As the sun sinks lower and lower, his red beams die in a sea of great gray clouds.  Slowly and quietly they creep up over the night-sky.  Venus is shrouded.  The western stars blink faintly, then fade in the mounting vapors.  The vane points east of south.  The constellations in the zenith struggle to be seen, but presently give over, and hide their shining.

By late lamp-light the sky is all gray and dark; the vane has turned two points nearer east.  The clouds spit fine rain-drops, that you only feel with your face turned to the heavens.  But soon they grow thicker and heavier; and as I sit, watching the blaze, and—­dreaming—­they patter thick and fast under the driving wind upon the window, like the swift tread of an army of Men!

I.

Pride of Manliness.

And has manhood no dreams?  Does the soul wither at that Rubicon which lies between the Gallic country of youth and the Rome of manliness?  Does not fancy still love to cheat the heart, and weave gorgeous tissues to hang upon that horizon which lies along the years that are to come?  Is happiness so exhausted that no new forms of it lie in the mines of imagination, for busy hopes to drag up to day?

Where then would live the motives to an upward looking of the eye and of the soul; where the beckonings that bid us ever onward?

But these later dreams are not the dreams of fond boyhood, whose eye sees rarely below the surface of things; nor yet the delicious hopes of sparkling-blooded youth:  they are dreams of sober trustfulness, of practical results, of hard-wrought world-success, and, maybe, of Love and of Joy.

Ambitious forays do not rest where they rested once:  hitherto the balance of youth has given you, in all that you have dreamed of accomplishment, a strong vantage against age; hitherto in all your estimates you have been able to multiply them by that access of thought and of strength which manhood would bring to you.  Now this is forever ended.

There is a great meaning in that word—­manhood.  It covers all human growth.  It supposes no extensions or increase; it is integral, fixed, perfect,—­the whole.  There is no getting beyond manhood; it is much to live up to it; but once reached, you are all that a man was made to be in this world.

It is a strong thought—­that a man is perfected, so far as strength goes; that he will never be abler to do his work than under the very sun which is now shining on him.  There is a seriousness that few call to mind in the reflection that whatever you do in this age of manhood is an unalterable type of your whole bigness.  You may qualify particulars of your character by refinements, by special studies, and practice; but, once a man, and there is no more manliness to be lived for!

This thought kindles your soul to new and swifter dreams of ambition than belonged to youth.  They were toys; these are weapons.  They were fancies; these are motives.  The soul begins to struggle with the dust, the sloth, the circumstance, that beleaguer humanity, and to stagger into the van of action.