*
The interests of youth are rarely frank; his passions, like
Noah's dove, come home to roost. The fire, sensibility,
and volume of his own nature, that is all that he has
learned to recognise. The tumultuary and gray tide of
life, the empire of routine, the unrejoicing faces of his
elders, fill him with contemptuous surprise; there also he
seems to walk among the tombs of spirits; and it is only in
the course of years, and after much rubbing with his
fellow-men, that he begins by glimpses to see himself from
without and his fellows from within: to know his own for
one among the thousand undenoted countenances of the city
street, and to divine in others the throb of human agony
and hope. In the meantime he will avoid the hospital
doors, the pale faces, the cripple, the sweet whiff of
chloroform-for there, on the most thoughtless, the pains of
others are burned home; but he will continue to walk, in a
divine self-pity, the aisles of the forgotten graveyard.
The length of man's life, which is endless to the brave and
busy, is scorned by his ambitious thought. He cannot bear
to have come for so little, and to go again so wholly. He
cannot bear, above all, in that brief scene, to be still
idle, and by way of cure, neglects the little that he has
to do. The parable of the talent is the brief, epitome of
youth. To believe in immortality is one thing, but it is
first needful to believe in life.
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