Atlantic Monthly | Page 7

great gain?
When he passed from his toes to his toys, did he do it mournfully?
Does he look at his little feet and hands with a sigh for the joys that
once loitered there, but are now forever gone? Does he not rather feel a
little ashamed, when you remind him of those days? Does he not feel
that it trenches somewhat on his dignity? Yet the regret of maturity for
its past joys amounts to nothing less than this. Such regret is regret that
we cannot lie in the sunshine and play with our toes,--that we are no
longer but one remove, or but few removes, from the idiot. Away with
such folly! Every season of life has its distinctive and appropriate
enjoyments, which bud and blossom and ripen and fall off as the season
glides on to its close, to be succeeded by others better and brighter.
There is no consciousness of loss, for there is no loss. There is only a
growing up, and out of, and beyond.
Life does turn out differently from what was anticipated. It is an
infinitely higher and holier and nobler thing than our childhood fancied.
The world that lay before us then was but a tinsel toy to the world
which our firm feet tread. We have entered into the undiscovered land.
We have explored its ways of pleasantness, its depths of dole, its
mountains of difficulty, its valleys of delight, and, behold! it is very
good. Storms have swept fiercely, but they swept to purify. We have
heard in its thunders the Voice that woke once the echoes of the Garden.
Its lightnings have riven a path for the Angel of Peace.
Manhood discovers what childhood can never divine,--that the sorrows
of life are superficial, and the happinesses of life structural; and this
knowledge alone is enough to give a peace which passeth
understanding.

Yes, the dreams of youth were dreams, but the waking was more
glorious than they. They were only dreams,--fitful, flitting, fragmentary
visions of the coming day. The shallow joys, the capricious pleasures,
the wavering sunshine of infancy have deepened into virtues, graces,
heroisms. We have the bold outlook of calm, self-confident courage,
the strong fortitude of endurance, the imperial magnificence of
self-denial. Our hearts expand with benevolence, our lives broaden with
beneficence. We cease our perpetual skirmishing at the outposts, and
go inward to the citadel. Down into the secret places of life we descend.
Down among the beautiful ones in the cool and quiet shadows, on the
sunny summer levels, we walk securely, and the hidden fountains are
unsealed.
For those people who do nothing, for those to whom Christianity brings
no revelation, for those who see no eternity in time, no infinity in life,
for those to whom opportunity is but the handmaid of selfishness, to
whom smallness is informed by no greatness, for whom the lowly is
never lifted up by indwelling love to the heights of divine
performance,--for them, indeed, each hurrying year may well be a King
of Terrors. To pass out from the flooding light of the morning, to feel
all the dewiness drunk up by the thirsty, insatiate sun, to see the
shadows slowly and swiftly gathering, and no starlight to break the
gloom, and no home beyond the gloom for the unhoused, startled,
shivering soul,--ah! this indeed is terrible. The "confusions of a wasted
youth" strew thick confusions of a dreary age. Where youth garners up
only such power as beauty or strength may bestow, where youth is but
the revel of physical or frivolous delight, where youth aspires only with
paltry and ignoble ambitions, where youth presses the wine of life into
the cup of variety, there indeed Age comes, a thrice unwelcome guest.
Put him off. Thrust him back. Weep for the early days: you have found
no happiness to replace their joys. Mourn for the trifles that were
innocent, since the trifles of your manhood are heavy with guilt. Fight
to the last. Retreat inch by inch. With every step you lose. Every day
robs you of treasure. Every hour passes you over to insignificance; and
at the end stands Death. The bare and desolate decline drops suddenly
into the hopeless, dreadful grave, the black and yawning grave, the foul
and loathsome grave.
But why those who are Christians and not Pagans, who believe that

death is not an eternal sleep, who wrest from life its uses and gather
from life its beauty,--why they should dally along the road, and cling
frantically to the old landmarks, and shrink fearfully from the
approaching future, I cannot tell. You are getting into years. True. But
you are getting out again. The bowed frame, the tottering step, the
unsteady hand, the failing eye, the heavy ear, the tremulous voice,