be quite repeated. If you see
the same trees and hills, they do not appear the same from year to year.
Yesterday they were new and strange; you and they were young together.
To-day they are familiar and disregarded. Soon they will be old friends,
prattling to gray hairs of the brown locks and bounding breath of youth.

The pioneer of our growth is Imagination. Desire and Hope go on before
into the wilderness of the unknown; they open paths; they make a
clearing; they build and settle firmly before we ourselves in will and
power arrive at this opening, but they never await our coming. They are
the "Fore-runners," off again deeper into the vast possibility of being.
The boy walks in a dream of to-morrow. Two bushels of hickory-nuts in
his bag are no nuts to him, but silver shillings; yet neither are the
shillings shillings, but shining skates, into which they will presently
be transmuted. Already he is on the great pond by the roaring fire, or
ringing away into distant starry darkness with a sparkling brand.
Already, before his first skates are bought, before he has seen the coin
that buys them, he is dashing and wheeling with his fellows, a leader of
the flying train.

That early fore-reaching is a picture of our entire activity. "Care is
taken," said Goethe, "that the trees do not grow into the sky"; but man
is that tree which must outgrow the sky and lift its top into finer air
and sunshine. The essential seed is Growth; not shell and bark, nor
kernel, but a germ which pierces the soil and lifts the stone. Spirit is
such a germ, and perpetual reinforcement is its quality; so that the
great Being is known to us as a becoming Creator, adding himself to
himself, and life to life, in perpetual emanation.

The boy's thought never stops short of some personal prowess. It is
ability that charms him. To be a man, as he understands manliness, is to
have the whole planet for a gymnasium and play-ground. He would like to
have been on the other side of Hydaspes when Alexander came to that
stream. But he soon discovers that wit is the sword of sharpness,--that
he is the ruler who can reach the deepest desire of man and satisfy
that. If there is power in him, he becomes a careful student, examines
everything, examines his own enthusiasm, examines his last examination,
tries every estimate again and again. He distrusts his tools, and then
distrusts his own distrust, lifting himself by the very boot-straps in
his metaphysics, to ge