Merrimac. There, too, was the poet whose National Hymn, "My Country, 't
is of thee," is known to more millions, and dearer to many of them, than
all the other songs written since the Psalms of David. Four of our six
were clergymen; the engineer and the present writer completed the list.
Were we melancholy? Did we talk of graveyards and epitaphs? No,--we
remembered our dead tenderly, serenely, feeling deeply what we had lost
in those who but a little while ago were with us. How could we forget
James Freeman Clarke, that man of noble thought and vigorous action, who
pervaded this community with his spirit, and was felt through all its
channels as are the light and the strength that radiate through the wires
which stretch above us? It was a pride and a happiness to have such
classmates as he was to remember. We were not the moping, complaining
graybeards that many might suppose we must have been. We had been
favored with the blessing of long life. We had seen the drama well into
its fifth act. The sun still warmed us, the air was still grateful and
life-giving. But there was another underlying source of our cheerful
equanimity, which we could not conceal from ourselves if we had wished to
do it. Nature's kindly anodyne is telling upon us more and more with
every year. Our old doctors used to give an opiate which they called
"the black drop." It was stronger than laudanum, and, in fact, a
dangerously powerful narcotic. Something like this is that potent drug
in Nature's pharmacopoeia which she reserves for the time of need,--the
later stages of life. She commonly begins administering it at about the
time of the "grand climacteric," the ninth septennial period, the
sixty-third year. More and more freely she gives it, as the years go on,
to her grey-haired children, until, if they last long enough, every
faculty is benumbed, and they drop off quietly into sleep under its
benign influence.

Do you say that old age is unfeeling? It has not vital energy enough to