Is the best antiquity and which we may with least vanity admire. Like the one whose time has been long a working and like the winter fruit ripened when others may have just fallen down. He has learnt as many lessons of the world as days and learnt the best thing in it, the vanity of it.
He looks over his former self as a danger well past, and would not hazard himself to begin again. His lust was broken long before his body, yet he is glad, this tempation is broke too, and that he is fortified from it by this weakness.
The next door of death doesn't make him sad, he's lived a full life, a life in which he has loved someone with all his heart and was loved in return. He expects death calmly as his turn in nature and fears more his recoiling back to childishness than dust. You must pardon him if he likes his own times better than these, because, those things are follies to him now that were wisdom then.
He goes away at last, too soon whensoever, with all the men's sorrow but his own and his memory fresh when it is twice as old. This is whom I hope I can be when life refuses to be a friend for much longer.
