See how the world its veterans rewards! A youth of frolics, an old age of cards. POPE: _Moral Essays_. Alonso of Aragon was wont to say in commendation of age, that age appears to be best in four things--old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read.--BACON: _Apothegms_. Dr. Clara Barrus, who for many years has labored in the closest personal contact with John Burroughs, has kindly sent me, along with much other information, the notes he made during the last months of his life for an article that he never lived to complete on Old Age. The quotations and _aperçus_ that he collected and that most impressed him were such as the following: As men grow old they grow more foolish and more wise. Young saint, old devil; young devil, old saint. A man at sixteen will prove a child at sixty. When men grow virtuous in their old age they only make a sacrifice to God of the devil’s leavings. Nobody loves life like an old man. An old young man will make a young old man. Old age is a tyrant who forbids men, under pain of death, the pleasures of youth. Reckless youth makes rueful age. Young men think old men fools and old men know young men to be so. The evening of life brings with it its lamps. A youthful age is desirable but aged youth is troublesome and grievous. To me the worst thing about old age is that one has outlived all his old friends. The past becomes a cemetery. It is characteristic of old age to reverse its opinions and its likes and dislikes. But it does not reverse them; it revises them. If its years have been well spent it has reached a higher position from which to overlook Life; it commands a wider view. Old Age may reason well but old age does not remember well. The power of attention fails, which we so often mistake for deafness in the old. It is the mind that is blunted and not the ear. Hence we octogenarians so often ask for your question over again. We do not grasp it the first time. We do not want you to speak louder. We only need to focus upon you a little more completely. I probably make more strenuous demands upon him who aspires to be a poet than ever before. I see more clearly than ever before that sweetened prose put up in verse form does not make poetry any more than sweetened water put in the comb in the hive makes honey. The quality of the man makes all the difference in the world. A great nature can describe birds and flowers and clouds and sunsets and spring and autumn greatly.