d if the venture prove successful,
you follow the tide tremulously, until some sudden reverse throws you
back upon the resources of your professional employ.
But again as you see this and that one wearing the blazonry which wealth
wins, and which the man of the world is sure to covet,--your weak soul
glows again with the impassioned desire, and you hunger, with brute
appetite and bestial eye, for riches. You see the mania around you, and
it is relieved of odium by the community of error. You consult some gray
old veteran in the war of gold, scarred with wounds, and crowned with
honors, and watch eagerly for the words and the ways which have won him
wealth.
Your fingers tingle with mad expectancies; your eyes roam, lost in
estimates. Your note-book shows long lines of figures. Your reading of
the news centres in the stock-list. Your brow grows cramped with the
fever of anxiety. Through whole church-hours your dreams range over the
shadowy transactions of the week or the month to come.
Even with old religious habit clinging fast to your soul, you dream now
only of nice conformity, comfortable faith, high respectability; there
lies very little in you of that noble consciousness of Duty
performed,--of living up to the Life that is in you,--of grasping boldly
and stoutly at those chains of Love which the Infinite Power has lowered
to our reach. You do not dream of being, but of seeming. You spill the
real essence, and clutch at the vial which has only a label of Truth.
Great and holy thoughts of the Future,--shadowy, yet bold conceptions of
the Infinite,--float past you dimly, and your hold is never strong
enough to grapple them to you. They fly, like eagles, too near the sun;
and there lies game below for your vulture beak to feed upon.
[Great thoughts belong only and truly to him whose mind can hold them.
No matter who first puts them in words, if they come to a soul and fill
it, they belong to it,--whether they floated on the voice of others, or
on the wings of silence and the night.]
To be up with the fashion of the time, to be ignorant of plain things
and people, and to be knowing in brilliancies, is a kind of Pelhamism
that is very apt to overtake one in the first blush of manhood. To hold
a fair place in the after-dinner table-talk, to meet distinction as a
familiarity, to wear _salon_ honors with aplomb, to know affection so
far as to wield it into grace of language, are all splendid achievements
with a man
|