[This particular record is noteworthy principally for containing a paper
by my friend, the Professor, with a poem or two annexed or intercalated.
I would suggest to young persons that they should pass over it for the
present, and read, instead of it, that story about the young man who was
in love with the young lady, and in great trouble for something like nine
pages, but happily married on the tenth page or thereabouts, which, I
take it for granted, will be contained in the periodical where this is
found, unless it differ from all other publications of the kind.
Perhaps, if such young people will lay the number aside, and take it up
ten years, or a little more, from the present time, they may find
something in it for their advantage. They can’t possibly understand it
all now.]
My friend, the Professor, began talking with me one day in a dreary sort
of way. I couldn’t get at the difficulty for a good while, but at last
it turned out that somebody had been calling him an old man.—He didn’t
mind his students calling him _the_ old man, he said. That was a
technical expression, and he thought that he remembered hearing it
applied to himself when he was about twenty-five. It may be considered
as a familiar and sometimes endearing appellation. An Irishwoman calls
her husband “the old man,” and he returns the caressing expression by
speaking of her as “the old woman.” But now, said he, just suppose a
case like one of these. A young stranger is overheard talking of you as
a very nice old gentleman. A friendly and genial critic speaks of your
green old age as illustrating the truth of some axiom you had uttered
with reference to that period of life. What _I_ call an old man is a
person with a smooth, shining crown and a fringe of scattered white
hairs, seen in the streets on sunshiny days, stooping as he walks,
bearing a cane, moving cautiously and slowly; telling old stories,
smiling at present follies, living in a narrow world of dry habits; one
that remains waking when others have dropped asleep, and keeps a little
night-lamp-flame of life burning year after year, if the lamp is not
upset, and there is only a careful hand held round it to prevent the
puffs of wind from blowing the flame out. That’s what I call an old man.
Now, said the Professor, you don’t mean to tell me that I have got to
that yet? Why, bless you, I am several years short of the time when—[I
knew what was coming, and could hardly keep from laughing; twenty years
ago he used to quote it as one of those absurd speeches men of genius
will make, and now he is going to argue from it]—several years short of
the time when Balzac says that men are—most—you know—dangerous to—the
hearts of—in short, most to be dreaded by duennas that have charge of
susceptible females.—What age is that? said I, statistically.—Fifty-two
years, answered the Professor.—Balzac ought to know, said I, if it is
true that Goethe said of him that each of his stories must have been dug
out of a woman’s heart. But fifty-two is a high figure.
Stand in the light of the window, Professor, said I.—The Professor took
up the desired position.—You have white hairs, I said.—Had ’em any time
these twenty years, said the Professor.—And the crow’s-foot,—_pes
anserinus_, rather.—The Professor smiled, as I wanted him to, and the
folds radiated like the ridges of a half-opened fan, from the outer
corner of the eyes to the temples.—And the calipers said I.—What are the
_calipers_? he asked, curiously.—Why, the parenthesis, said
I.—_Parenthesis_? said the Professor; what’s that?—Why, look in the glass
when you are disposed to laugh, and see if your mouth isn’t framed in a
couple of crescent lines,—so, my boy ( ).—It’s all nonsense, said the
Professor; just look at my _biceps_;—and he began pulling off his coat to
show me his arm. Be careful, said I; you can’t bear exposure to the air,
at your time of life, as you could once.—I will box with you, said the
Professor, row with you, walk with you, ride with you, swim with you, or
sit at table with you, for fifty dollars a side.—Pluck survives stamina,
I answered.
The Professor went off a little out of humor. A few weeks afterwards he
came in, looking very good-natured, and brought me a paper, which I have
here, and from which I shall read you some portions, if you don’t object.
He had been thinking the matter over, he said,—had read Cicero “De
Senectute,” and made up his mind to meet old age half way. These were
some of his reflections that he had written down; so here you have.
THE PROFESSOR’S PAPER.
There is no doubt when old age begins. The human body is a furnace which
keeps in blast three-score years and ten, more or less. It burns about
three hundred pounds of carbon a year, (besides other fuel,) when in fair
working order, according to a great chemist’s estimate. When the fire
slackens, life declines; when it goes out, we are dead.
It has been shown by some noted French experimenters, that the amount of
combustion increases up to about the thirtieth year, remains stationary
to about forty-five, and then diminishes. This last is the point where
old age starts from. The great fact of physical life is the perpetual
commerce with the elements, and the fire is the measure of it.
About this time of life, if food is plenty where you live,—for that, you
know, regulates matrimony,—you may be expecting to find yourself a
grandfather some fine morning; a kind of domestic felicity that gives one
a cool shiver of delight to think of, as among the not remotely possible
events.
I don’t mind much those slipshod lines Dr. Johnson wrote to Thrale,
telling her about life’s declining from _thirty-five_; the furnace is in
full blast for ten years longer, as I have said. The Romans came very
near the mark; their age of enlistment reached from seventeen to
forty-six years.
