Madame de Stael finds compensation in silence for the decay of the passion that once fired her blood; heathen Socrates, seventy years old, thanks the gods that he is now free from that "ravenous beast" which has disturbed his philosophic meditations for many years. Romance is the child of passion and imagination--the sudden father that, the long-protracting mother this. Old age has little romance. Only some rare man, like Wilhelm Von Humboldt, keeps it still fresh in his bosom. In intellectual matters, the old man loves to recall the old time, to review his favorite old men--no new ones half so fair. So in Homer, Nestor, who is the oldest of the Greeks, is always talking of the olden times, before the grandfathers of the men then living had come into being; "not such as living had degenerate days." Verse-loving John Quincy Adams turns off from Byron and Shelley, and Wieland and Goethe, and returns to Pope. * * * Elder Brewster expects to hear St. Martin's and Old Hundred chanted in heaven. To him heaven comes in the long-used musical tradition. The middle-aged man looks around at the present; he hopes less and works more. The old man looks back on the field he has trod: "this is the tree I planted--this is my footstep;" and he loves his old home, his old carriage, cat, dog, staff and friend. In lands where the vine grows, I have seen an old man sit all day long, a sunny Autumn day, before his cottage-door, in a great arm-chair, his old dog lay couched at his feet, in the genial sun. The autumn winds played in the old man's venerable hairs. Above him on the wall, purpling in the sunlight, hung the full clusters of the grapes, ripening and maturing yet more. The two were just alike--the wind stirred the vine-leaves and they fell, stirred the old man's hairs and they whitened yet more--both were waiting for the spirit in them to be fully ripe. The young man looks forward--the old man looks back. How long the shadows lie in the setting sun--the steeples, a mile long, reaching across the plain, as the sun stretches out the hills in grotesque dimensions! So are the events of life in the old man's consciousness. BEAUTIFUL, AND AS TRUE AS BEAUTIFUL. [Paul Denton, a celebrated itinerant Methodist preacher and missionary, in the early days of Texas, when the State, then a Mexican province, was the outlaw's home, collected a large crowd at a barbecue where he promised there should be plenty to drink of the best of liquors. Denton did this to collect a crowd that he might preach to them. After the barbecue was over, one of the boldest told Paul that he lied. "Where is your liquor?" said he. Drawing himself up to his full height, Paul thus broke forth in a strain that remains unsurpassed:] "There--there is the liquor which God, the Eternal, brews for his children.