noble gains and acquirements, WE ARE GO- | this world, the aged man or woman may be ING ONWARD AND UPWARD! It seems to me growing still. In the last days, indeed, it that the clergyman's state of feeling must be may be ripening rather than growing: mela curious one, who, on a fine Sunday morn- lowing, not expanding. But to do that is to ing, when he is sixty, can take out of his " grow in grace." And doubtless the yeldrawer a sermon which he wrote at five-and- low harvest-field in September is an advance twenty, and go and preach it with perfect upon the fresh green blades of June. You approval and without the alteration of a may like better to look upon the wheat that word. It is somewhat mortifying, no doubt, is progressing towards ripeness; but the to look at a sermon which you wrote seven wheat which has reached ripeness is not a or eight years since, and which you then falling off. The stalks will not bend now, thought brilliant eloquence, and to find that without breaking: you rub the heads, and in your present judgment it is no better than the yellow chaff that wraps the grain, crumtawdry fustian. But still, my friend, even bles off in dust. But it is beyond a question though you grudge to find that you must that there you see wheat at its best. throw the sermon aside and preach it no Still, not forgetting this, we must all feel more, are you not secretly pleased at this it sad to see human beings as they grow old, proof how much your mind has grown in retrograding in material comforts and advanthese years? It is pleasant to think that tages. It is a mournful thing to see: a man you have not been falling off, not standing grower poorer as he is growing older, or losstill. The wings of your imagination are ing position in any way. If it were in my somewhat clipped indeed, and your style has power, I would make all barristers, above lost something of that pith which goes with sixty, judges. They ought to be put in a want of consideration. Some youthful judges situation of dignity and independence. You may think that you have sadly fallen off; don't like to go into a court of justice, and but you are content in the firm conviction there behold a thin, gray-headed counsel, that you have vastly improved. It was veal somewhat shaken in nerve, looking rather then: it is beef now. I remember hearing frail, battling away with a full-blooded, conwith great interest how a venerable professor fident, hopeful, impudent fellow, five-andof fourscore wrote in the last few weeks of twenty years his junior. The youthful, bighis life a little course of lectures on a certain whiskered, roaring, and bullying advocate is debated point of theology. He had out- sure to be held in much the greater estimagrown his former notions upon the subject. tion by attorney's clerks. The old gentleThe old man said his former lectures upon it man's day is over; but with lessening pracdid not do him justice. Was it not a pleas- tice and disappointed hopes he must drive ant sight-the aged tree bearing fruit to the on at the bar still. I wish I were a chief last? How it must have pleased and soothed justice, that by special deference and kindthe good man amid many advancing infirm-liness of manner, I might daily soothe someities to persuade himself (justly or unjustly) that in the most important respect he was going onward still!

It is indeed a pleasant sight to kindly onlookers, and it is a sustaining and consoling thing to the old man himself, when amid physical decadence there is intellectual growth. But this is not a common thing. As a general rule it cannot be doubted that, intellectually, we top the summit sometime before fourscore, and begin to go down hill. I do not wish to turn my essays into sermons; or to push upon my readers in Fraser things more fitly addressed to my congregation on Sundays: still, let me say that in the thought that growing old implies at last a decay both mental and bodily, and that unrelieved going down is a very sad thing to feel or to see, I find great comfort in remembering that as regards the best and noblest of all characteristics, the old man may be progressing to the last. In all those beautiful qualities which most attract the love and reverence of those around, and which fit for purer and happier company than can be found in

what the feelings of that aging man. But it is especially in the case of the clergy that one sees the painful sight of men growing poorer as they are growing older. I think of the case of a clergyman who at his first start was rather fortunate: who gets a nice parish at six-and-twenty: I mean a parish which is a nice one for a man of six-andtwenty: and who never gets any other preferment, but in that parish grows old. Don't we all know how pretty and elegant every thing was about him at first: how trim and weedless were his garden and shrubbery: how rosy his carpets, how airy his windowcurtains, how neat though slight all his furniture: how graceful, merry, and nicely dressed the young girl who was his wife: how (besides hosts of parochial improvements) he devised numberless little changes about his dwelling: rustic bowers, mosshouses, green mounts, labyrinthine walks, fantastically trimmed yews, root-bridges over the little stream. But as his family increased, his income stood still. It was hard enough work to make the ends meet even at first,