What is the use of fighting against the seasons, or the tides, or the
movements of the planetary bodies, or this ebb in the wave of life that
flows through us? We are old fellows from the moment the fire begins to
go out. Let us always behave like gentlemen when we are introduced to
new acquaintance.
_Incipit Allegoria Senectutis_.
Old Age, this is Mr. Professor; Mr. Professor, this is Old Age.
_Old Age_.—Mr. Professor, I hope to see you well. I have known you for
some time, though I think you did not know me. Shall we walk down the
street together?
_Professor_ (drawing back a little).—We can talk more quietly, perhaps,
in my study. Will you tell me how it is you seem to be acquainted with
everybody you are introduced to, though he evidently considers you an
entire stranger?
_Old Age_.—I make it a rule never to force myself upon a person’s
recognition until I have known him at least _five years_.
_Professor_.—Do you mean to say that you have known me so long as that?
_Old Age_. I do. I left my card on you longer ago than that, but I am
afraid you never read it; yet I see you have it with you.
_Professor_.—Where?
_Old Age_.—There, between your eyebrows,—three straight lines running up
and down; all the probate courts know that token,—“Old Age, his mark.”
Put your forefinger on the inner end of one eyebrow, and your middle
finger on the inner end of the other eyebrow; now separate the fingers,
and you will smooth out my sign-manual; that’s the way you used to look
before I left my card on you.
_Professor_.—What message do people generally send back when you first
call on them?
_Old Age_.—Not at home. Then I leave a card and go. Next year I call;
get the same answer; leave another card. So for five or six,—sometimes
ten years or more. At last, if they don’t let me in, I break in through
the front door or the windows.
We talked together in this way some time. Then Old Age said again,—Come,
let us walk down the street together,—and offered me a cane, an eyeglass,
a tippet, and a pair of over-shoes.—No, much obliged to you, said I. I
don’t want those things, and I had a little rather talk with you here,
privately, in my study. So I dressed myself up in a jaunty way and
walked out alone;—got a fall, caught a cold, was laid up with a lumbago,
and had time to think over this whole matter.
_Explicit Allegoria Senectutis_.
We have settled when old age begins. Like all Nature’s processes, it is
gentle and gradual in its approaches, strewed with illusions, and all its
little griefs soothed by natural sedatives. But the iron hand is not
less irresistible because it wears the velvet glove. The button-wood
throws off its bark in large flakes, which one may find lying at its
foot, pushed out, and at last pushed off, by that tranquil movement from
beneath, which is too slow to be seen, but too powerful to be arrested.
One finds them always, but one rarely sees them fall. So it is our youth
drops from us,—scales off, sapless and lifeless, and lays bare the tender
and immature fresh growth of old age. Looked at collectively, the
changes of old age appear as a series of personal insults and
indignities, terminating at last in death, which Sir Thomas Browne has
called “the very disgrace and ignominy of our nature.”
My lady’s cheek can boast no more
The cranberry white and pink it wore;
And where her shining locks divide,
The parting line is all too wide—
No, no,—this will never do. Talk about men, if you will, but spare the
poor women.
We have a brief description of seven stages of life by a remarkably good
observer. It is very presumptuous to attempt to add to it, yet I have
been struck with the fact that life admits of a natural analysis into no
less than fifteen distinct periods. Taking the five primary divisions,
infancy, childhood, youth, manhood, old age, each of these has its own
three periods of immaturity, complete development, and decline. I
recognize on _old_ baby at once,—with its “pipe and mug,” (a stick of
candy and a porringer,)—so does everybody; and an old child shedding its
milk-teeth is only a little prototype of the old man shedding his
permanent ones. Fifty or thereabouts is only the childhood, as it were,
of old age; the graybeard youngster must be weaned from his late suppers
now. So you will see that you have to make fifteen stages at any rate,
and that it would not be hard to make twenty-five; five primary, each
with five secondary divisions.
The infancy and childhood of commencing old age have the same ingenuous
simplicity and delightful unconsciousness about them as the first stage
of the earlier periods of life shows. The great delusion of mankind is
in supposing that to be individual and exceptional which is universal and
according to law. A person is always startled when he hears himself
seriously called an old man for the first time.
Nature gets us out of youth into manhood, as sailors are hurried on board
of vessels,—in a state of intoxication. We are hustled into maturity
reeling with our passions and imaginations, and we have drifted far away
from port before we awake out of our illusions. But to carry us out of
maturity into old age, without our knowing where we are going, she drugs
us with strong opiates, and so we stagger along with wide open eyes that
see nothing until snow enough has fallen on our heads to rouse our
comatose brains out of their stupid trances.
