George Ticknor, Life, letters and journals of George Ticknor
George Hillard, Ed.

[483] termination never seemed to be one of its elements. Certainly, I think, it never occurred to me that I should survive him, though, perhaps, I had sometimes worse fears than that.

What you tell me of his own anticipations, founded on the verses of Bland, which he so long recollected, falls in with my own impressions, and with what he intimated to me more than once in two visits of some length which we made to him in Canada. I think he feared a slow decay of his faculties, with, perhaps, a long life. Yet he was so full of physical strength, which he delighted to enjoy in the most vigorous bodily exercises, and he took such pleasure in the resources of his marvellous memory, as well as in a sort of general intellectual activity, which he spread over so many subjects of elegant culture, as well as of judicial and administrative policy, that I never much shared his own apprehensions or those of his friends.

To Hon. Edward Twisleton.

Boston, April 29, 1869.

my dear Twisleton,—Don't give me up because I have grown old. At 77-8 a man does, not what he most likes to do, but what he is able to do; and I am not able to do the half of what I could in a day only a few years ago, nor half as well as then. A long time before I came to this conclusion good old Dr. Jackson, whom you must remember, told me, in one of the last visits he ever made me, that he was reduced to one third. It seemed to me very strange, but I now find that my time is come, and coming. I feel constantly a great weariness, and avoid all the work I can, except reading, of which I have not yet begun to tire. I hope it will last me out, especially my love of old books; but I do not know. I care little about new ones.

During the year past you have been very good to me, and I take much pleasure in acknowledging it.