heir own devout and constant toil in the line of their
aspiration. But would it avail to tell them so?

One of the knowledges of a period of life which we will call the riper
maturity is that we need all the accumulated vigilance of the past to
secure us from the ever-besetting dangers of the present: the dangers of
indolence, of slovenly performance, of indistinct vision, of weakening
conscience in our work. We need every atom of force, every particle of
the stored electricity of youth, to keep us going in later years. While
we are still young we are aware of an environing and pervading censure,
coming from the rivalry, the envy, the generous emulation, the approval,
the disapproval, the love, the hate of all those who witness our
endeavor. No smallest slip, no slightest defect will be lost upon this
censure, equally useful whether sympathetic or antipathetic. But as we
grow old we are sensible of a relaxing, a lifting, a withdrawal of the
environing and pervading censure. We have become the objects of a
compassionate toleration or a contemptuous indifference; it no longer
matters greatly to the world whether we do our work well or ill. But if
we love our work as we ought till we die, it should matter more than
ever to us whether we do it well or ill. We have come to the most
perilous days of our years when we are tempted not so much to slight our
work as to spare our nerves, in which the stored electricity is lower
and scanter than it was, and to let a present feeble performance blight
the fame of strenuous achievements in the past. We may then make our
choice of two things--stop working; stop going, cease to move, to
exist--or gather at each successive effort whatever remains of habit, of
conscience, of native force, and put it into effect till our work, which
we have not dropped, drops us.

Should Eugenio address these hard sayings to his appealing, his
palpitating correspondents? He found himself on the point of telling
them that of all the accumulated energies which could avail them when
they came of his age, or were coming of it, there was none that would
count for so much as the force of habit; and what could be more banal
than that? It would not save it from banality if he explained that he
meant the habit of loving the very best one can do, and doing that and
not something less. It would still be banal to say that now in their
youth was the only time they would have to form the habit of tirelessly
doing their