There is one mark of age that strikes me more than any of the physical
ones;—I mean the formation of _Habits_. An old man who shrinks into
himself falls into ways that become as positive and as much beyond the
reach of outside influences as if they were governed by clock-work. The
_animal_ functions, as the physiologists call them, in distinction from
the _organic_, tend, in the process of deterioration to which age and
neglect united gradually lead them, to assume the periodical or
rhythmical type of movement. Every man’s _heart_ (this organ belongs,
you know, to the organic system) has a regular mode of action; but I know
a great many men whose _brains_, and all their voluntary existence
flowing from their brains, have a _systole_ and _diastole_ as regular as
that of the heart itself. Habit is the approximation of the animal
system to the organic. It is a confession of failure in the highest
function of being, which involves a perpetual self-determination, in full
view of all existing circumstances. But habit, you see, is an action in
present circumstances from past motives. It is substituting a _vis a
tergo_ for the evolution of living force.
When a man, instead of burning up three hundred pounds of carbon a year,
has got down to two hundred and fifty, it is plain enough he must
economize force somewhere. Now habit is a labor-saving invention which
enables a man to get along with less fuel,—that is all; for fuel is
force, you know, just as much in the page I am writing for you as in the
locomotive or the legs that carry it to you. Carbon is the same thing,
whether you call it wood, or coal, or bread and cheese. A reverend
gentleman demurred to this statement,—as if, because combustion is
asserted to be the _sine qua non_ of thought, therefore thought is
alleged to be a purely chemical process. Facts of chemistry are one
thing, I told him, and facts of consciousness another. It can be proved
to him, by a very simple analysis of some of his spare elements, that
every Sunday, when he does his duty faithfully, he uses up more
phosphorus out of his brain and nerves than on ordinary days. But then
he had his choice whether to do his duty, or to neglect it, and save his
phosphorus and other combustibles.
It follows from all this that _the formation of habits_ ought naturally
to be, as it is, the special characteristic of age. As for the muscular
powers, they pass their maximum long before the time when the true
decline of life begins, if we may judge by the experience of the ring. A
man is “stale,” I think, in their language, soon after thirty,—often, no
doubt, much earlier, as gentlemen of the pugilistic profession are
exceedingly apt to keep their vital fire burning _with the blower up_.
—So far without Tully. But in the mean time I have been reading the
treatise, “De Senectute.” It is not long, but a leisurely performance.
The old gentleman was sixty-three years of age when he addressed it to
his friend T. Pomponius Atticus, Eq., a person of distinction, some two
or three years older. We read it when we are schoolboys, forget all
about it for thirty years, and then take it up again by a natural
instinct,—provided always that we read Latin as we drink water, without
stopping to taste it, as all of us who ever learned it at school or
college ought to do.
Cato is the chief speaker in the dialogue. A good deal of it is what
would be called in vulgar phrase “slow.” It unpacks and unfolds
incidental illustrations which a modern writer would look at the back of,
and toss each to its pigeon-hole. I think ancient classics and ancient
people are alike in the tendency to this kind of expansion.
An old doctor came to me once (this is literal fact) with some
contrivance or other for people with broken kneepans. As the patient
would be confined for a good while, he might find it dull work to sit
with his hands in his lap. Reading, the ingenious inventor suggested,
would be an agreeable mode of passing the time. He mentioned, in his
written account of his contrivance, various works that might amuse the
weary hour. I remember only three,—Don Quixote, Tom Jones, and _Watts on
the Mind_.
It is not generally understood that Cicero’s essay was delivered as a
lyceum lecture, (_concio popularis_,) at the Temple of Mercury. The
journals (_papyri_) of the day (“Tempora Quotidiana,”—“Tribuinus
Quirinalis,”—“Præco Romanus,” and the rest) gave abstracts of it, one of
which I have translated and modernized, as being a substitute for the
analysis I intended to make.
IV. Kal. Mart. . . . .
The lecture at the Temple of Mercury, last evening, was well attended by
the _élite_ of our great city. Two hundred thousand sestertia were
thought to have been represented in the house. The doors were besieged
by a mob of shabby fellows, (_illotum vulgus_,) who were at length
quieted after two or three had been somewhat roughly handled (_gladio
jugulati_). The speaker was the well-known Mark Tully, Eq.,—the subject
Old Age. Mr. T. has a lean and scraggy person, with a very unpleasant
excrescence upon his nasal feature, from which his nickname of
_chick-pea_ (Cicero) is said by some to be derived. As a lecturer is
public property, we may remark, that his outer garment (_toga_) was of
cheap stuff and somewhat worn, and that his general style and appearance
of dress and manner (_habitus_, _vestitusque_) were somewhat provincial.
The lecture consisted of an imaginary dialogue between Cato and Lælius.
We found the first portion rather heavy, and retired a few moments for
refreshment (_pocula quædam vini_).—All want to reach old age, says Cato,
and grumble when they get it; therefore they are donkeys.—The lecturer
will allow us to say that he is the donkey; we know we shall grumble at
old age, but we want to live through youth and manhood, _in spite_ of the
troubles we shall groan over.—There was considerable prosing as to what
old age can do and can’t.—True, but not new. Certainly, old folks can’t
jump,—break the necks of their thigh-bones, (_femorum cervices_,) if they
do; can’t crack nuts with their teeth; can’t climb a greased pole (_malum
inunctum scandere non possunt_); but they can tell old stories and give
you good advice; if they know what you have made up your mind to do when
you ask them.—All this is well enough, but won’t set the Tiber on fire
(_Tiberim accendere nequaquam potest_.)
