oung people.

There can be no doubt that the intellectual powers are most capable
of enduring great and sustained efforts in youth, up to the age of
thirty-five at latest; from which period their strength begins to
decline, though very gradually. Still, the later years of life, and
even old age itself, are not without their intellectual compensation.
It is only then that a man can be said to be really rich in experience
or in learning; he has then had time and opportunity enough to enable
him to see and think over life from all its sides; he has been able to
compare one thing with another, and to discover points of contact and
connecting links, so that only then are the true relations of things
rightly understood. Further, in old age there comes an increased depth
in the knowledge that was acquired in youth; a man has now many more
illustrations of any ideas he may have attained; things which he
thought he knew when he was young, he now knows in reality. And
besides, his range of knowledge is wider; and in whatever direction it
extends, it is thorough, and therefore formed into a consistent and
connected whole; whereas in youth knowledge is always defective and
fragmentary.

A complete and adequate notion of life can never be attained by any
one who does not reach old age; for it is only the old man who
sees life whole and knows its natural course; it is only he who is
acquainted--and this is most important--not only with its entrance,
like the rest of mankind, but with its exit too; so that he alone has
a full sense of its utter vanity; whilst the others never cease to
labor under the false notion that everything will come right in the
end.

On the other hand, there is more conceptive power in youth, and at
that time of life a man can make more out of the little that he knows.
In age, judgment, penetration and thoroughness predominate. Youth is
the time for amassing the material for a knowledge of the world that
shall be distinctive and peculiar,--for an original view of life, in
other words, the legacy that a man of genius leaves to his fellow-men;
it is, however, only in later years that he becomes master of his
material. Accordingly it will be found that, as a rule, a great writer
gives his best work to the world when he is about fifty years of age.
But though the tree of knowledge must reach its full height before it
can bear fruit, the roots of it lie in youth.

Every generation, no matter how paltry its char