Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The soul that riseth with us, our life's Star,
Hath elsewhere had its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter darkness,
But trailing clouds of glory, do we come
From God who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy.--Wordsworth.
"Like virgin parchment," says Montaigne, "youth is
capable of any inscription." Let us have only those inscriptions which
will do us honor in the long years that the parchment will unroll before
us. "Unless a tree has borne its blossoms in the spring," writes Bishop
Hare, "you will vainly look for fruit on it in autumn." All through the
great history of Thiers, wherein he recites the scenes of the French
revolution, the Consulate, the Empire, and the rock of St. Helena, there
runs one consistent observation that youth is noble and magnanimous.
The thousands of characters who "strut their brief hour" upon the stage
in the terrible drama which this historian depicts are young and
generous, lofty and incorruptible. Then they ripen into manhood, glory
waits upon their comings and their goings, and they are soon between two
masters, their interests and their consciences. A circumstance threatens
their early resolutions, an event overturns their consciences, and a
selfish, jealous, ambitious mind thenceforth guides the fortunes of a
life.