There were some clever things enough, (_dicta hand inepta_,) a few of
which are worth reporting.—Old people are accused of being forgetful; but
they never forget where they have put their money.—Nobody is so old he
doesn’t think he can live a year.—The lecturer quoted an ancient
maxim,—Grow old early, if you would be old long,—but disputed
it.—Authority, he thought, was the chief privilege of age.—It is not
great to have money, but fine to govern those that have it.—Old age
begins at _forty-six_ years, according to the common opinion.—It is not
every kind of old age or of wine that grows sour with time.—Some
excellent remarks were made on immortality, but mainly borrowed from and
credited to Plato.—Several pleasing anecdotes were told.—Old Milo,
champion of the heavy weights in his day, looked at his arms and
whimpered, “They are dead.” Not so dead as you, you old fool,—says
Cato;—you never were good for anything but for your shoulders and
flanks.—Pisistratus asked Solon what made him dare to be so obstinate.
Old age, said Solon.
The lecture was on the whole acceptable, and a credit to our culture and
civilization.—The reporter goes on to state that there will be no lecture
next week, on account of the expected combat between the bear and the
barbarian. Betting (_sponsio_) two to one (_duo ad unum_) on the bear.
* * * * *
—After all, the most encouraging things I find in the treatise, “De
Senectute,” are the stories of men who have found new occupations when
growing old, or kept up their common pursuits in the extreme period of
life. Cato learned Greek when he was old, and speaks of wishing to learn
the fiddle, or some such instrument, (_fidibus_,) after the example of
Socrates. Solon learned something new, every day, in his old age, as he
gloried to proclaim. Cyrus pointed out with pride and pleasure the trees
he had planted with his own hand. [I remember a pillar on the Duke of
Northumberland’s estate at Alnwick, with an inscription in similar words,
if not the same. That, like other country pleasures, never wears out.
None is too rich, none too poor, none too young, none too old to enjoy
it.] There is a New England story I have heard more to the point,
however, than any of Cicero’s. A young farmer was urged to set out some
apple-trees.—No, said he, they are too long growing, and I don’t want to
plant for other people. The young farmer’s father was spoken to about
it, but he, with better reason, alleged that apple-trees were slow and
life was fleeting. At last some one mentioned it to the old grandfather
of the young farmer. He had nothing else to do,—so he stuck in some
trees. He lived long enough to drink barrels of cider made from the
apples that grew on those trees.
As for myself, after visiting a friend lately,—[Do remember all the time
that this is the Professor’s paper.]—I satisfied myself that I had better
concede the fact that—my contemporaries are not so young as they have
been,—and that,—awkward as it is,—science and history agree in telling me
that I can claim the immunities and must own the humiliations of the
early stage of senility. Ah! but we have all gone down the hill
together. The dandies of my time have split their waistbands and taken
to high-low shoes. The beauties of my recollections—where are they?
They have run the gantlet of the years as well as I. First the years
pelted them with red roses till their cheeks were all on fire. By and by
they began throwing white roses, and that morning flush passed away. At
last one of the years threw a snow-ball, and after that no year let the
poor girls pass without throwing snow-balls. And then came rougher
missiles,—ice and stones; and from time to time an arrow whistled, and
down went one of the poor girls. So there are but few left; and we don’t
call those few _girls_, but—
Ah, me! Here am I groaning just as the old Greek sighed _Aï_, _aï_! and
the old Roman, _Eheu_! I have no doubt we should die of shame and grief
at the indignities offered us by age, if it were not that we see so many
others as badly or worse off than ourselves. We always compare ourselves
with our contemporaries.
[I was interrupted in my reading just here. Before I began at the next
breakfast, I read them these verses;—I hope you will like them, and get a
useful lesson from them.]
THE LAST BLOSSOM.
Though young no more, we still would dream
Of beauty’s dear deluding wiles;
The leagues of life to graybeards seem
Shorter than boyhood’s lingering miles.
Who knows a woman’s wild caprice?
It played with Goethe’s silvered hair,
And many a Holy Father’s “niece”
Has softly smoothed the papal chair.
When sixty bids us sigh in vain
To melt the heart of sweet sixteen,
We think upon those ladies twain
Who loved so well the tough old Dean.
We see the Patriarch’s wintry face,
The maid of Egypt’s dusky glow,
And dream that Youth and Age embrace,
As April violets fill with snow.
Tranced in her Lord’s Olympian smile
His lotus-loving Memphian lies,—
The musky daughter of the Nile
With plaited hair and almond eyes.
Might we but share one wild caress
Ere life’s autumnal blossoms fall,
And Earth’s brown, clinging lips impress
The long cold kiss that waits us all!
