de, hysteria, and haunting
of the grave, is nothing else than naked, ignorant selfishness. It is
himself that he sees dead; those are his virtues that are forgotten; his
is the vague epitaph. Pity him but the more, if pity be your cue; for
where a man is all pride, vanity, and personal aspiration, he goes
through fire unshielded. In every part and corner of our life, to lose
oneself is to be gainer; to forget oneself is to be happy; and this
poor, laughable, and tragic fool has not yet learned the rudiments;
himself, giant Prometheus, is still ironed on the peaks of Caucasus.
But by and by his truant interests will leave that tortured body, slip
abroad and gather flowers. Then shall death appear before him in an
altered guise; no longer as a doom peculiar to himself, whether fate's
crowning injustice or his own last vengeance upon those who fail to
value him; but now as a power that wounds him far more tenderly, not
without solemn compensations, taking and giving, bereaving and yet
storing up.

*****

The interests of youth are rarely frank; his passions, like Noah's dove,
come home to roost. The fire, sensibility, and volume of his own nature,
that is all that he has learned to recognise. The tumultuary and gray
tide of life, the empire of routine, the unrejoicing faces of his
elders, fill him with contemptuous surprise; there also he seems to walk
among the tombs of spirits; and it is only in the course of years, and
after much rubbing with his fellow-men, that he begins by glimpses to
see himself from without and his fellows from within: to know his own
for one among the thousand undenoted countenances of the city street,
and to divine in others the throb of human agony and hope. In the
meantime he will avoid the hospital doors, the pale faces, the cripple,
the sweet whiff of chloroform-for there, on the most thoughtless, the
pains of others are burned home; but he will continue to walk, in a
divine self-pity, the aisles of the forgotten graveyard. The length of
man's life, which is endless to the brave and busy, is scorned by his
ambitious thought. He cannot bear to have come for so little, and to go
again so wholly. He cannot bear, above all, in that brief scene, to be
still idle, and by way of cure, neglects the little that he has to do.
The parable of the talent is the brief, epitome of youth. To believe in
immortality is one thing, but it is first needful to believe in life.
Denunciatory preachers seem not to