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nature turns and weans the mind from the ambitions and excitements of worldly life, or makes disappointment the result of any pertinacious efforts to be the bustling actors and contenders that we may have been before. The very changes in our body prevent and disincline us from being any longer wrestlers or combatants in that arena from which we are about to be withdrawn. Our frame and functions have been expressly constructed so as to produce this effect upon us at this period of our earthly duration. These alterations disable the individual spirit from being or doing any longer what it was and did in its younger capacities. The internal changes increase as we advance to seventy years and beyond; and thereby the mind is brought into a state of vacancy, quiet, and serenity as to all the endangering, agitating, and occupying pursuits, passions, projects, conflicts, and perturbations of the present world, which, by their opposing effects, exclude the due consideration of any other.

To all these old age brings its natural anodynes-the sedatives that act most efficaciously on the ethereal nature of its vivacious personality, and which gradually draw the spirit to that pausing tranquillity of thought and feeling, that suspension of all that would impede its better thoughts and further improvement, which peculiarly suit the grander objects that are now awaiting it, and to which nature is pressing it with an accelerated force and irresistible certainty.

Protracted years thus enable and dispose the aged to give that more direct and continued attention to the next stage of their being to which they are unavoidably advancing, but which, amid the activities and enjoyments of younger days, they were less able or less inclined to think of.

The bodily changes of age are likewise admonitions to it to regard itself as a being who is not to be much longer a residing or abiding portion of the present world, but who has decidedly commenced his journey to another, or who soon will be conveyed to it. To this region, though its position and circumstances be involved in obscurity, age then invites us, and peculiar circumstances are always arising to give its thought this direction.

Age outlives every day more and more of its former hopes and attachments, and of all connected with them. Its preceding friends and acquaintances die off in every succeeding year; often in every sequent month. Those who were most like

itself, who grew up with it, and with whom it had most sympatnies, most views, and hopes in common, disappear to return no more. It finds itself surrounded by others, who, because they are younger, have not the same ideas and feelings, nor are forming the same plans or prospects. All things become newer and stranger to it. The state of public events also has undergone mutations as striking, and passes into a contrast which increases with our years. Hence old age, if it reflect

on itself as others think about it, cannot but feel itself less adapted to the world around it, which, from its own novelties, deems its seniors as no less dissimilar to them, and at times incompatible with them, or with their views and purposes. There is an impression in all the classes younger than itself; that age ought to be attending more to the better country into which it will soon enter than of that in which it is still lingering. The more it is seen to do so, the more it is respected and if it act thus, the more respectable it will become, and the less it will be in the way of its juniors; for it will be pursuing objects with which no others will interfere. Age can thus be ever seeking and enjoying a happiness of its own, which cannot offend or injure any one. In addition to this personal benefit, we may add, that old age, in any moderate degree of health and efficiency, is the finest and most improved state of the human mind; and is in the most favourable circumstances for self-improvement; and if it be intellectually and morally employed, as in every class it may be, it will then be the happiest and most meliorated condition which human nature can experience in its present localization.

To society old age is also intended by its Maker to be a benefiting spectacle, even in its most inactive existence. The aged present to the world at large an order of human beings, who, as such, are placed, as it were, in the position of an isthmus between earth and Heaven, connecting and connected with both; belonging to both, and leading and pointing from the temporary to the everlasting-from the seen to the unseen-from that which has been to that which is to be, The hoary head of age, its peculiar countenance, its manifest change of features, its feebler step, its decaying strength, its frequent infirmities, present, in their contrast with all that is younger, to the continual view and notice of society, an altered being a living transition from existing things to some other condition and abode. If not in that stage ourselves, we can

not look at it without feeling it to be in this state of passage. It carries our thoughts involuntarily to the region of the departed. It silently reminds its companions both of death and immortality; of death, as a picture of natural decline towards it; of immortality, by presenting to us, in its intellectual and social animation, a principle of vivacious life that seems beyond the power of bodily dissolution to destroy. The older it becomes the more it awakens these ideas; and thus our living world, by the very principles and laws of its natural constitution, is always setting both death and futurity before us; the beginning and the end, and the ulterior state and sequence of human life. In this panorama, age and longevity act like the heralds of time, to warn us of that eternity which they are so closely and so visibly approaching, that we expect every day to find that they have disappeared into it. The moral effects of such remembrancers are small and gradual, but, being continuous and universal, produce important benefit to society in their extensive and collective amount. Human good is made up, in every individual composition of it, of innumerable small particles, successively, and often imperceptibly accruing.