My bosom heaves, remembering yet
The morning of that blissful day
When Rose, the flower of spring, I met,
And gave my raptured soul away.
Flung from her eyes of purest blue,
A lasso, with its leaping chain
Light as a loop of larkspurs, flew
O’er sense and spirit, heart and brain.
Thou com’st to cheer my waning age,
Sweet vision, waited for so long!
Dove that would seek the poet’s cage
Lured by the magic breath of song!
She blushes! Ah, reluctant maid,
Love’s _drapeau rouge_ the truth has told!
O’er girlhood’s yielding barricade
Floats the great Leveller’s crimson fold!
Come to my arms!—love heeds not years
No frost the bud of passion knows.—
Ha! what is this my frenzy hears?
A voice behind me uttered,—Rose!
Sweet was her smile,—but not for me;
Alas, when woman looks _too_ kind,
Just turn your foolish head and see,—
Some youth is walking close behind!
As to _giving up_ because the almanac or the Family-Bible says that it is
about time to do it, I have no intention of doing any such thing. I
grant you that I burn less carbon than some years ago. I see people of
my standing really good for nothing, decrepit, effete, _la lèvre
inférieure déjà pendante_, with what little life they have left mainly
concentrated in their epigastrium. But as the disease of old age is
epidemic, endemic, and sporadic, and everybody that lives long enough is
sure to catch it, I am going to say, for the encouragement of such as
need it, how I treat the malady in my own case.
First. As I feel, that, when I have anything to do, there is less time
for it than when I was younger, I find that I give my attention more
thoroughly, and use my time more economically than ever before; so that I
can learn anything twice as easily as in my earlier days. I am not,
therefore, afraid to attack a new study. I took up a difficult language
a very few years ago with good success, and think of mathematics and
metaphysics by-and-by.
Secondly. I have opened my eyes to a good many neglected privileges and
pleasures within my reach, and requiring only a little courage to enjoy
them. You may well suppose it pleased me to find that old Cato was
thinking of learning to play the fiddle, when I had deliberately taken it
up in my old age, and satisfied myself that I could get much comfort, if
not much music, out of it.
Thirdly. I have found that some of those active exercises, which are
commonly thought to belong to young folks only, may be enjoyed at a much
later period.
A young friend has lately written an admirable article in one of the
journals, entitled, “Saints and their Bodies.” Approving of his general
doctrines, and grateful for his records of personal experience, I cannot
refuse to add my own experimental confirmation of his eulogy of one
particular form of active exercise and amusement, namely, _boating_. For
the past nine years, I have rowed about, during a good part of the
summer, on fresh or salt water. My present fleet on the river Charles
consists of three row-boats. 1. A small flat-bottomed skiff of the shape
of a flat-iron, kept mainly to lend to boys. 2. A fancy “dory” for two
pairs of sculls, in which I sometimes go out with my young folks. 3. My
own particular water-sulky, a “skeleton” or “shell” race-boat, twenty-two
feet long, with huge outriggers, which boat I pull with ten-foot
sculls,—alone, of course, as it holds but one, and tips him out, if he
doesn’t mind what he is about. In this I glide around the Back Bay, down
the stream, up the Charles to Cambridge and Watertown, up the Mystic,
round the wharves, in the wake of steamboats which leave a swell after
them delightful to rock upon; I linger under the bridges,—those
“caterpillar bridges,” as my brother professor so happily called them;
rub against the black sides of old wood-schooners; cool down under the
overhanging stern of some tall Indiaman; stretch across to the Navy-Yard,
where the sentinel warns me off from the Ohio,—just as if I should hurt
her by lying in her shadow; then strike out into the harbor, where the
water gets clear and the air smells of the ocean,—till all at once I
remember, that, if a west wind blows up of a sudden, I shall drift along
past the islands, out of sight of the dear old State-house,—plate,
tumbler, knife and fork all waiting at home, but no chair drawn up at the
table,—all the dear people waiting, waiting, waiting, while the boat is
sliding, sliding, sliding into the great desert, where there is no tree
and no fountain. As I don’t want my wreck to be washed up on one of the
beaches in company with devil’s-aprons, bladder-weeds, dead horse-shoes,
and bleached crab-shells, I turn about and flap my long narrow wings for
home. When the tide is running out swiftly, I have a splendid fight to
get through the bridges, but always make it a rule to beat,—though I have
been jammed up into pretty tight places at times, and was caught once
between a vessel swinging round and the pier, until our bones (the
boat’s, that is) cracked as if we had been in the jaws of Behemoth. Then
back to my moorings at the foot of the Common, off with the rowing-dress,
dash under the green translucent wave, return to the garb of
civilization, walk through my Garden, take a look at my elms on the
Common, and, reaching my habitat, in consideration of my advanced period
of life, indulge in the Elysian abandonment of a huge recumbent chair.
When I have established a pair of well-pronounced feathering-calluses on
my thumbs, when I am in training so that I can do my fifteen miles at a
stretch without coming to grief in any way, when I can perform my mile in
eight minutes or a little less, then I feel as if I had old Time’s head
in chancery, and could give it to him at my leisure.
