H. B. Marriott Watson

“ Is it not plain to you that in your youth you pursued objects which were shadows? And, were they substantial, you are a score of years beyond them now. What keeps you alive? What can you have left for your ruin of a human frame, for your pillaged temple of a body? ”

“ Yet you are more fortunate than he; for though like you he lives in the ever-flowing present, there comes a time when he fears the future, while for you there is only the past. Between you and him lie all the terrors, the sorrows, the failures, the tragedies of life. ”

“ Yet you take life with the ease and indifference of twenty, with no greater anxiety than has the youth on whom a golden world is dawning. It is true his model is not yours to the finger-tips, for you have the secret of living with ease only and not with elegance. ”

“ There are threescore and more of venerable annals in your memory, and to live a twelvemonth is to see strange things. You are yourself a fraction of the world's age, and must embrace some mighty circumstances in her history. ”

“ For as your grey beard turns white, one by one they go by you into the darkness. How long have they been falling away who could remember with you once the great occasion of your manhood? Once you could crack with many, but now your recollections overlap with few. ”

“ You are no cipher, therefore; for, even though it were against your will, you have been a constituent of change in a planet which is part of the universe. No wonder this knowledge disposes you to disdain the uninfluential young, for your movements have helped to set the stars a-tingle. ”

“ You have no grudge against your position, nor any dread of it. I doubt if you have ever wittingly set your faces to the mist since you grew greybeards; the desire of knowledge and the fear of the unknown died gradually with that growth. ”

“ Have you still the dear fiction that there are wondrous things beyond the west? I am sure that long since you have forgot the very name of Woman. She is a domestic instrument between you and the dark; to escape thither you must pass her. She fends you from the eventual evil ”

“ You keep yourself in an even balance with external accidents so that they do not disarrange your equable mood, and time has formed this habit so perfectly that you yield only to some material disappointment of a primary order. ”

“ Threescore years have turned you out a most dainty connoisseur of the daily round, and it is only outrage of this taste smacks to you of misfortune. If your dinner misfits, 'tis an offence for the stocks ”