They say our emotional life is damped. True, we are more immune from certain great passions and our affectivity is very differently distributed. But what lessons of repression we have to learn! If the fires of youth are banked and smouldering they are in no wise extinguished and perhaps burn only the more fiercely inwardly because they cannot vent themselves, as even the Lange-James theory admits for repressed feelings, inhibition of which really only makes them more intense. We get scant credit for the self-control that restrains us from so much we feel impelled to say and do and if we break out, it is ascribed not to its true cause in outer circumstance but to the irritability thought characteristic of our years. Age has the same right to emotional perturbations as youth and is no whit less exposed and disposed to them. Here, as everywhere, we are misunderstood and are in such a feeble minority that we have to incessantly renounce our impulsions. Marie Bashkirtseff has betrayed the secret of how the pubescent girl, and Karin Michaëlis, of how the woman of forty feels, but no one has ever attempted to explain the sentimental nature of aging men or women. Even Solomon and Omar Khayyam presented only the negations and not the reaffirmations of the will-to-live. Thus it is no wonder if the old often best illustrate what Henri Bordeaux describes as “the fear of living.” René Doumic thinks that there is a new disease in our old civilization and that many in their prime only make a pretense of living. “We value our peace above everything and wish to keep it at all hazards, however dearly we must pay for it. We shun responsibilities, avoid risks and chances of struggle, flee from adventure and danger, seek to escape from everything that makes for the charm and value of life. We no longer have any faith in the future because we no longer have faith in ourselves.” How well this applies to those brought face to face with the last stage of life! The fact is, we must find and make new pleasures as well as new modes of escaping and mitigating the pains of body and mind and must learn anew how to love, hate, fear, be angry, pity, and sympathize aright. The serenity ascribed to us would pall and bring stagnation. It is a profound psychological truth that “out of the heart are the issues of life” and our heart is not dead; on the contrary, emotivity probably increases with years and most expressions of it, unless they become more sublimated, strongly tend to grow more crass and stormy. We were never more interested in things, persons, events, causes, in life itself. Slights rankle, neglect chills, attentions warm, affronts incense, and praise thrills us, and if we grow censorious, it is because our ideals of conduct and motive have become higher and purer and we are in a greater hurry to see them realized. We cannot help these gropings toward a new dispensation and their very persistence is the best reason for believing that they will