And the day before yesterday, gentlemen, was thirty-five years, and yesterday was more than eighteen years, ago. I have gone on feeling young, but I have noticed that I have met fewer of the old to whom to show my deference, and recently I was startled by being told that ours is an old bench. Well, I accept the fact, although I find it hard to realize, and I ask myself, what is there to show for this half lifetime that has passed? I look into my book in which I keep a docket of the decisions of the full court which fall to me to write, and find about a thousand cases. A thousand cases, many of them upon trifling or transitory matters, to represent nearly half a lifetime! A thousand cases, when one would have liked to study to the bottom and to say his say on every question which the law ever has presented, and then to go on and invent new problems which should be the test of doctrine, and then to generalize it all and write it in continuous, logical, philosophic exposition, setting forth the whole corpus with its roots in history and its justifications of expedience, real or supposed! Alas, gentlemen, that is life. I often imagine Shakespeare or Napoleon summing himself up and thinking: "Yes, I have written five thousand lines of solid gold, and a good deal of padding--I, who have covered the milky way with words which outshine the stars!" "Yes, I beat the Austrians in Italy and elsewhere; I made a few brilliant campaigns, and I ended in middle life in a _cul-de-sac_--I who had dreamed of a world monarchy and of Asiatic power!" We cannot live in our dreams. We are lucky enough if we can give a sample of our best, and if in our hearts we can feel that it has been nobly done. Some changes come about in the process: changes not necessarily so much in the nature as in the emphasis of our interest. I do not mean in our wish to make a living and to succeed--of course, we all want those things--but I mean in our ulterior intellectual or spiritual interests, in the ideal part, without which we are but snails or tigers.