It is to spend long days And not once feel that we were ever young; It is to add, immured In the hot prison of the present, month To month with weary pain. It is to suffer this, And feel but half, and feebly, what we feel Deep in our hidden heart Festers the dull remembrance of a change, But no emotion--none. It is--last stage of all-- When we are frozen up within, and quite The phantom of ourselves, To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost, Which blamed the living man. From Walt Whitman I quote the following four extracts:[112] THANKS IN OLD AGE Thanks in old age--thanks ere I go, For health, the midday sun, the impalpable air--for life, mere life, For precious ever-lingering memories, (of you my mother dear--you, father--you, brothers, sisters, friends,) For all my days--not those of peace alone--the days of war the same, For gentle words, caresses, gifts from foreign lands, For shelter, wine and meat--for sweet appreciation. A CAROL CLOSING SIXTY-NINE Of me myself--the jocund heart yet beating in my breast, The body wreck’d, old, poor and paralyzed--the strange inertia falling pall-like round me, The burning fires down in my sluggish blood not yet extinct, The undiminish’d faith--the groups of loving friends. QUERIES TO MY SEVENTIETH YEAR Approaching, nearing, curious, Thou dim, uncertain spectre--bringest thou life or death? Strength, weakness, blindness, more paralysis and heavier? Or placid skies and sun? Wilt stir the waters yet? Or haply cut me short for good? Or leave me here as now, Dull, parrot-like and old, with crack’d voice harping, screeching? AS I SIT WRITING HERE As I sit writing here, sick and grown old, Not my least burden is that dulness of the years, querilities, Ungracious glooms, aches, lethargy, constipation, whimpering ennui, May filter in my daily songs. Longfellow strikes a less pessimistic note:[113] MORITURI SALUTAMUS Ah, nothing is too late Till the tired heart shall cease to palpitate. Cato learned Greek at 80; Sophocles Wrote his grand Œdipus, and Simonides Bore off the prize of verse From his compeers When each had numbered more than four-score years. And Theophrastus at four-score and ten Had but begun his characters of men. Chaucer at Wadstock, with the nightingales, At sixty wrote The Canterbury Tales. Goethe at Weimar, toiling to the last, Completed Faust when eighty years were past. These are, indeed, exceptions, but they show How far the gulf stream of our youth may flow Into the Arctic regions of our lives Where little else but life itself survives. * * * * *