The only advantage which childhood has over manhood is the absence of foreboding, and this indeed is much.  A large part of our suffering is anticipatory, much of which children are spared.  The present happiness is clouded for them by no shadowy possibility; but for this small indemnity shall we offset the glory of our manly years?  Because their narrowness cannot take in the contingencies that threaten peace, are they blessed above all others?  Does not the same narrowness cut them off from the bright certainty that underlies all doubts and fears?  If ignorance is bliss, man stands at the summit of mortal misery, and the scale of happiness is a descending one.  We must go down into the ocean-depths, where, for the scintillant soul, a dim, twilight instinct lights up gelatinous lives.  If childhood is indeed the happiest period, then the mysterious God-breathed breath was no boon and the Deity is cruel.  Immortality were well exchanged for the blank of annihilation.

There is infinite talk of the dissipated illusions of youth, the paling of bright, young dreams.  Life, it is said, turns out to be different from what was pictured.  The rosy-hued morning fades away into the gray and livid evening, the black and ghastly night.  In especial cases it may be so, but I do not believe it is the general experience.  It surely need not be.  It should not be.  I have found things a great deal better than I expected.  I am but one; but with all my oneness, with all that there is of me, I protest against such shallow generalities.  I think they are slanderous of Him who ordained life, its processes and its vicissitudes.  He never made our dreams to outstrip our realizations.  Every conception, brain-born, has its execution, hand-wrought.  Life is not a paltry tin cup which the child drains dry, leaving the man to go weary and hopeless, quaffing at it in vain with black, parched lips.  It is a fountain ever springing.  It is a great deep, which the wisest has never bounded, the grandest never fathomed.

It is not only idle, but stupid, to lament the departure of childhood’s joys.  It is as if something precious and valued had been forcibly torn from us, and we go sorrowing for lost treasure.  But these things fall off from us naturally; we do not give them up.  We are never called upon to give them up.  There is no pang, no sorrow, no wrenching away of a part of our lives.  The baby lies in his cradle and plays with his fingers and toes.  There comes an hour when his fingers and toes no longer afford him amusement.  He has attained to the dignity of a rattle, a whip, a ball.  Has he suffered a loss?  Has he not rather made a great gain?  When he passed from his toes to his toys, did he do it mournfully?  Does he look at his little feet and hands with a sigh for the joys that once loitered there, but are now forever gone?  Does he not rather feel a little ashamed, when you remind him of those days?  Does he not feel that it trenches somewhat