meditating on such things as these: counting his pocket-handkerchiefs, and suspecting that one is stolen; or looking ruefully at a boot which has been cut where the upper leather joins the sole. Let not the aged man be worried with such petty details! Of course, my reader, I know as well as you do, that very many aged people must think of these things to the last. All I say is, that if I had the ordering of things, no man or woman above fifty should ever know the want of money. And whenever I find a fourleaved shamrock, that is the very first ar

though young hearts are hopeful: but with six or seven children, with boys who must be sent to college, with girls who must be educated as ladies, with the prices of all things ever increasing, with multiplying bills from the shoemaker, tailor, dressmaker; the poor parson grows yearly poorer. The rosy face of the young wife has now deep lines of care: the weekly sermon is dull and spiritless: the parcel of books comes no more: the carpets grow threadbare but are not replaced the furniture becomes creaky and rickety: the garden walks are weedy: the bark peels off the rustic verandah: the moss-rangement I shall make. Possibly I may house falls much over to one side: the friends, far away, grow out of all acquaintance. The parson himself, once so precise in dress, is shabby and untidy now; and his wife's neat figure is gone: the servants are of inferior class, coarse and insolent: perhaps the burden of hopeless debt presses always with its dull, dead weight upon the poor clergyman's heart. There is little spring in him to push off the invasion of fatigue and infection, and he is much exposed to both; and should he be taken away, who shall care for the widow and the fatherless, losing at once their head, their home, their means of living? Even you, non-clerical reader, know precisely what I describe: hundreds have seen it: and such will agree with me when I say that there is no sadder sight than that of a clergyman, with a wife and children, growing poor as he is growing old. Oh, that I had the fortune of John Jacob Astor, that I might found, once for all, a fund that should raise forever above penury and degradation the widows and the orphans of rectory, vicarage, parsonage, and manse!

And even when the old man has none depending upon him for bread, to be provided from his lessening store, there is something inexpressibly touching and mournful in the spectacle of an old man who must pinch and screw. You do not mind a bit about a hopeful young lad having to live in humble lodgings up three pair of stairs; or about such a one having a limited number of shirts, stockings, and boots, and needing to be very careful and saving as to his clothes; or about his having very homely shaving-things, or hair-brushes which are a good deal worn out. The young fellow can stand all that: it is all quite right: let him bear the yoke in his youth: he may look forward to better days. Nor does there seem in the nature of things any very sad inconsistency in the idea of a young lad carefully considering how long his boots or great coat will last, or with what minimum of shirts he can manage to get on. But I cannot bear the thought of a grayheaded old man, with shaky hand and weary limb, sitting down in his lonely lodging, and

It is

extend the arrangement further, and provide
that no honest married man or woman shall
ever grow early old through wearing care.
What a little end is sometimes the grand
object of a human being's strivings through
many weeks and months! I sat down the
other day in a poor chamber, damp_with
much linen drying upon crossing lines. There
dwells a solitary woman, an aged and infirm
woman, who supports herself by washing.
For months past her earnings have averaged
three shillings a week. Out of that sum she
must provide food and raiment; she must
keep in her poor fire, and she must pay a
rent of nearly three pounds a year.
hard work, sir," she said: "it costs me
many a thought getting together the money
to pay my rent." And I could see well, that
from the year's beginning to its end, the
thing always uppermost in that poor old
widow's waking thoughts, was the raising
of that great incubus of a sum of money.
A small end, you would say, for the chief
thoughts of an immortal being! Don't you
feel, gay young reader, for that fellow-crea-
ture, to whom a week has been a success,
if at its close she can put by a few haifpence
towards meeting the term day? Would you
not like to enrich her, to give her a light
heart, by sending her a half-sovereign? If
you would, you may send it to me.

