loves to read about people of ninety and over. He peers among the
asterisks of the triennial catalogue of the University for the names of
graduates who have been seventy years out of college and remain still
unstarred. He is curious about the biographies of centenarians. Such
escapades as those of that terrible old sinner and ancestor of great men,
the Reverend Stephen Bachelder, interest him as they never did before.
But he cannot deceive himself much longer. See him walking on a level
surface, and he steps off almost as well as ever; but watch him coming
down a flight of stairs, and the family record could not tell his years
more faithfully. He cut you dead, you say? Did it occur to you that he
could not see you clearly enough to know you from any other son or
daughter of Adam? He said he was very glad to hear it, did he, when you
told him that your beloved grandmother had just deceased? Did you happen
to remember that though he does not allow that he is deaf, he will not
deny that he does not hear quite so well as he used to? No matter about
his failings; the longer he holds on to life, the longer he makes life
seem to all the living who follow him, and thus he is their constant
benefactor.

Every stage of existence has its special trials and its special
consolations. Habits are the crutches of old age; by the aid of these we
manage to hobble along after the mental joints are stiff and the muscles
rheumatic, to speak metaphorically,--that is to say, when every act of
self-determination costs an effort and a pang. We become more and more
automatic as we grow older, and if we lived long enough we should come to
be pieces of creaking machinery like Maelzel's chess player,--or what
that seemed to be.

Emerson was sixty-three years old, the year I have referred to as that of
the grand climacteric, when he read to his son the poem he called