on his dignity?  Yet the regret of maturity for its past joys amounts to nothing less than this.  Such regret is regret that we cannot lie in the sunshine and play with our toes,—­that we are no longer but one remove, or but few removes, from the idiot.  Away with such folly!  Every season of life has its distinctive and appropriate enjoyments, which bud and blossom and ripen and fall off as the season glides on to its close, to be succeeded by others better and brighter.  There is no consciousness of loss, for there is no loss.  There is only a growing up, and out of, and beyond.

Life does turn out differently from what was anticipated.  It is an infinitely higher and holier and nobler thing than our childhood fancied.  The world that lay before us then was but a tinsel toy to the world which our firm feet tread.  We have entered into the undiscovered land.  We have explored its ways of pleasantness, its depths of dole, its mountains of difficulty, its valleys of delight, and, behold! it is very good.  Storms have swept fiercely, but they swept to purify.  We have heard in its thunders the Voice that woke once the echoes of the Garden.  Its lightnings have riven a path for the Angel of Peace.

Manhood discovers what childhood can never divine,—­that the sorrows of life are superficial, and the happinesses of life structural; and this knowledge alone is enough to give a peace which passeth understanding.

Yes, the dreams of youth were dreams, but the waking was more glorious than they.  They were only dreams,—­fitful, flitting, fragmentary visions of the coming day.  The shallow joys, the capricious pleasures, the wavering sunshine of infancy have deepened into virtues, graces, heroisms.  We have the bold outlook of calm, self-confident courage, the strong fortitude of endurance, the imperial magnificence of self-denial.  Our hearts expand with benevolence, our lives broaden with beneficence.  We cease our perpetual skirmishing at the outposts, and go inward to the citadel.  Down into the secret places of life we descend.  Down among the beautiful ones in the cool and quiet shadows, on the sunny summer levels, we walk securely, and the hidden fountains are unsealed.

For those people who do nothing, for those to whom Christianity brings no revelation, for those who see no eternity in time, no infinity in life, for those to whom opportunity is but the handmaid of selfishness, to whom smallness is informed by no greatness, for whom the lowly is never lifted up by indwelling love to the heights of divine performance,—­for them, indeed, each hurrying year may well be a King of Terrors.  To pass out from the flooding light of the morning, to feel all the dewiness drunk up by the thirsty, insatiate sun, to see the shadows slowly and swiftly gathering, and no starlight to break the gloom, and no home beyond the gloom for the unhoused, startled, shivering soul,—­ah! this indeed is terrible.  The “confusions of a wasted