Worcester daily spy. [volume] (Worcester [Mass.]) 1850-1888, 1854-04-25
GAe 4aiIg spp.
TUESDAY. APRIL Is, 1854.
Fenas Of the Aged.

More than sixty years had turned their backs
upon Bacon and Leibnitz and Locke, more
than seventy upon Kant and Reid, when their
most memorial writings were begun. But
these were philosophers. l will remember,
then, that the sun of more than three-score
summers was shining on the dark ened eyes
of Milton when his Sampson Agonistes, and
the great sequel to the greatest sacred epic OF
our language and of modern times sprung to
light. st. Augustine revised for circulation
the works that amaze modern scholarship with
the profound ntricacies of their subjects and
the huge volumes of their contents, when he
was seventy three years old. Cassiolorus,
statesman before he came monastic, was
ninety-three when his fayorite study of Lam
guage found him still employed with his pen.
The most learned of Romans, Varro, was an
octogenarian when he wrote his treatise on
Farming; and best Of all it was dedicated to
Fundania, his wife, at whose instance it was
composed. The most inustrious scourger Of
Roman degeneracy, Juvena, was but httlo
short of that age, when his thirteenth and
fifteenth satires showed that nothing Of the
former yigor or skill was lost Straho, the
prince Of Grecian geographers, WIS still fur
ther advanced when his folios were first ta-
ken in hand Aristobulas, one Of the gener-
ais of Alexander the Great, made it the
history of his young commanded Plato was
laboring cheerfully upon his books of the Laws,
at period oflife when the nineteenth Psalm,
if he could have read it, in its untranslated
Hebrew, would have pointed its grim text at
him but in vain. Sophocles, the warrior dra-
matist wrote his " (Epidus at Colonus at the
age of ninety and the critics who find it
somewhat tanner than his "CEpidus King
find only the natural difference between a
palace and cottage sceue, and between the
Iheban hero himself in his martial aud his
secluded days. There is nothing in the piece
that is unworthy of its authors fame.
Isocrates, Millions % old man eloquent"
spanned almost a century, and kept his repu-
tation to the last. At the age of eighty-two
he composed the mastery Grafton in which he
defended his profession against the aspersions
of Plato Then there was Theophastrus the
disciple, friend and successor of Z" the mighty
Stagirite" to whom that most really phil
osophlc mind of the Greeian world commit
ted his writings. He was q scholar and
teacher, and something better than that, a
man of great public and private service. Ira
dition assigns to him an age further advanced
than can be soberly believed in and when
he left the world, it was not as if delivered
from prison, but taking reluctant farewell
of the light. He chided with nature, Cicero
tells us, that she shold bestow protracted
existence upon the stag and crow, who did
not need it, and withhold it from man, who
could continually bring 50 much to pass. He
complained that when he was just beginning
to see things as they were, heshould be g ex-
tinguished.'' Doubtless he was unreasonable
in that complaint. and doubtless he was IN
error when he supposed that human improves
ment would be advanced by the further ex-
tensicg of the term Of human life. But who
can help admiring the courageous manhood
that could express itself in such words as hiss
And who will refuse to bless that nature with
which he found fault, that she has made it
possible to carry our poor faculties here on
earth so far and so well
Examples such as now come to my mind
might be multiplied to almost any extent, by
those who would make this subject one of
| special research. l have no purpose in pur-
suing it even so far as this, but to record an
animating lesson against the Responding
thoughts that tempt men to give over too soon,
and allow that portion of their permitted time
toibe darkened which most needs to be cheered,
and keep them looking back, and hanging
back, instead of going on, with their faces for
ward, and their feet in the path, till they rest
and stand i'll their lot-aye, and stand stead
lastly, too-til the end of their days.-chris-
ttGn Eranainer. a