DON’T MURMUR

Waipawa Mail, Volume VIII, Issue 782, 28 May 1885, Page 4

DON’T MURMUR

People past their bodily prime are often heard complaining or the decline and degeneracy of thing*. Since they were young, they say, the world lias loHt its old simplicities, beauty is tarnished and novelty at an end. What, does it amount to? Simply that they who utter these dismal ditties have not cared to keep alive with sympathies which carry a man along w ith his age ; that they have not cultivated a habit of genial observation, but have shut themselves up in self-sophistication, under the delusion that the pleasures of youth belong otdy to the young in vears. Foolish and lamentable error ! if men have little or no pleasure in the experience of the changes which are brought by increase of years, it is because they are not good and wise enough to find and contemplate the past in the present, and thus induce a sweet and meditative continuity of earliest years, but in the unskilful use of them'; the tedium of a long journey is not in the miles, but in the complainer; if time be tiresome it is because we do not spin amusements out of ourselves, as silkworms spin their silk. With the man who has really lived, the time is never past for sublime pleasures. Though many ho enjoyed in his youth may no longer be accessible by reason of his failing muscles, his capacity for the attainable is free and buoyant to the last.