t-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 parti