e unquiet waves of doubt. If you confess to the same
perplexities and uncertainties that torture them, they are grateful for
your companionship. If you have groped your way out of the wilderness in
which you were once wandering with them, they will follow your footsteps,
it may be, and bless you as their deliverer. So, all at once, a writer
finds he has a parish of devout listeners, scattered, it is true, beyond
the reach of any summons but that of a trumpet like the archangel's, to
whom his slight discourse may be of more value than the exhortations they
hear from the pulpit, if these last do not happen to suit their special
needs. Young men with more ambition and intelligence than force of
character, who have missed their first steps in life and are stumbling
irresolute amidst vague aims and changing purposes, hold out their hands,
imploring to be led into, or at least pointed towards, some path where
they can find a firm foothold. Young women born into a chilling
atmosphere of circumstance which keeps all the buds of their nature
unopened and always striving to get to a ray of sunshine, if one finds
its way to their neighborhood, tell their stories, sometimes simply and
touchingly, sometimes in a more or less affected and rhetorical way, but
still stories of defeated and disappointed instincts which ought to make
any moderately impressible person feel very tenderly toward them.

In speaking privately to these young persons, many of whom have literary
aspirations, one should be very considerate of their human feelings. But
addressing them collectively a few plain truths will not give any one of
them much pain. Indeed, almost every individual among them will feel
sure that he or she is an exception to those generalities which apply so
well to the rest.

If I were a literary Pope sending out an Encyclical, I would tell these
inexperienced persons that nothing is so frequent as to mistake an
ordinary human gift for a special and extraordinary endowment. The
mechanism of breathing and that of swallowing are very wonderful, and if
one had seen and studied them in his own person only, he might well think
himself a prodigy. Everybody knows these and other bodily faculties are
common gifts; but nobody except editors and school-teachers and here and
there a literary than knows how common is the capacity of rhyming and
prattling in readable prose, especially among young women of a certain
degree of education. In my cha