116 SPARKS FROM A GEOLOGIST'S HAMMER. 



old age cannot be all of this unless it follows a cultured 

 and virtuous life. The old agje of the is^norant and the 

 hard-worked degenerates into decrepitude, and wrinkles, 

 and imbecility. A peasant woman of seventy or eighty 

 years, with face cross hatched with wrinkles, and antique 

 coif drawn down over her time-blasted brows, with no 

 past memories worthy to rehearse, and no present inter- 

 ests to inspire a gleam in her withered eye, and lift her 

 bent form for outlook into the affairs which stir the world 

 to-day, is not an object of beauty, whatever of interest 

 or domestic aftection may hallow her presence. But what 

 a different picture is presented by such octogenarians as 

 Mary Somerville, Caroline Herschel, William Cullen Bry- 

 ant, Peter Cooper, Victor Hugo, or Guiseppe Garibaldi. 

 Ah, it is intelligence and serenity, and urbanity, the 

 memory of life improved, the expectation of heavenly 

 welcome, which make old age beautiful. It is the well- 

 developed brain which blossoms as a century plant when 

 the light of another world begins to descend upon our 

 heads. 



Still other forms of beauty enter our souls through 

 the senses, the beauty of motion and the beauty of 

 sounds. Those curves which agreeably impress the aesthetic 

 sense impress it with a livelier sentiment when they be- 

 come the paths of moving objects. The swaying of a 

 willow in the wind; the undulations of a field of grain; 

 the circling movements of the quadrille or waltz; the ser- 

 pentine course of a rivulet across the plain; the spray 

 rising from a waterfall; the course of a ship on the 

 water, or of a bird in the air, these are familiar ex- 

 amples of the beauty of motion. Music is the beauti- 

 ful addressed to another sense. The occasion does not 



