like the same scenery when you come up quite close to it.

And, lastly, there is another circumstance that contributes to the
happiness of childhood. As spring commences, the young leaves on the
trees are similar in color and much the same in shape; and in the
first years of life we all resemble one another and harmonize very
well. But with puberty divergence begins; and, like the radii of a
circle, we go further and further apart.

The period of youth, which forms the remainder of this earlier half of
our existence--and how many advantages it has over the later half!--is
troubled and made miserable by the pursuit of happiness, as though
there were no doubt that it can be met with somewhere in life,--a hope
that always ends in failure and leads to discontent. An illusory
image of some vague future bliss--born of a dream and shaped by
fancy--floats before our eyes; and we search for the reality in
vain. So it is that the young man is generally dissatisfied with the
position in which he finds himself, whatever it may be; he ascribes
his disappointment solely to the state of things that meets him on
his first introduction to life, when he had expected something very
different; whereas it is only the vanity and wretchedness of human
life everywhere that he is now for the first time experiencing.

It would be a great advantage to a young man if his early training
could eradicate the idea that the world has a great deal to offer him.
But the usual result of education is to strengthen this delusion; and
our first ideas of life are generally taken from fiction rather than
from fact.

In the bright dawn of our youthful days, the poetry of life spreads
out a gorgeous vision before us, and we torture ourselves by longing
to see it realized. We might as well wish to grasp the rainbow! The
youth expects his career to be like an interesting romance; and there
lies the germ of that disappointment which I have been describing.[1]
What lends a charm to all these visions is just the fact that they are
visionary and not real, and that in contemplating them we are in the
sphere of pure knowledge, which is sufficient in itself and free from
the noise and struggle of life. To try and realize those visions is
to make them an object of _will_--a process which always involves
pain.[2]

[Footnote 1: Cf. loc. cit., p. 428.]

[Footnote 2: Let me refer the reader, if he is interested in the
subject, to the volume already cited, chapter 37.]