It is well, I have said, for a man who is growing old, if he is able to persuade himself that though physically going downhill, he is yet in some respect progressing. For if he can persuade himself that he is progressing in any one thing, he will certainly believe that he is advancing on the whole. Still, it must be said, that the self-complacency of old gentlemen is sometimes amusing (where not irritating) to their juniors. The self-conceit of many old men is something quite amazing. They talk incessantly about themselves and their doings; and, to hear them talk, you would imagine that every great social or political change of late years had been brought about mainly by their instrumentality. I have heard an elderly man of fair average ability, declare in sober ear

nest, that had he gone to the bar, he "had no circumstances: to go back, perhaps, to some hesitation in saying" that he would have place where he had lived many years before, been chancellor or chief justice of England. and there, as Dr. Johnson expresses it, to I have witnessed an elderly man whom the "recover youth in the fields where he once late Sir Robert Peel never saw or heard of, was young." The aged clergyman thinks declare that Sir Robert had borrowed from that if he were now to go to the parish he was him his idea of abolishing the Corn-laws. I offered forty years since, it would bring back have heard an elderly mercantile man, who those days again: he would be the man he had gone the previous day to look at a small was then. Of course, in most cases, such a property which was for sale, remark that he feeling is like the leaping up of the flame behad no doubt that by this time all the country fore it goes out; it is an impulse as natural was aware of what he had been doing. With and as unreasonable as that which makes the majority of elderly men, you can hardly the dying man insist within an hour of his err on the side of over-estimating the amount death on being lifted from his bed and of their vanity. They will receive with satis- placed in his easy-chair, and then he will be faction a degree of flattery which would at all right. But sometimes there really is in once lead a young man to suspect you were human feeling and life something analogous making a fool of him. There is no doubt that if to the Martinmas summer in the year. a man be foolish at all, he always grows more Sometimes after we had made up our mind foolish as he grows older. The most outra- that we had grown old, it flashes upon us geous conceit of personal beauty, intellectual that we are not old after all: there is a real prowess, weight in the county, superiority in rejuvenescence. Happy days promote the the regard of horses, wine, pictures, grapes, feeling. You know that as autumn draws potatoes, poultry, pigs, and all other posses- on, there come days on which it is summer sions, which I have ever seen, has been in or winter just as the weather chances to be the case of old men. And I have known fair or foul. And so there is a stage of life commonplace old women, to whom if you in which it depends mainly on a man's surhad ascribed queenly beauty and the intellect roundings whether he shall be old or young. of Shakspeare, they would have thought you If unsuccessful, over-burdened, over-driven, were doing them simple justice. The truth lightly esteemed, with much depending upon appears to be, not that the vanity of elderly him, and little aid or sympathy, a man may folk is naturally bigger than that of their feel old at thirty-five. But if there still be juniors, but that it is not mown down in a house where he is one of the boys: if he that unsparing fashion to which the vanity be living among his kindred and those who of their juniors is subjected. If an old man have grown up along with him if he be tells you that the abolition of the slave-trade still unmarried: if he have not lived in originated in his back-parlor, you may think many different places, or in any place very him a vain, silly old fellow, but you do not far away: if he have not known many diftell him so. Whereas if a young person ferent modes of life, or worked in many makes an exhibition of personal vanity, he kinds of work: then at thirty-five he may is severely ridiculed. He is taught sharply feel very young. that, however great may be his estimate of himself, it will not do to show it. "Shut up, old fellow, and don't make a fool of yourself," you say to a friend of your own age, should he begin to vapor. But when the aged pilgrim begins to boast, you feel bound to listen with apparent respect. And the result is, that the old gentlemen fancies you believe all he tells you.

Not unfrequently, when a man has grown old to that degree that all his powers of mind and body are considerably impaired, there is a curious and touching mood which comes before an almost sudden breaking-down into decripitude. It is a mood in which the man becomes convinced that he is not so very old; that he has been mistaken in fancying that the autumn of life was so far advanced with him; and that all he has to do in order to be as active and vigorous as he ever was, is to make some great change of scene and

There are men who at that age have never known what it is to stand upon their own legs in life, and to act upon their own responsibility. They have always had some one to tell them what to do. I can imagine that towards the close of the ten years which Pisistratus Caxton spent in Australia, far away from his parents and his home, and day by day obliged to decide and to manage for himself, he had begun to feel tolerably old. But when he came back again, and found his father and mother hardly changed in aspect; and found the chairs, and sofas and beds, and possibly even the carpets, looking much as he had left them; those ten years, a vast expanse while they were passing over, would close up into something very small in the perspective; and he would feel with a sudden exultation that he was quite a young fellow yet.

