The second attitude is illustrated by Matthew Arnold and by the lugubrious phase of Walt Whitman, both written after decrepitude had begun. Poems written in this spirit arouse the question whether old age is intrinsically pessimistic or perhaps even pathological. Should senescents express or repress the inexorable and progressive limitations and weaknesses senescence brings in its train, or strive to ignore if they cannot be oblivious to them? Are not such abandonments to pathos, in their deeper psychological motivation, a cry for pity, to which strong souls feel it unworthy to appeal? Are they perhaps atavistic vestiges or echoes of a time when the old were more cruelly treated? Why spend time and energy in mourning for what old age takes away rather than in finding “joy in what remains behind” and which no other stage of life can give? Hysterical symptoms are often only an appeal for sympathy by those who crave, perhaps subconsciously, more attention and service, which only selfishness would think lacking. Psychopaths and paranoiacs have often made literary capital of their aberrations, as have adolescents out of the ferments peculiar to their age. All this has its place but should, in my opinion, always be known as what it is, namely, abnormal and aberrant and thus belonging entirely to science and not to literary art. The third or reminiscent type expresses the inveterate instinct of the old to look back upon life, to illumine and interpret its memories by such philosophy as experience brings, in some measure, to all who can reflect. It is a happy circumstance that senile amnesia always begins with the loss of recent recollections, while those of early life are only later and very rarely effaced. This resource is always open to the aged, who can relive the most interesting stages of their early and adult lives, unify them, and draw the moral of them as a whole. The world owes much and, as it grows old, will owe ever more to the autobiographic impulse of those who achieve normal senectitude. The following is Matthew Arnold’s “Growing Old”: What is it to grow old? Is it to lose the glory of the form, The lustre of the eye? Is it for beauty to forego her wreath? --Yes, but not this alone. Is it to feel our strength-- Not our bloom only, but our strength--decay? Is it to feel each limb Grow stiffer, every function less exact, Each nerve more loosely strung? Yes, this, and more; but not Ah, ’tis not what in youth we dream’d ’twould be! ’Tis not to have our life Mellow’d and soften’d as with sunset-glow, A golden day’s decline. ’Tis not to see the world As from a height, with rapt prophetic eyes, And heart profoundly stirr’d; And weep, and feel the fulness of the past. The years that are no more.