'The Changing Year’s Successive Plan'

Walter Jackson Bate tells us in his biography of Dr. Johnson that as he aged, the crusty old man mellowed. “[I]n many ways,” Bate writes, “he was changing—not changing in his character but in what he said or admitted.” Previously, Johnson had denied the impact of the seasons on the emotions (“imagination operating on luxury”), what we call in some cases “seasonal affective disorder (SAD).” In 1784, the year he would turn seventy-five, Johnson spent July through November in Lichfield, the city of his birth. “As November came to Lichfield, which he could reasonably doubt that he would ever see again,” Bate writes, “he felt the poignance of autumn as never before. One of Horace’s odes (IV, vii) especially haunted him – the one in which the large revolving changes of nature, destroying and re-creating, are contrasted with the hopes and destiny of short-lived man.” Johnson’s translation of the ode, composed in Lichfield, is among the last things he ever wrote: “The snow dissolv’d, no more…