In "Old Age," an essay that he wrote in 1870, Ralph Waldo Emerson, 67, lamented that "America is a country of young men, and too full of work hitherto for leisure and tranquillity."
Emerson thought that Americans ignored the "particular benefits" of age, especially the value of experience. For youth, he said, "every object glitters and attracts," and life is apt to be "a heap of beginnings" with little result. The elderly are different: "Age...