194 THE OLIVE LEAF. CHAP. 



mind in old age. How numerous and splendid are the 

 examples of intellect disclosing its fullest powers at the 

 very close of life ! As an old man Cato learnt Greek. 

 Goethe was fourscore years old when he completed the 

 second part of Faust. Jussieu between his eighty-third 

 and eighty-eighth year occupied himself with dictating a 

 new edition of his famous " Introduction to Botany," 

 not in his mother tongue, but in the most elegant 

 Latin. Mason, on his seventy-second birthday, wrote 

 one of the most beautiful sonnets in our language ; and 

 Milton produced the grandest work of his wonderful 

 intellect when he was nearly sixty years of age. It is 

 related of James Watt that he mastered the Anglo- 

 Saxon language with facility when he was upwards of 

 seventy ; a task which he had undertaken in order to 

 prove whether his intellectual faculties were then unim- 

 paired. And who does not know how early tastes 

 revive in declining years, when the pressure of the 

 world's cares and activities in an assured position is 

 removed, as the native wild flowers bloom again in 

 the fallow field which is no more turned up by the 

 plough ? We go back to the poets who first showed 

 us the beauty of the world, and to the philosophers 

 who first taught us the power of thought, with fresh 

 interest and new enjoyment, acquired by our own 

 wider experience. Literary men have often recorded 

 the peculiar delight with which in their later years 

 they have returned to the studies of their youth. 

 What is genius but a return of the mind from exhausted 

 ways and methods to the freedom, simplicity, and ever- 



