this young man at Grand Haven, on the western border of Lake Michigan,
boards the structure of pine wood and ten-penny nails called the Alpena.
The Alpena floats out into her last night--into the valley of the shadow
of death. Presently the young man feels his vessel and his life
trembling like a captive wild bird in a remorseless grasp. Anon this
trembling grows into the awful, final, fatal paroxysms. Then suddenly
the mind of the young man breaks from the shackles of vanity and
self-sufficiency, and he views, for the first time, the visible forms of
angered Nature. He recalls his white gloves, his former complete idea of
a storm, his triumphant, _au revoir_ retreat from the opera-box, and, as
the discords of the Everlasting gradually resolve toward the diapason,
the full chant, of His solemn eternity, the young man cries out, in a
spirit of revelation, "What a worm am I!" and adds his own piteous
tragedy to the unheard murmurs of bubbling death and muddy burial!
"REMEMBER NOW THY CREATOR,
in the days of thy youth," says Solomon. "Train up a child in the way he
should go," says the proverb, "and when he is old he will not depart
from it." Be not afraid of the sneers of the ungodly. "As the cracking
of thorns under a pot, so is the laughter of a fool." "The fairest
flower in the garden of creation," says Sir James E. Smith, "is a young
mind, offering and unfolding itself to the influence of Divine Wisdom,
as the heliotrope turns its sweet blossoms to the sun."
Lord Bacon, in his forty-third essay, thus sums up the qualities of
youth: "Young men are fitter to invent than to judge; fitter for
execution than for counsel; and fitter for new projects than for settled
business. For the experience of age, in things that fall within the
compass of it, directeth them; but in new things abuseth them. The
errors of young men are the ruin of business;