If now youth will permit us to look a little deeper into its heart, we will attempt to celebrate that unpublished and vestal wisdom written there.  Age does us only indirect justice,—­by the value it gives to memory.  It slights and forgets its own present.  This day with its trivialities dwindles and vanishes before the teeming hours wherein it learned and felt and suffered;—­so the circles, which are the tree’s memories of its own growth, are more distinct near the centre, where its growth began, than in the outer and later development.  Give age the past, and let us be content with our legacy, which is the future.  Still shall youth cast one retrospective glance at the experience of its nonage, ere it assumes its prerogative, and quite forgets it.

When the first surprise at the discovery of the faculties is over, begins the era of experience.  The aspiration conducting to experiment has revealed the power or the inability.  Henceforth the youth will know his relations to the world.  But as yet men are ignorant how it stands between them.  There has been only a closet performance, a morning rehearsal.  He sees the tribute to genius, to industry, to birth, to fortune.  At first he yields reluctantly to novitiate and culture; he yearns for action.  His masters tell him that the world is coy, must be approached cautiously, and with something substantial in the hand.  The old bird will not be caught with chaff.  He does not yet understand the process of accumulation and transmutation.  The fate of the Danaides is his, and he draws long with a bottomless bucket.  But at last his incompetency can no further be concealed.  Then he either submits to the suggestions of despair and oblivion or bravely begins his work.  The exhilaration and satisfaction which he felt at his first performances, in this hour of renunciation, are changed to bitterness and disgust.  He remembers the old oracle:  “In the Bacchic procession many carry the thyrsus, but few are inspired.”  The possibility of ultimate failure threatens him more and more while he reflects; as the chasm which you wish to leap grows impassable, if you measure and deliberate.  But the vivacity of youth preserves him from any permanent misanthropy or doubt.  Nature makes us blind where we should be injured by seeing.  We partake of the lead of Saturn, the activity of fire, the forgetfulness of water.  His academic praises console him, maugre his depreciation of them.  His little fame, the homage of his little world, have in them the same sweetness as the reverberation of ages.  Heaven would show him his capacity for those things to which he aspires by giving him an early and representative realization of them.  It is a happy confidence.  Reality is tyrannous.  Let him construe everything in the poet’s mood.  He shall dream, and the day will have more significance.  Youth belongs to the Muse.

How the old men envy us!  They wisely preclude us from their world, since they know how it would bereave us of all that makes our state so full of freedom and delight, and to them so suggestive of the past.