ws save himself. His words and
actions do but inadequately reveal the being he is. We are all greater
than we seem to each other. The heart's deepest secrets will not be
told. The secret of the interest and delight we take in romances and
poetry is that they realize the expectations and hopes of youth. It is
the world we had painted and expected. He is unhappy who has never
known the eagerness of childish anticipation.

Full of anticipations, full of simple, sweet delights, are these
years, the most valuable of lifetime. Then wisdom and religion are
intuitive. But the child hastens to leave its beautiful time and
state, and watches its own growth with impatient eye. Soon he will
seek to return. The expectation of the future has been disappointed.
Manhood is not that free, powerful, and commanding state the
imagination had delineated. And the world, too, disappoints his hope.
He finds there things which none of his teachers ever hinted to him.
He beholds a universal system of compromise and conformity, and in a
fatal day he learns to compromise and conform. At eighteen the youth
requires much stricter truth of men than at twenty-four.

At twenty-four the prophecies of childhood and boyhood begin to be
fulfilled, the longings of the heart to be satisfied. He finds and
tastes that life which once seemed to him so full of satisfaction and
advantage. The inclination to speak in the first person passes away,
and his composition is less autobiographical. The claims of society
and friends begin to be respected. Solitude and musing are less sweet.
The morbid effusions of earlier years, once so precious, no longer
please. Now he regards most his unwritten thought. He uses fewer
adjectives and alliterations, more verbs and dogmatism. There was a
time when his genius was not domesticated, and he did his work
somewhat awkwardly, yet with a fervor prophetic of settled wisdom and
eloquence. The youth is almost too much in earnest. He aims at nothing
less than all knowledge, all wisdom, all power. Perchance the end of
all this is that he may discover his own proper work and tendency, and
learn to know himself from the revelations of his own nature in
universal nature.

For it is by this sign we choose companions and books. Not that they
are the best persons or the best thoughts; but some subtile affinity
attracts and invites as to another self. In the choosing of companions
there seems to be no choice at all. "We meet, we know not h