Consider her as the person whose interests may be more closely allied with your own than those of any other soul on earth.  It certainly cannot lessen your respect for the high relation she sustains toward your life and your happiness.  Counsel her in exceeding kindness, for you will find her inclined to retort, as did Ophelia to her brother Laertes, at the head of this chapter, bidding you be sure you “reck your own rede” which was an ancient form of admonishing one to heed his own advice.

[Illustration]

YOUTH

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: 
The soul that riseth with us, our life’s Star,
Hath elsewhere had its setting,
And cometh from afar: 
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter darkness,
But trailing clouds of glory, do we come
From God who is our home: 
Heaven lies about us in our infancy.—­Wordsworth.

“Like virgin parchment,” says Montaigne, “youth is capable of any inscription.”  Let us have only those inscriptions which will do us honor in the long years that the parchment will unroll before us.  “Unless a tree has borne its blossoms in the spring,” writes Bishop Hare, “you will vainly look for fruit on it in autumn.”  All through the great history of Thiers, wherein he recites the scenes of the French revolution, the Consulate, the Empire, and the rock of St. Helena, there runs one consistent observation that youth is noble and magnanimous.  The thousands of characters who “strut their brief hour” upon the stage in the terrible drama which this historian depicts are young and generous, lofty and incorruptible.  Then they ripen into manhood, glory waits upon their comings and their goings, and they are soon between two masters, their interests and their consciences.  A circumstance threatens their early resolutions, an event overturns their consciences, and a selfish, jealous, ambitious mind thenceforth guides the fortunes of a life.

HOW FORTUNATE FOR THE RACE OF MAN

that when the mind is least prejudiced with set beliefs and when the heart is kindliest, it lies in the power of those who have the young near them to bear them frequent counsel, and to strengthen the natural nobility of their natures!

A great deal can be accomplished in the early years of life.  Many men have made all their fame in the morning, and enjoyed it through the rest of their lives.  Alexander, Pompey, Hannibal, Scipio, Napoleon, Charles XII., Alexander Hamilton, Shelley, Keats, Bryant—­hundreds of examples readily come to the recollection, showing how thoroughly the mind can be trusted even in its immaturity.  Youth is beautiful.  It is “the gay and pleasant spring of life, when joy is stirring in the dancing blood, and nature calls us with a thousand songs to share her general feast.”  “Keep true to the dreams of thy youth,” sings Schiller.  We love the young.  “The girls we love for what they are,” says Goethe, “young men, for what they promise to be.”  “The lovely time of youth,” says Jean Paul Richter, “is