The feeling of youth is
something much deeper and more enduring than the ability to jump five feet
eight. It may be as vigorous at eighty as it is at eighteen. It is only its
manner of expression which is changed. Holmes never admitted that he had
grown old. "I am eighty-three young to-day," he would say. And Johnson,
with his old age and his infirmities, still insisted that he was "a young
fellow"--as, indeed, he was, for where shall we find such freshness of
spirit, such a defiance of the tooth of Time as in that grand old boy?
Youth, in fact, is not a physical affair at all, but an affair of the soul.
You may be spiritually bald-headed at twenty-five or a romping young blade
at eighty. Byron was only thirty-four when he wrote:--
I am ashes where once I was fire.
And the soul in my bosom is dead;
What I loved I now merely admire,
And my heart is as grey as my head.
Perhaps there was some affectation in this, for Byron was always
dramatising himself. But that he died an old man at thirty-six is as
indisputable as that Browning died a young man at seventy-seven, with that
triumphant envoi of _Asolando_ as his last expression of the eternal youth
of the soul.
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