I do not deny the attraction of walking. I have bored this ancient city
through and through in my daily travels, until I know it as an old
inhabitant of a Cheshire knows his cheese. Why, it was I who, in the
course of these rambles, discovered that remarkable avenue called _Myrtle
Street_, stretching in one long line from east of the Reservoir to a
precipitous and rudely paved cliff which looks down on the grim abode of
Science, and beyond it to the far hills; a promenade so delicious in its
repose, so cheerfully varied with glimpses down the northern slope into
busy Cambridge Street with its iron river of the horse-railroad, and
wheeled barges gliding back and forward over it,—so delightfully closing
at its western extremity in sunny courts and passages where I know peace,
and beauty, and virtue, and serene old age must be perpetual tenants,—so
alluring to all who desire to take their daily stroll, in the words of
Dr. Watts,—
“Alike unknowing and unknown,”—
that nothing but a sense of duty would have prompted me to reveal the
secret of its existence. I concede, therefore, that walking is an
immeasurably fine invention, of which old age ought constantly to avail
itself.
Saddle-leather is in some respects even preferable to sole-leather. The
principal objection to it is of a financial character. But you may be
sure that Bacon and Sydenham did not recommend it for nothing. One’s
_hepar_, or, in vulgar language, liver,—a ponderous organ, weighing some
three or four pounds,—goes up and down like the dasher of a churn in the
midst of the other vital arrangements, at every step of a trotting horse.
The brains also are shaken up like coppers in a money-box. Riding is
good, for those that are born with a silver-mounted bridle in their hand,
and can ride as much and as often as they like, without thinking all the
time they hear that steady grinding sound as the horse’s jaws triturate
with calm lateral movement the bank-bills and promises to pay upon which
it is notorious that the profligate animal in question feeds day and
night.
Instead, however, of considering these kinds of exercise in this
empirical way, I will devote a brief space to an examination of them in a
more scientific form.
The pleasure of exercise is due first to a purely physical impression,
and secondly to a sense of power in action. The first source of pleasure
varies of course with our condition and the state of the surrounding
circumstances; the second with the amount and kind of power, and the
extent and kind of action. In all forms of active exercise there are
three powers simultaneously in action,—the will, the muscles, and the
intellect. Each of these predominates in different kinds of exercise.
In walking, the will and muscles are so accustomed to work together and
perform their task with so little expenditure of force, that the
intellect is left comparatively free. The mental pleasure in walking, as
such, is in the sense of power over all our moving machinery. But in
riding, I have the additional pleasure of governing another will, and my
muscles extend to the tips of the animal’s ears and to his four hoofs,
instead of stopping at my hands and feet. Now in this extension of my
volition and my physical frame into another animal, my tyrannical
instincts and my desire for heroic strength are at once gratified. When
the horse ceases to have a will of his own and his muscles require no
special attention on your part, then you may live on horseback as Wesley
did, and write sermons or take naps, as you like. But you will observe,
that, in riding on horseback, you always have a feeling, that, after all,
it is not you that do the work, but the animal, and this prevents the
satisfaction from being complete.
Now let us look at the conditions of rowing. I won’t suppose you to be
disgracing yourself in one of those miserable tubs, tugging in which is
to rowing the true boat what riding a cow is to bestriding an Arab. You
know the Esquimaux _kayak_, (if that is the name of it,) don’t you? Look
at that model of one over my door. Sharp, rather?—On the contrary, it is
a lubber to the one you and I must have; a Dutch fish-wife to Psyche,
contrasted with what I will tell you about.—Our boat, then, is something
of the shape of a pickerel, as you look down upon his back, he lying in
the sunshine just where the sharp edge of the water cuts in among the
lily-pads. It is a kind of a giant _pod_, as one may say,—tight
everywhere, except in a little place in the middle, where you sit. Its
length is from seven to ten yards, and as it is only from sixteen to
thirty inches wide in its widest part, you understand why you want those
“outriggers,” or projecting iron frames with the rowlocks in which the
oars play. My rowlocks are five feet apart; double the greatest width of
the boat.
Here you are, then, afloat with a body a rod and a half long, with arms,
or wings, as you may choose to call them, stretching more than twenty
feet from tip to tip; every volition of yours extending as perfectly into
them as if your spinal cord ran down the centre strip of your boat, and
the nerves of your arms tingled as far as the broad blades of your
oars,—oars of spruce, balanced, leathered, and ringed under your own
special direction. This, in sober earnest, is the nearest approach to
flying that man has ever made or perhaps ever will make. As the hawk
sails without flapping his pinions, so you drift with the tide when you
will, in the most luxurious form of locomotion indulged to an embodied
spirit. But if your blood wants rousing, turn round that stake in the
river, which you see a mile from here; and when you come in in sixteen
minutes, (if you do, for we are old boys, and not champion scullers, you
remember,) then say if you begin to feel a little warmed up or not! You
can row easily and gently all day, and you can row yourself blind and
black in the face in ten minutes, just as you like. It has been long
agreed that there is no way in which a man can accomplish so much labor
with his muscles as in rowing. It is in the boat, then, that man finds
the largest extension of his volitional and muscular existence; and yet
he may tax both of them so slightly, in that most delicious of exercises,
that he shall mentally write his sermon, or his poem, or recall the
remarks he has made in company and put them in form for the public, as
well as in his easy-chair.
