th a newly realized purport in the words,

"A boy's will is the wind's will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts."

The words are, as the poet promptly declares, the burden of a Lapland
song, which "is haunting his memory still," which "murmurs and whispers
still," which "is singing and saying still," which "is mournful" and
"sweet" and "fitful" and "fatal" and "strange" and "beautiful." Yet he
seems not to have known, as our friend now thinks he himself knows, that
they express a difference, unrecognized hitherto, between youth and age,
and rightfully attribute to the young a steadfastness and persistence in
objects and ideals formerly supposed the distinguishing qualities of the
old. In other words, they have precipitated into his consciousness a
truth unwittingly held in solution by both the poets in their verse. Or,
if it was conveyed to him by their sensible connivance, he is the first
who has been made its repository. Or, if he cannot claim an exclusive
property in the revelation, it is now his, in his turn, by that sad
right of seniority whose advantages are not ours till there are few or
none left to contest them with us. One has not been promoted to them
because of any merit or achievement; one has simply lived into them; and
how much of one has died in the process of survival! The lines speak to
our friend's age a language which his youth could not have understood,
and it is because he is no longer young that he perceives how long the
thoughts of youth were and how brief the thoughts of age.

He had always fancied that his later years should be a time of repose in
the faiths, loves, and joys through which he realized himself. But
nothing apparently was farther from the fact. Such length of thoughts as
he had, such abiding pleasures, such persistent hopes, were from his
youth; and the later sort were as the leaves of the tree to the tree
itself. He put them forth at the beginning of an epoch, a season, and
they dropped from him at the close. In as great bitterness as is
consonant with his temperament he has asked us why youth should ever
have been deemed fickle and age constant when so precisely the contrary
is true. Youth, he owns, is indeed full of vain endeavors and of
enterprises that come to nothing, but it is far more fixed than age in
its aspirations. His aspirations change now with such rapidity that they
seem different not only from year to year, but from month to month, from
day