OUR ITALY AND GREECE,

full of gods and temples.”  Let not the Vandals and Goths of after-life swoop down upon this sunny region in our lives; yet if they do, may we not look upon our noble ruins, our Coliseum and our Parthenon, in a kind of classic love that shall endear and sanctify the rights of the young about us and lengthen out their “golden age.”  Youth should be young.  Says Shakspeare:  “Youth no less becomes

THE LIGHT AND CARELESS LIVERY THAT IT WEARS,

than settled age its sables and its weeds, importing health and graveness.”  Youth is like Adam’s early walk in the Garden of Paradise.  “The senses,” says Edmund Burke, “are unworn and tender, and the whole frame is awake in every part.”  The dew lies upon the grass.  No smoke of busy life has darkened or stained the morning of our day.  The pure light shines about us.  “If any little mist happen to rise,” says Willmott, “the sunbeam of hope catches and glorifies it.”

[Illustration:  “Youth is our Italy and Greece, full of Gods and Temples.”  Page 64.]

Youth is rash.  It “skips like the hare over the meshes of good counsel,” says Shakspeare.  “Then let our nets and snares of benevolence be laid with the more cunning.  Youth is a continual intoxication,” says Rochefoucauld; “it is the fever of reason.”  We must cool this fever, spread around it cheering flowers of truth, bathe it in the water-brooks of gentleness and self-sacrifice.  “Young men,” according to Chesterfield, “are apt to think themselves wise enough, as drunken men are to think themselves sober enough,” yet joined with this self-esteem, we find that “youth is ever confiding; and we can almost forgive its disinclination to follow the counsels of age, for the sake of the generous disdain with which it rejects suspicion.”  “How charming the young would be,” writes Arthur Helps, “with their freshness, fearlessness, and truthfulness, if only—­to take a metaphor from painting—­they would make more use of grays and other neutral tints, instead of dabbing on so recklessly the strongest positives in color.”  Why should their colors not be rich?  Are not the hues upon their cheeks as rich as the sunset?

DOES NOT THE CHERRY

“dab on” the scarlet and the carmine direct from the gorgeous sun himself?  Age marvels at the happiness of youth.  The sombre lessons of the world have left their marks on the mind of the one; the other has everything to learn.  It would seem as though its residence had been (as the poet has written so beautifully at the head of the chapter) in some Paradise, whence, it issued to this earth, “trailing clouds of glory” as it came.  Age has suffered from the heats and dust of the previous day, and sees in the blood-red “copper sun,” only the indication of another march of weariness and thirst.