Advancing Years

Any trifle will scratch the match, but it kindles a great fire, in which the dreams and hopes of youth begin to dissipate in smoke and vapor. Someone incidentally speaks of us as "middle-aged," whereas our mothers hardly seem to us to have passed that meridian, the boundary line of a different land from youth; but after a fair debate with facts and the looking-glass, we have had to yield the point.

The daughter of our old schoolmate, married on or about her graduation day, who has now grown up and come before us to replace her mother in some mysterious way, receives our embrace as a "good motherly kiss, " and arouses us to the circumstance that whatever we have been thinking of her as our contemporary, she has been thinking of us as her mother's contemporary.

We have never given the subject a thought before; it has been one of the things taken for granted with us that of course we are young, just as the sky is blue or the earth round, because we always have been young that, in truth, all people are young till they feel old. But what are the facts? For the first time we consider them. As far as years go to make up the count, we must admit that we have crossed the median line, perhaps: our years are no longer the years of romance and poetry. As far as looks go well, it is true there are silver threads among the gold; we had regarded them as accidents, but they were not accidents they were necessities; there are wrinkles round the eyes, more or less, which have no longer the firm young muscle to hold them full; some teeth are missing, or the dazzle of the enamel is gone; there is the suspicion of a horrid hollow on the cheek; under the best conditions, and however attractive the face may remain, the rosy roundness there is gone. So far as feelings go well, it has seemed to us till now only as if life deepened and enriched itself each year. Then we begin to look about us, peradventure to see how the thing strikes the rest of the world. We have spent years in listening, in learning, in making ourselves companionable and possibly entertaining; we see the veriest chit, with her luscious flesh and color, ignorant of life and of everything else but her own senses, preferred before us. Ah! then other people found out long ago what has just been revealed to us: we are old, and have been making fools of ourselves in masquerading as young. We declare to our self-investigation, then, that we do not care for the successes of the pretty girl; it may be that we had as much in our day, we do not find it in our heart to envy her; perhaps we pity her that the beam in which she sports so soon must fade. Then suddenly we see that we are pitying the young; truly we are not of their number! And if we had no sensation of the sort before, henceforth we acknowledge that we have one foot in the grave. Then, by slow access of meditation, we are aware that much of the freshness of feeling is gone, much of that which once gave us rapture, our power of joyous appreciation, our fullness of enthusiasm ; we are not again rapt by the spell of any great painting into fairy-land, as the case has been with us, when all the lovely hues and aerial distances seemed to be portions of the region to which we traveled, that region into which the coming years were sure to bring us; no single dash of color in the sky fills us with unspeakable delight and longing after the unknown; we do not lean out into the star-lit nights with conscious companionship of the spirits of the stars and the deeps and the dark we are a little afraid of the damps and draughts and rheumatism ; we remember all these things; we do not feel them afresh. Nor do the same books please us, we find, that once we read and re-read; the poems that we ruined with our pencil marks and underscoring have ceased to charm, and the volumes that in the days of those pencil-marks we would have scorned, now attract us at first sight; the bread-and-butter novel moves us to derision; we feel sufficient acquaintance with life and its passions and subtle motives and secret springs to read the books of darker dealings. Dancing does not seem to us, either, the pleasantest way in the world in which to spend time. We do not think a youth of twenty-one or twenty-two the ideal being for whom the heavens and earth were created. Possibly we prefer lamp-light and people to all the moonlight and solitude in the world. What then? It seems that middle age has its pleasures, which it would not exchange for those of youth ; why will we persist in looking back so regretfully on those of youth, which we would no longer enjoy if we had them?