I 



THE SUMMIT OF THE YEARS 



THE longer I live the more my mind dwells upon 

 the beauty and the wonder of the world. I 

 hardly know which feeling leads, wonderment or 

 admiration. After a man has passed the psalmist's 

 dead line of seventy years, as Dr. Holmes called it, 

 if he is of a certain temperament, he becomes more 

 and more detached from the noise and turmoil of 

 the times in which he lives. The passing hubbub in 

 the street attracts him less and less; more and more 

 he turns to the permanent, the fundamental, the 

 everlasting. More and more is he impressed with 

 life and nature in themselves, and the beauty and 

 the grandeur of the voyage we are making on this 

 planet. The burning questions and issues of the 

 hour are for the new generations, in whom life also 

 burns intensely. 



My life has always been more or less detached 

 from the life about me. I have not been a hermit, 

 but my temperament and love of solitude, and a 

 certain constitutional timidity and shrinking from 

 all kinds of strife, have kept me in the by-paths 

 rather than on the great highways of life. My talent, 

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