suspect that they may be taken
gravely and in evil part; that young men may come to think of time as of
a moment, and with the pride of Satan wave back the inadequate gift. Yet
here is a true peril; this it is that sets them to pace the graveyard
alleys and to read, with strange extremes of pity and derision, the
memorials of the dead.

Books were the proper remedy: books of vivid human import, forcing upon
their minds the issues, pleasures, busyness, importance, and immediacy
of that life in which they stand; books of smiling or heroic temper, to
excite or to console; books of a large design, shadowing the complexity
of that game of consequences to which we all sit down, the hanger-back
not least. But the average sermon flees the point, disporting itself in
that eternity of which we know, and need to know, so little; avoiding
the bright, crowded, and momentous fields of life where destiny awaits
us.

*****

And so in the majority of cases, a man who fancies himself dying will
get cold comfort from the very youthful view expressed in this essay.
He, as a living man, has some to help, some to love, some to correct; it
may be some to punish. These duties cling, not upon humanity, but upon
the man himself. It is he, not another, who is one woman's son and a
second woman's husband, and a third woman's father. That life which
began so small has now grown, with a myriad filaments, into the lives
of others. It is not indispensable; another will take the place and
shoulder the discharged responsibilities; but the better the man and
the nobler his purposes, the more will he be tempted to regret the
extinction of his powers and the deletion of his personality. To have
lived a generation is not only to have grown at home in that perplexing
medium, but to have assumed innumerable duties. To die at such an age
has, for all but the entirely base, something of the air of a betrayal.

*****

Even if death catch people, like an open pitfall, and in mid-career,
laying out vast projects, and planning monstrous foundations, flushed
with hope, and their mouths full of boastful language, they should be at
once tripped up and silenced: is there not something brave and spirited
in such a termination? and does not life go down with a better grace,
foaming in full body over a precipice, than miserably straggling to an
end in sandy deltas? When the Greeks made their fine saying that those
whom the gods love die young, I cannot help believin