Collected works > Edinburgh edition, 1894-98 - Works of Robert Louis Stevenson > Volume 11, 1895 - Miscellanies, Volume III

CRABBED AGE AND YOUTH
preparation for old age is only trouble thrown away.
We fall on guard, and after all it is a friend who
comes to meet us. After the sun is down and the
west faded, the heavens begin to fill with shining
stars. So, as we grow old, a sort of equable jog-
trot of feeling is substituted for the violent ups and
downs of passion and disgust ; the same influence
that restrains our hopes quiets our apprehensions ; if
the pleasures are less intense, the troubles are milder
and more tolerable ; and in a word, this period for
which we are asked to hoard up everything as for
a time of famine, is, in its own right, the richest,
easiest, and happiest of life. Nay, by managing its
own work and following its own happy inspiration,
youth is doing the best it can to endow the leisure
of age. A full, busy youth is your only prelude to
a self-contained and independent age ; and the mufl*
inevitably develops into the bore. There are not
many Doctor Johnsons, to set forth upon their first
romantic voyage at sixty-four. If we wish to scale
Mont Blanc, or visit a thieves' kitchen in the East
End, to go down in a diving-dress or up in a balloon,
we must be about it while we are still young. It
will not do to delay until we are clogged with
prudence and limping with rheumatism, and people
begin to ask us : ' What does Gravity out of bed ? '
Youth is the time to go flashing from one end of
the world to the other both in mind and body ; to
try the manners of different nations ; to hear the
chimes at midnight ; to see sunrise in town and
country ; to be converted at a revival ; to circum-
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