I remember, I remember,
       The fir trees dark and high;
     I used to think their slender tops
       Were close against the sky;
     It was a childish ignorance,
       But now ’tis little joy
     To know I’m further off from heaven
       Than when I was a boy.

Dr. Watts lays down to youth that it should have a decent and agreeable behavior among men, “a modest freedom of speech, a soft and elegant manner of address, a graceful and lovely deportment, a cheerful gravity and good humor, with a mind appearing ever serene under the ruffling accidents of life.”  This programme of action is far beyond the reach of a well-balanced adult, much further the inexperienced and untried mind of younger life.  But the character which should attain to such angelic proportions would truly have a reverent place among men’s memories.

THE ALPENA.

Youth has no knowledge of God’s power.  The confidence that early years implant in the mind supplies an unsubstantial substitute.  I have pictured to myself an illustration:  A bright young man is present at a grand concert.  It is between the parts.  He bends suavely over the back of a lady’s chair and talks sweet music to her ear.  He says:  “Could you not follow every thought of the composer in that symphony?” (which they have just heard).  “And was not the effect sublime when the storm reached the heights of the mountains, and all the elements of Nature struggled so stubbornly?” And the young woman demurely gives him an assuring look which conserves all her interests; whereupon he backs off in triumph, and feels that the concert is worth his week’s wages after all!

AGAIN,

this young man at Grand Haven, on the western border of Lake Michigan, boards the structure of pine wood and ten-penny nails called the Alpena.  The Alpena floats out into her last night—­into the valley of the shadow of death.  Presently the young man feels his vessel and his life trembling like a captive wild bird in a remorseless grasp.  Anon this trembling grows into the awful, final, fatal paroxysms.  Then suddenly the mind of the young man breaks from the shackles of vanity and self-sufficiency, and he views, for the first time, the visible forms of angered Nature.  He recalls his white gloves, his former complete idea of a storm, his triumphant, au revoir retreat from the opera-box, and, as the discords of the Everlasting gradually resolve toward the diapason, the full chant, of His solemn eternity, the young man cries out, in a spirit of revelation, “What a worm am I!” and adds his own piteous tragedy to the unheard murmurs of bubbling death and muddy burial!

“REMEMBER NOW THY CREATOR,

in the days of thy youth,” says Solomon.  “Train up a child in the way he should go,” says the proverb, “and when he is old he will not depart from it.”  Be not afraid of the sneers of the ungodly.  “As the cracking of thorns under a pot, so is the laughter of a fool.”  “The fairest flower in the garden of creation,” says Sir James E. Smith, “is a young mind, offering and unfolding itself to the influence of Divine Wisdom, as the heliotrope turns its sweet blossoms to the sun.”