two at the tine of their deaths, and, by a curious parallel, both of them had finished their work in the world five yours carlier, Some great men have owed their buccos "to their extraordinary recociousness; these, think, dom "live to old age, even hey escape the treatment which our perverse race often reserves for its greatest benefactors.
And. yet we have a feeling that a life which ends long before Sts natural term is incomplete. Wo express, and we actually feel, move regret, for the death of a young or middle-aged friend than for one who has come to the grave in a full age, as a. shoek of com garnered at the time of harvest. There is no universal rule. Some very short lives are complete; they:
short time fulfilled a long time." "And some long lives are A noire extension of futility.
"Youthful" Mothers.
They would not have approved either of flapper voters or of octogenarian directors.
Perhaps the grimmest description of the miseries of old age is in the last two chapters of Ecclesiastes, where the young man is exhorted to gather roses while he may, "before the evil days come in which thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them."
"Shock to Children Children, to whom the break-up of the physical constitution always seems a shocking and dreadful thing, find a sort of—trembling fascination in the weird poetical Imagery of the versed which describe how the keepers of the hous (the arms) shall tremble, and the strong men (the feet) shall bow themselves; how the grinding Women shall cease because they ure few, and those that look out of windows shall be darkened; till at last the silver thread of life snapped and the golden bowel broken.
Very different is~ the cheerful outlook of Robert Browning, who made himself the panegyrist of old og "So at the last shall come old age, Decrepit as befits that stage; How else would'st thou retire apart With the hoarded memories of thy And gather all to the very least Of the fragments of life's earlier Old age for him is the last and best of life. for which the first was made, Fey, Tam afraid, will go all this way with him, Nevertheless, T'think he is right] {in insisting that old age is not mere. ly the beginning of dissolution, but time of life which has' its' own value, for self and for others, "I like the brave sentence' in Sir Them Overby about the id man the strength of his sout than by the els the advance of aye "rather by
weakness of his body," and St. Paul words, "Though out outward man perish, yet our inward man is re-nowed! day by day."
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.