POST-MERIDIAN. II. Evening. AGE cannot wither her whom not gray hairs Proud Nilus shelters with engulfing slime; With sense of duty done without complaint! Strength to the weak, and courage to the faintThy bleaching locks, thy wrinkles, have but been Fresh beads upon the rosary of a saint! Wendell P. Garrison. THE GHOST OF OLD AGE. ON a final analysis, the horror of old age comes from centering our life and our strength in things that are doomed to pass away. The result is loneliness - loneliness that in the end sees us stripped not only of lively associations with the world, of strong ties binding us to kindred and friends, but stripped, too, of flesh, physical vigor, emotional power, mental force. Our earthly treasures drop away from us one by one, till at last we live, a ghost, shivering in the shaking structure of our own skeletons. It is the fearful, fearful loneliness of old age that is the whole terror of it. Now, is there anything in us that can alter this situation that confronts us all, barring the accident of an early death? Yes; the ghost of old age that survives shuddering amid the wreck of its own personality is in the beginning a spirit that needs only some slight attention, while we are in the possession of our faculties, to create for us a sphere of beautiful life in which we shall walk with constantly increasing vigor, constantly increasing capacity of enjoyment, as the years and the world drop behind us. This spirit requires for its perfection no more than that we learn to love solitude. Not that, like the misanthrope and churl, we are to shun the world because we love ourselves. We will simply take advantage of the hours and moments when others make no demand upon us, and instead of rushing out to force our demands upon the world, we will stay at home quietly, alone with our souls. Harper's Bazar. ATTRACTIVE AGE OF WOMAN. HISTORY tells us that passionate love was given to George Eliot when she had passed her sixtieth birthday; to Mme. de Stael at forty-four, and to Charlotte Brontë at thirty-six. Helen of Troy was forty-four when she fascinated Paris with her beauty and charm and fled with him to make subject matter for all sorts of ancient and modern writers. She was old enough to know better. If she had foreseen the amount of notoriety to be hers it is quite likely she would have preferred the dullness of virtuous obscurity. Three generations paid equally ardent court to Ninon de l'Enclos, and Mme. de Maintenon was fifty when the greatest monarch of Europe married her for love. Mme. Recamier had lost none of her beauty at fifty-five. For modern examples, there is the Divine Sarah and the adorably vivacious Rejane. They, too, seem to find no dividing fence that shall separate the youthful present from the withered has been. Balzac declared that a woman was most attractive at thirty. Guy de Maupassant admitted that a woman might be attractive at forty, while Thomas Hardy (that exceedingly dreary voice crying in the wilderness) goes so far as to insinuate that a woman's personal charm is gone at thirty-three. With this confliction and wide divergence of opinion it is impossible that all should be right. Therefore, let us presume that all are wrong, at least when they fix a definite age for women to fade and break. There is no definite age for this. How can there be? It is unhappiness, and unhappiness alone, that pales the fresh color, darkens the sparkling eyes, and droops pitifully the laughing mouth, deadening the piquant manner into apathetic listlessness. One day every woman must look into her mirror and see a caricature of her former self. And, unless she can call back peace to her perturbed spirit and quiet happiness to her heart, her beauty is gone, and with it her charm, her fascination, irrevocably. Sophie Gates Kerr. SONG OF THE SCYTHES. HUSH, ah hush, the scythes are saying, Andrew Lang. PERSONAL NOTES. "PROFESSOR HIRAM CORSON," says The Philadelphia Record, "who has the chair of English literature at Cornell, belongs to the well-known Corson family whose homestead is near Norristown, at Plymouth. A very old man now, he is, perhaps, the most picturesque figure in the college town of Ithaca. His lectures are extremely popular; he speaks with graceful gestures, his hands weighted with beautiful jewels, and he wears on his forefinger a ring the poet Browning gave him. He says good things he is always saying good things. 'Professor Corson,' a pretty little co-ed murmured recently, 'won't you give me one of your photographs to hang up in my room?' The learned old man smiled and assented. 'But I won't give you one of those a New York photographer has just made of me,' he said. "The fellow had the impudence to take all the lines out of my face. It made me, he thought, look younger. I shouted at him: 'You are a fool. How dared you remove those lines? Don't you know it took me sixty years to get them there?"" RICHARD HENRY STODDARD. THE typical representative of New York's old-time writers, and the last link between the present school and that of half a century ago, was Richard Henry Stoddard, the venerable port, essayist, editor, critic, or, as he modestly styled himself, "literary journalist." Mr. Stoddard's long literary life, extending practically through the history of American literature, began nearly threescore years ago, when he was less than twenty years of age; and during the years that have passed he has been the friend of most every man known to letters, as well as the bitter enemy of one of its most brilliant lights, Edgar Allan Poe. For close on to fifty years he has read and reviewed every important book printed in English. WHEN my bier is borne to the grave, Nor cry like the mourners around Richard Henry Stoddard. |