e time: youth is an army, the
whole battalion of our faculties and our freshnesses, our passions and
our illusions, on a considerably reluctant march into the enemy's
country, the country of the general lost freshness; and I think it
throws out at least as many stragglers behind as skirmishers
ahead--stragglers who often catch up but belatedly with the main body,
and even in many a case never catch up at all. Or under another figure
it is a book in several volumes, and even at this a mere instalment of
the large library of life, with a volume here and there closing, as
something in the clap of its covers may assure us, while another remains
either completely agape or kept open by a fond finger thrust in between
the leaves. A volume, and a most substantial, _had_ felt its pages very
gravely pressed together before the winter's end that I have spoken of,
but a restriction may still bear, and blessedly enough, as I gather from
memory, on my sense of the whole year then terminated--a year seen by me
now in the light of agitations, explorations, initiations (I scarce know
how endearingly enough to name them!) which I should call fairly
infantine in their indifference to proportions and aims, had they not
still more left with me effects and possessions that even yet lend
themselves to estimation.

[1] "Notes of a Son and Brother," 1914.

It was at any rate impossible to have been younger, in spite of whatever
inevitable submissions to the rather violent push forward at certain
particular points and on lines corresponding with them, than I found
myself, from the first day of March 1869, in the face of an opportunity
that affected me then and there as the happiest, the most interesting,
the most alluring and beguiling, that could ever have opened before a
somewhat disabled young man who was about to complete his twenty-sixth
year. Treasures of susceptibility, treasures not only unconscious of the
remotest approach to exhaustion, but, given the dazzling possibilities,
positively and ideally intact, I now recognise--I in fact long ago
recognised--on the part of that intensely "reacting" small organism;
which couldn't have been in higher spirits or made more inward fuss
about the matter if it had come into a property measured not by mere
impressions and visions, occasions for play of perception and
imagination, mind and soul, but by dollars and "shares," lands and
houses or flocks and herds. It is to the account of that immense