It is wonderful what a vast amount of work a man may go through without its

years that the romantic interest had for him fled from life, to find that music could still thrill through him as of yore, and that the capacity of spooniness was not at all obliterated. As Festus says,

"Rouse thee, heart! Bow of my life, thou yet art full of spring! My quiver still hath many purposes."

When Sir Philip Sidney tells us that in walking through the fields of his Arcadia, you would, among other pleasant sights and herd boy, "piping as if he would never grow sounds, here and there chance upon a shepold," you find the chivalrous knight giving his countenance to the vulgar impression that youth is a finer thing than age. And Nathaniel Hawthorne a most exquisite one you may find among the Twice-told Tales of called The Fountain of Youth, in which we are told of three old gentlemen and an old draught which brought back the exhilaration lady, who were so enchanted by tasting a

telling much upon him: and how many ery to any man, after he had fancied for years he may live without feeling perceptibly older at their close. The years were long in passing; they look like nothing when past. If you were to go away, my friend, from London or Edinburgh, and live for five or six years in the centre of the Libyan desert; or in an island of the South Seas; or at an up-country station in India; there would be many evenings in those years on which you would feel as though you were separated by ages from the scenes and friends you knew. It would seem like a century since you came away; it would seem like an impossibility that you should ever be back again in the old place, looking and feeling much in the old way. But at length travelling on week after week, you come home again. You find your old companions looking just as before, and the places you knew are little changed. Miss Smith a blooming young woman before you went out, is a blooming young woman still, and probably singing the same songs which you remember her singing then. Why, it rushes upon you, you have been of youth for half an hour (though it led them a very short time away; you are not a day likewise to make very great fools of themolder; it is a mere nothing to go out sperm-wander over the world till they should find selves), that they determined they would whaling for four or five years, or to retire for that period to a parish in the Ultima Thule. Life, after all, is so long, that you may cut a good large slice out of the earlier years of it without making it perceptibly less. When Macaulay returned from India after his years there, I have no doubt he felt this. And the general principle is true, that almost any outward condition or any state of feeling, after it has passed away, appears to us to have lasted a very much shorter time than it did when it was passing; and it leaves us with the conviction that we are not nearly so old as we had fancied while it was passing. And the rejuvenescence is sometimes not merely in feeling, but in fact and in appearance. Have you not known a lady of perhaps three and thirty years married to an ugly old fogy And indeed it is to be admitted that in a of eighty-five, who, during the old fogy's life whose poetry is drawn from the domain life, wore high dresses, and caps, that she of passion and imagination, the poetry does might appear something like a suitable pass away as imagination flags and the camatch for the old fogy; but who instantly pacity of emotion dries up with advancing the ancient buffalo departed this life, cast time. But the true philosopher among the aside her venerable trappings, and burst upon the world almost as a blooming girl, doubtless to her own astonishment no less than to that of her friends? And you remember that pleasing touch of nature in the new series of Friends in Council, when Milverton, after having talked of himself as a faded widower, and appeared before us as one devoted to grave philosophic research, falls in love with a girl of two-and-twenty, and discovers that after all he is not so old. And I suppose it would be a pleasant discov

that wondrous fountain, and then quaff its
waters morning, noon, and night. And
Thomas Moore, in one of his sweetest songs,
warms for a minute from cold glitter into
earnestness, as he declares his belief that no
gains which advancing years can bring with
them are any compensation for the light-
heartedness and the passionate excitement
which they take away. He says,— •
"Ne'er tell me of glories serenely adorning

The close of our day, the calm eve of our

night:

Give me back, give me back the wild freshness of morning,

Its smiles and its tears are worth evening's

best light."