I dare not publicly name the rare joys, the infinite delights, that
intoxicate me on some sweet June morning, when the river and bay are
smooth as a sheet of beryl-green silk, and I run along ripping it up with
my knife-edged shell of a boat, the rent closing after me like those
wounds of angels which Milton tells of, but the seam still shining for
many a long rood behind me. To lie still over the Flats, where the
waters are shallow, and see the crabs crawling and the sculpins gliding
busily and silently beneath the boat,—to rustle in through the long harsh
grass that leads up some tranquil creek,—to take shelter from the
sunbeams under one of the thousand-footed bridges, and look down its
interminable colonnades, crusted with green and oozy growths, studded
with minute barnacles, and belted with rings of dark muscles, while
overhead streams and thunders that other river whose every wave is a
human soul flowing to eternity as the river below flows to the
ocean,—lying there moored unseen, in loneliness so profound that the
columns of Tadmor in the Desert could not seem more remote from life,—the
cool breeze on one’s forehead, the stream whispering against the
half-sunken pillars,—why should I tell of these things, that I should
live to see my beloved haunts invaded and the waves blackened with boats
as with a swarm of water-beetles? What a city of idiots we must be not
to have covered this glorious bay with gondolas and wherries, as we have
just learned to cover the ice in winter with skaters!
I am satisfied that such a set of black-coated, stiff-jointed,
soft-muscled, paste-complexioned youth as we can boast in our Atlantic
cities never before sprang from loins of Anglo-Saxon lineage. Of the
females that are the mates of these males I do not here speak. I
preached my sermon from the lay-pulpit on this matter a good while ago.
Of course, if you heard it, you know my belief is that the total climatic
influences here are getting up a number of new patterns of humanity, some
of which are not an improvement on the old model. Clipper-built, sharp
in the bows, long in the spars, slender to look at, and fast to go, the
ship, which is the great organ of our national life of relation, is but a
reproduction of the typical form which the elements impress upon its
builder. All this we cannot help; but we can make the best of these
influences, such as they are. We have a few good boatmen,—no good
horsemen that I hear of,—I cannot speak for cricketing,—but as for any
great athletic feat performed by a gentleman in these latitudes, society
would drop a man who should run round the Common in five minutes. Some
of our amateur fencers, single-stick players, and boxers, we have no
reason to be ashamed of. Boxing is rough play, but not too rough for a
hearty young fellow. Anything is better than this white-blooded
degeneration to which we all tend.
I dropped into a gentlemen’s sparring exhibition only last evening. It
did my heart good to see that there were a few young and youngish youths
left who could take care of their own heads in case of emergency. It is
a fine sight, that of a gentleman resolving himself into the primitive
constituents of his humanity. Here is a delicate young man now, with an
intellectual countenance, a slight figure, a sub-pallid complexion, a
most unassuming deportment, a mild adolescent in fact, that any Hiram or
Jonathan from between the ploughtails would of course expect to handle
with perfect ease. Oh, he is taking off his gold-bowed spectacles! Ah,
he is divesting himself of his cravat! Why, he is stripping off his
coat! Well, here he is, sure enough, in a tight silk shirt, and with two
things that look like batter puddings in the place of his fists. Now see
that other fellow with another pair of batter puddings,—the big one with
the broad shoulders; he will certainly knock the little man’s head off,
if he strikes him. Feinting, dodging, stopping, hitting,
countering,—little man’s head not off yet. You might as well try to jump
upon your own shadow as to hit the little man’s intellectual features.
He needn’t have taken off the gold-bowed spectacles at all. Quick,
cautious, shifty, nimble, cool, he catches all the fierce lunges or gets
out of their reach, till his turn comes, and then, whack goes one of the
batter puddings against the big one’s ribs, and bang goes the other into
the big one’s face, and, staggering, shuffling, slipping, tripping,
collapsing, sprawling, down goes the big one in a miscellaneous
bundle.—If my young friend, whose excellent article I have referred to,
could only introduce the manly art of self-defence among the clergy, I am
satisfied that we should have better sermons and an infinitely less
quarrelsome church-militant. A bout with the gloves would let off the
ill-nature, and cure the indigestion, which, united, have embroiled their
subject in a bitter controversy. We should then often hear that a point
of difference between an infallible and a heretic, instead of being
vehemently discussed in a series of newspaper articles, had been settled
by a friendly contest in several rounds, at the close of which the
parties shook hands and appeared cordially reconciled.
