as it grows old that the beast gives way and the
angel-wings bud, and all along through infancy and childhood the beast
gives way and gives way and the angel-wings bud and bud; and yet we
entertain our angel so unawares, that we look back regretfully to the
time when the angel was in abeyance and the beast raved regnant.

The only advantage which childhood has over manhood is the absence of
foreboding, and this indeed is much. A large part of our suffering is
anticipatory, much of which children are spared. The present happiness
is clouded for them by no shadowy possibility; but for this small
indemnity shall we offset the glory of our manly years? Because their
narrowness cannot take in the contingencies that threaten peace, are
they blessed above all others? Does not the same narrowness cut them
off from the bright certainty that underlies all doubts and fears? If
ignorance is bliss, man stands at the summit of mortal misery, and the
scale of happiness is a descending one. We must go down into the
ocean-depths, where, for the scintillant soul, a dim, twilight instinct
lights up gelatinous lives. If childhood is indeed the happiest
period, then the mysterious God-breathed breath was no boon, and the
Deity is cruel. Immortality were well exchanged for the blank of
annihilation.

We hear of the dissipated illusions of youth, the paling of bright,
young dreams. Life, it is said, turns out to be different from what
was pictured. The rosy-hued morning fades away into the gray and livid
evening, the black and ghastly night. In especial cases it may be so,
but I do not believe it is the general experience. It surely need not
be. It should not be. I have found things a great deal better than I
expected. I am but one; but with all my oneness, with all that there
is of me, I protest against such generalities. I think they are
slanderous of Him who ordained life, its processes and its
vicissitudes. He never made our dreams to outstrip our realizations.
Every conception, brain-born, has its execution, hand-wrought. Life is
not a paltry tin cup which the child drains dry, leaving the man to go
weary and hopeless, quaffing at it in vain with black, parched lips.
It is a fountain ever springing. It is a great deep, which the wisest
has never bounded, the grandest never fathomed.

It is not only idle, but stupid, to lament the departure of childhood's
joys. It is as if something precious and valued had been forcib