three writers who have been mentioned, is Mr. Hawthorne. He shows us how the exhilaration, the wild freshness of the season when life is at blood-heat, partakes of the nature of intoxication; and he leaves us with the sober conviction that the truly wise man may well be thankful when he has got safely through that feverish season of temptation and of folly. Let us be glad if our bark has come (even a little battered) through the Maelstrom, by the Scylla and Charybdis, and is now sailing quietly upon a calm and

tranquil sea. Wait till you are a little older, youthful reader, and you will understand that truth and soberness (how fitly linked together) are noble things. If you are a good man-let me say it at once, a Christian man -your latter days are better a thousand times than those early ones after which superficial and worldly folk whimper. The capacity of excitement is much lessened; the freshness of feeling and heart are much gone; though not, of recessity, so very much. You begin, like the old grandmother in that exquisite poem of Mr. Tennyson, "to be a little weary;" the morning air is hardly so exhilarating, nor the frosty winter afternoon; the snowdrops and primroses come back, and you are disappointed that so little of the vernal joy comes with them; you go and stand by the grave of your young sister on the anniversary of the day when she died, and you wonder that you have come to feel so little where once you felt so much. You preach the sermons you once preached with emotion so deep that it was contagious; but now the corresponding feeling does not come; you give them coldly; you are mortified at the

contrast between the warmth there is in the

The wearied bird 'blown o'er the deep would sooner quit its shore,

Than I would cross the gulf again that Time has brought me o'er!"

grow

The dead are the only people that never the arrestment of time in the case of the old. There was something typical in youthful miner, of whom we have already spoken. Your little brother or sister that died long ago remains in death and in reIt is fourteen years this evening since the membrance the same young thing forever. writer's sister's left this world. She was fifteen years old then-she is fifteen years old yet. I have grown older since then by fourteen years, but she has never changed as they advanced; and if God spares me to fourscore, I never shall think of her as other than the youthful creature she faded. The other day I listened as a poor woman told of

the death of her first-born child. He was

two years old. She had a small washinggreen, across which was stretched a rope that came in the middle close to the ground. The boy was leaning on the rope, swinging backwards and forwards, and shouting with old words, and the chilliness with which you and lost sight of him for a minute; and delight. The mother went into her cottage speak them. You hear of the death of a when she returned the little man was lying dear friend, and you are vexed that you can take it so coolly. But O my brother, aging chin: he had not sense to push it away; across the rope, dead. It had got under his like myself, do you not know, in sober ear- and he was suffocated. The mother told me, nest, that for such losses as these, other and I believe truly, that she had never been things have brought abundant recompense? the same person since; but the thing which What a meaning there is now to you in the mainly struck me was, that though it is eighwords of St. Austin-" Thou madst us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless till they child as an infant of two years yet: it is a teen years since then, she thought of her find rest in Thee!" You are beginning to little child she looks for to meet her at the understand that St. Paul was right, when (even in the face of the fact that inexpe- lived he would have been twenty years old of the Golden City. Had her child gate rienced youth is proverbially the most hope- now he died, and he is only two: he is two ful) he declared that in the truest sense "ex-yet: he will never be more than two. The perience waketh hope." What a calm there little rosy face of that morning, and the little is here! Passion is no longer the disturbing half-articulate voice, would have been faintly force it once was. Your eyes are no longer remembered by the mother had they gradublinded to the truth of things by the glitter-ally died into boyhood and manhood; but ing mists of fancy. You do your duty qui- that day stereotyped them: they remain unetly and hopefully. You can bear patiently changed.. with the follies and the expectations of youth. I say it with the firmest assurance of the truth of what I say, that as he grows old, the wise man has great reason to thank God that he is no longer young. Truth and soberness are well worth all they cost. You wont make a terrific fool of yourself any more. Campbell was not a philosopher, and possibly he was only half in earnest when he wrote the following verse; but many men, no longer young, will know how true it is:"Hail, welcome tide of life, where no tumultuous billows roll,

:

How wondrous to myself appears this halcyon

calm of soul !

had grown old in life grow young after death? Have you seen, my reader, the face that The expression of many years since, lost for long, come out startlingly in the features, fixed and cold? Every one has seen it: and it is sometimes strange how rapidly the out, and with them the marks of age. I change takes place. The marks of pain fade once saw an aged lady die. She had borne sharp pain for many days with the endurance of a martyr; she had to bear sharp pain to the very last. The features were tense and life remained. It was a beautiful sight to rigid with suffering; they remained so while