In _Over the Teacups_ he says that at sixty we come within the range of the rifle pits and describes the nine survivors of his class, which graduated fifty-nine members. But here he is most impressed with the amazing progress he has seen--the friction match, the railroad, ocean steamer, photography, spectroscope, telegraph, telephone, phonograph, anesthesia, electric illumination, bicycle, etc., telling us that all his boyish shooting was done with a flintlock and all his voyaging on a sailing packet. He has a tingling sense of progress that amounts to a kind of pity for his own youth; and although he cannot conceive how it is possible, he has a faint hope that progress may go on at the same rate. The thing to be avoided is automatism, which is habit gone to seed. We must be sure and take in sail betimes. In deciding between duties and the desire to rest, many have actually welcomed the decay of powers in order that they might rest. He bitterly condemns conservative religious dogmas, which have done so much to disorganize our thinking powers, and recognizes the happy tendency to soften and then throw off creeds as one grows old as if in order to return to the source of life as ignorant and helpless as we came from it. He ends with a meager array of facts to indicate that poets are not short-lived and that although their powers may wane, some of the best poems have come from people of advanced age. The late Senator G. F. Hoar[94] thinks young people contemplate old age and death from a distance, as Milton’s “Hymn on Morning” was written at midnight. “I would indite something concerning the solar system--Betty, bring the candles.” Old age is a matter of temperament and not of years. In some, old age is congenital. Lowell says, “From the womb he emerged gravely, a little old man.” John Quincy Adams fought the House of Representatives at 83; Josiah Quincy attacked the “Know-Nothings” at 85--said the bats were leading the eagles. He broke his hip at 92 and when Dr. Ellis called, he was so charmed that he forgot to ask him how he was and went back to do so. Quincy said, “Damn the leg.” Gladstone, aged 83, faced a hostile government, House of Lords, press, aristocracy, university, and perhaps a hostile queen, and said, “I represent the youth and hope of England. The solution of these questions of the future belongs aright to us who are of the future and not to you who are of the past.” There are certain functions especially assigned to age, for example, the magistrate passes upon things after the controversy is over. Senators by law must be at least thirty but the average age of them is nearly sixty. Methuselah’s days must have been stupid. Age should cultivate unripe fruit. The greatest penalty of growing old is losing the friends of youth, dying in the death of others. But a large capacity for friendship atones. General Sherman’s friendship was like being admitted to an order of nobility or knighted.