Chapter XXII: Terminus

“_It is time to be old,
To take in sail:--
The god of bounds,
Who sets to seas a shore,
Came to me in his fatal rounds,
And said: ‘No more!
No farther shoot
Thy broad ambitious branches, and thy root,
Fancy departs: no more invent;
Contract thy firmament
To compass of a tent.
There’s not enough for this and that,
Make thy option which of two;
Economize the failing river,
Not the less revere the Giver,
Leave the many and hold the few.
Timely wise accept the terms,
Soften the fall with wary foot;
A little while
Still plan and smile,
And, fault of novel germs,
Mature the unfallen fruit.
Curse, if thou wilt, thy sires,
Bad husbands of their fires,
Who, when they gave thee breath,
Failed to bequeath
The needful sinew stark as once,
The Baresark marrow to thy bones,
But left a legacy of ebbing veins,
Inconstant heat and nerveless reins,--
Amid the Muses, left thee deaf and dumb,
Amid the gladiators, halt and numb.’_

“_As the bird trims her to the gale,
I trim myself to the storm of time,
I man the rudder, reef the sail,
Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime:
‘Lowly faithful, banish fear,
Right onward drive unharmed;
The port, well worth the cruise, is near,
And every wave is charmed.’_”

To the man of action the approach of age is dreaded because it means defeat. The strong man conscious of failing powers yields to one stronger than himself because younger.

To Emerson, as a man thinking, the great weakness of age was to be found in its lack of faith in ideals. He saw old men who accepted the actual and denied the possibility of what they had not been able to achieve. They praised the past time and looked askance at the threatening future. From the timidities of age which are often mistaken for wisdom, he asked to be delivered, and his prayer was granted.

He had lived through a transition period in thought. Almost all his contemporaries, including those who were younger than himself, have left in their later utterances a record of disillusion. Carlyle, Ruskin, Matthew Arnold and Tennyson were inclined to sing dirges over a beautiful age of faith which had vanished before the advance of science. James Russell Lowell, with all his sturdy Americanism yielded to the same impulse. There was an acknowledgment of spiritual defeat. It might be expressed in gallant language, but the meaning was none the less clear.

To Emerson this so-called disillusion was only another illusion. He speaks of the man “who during all his years of health has planted himself on the side of progress, but who as soon as he begins to die, checks his forward play, calls in his troops, and becomes conservative. All conservatives are such from personal defects. They can only, like invalids, act on the defensive.”

One thing he resolved to do, to “obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime.” In this he was eminently successful.

Doctor Holmes speaks delicately and discriminatingly of “the decline of Emerson’s working faculties.” That exactly describes what happened. The working faculties gradually failed, memory became less clear, but spiritual insight and loyalty to youthful ideals remained to the last.

While yet a young man, he had written down certain resolutions by which he wished to guide his life. Seldom has any one been more consistent in following his principles.

“Thou shalt not profess that which thou dost not believe.

“Thou shalt not heed the voice of man when it agrees not with the voice of God in thine own soul.

“Thou shalt study and obey the laws of the Universe, and they will be thy fellow servants.

“Nature shall be to thee as a symbol. The life of the soul in conscious union with the Infinite shall be for thee the only real existence.

“Teach men that each generation begins the world afresh, in perfect freedom; that the present is not the prisoner of the past, but that to-day holds captive all the yesterdays, to judge, to accept, to reject their teachings, as they are shown by its own morning sun.

“To thy fellow countrymen thou shalt preach the gospel of the New World, that here, here in America, is the home of man, that here is the promise of a new and more excellent social state than history has recorded.”

As to death, he had always been unafraid. When it came at the end of his seventy-ninth year, it found him in the mood that was habitual to him. He had long ago learned the lesson.

“Teach me your mood, O patient stars!
Who climb each night the ancient sky,
Leaving on space no shade, no scars,
No trace of age, no fear to die.”

THE END

BOOKS BY

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

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His Authorized Publishers

EMERSON’S JOURNALS:

Edited by Edward W. Emerson and Waldo Emerson Forbes. _A chronological record of Emerson’s life from 1820 to 1876, published in a style uniform with the Centenary Edition of his Works. Complete in ten volumes, which are sold either separately or as a set._

“No more remarkable history of the human intellect in its untrammeled development has ever been written,” said the _Literary Digest_ of this intimate record of Emerson’s spiritual and intellectual development. All Emerson’s nobility of thought and felicity of expression appear at their best in these volumes, while beyond this they have a deep human interest as a fresh and living picture of the man and his period. From every point of view the Journals rank with the best of Emerson’s writings, and without them his Works are incomplete.

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ESSAYS: FIRST SERIES
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LETTERS AND SOCIAL AIMS
POEMS
LECTURES AND BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES
MISCELLANIES
NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT AND OTHER PAPERS

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Transcriber's Notes:

Repetitive heading before page 1 has been removed.

Italics are shown thus: _sloping_.

Variations in spelling and hyphenation are retained.

Perceived typographical errors have been changed.