Thus the poet's word is beginning to strike forcefully upon the hearts of all men while absolute men of letters think that they alone live in the real world.

If you read back in the Bible the letter of the apostle Paul to the church of Thessalonia he said that in the latter days before the end of the age that the Earth would be caught up in what he called the birth pangs of a new order.

In old age we are like a batch of letters that someone has sent. We are no longer in the past we have arrived.