But boxing you and I are too old for, I am afraid. I was for a moment
tempted, by the contagion of muscular electricity last evening, to try
the gloves with the Benicia Boy, who looked in as a friend to the noble
art; but remembering that he had twice my weight and half my age, besides
the advantage of his training, I sat still and said nothing.
There is one other delicate point I wish to speak of with reference to
old age. I refer to the use of dioptric media which correct the
diminished refracting power of the humors of the eye,—in other words,
spectacles. I don’t use them. All I ask is a large, fair type, a strong
daylight or gas-light, and one yard of focal distance, and my eyes are as
good as ever. But if _your_ eyes fail, I can tell you something
encouraging. There is now living in New York State an old gentleman who,
perceiving his sight to fail, immediately took to exercising it on the
finest print, and in this way fairly bullied Nature out of her foolish
habit of taking liberties at five-and-forty, or thereabout. And now this
old gentleman performs the most extraordinary feats with his pen, showing
that his eyes must be a pair of microscopes. I should be afraid to say
to you how much he writes in the compass of a half-dime,—whether the
Psalms or the Gospels, or the Psalms _and_ the Gospels, I won’t be
positive.
But now let rue tell you this. If the time comes when you must lay down
the fiddle and the bow, because your fingers are too stiff, and drop the
ten-foot sculls, because your arms are too weak, and, after dallying
awhile with eye-glasses, come at last to the undisguised reality of
spectacles,—if the time comes when that fire of life we spoke of has
burned so low that where its flames reverberated there is only the sombre
stain of regret, and where its coals glowed, only the white ashes that
cover the embers of memory,—don’t let your heart grow cold, and you may
carry cheerfulness and love with you into the teens of your second
century, if you can last so long. As our friend, the Poet, once said, in
some of those old-fashioned heroics of his which he keeps for his private
reading,—
Call him not old, whose visionary brain
Holds o’er the past its undivided reign.
For him in vain the envious seasons roll
Who bears eternal summer in his soul.
If yet the minstrel’s song, the poet’s lay,
Spring with her birds, or children with their play,
Or maiden’s smile, or heavenly dream of art
Stir the few life-drops creeping round his heart,—
Turn to the record where his years are told,—
Count his gray hairs,—they cannot make him old!
_End of the Professor’s paper_.
[The above essay was not read at one time, but in several instalments,
and accompanied by various comments from different persons at the table.
The company were in the main attentive, with the exception of a little
somnolence on the part of the old gentleman opposite at times, and a few
sly, malicious questions about the “old boys” on the part of that forward
young fellow who has figured occasionally, not always to his advantage,
in these reports.
On Sunday mornings, in obedience to a feeling I am not ashamed of, I have
always tried to give a more appropriate character to our conversation. I
have never read them my sermon yet, and I don’t know that I shall, as
some of them might take my convictions as a personal indignity to
themselves. But having read our company so much of the Professor’s talk
about age and other subjects connected with physical life, I took the
next Sunday morning to repeat to them the following poem of his, which I
have had by me some time. He calls it—I suppose, for his professional
friends—THE ANATOMIST’S HYMN, but I shall name it—]
THE LIVING TEMPLE.
Not in the world of light alone,
Where God has built his blazing throne,
Nor yet alone in earth below,
With belted seas that come and go,
And endless isles of sunlit green,
Is all thy Maker’s glory seen:
Look in upon thy wondrous frame,—
Eternal wisdom still the same!
The smooth, soft air with pulse-like waves
Flows murmuring through its hidden caves
Whose streams of brightening purple rush
Fired with a new and livelier blush,
While all their burden of decay
The ebbing current steals away,
And red with Nature’s flame they start
From the warm fountains of the heart.
No rest that throbbing slave may ask,
Forever quivering o’er his task,
While far and wide a crimson jet
Leaps forth to fill the woven net
Which in unnumbered crossing tides
The flood of burning life divides,
Then kindling each decaying part
Creeps back to find the throbbing heart.
But warmed with that uchanging flame
Behold the outward moving frame,
Its living marbles jointed strong
With glistening band and silvery thong,
And linked to reason’s guiding reins
By myriad rings in trembling chains,
Each graven with the threaded zone
Which claims it as the master’s own.
See how yon beam of seeming white
Is braided out of seven-hued light,
Yet in those lucid globes no ray
By any chance shall break astray.
Hark how the rolling surge of sound,
Arches and spirals circling round,
Wakes the hushed spirit through thine ear
With music it is heaven to hear.
Then mark the cloven sphere that holds
All thought in its mysterious folds,
That feels sensation’s faintest thrill
And flashes forth the sovereign will;
Think on the stormy world that dwells
Locked in its dim and clustering cells!
The lightning gleams of power it sheds
Along its hollow glassy threads!
O Father! grant thy love divine
To make these mystic temples thine!
When wasting age and wearying strife
Have sapped the leaning walls of life,
When darkness gathers over all,
And the last tottering pillars fall,
Take the poor dust thy mercy warms
And mould it into heavenly forms!