But the direct and positive benefits of old age to society, while it can efficiently serve it, are as incalculable as they are obvious. It diffuses all those advantages which superior knowledge, experience, judgment, and practised wisdom can confer and are always imparting. Literature, science, polity, legislation, magistracy, all national cabinets, and most of the active departments of life, attest the continual contributions of the aged to the right course, and progression, and wellbeing of their contemporaries and of posterity. No community could long prosper without their services and influence.

Every individual in this stage of life may also, in his little circle, become a benefactor and a model to it. He may always be doing some good by his examples, his counsels, or his judicious and kind assistances. Age thus employing itself, as the opportunities arise, may obtain a personal esteem and regard that were not its property before. The heart and reason will unite to affix to it a distinction and a veneration peculiarly its own. Such a result, while it will make its longevity valuable and desired, will also sooth the possessor of it with one of the most pleasing cordials that life can fur

nish—the approbation of those with whom it has its daily in

tercourse.

It has been a subject of inquiry, whether longer life accrues oftener to the married or to the single members of society. The Prussian gentleman who has investigated the point considers it as certain, that, in both sexes, marriage contributes to longevity.*

LETTER XXIII.

Great Longevity one part of the Plan, and one of the Laws of Human Life.-Its Existence in Antiquity, and in all Periods of the World down to our own Times.-The most remarkable Instances of it in the two last Centuries.

MY DEAR SYDNEY,

The tables of both our living and dying world show us that it has been a further part of the Divine plan of human life that there should be, among its various populations, some individuals who should enjoy such a prolongation of their human life as to reach the age of one hundred years; and that a smaller portion should last several years beyond this date. Such individuals are found not only in almost every other

*Dr. Casper, in a paper published at Berlin in 1836, remarks, that Hufeland, Deparcieux, and others have asserted that bachelors are less long-lived than married men. Odier first made the inquiry with any exactness. He found," Bibl Dict.," 1814, that in females the mean duration of life for the married women of twenty-five was above thirty-six years, but for the unmarried only thirty and a half. At thirty there was a difference of four years in favour of the married, and at thirty-five an advantage of two years.

As to men, he inferred from Deparcieux and the Amsterdam tables that the mortality of those from thirty to forty-five was twenty-seven per cent. for the unmarried, and only eighteen for the married; also, that 78 married men attained the age of forty to 41 bachelors. The difference becomes more striking as age advances; for at the age of sixty there were only 22 unmarried alive to 48 who were married. At seventy, there were the proportion of 11 bachelors to 27 married men, and at eighty, 3 only to 9. Nearly the same results were exhibited in the female sex; 72 married women were forty-five, while only 52 unmarried had reached it.-New Monthly Mag., 1836, p. 250. Hence Dr. Casper thought the point to be incontestably settled, that in both sexes marriage conduced to the lengthening of the individual life.

country, but likewise in all eras, and even in the most opposite states of society; in the uncivilized as well as in civilized. These circumstances concur to indicate that this extraordinary longevity has been an appointed contingency of human nature; contingent as to the persons who should enjoy and exhibit it, but certain and fixed as to the occurrence of the phenomenon, in those proportions and degrees in which it has been found to take place. Like all the results of the laws of our life and death, both the extension of the duration, and the ratio of those who have it as to the rest of their community, vary in different times and places; but always within limits that are never overpassed. Their numbers are always few, but their appearance forms a constant portion of most societies. It is, therefore, a law of human life, that it should be thus prolonged in this section of its living world. Such a law must have been specially designed, and, like all our specific laws and their results, must have some process of means attached to it from which its effects originate and by which it acts. Some special purposes must be also accompanying its operation, for which it has been instituted. All these points are worthy of our consideration. Indeed, there is no living individual to whom they can be uninteresting; for since the contingence is certain, as an established law of nature, to occur to some, and as the possibility is attached to the principle of life in one as well as in another, every one is susceptible of the benefit, and no one can beforehand know that he will not be the subject of it. It is one of the grand prizes of human existence in this world, sure to fall into the possession of some one; and therefore reason suggests to all to inquire whether any skill or care can increase to individuals the chance of acquiring it, and of making it, if it should arrive, as comfortable a period as any other portion of his present existence. As it will be always a gift of the Divine goodness to those who enjoy it, and, like all his bounties, is meant to be a blessing, my own impression is that it may be made a happy epocha of an earthly life. This is more within our power than its attainment; for though much may be done by enlightened judgment and self-regulating care to favour its occurrence, still it must always depend on his will who ordains it, to whom the benefaction shall be applied. Yet, as longevity has been thus made an appertenance to human nature, the probability will always be, that, by a due use of the means

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