the next page.  Somehow there is a feeling as of the difference between the night before and the next morning.  It is as though the crushed ball-dress and the dishevelled locks of the close of the evening reappeared, the same, before breakfast.  Let us have homely sense at the top of the page, pathos at the foot of it.  What a force in the bad type of the shabby little “Childe Harold” you used to read so often!  You turn it over in a grand illustrated edition, and it seems like another poem.  Let it here be said, that occasionally you look with something like indignation on the volume which enchained you in your boyish days.  For now you have burst the chain.  And you have somewhat of the feeling of the prisoner towards the jailer who held him in unjust bondage.  What right had that bombastic rubbish to touch and thrill you as it used to do?  Well, remember that it suits successive generations at their enthusiastic stage.  There are poets whose great admirers are for the most part under twenty years old; but probably almost every clever young person regards them at some period in his life as among the noblest of mortals.  And it is no ignoble ambition to win the ardent appreciation of even immature tastes and hearts.  Its brief endurance is compensated by its intensity.  You sit by the fireside and read your leisurely “Times,” and you feel a tranquil enjoyment.  You like it better than the “Sorrows of Werter,” but you do not like it a twentieth part as much as you once liked the “Sorrows of Werter.”  You would be interested in meeting the man who wrote that brilliant and slashing leader; but you would not regard him with speechless awe, as something more than human.  Yet, remembering all the weaknesses out of which men grow, and on which they look back with a smile or sigh, who does not feel that there is a charm which will not depart about early youth?  Longfellow knew that he would reach the hearts of most men, when he wrote such a verse as this:—­

  “The green trees whispered low and mild;
    It was a sound of joy! 
  They were my playmates when a child,
  And rocked me in their arms so wild;
  Still they looked at me and smiled,
    As if I were a boy!”

Such, readers as are young men will understand what has already been said as to the bitter indignation with which the writer, some years ago, listened to self-conceited elderly persons who put aside the arguments and the doings of younger men with the remark that these younger men were boys.  There are few terms of reproach which I have heard uttered with looks of such deadly ferocity.  And there are not many which excite feelings of greater wrath in the souls of clever young men.  I remember how in those days I determined to write an essay which should scorch up and finally destroy all these carping and malicious critics.  It was to be called “A Chapter on Boys.”  After an introduction of a sarcastic and magnificent character, setting out views substantially the same as those contained