The Golden Censer Part 4

OUR ITALY AND GREECE,

full of G.o.ds 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 n.o.ble ruins, our Coliseum and our Parthenon, in a kind of cla.s.sic 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 gra.s.s. 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."

[Ill.u.s.tration: "Youth is our Italy and Greece, full of G.o.ds 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.

YOUTH BREATHES THE DEWY AIR,

and beholds only the roseate tints of the sunrise. Why should not its heart rejoice? Says Lord Lytton: "Let youth cherish the happiest of earthly boons while yet it is at its command; for there cometh a day to all 'when neither the voice of the lute nor the birds' shall bring back the sweet slumbers that fall on their young eyes as unbidden as the dews." "Youth holds no society with grief," says old Euripides. Perhaps, rather, it makes those "formal calls" which have no feeling in them.

THE LITTLE GIRL'S KITTEN DIES,

and the little human heart is inconsolable for half an hour. In half a day, when asked to tell her greatest grief, she will relate an accident to her doll, forgetting the poor kitten yet waiting for burial! How could those lips and cheeks retain their delicate tints if the wet seasons of grief set in with tropical intensity? Lord Lytton, often, in his highly colored writings, cries out "O youth! O youth!" and there is a world of regret in the exclamation. "O the joy of young ideas," sighs Hannah Moore, "painted on the mind, in the warm, glowing colors which fancy spreads on objects not yet known, when all is new and all is lovely!"

SIR WALTER RALEIGH

has justly claimed the respect and admiration of the world for many high qualities of mind. One of the most admirable of his remarks is an admonition to youth, which runs as follows: "Use thy youth so that thou mayest have comfort to remember it when it hath forsaken thee, and not sigh and grieve at the account thereof. Use it as the spring-time which soon departeth, and wherein thou oughtest to plant and sow all provisions for a long and happy life." But this is difficult to do. The march of youth is through a mountainous country. The scenery is changing, but the progress is not encouraging. "Self-flattered, unexperienced, high in hope when young," says the poet Young, "with sanguine cheer and streamers gay, we cut our cable, launch into the world, and fondly dream each wind and star our friend." How many youths have believed they would, by merit alone, rise to the Presidency of the United States--

THE FIRST MAN IN FIFTY MILLIONS!

Youth keeps a diary, into which it pours a volume of "thought" that seems a very mine of gems. Take up that chronicle at middle age and see its weak and driveling character. Observe the almost total lack of one idea that will aid you to some honorable end! And yet there is something touching even in the great trust and confidence of childhood.

How sweet and true are the beautiful lines of Thomas Hood called "I remember, I remember:

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 G.o.d's power. The confidence that early years implant in the mind supplies an unsubstantial subst.i.tute. I have pictured to myself an ill.u.s.tration: 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 a.s.suring 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 unG.o.dly. "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."

Lord Bacon, in his forty-third essay, thus sums up the qualities of youth: "Young men are fitter to invent than to judge; fitter for execution than for counsel; and fitter for new projects than for settled business. For the experience of age, in things that fall within the compa.s.s of it, directeth them; but in new things abuseth them. The errors of young men are the ruin of business;

BUT THE ERRORS OF AGED MEN

amount to but this, that more might have been done, or sooner. Young men in the conduct and manage of actions, embrace more than they can hold; stir more than they can quiet; fly to the end without consideration of the means and degrees, pursue some few principles which they have chanced upon absurdly; care not to innovate, which draws unknown inconveniences; use extreme remedies at first; and, that which doubleth all errors, will not acknowledge or retract them--like an unready horse, they will neither stop nor turn."

THE HARD-PAN SERIES.

Now with this wise parallel of youth and age before me, with the importance which I attach to this period of life as the precise moment at which the final cast of the clay of life is set, and with the belief in Goethe's statement that the destiny of any nation, at any given time, depends on the opinions of its young men under twenty-five years of age, I beg to call the especial attention of the young to a Hard-Pan Series of ten chapters which follow, devoted largely to just this forming-period of life, when the mould is ready and the governing characteristics are fast pouring in. I beg parents and preceptors, if they approve my efforts, to lend their aid in attracting toward these admonitions such consideration as their merit shall warrant, and I have so endeavored to dispose the bitterness of practical advice as to both somewhat cover its presence and gratify a youthful and adventurous literary taste.

PRUDENCE IN SPEECH.

Give thy thoughts no tongue, Nor any unproportioned thought his act.

Be thou familiar but by no means vulgar;

Do not dull thy palm with entertainment Of each new hatched unfledged comrade

Give every man thine ear but few thy voice; Take each man's counsel but reserve thy judgment.

--Shakspeare.

You live. To live is costly. Who will pay for it? Your soul cries out "I." But how will you get the money? "Oh! I'll get it!"--that is the confident cry of youth. The confidence oozes out as life lengthens--and yet there are certain lines of action which, if followed, in this bright land of liberty, are sure to result in the acc.u.mulation of something for our old age.

THE MYSTERIOUS JUNIUS

one of the great exemplars in the matter of keeping a secret wrote to his publisher: "Let all your views in life, therefore, be directed to a solid, however moderate independence. Without it no man can be happy, nor even honest." This celebrated sentence was written by a man who was refusing a proffer of money for his writings (then in print) and it should not be read as inspiring one to avarice. The vice of avarice is more honest than envy, but is not the less unpleasant and reprehensible.

Let us suppose you are fortunate enough to have some grit and s.p.u.n.k about you. At the earliest point practicable you get something to do.

Perhaps at a Fourth of July celebration your Sunday school teacher trusts you in a booth to deal out lemonade and handle money. It is a good beginning. Perhaps you are