he gave to the world the best history upon this
subject ever written.

After Lincoln had walked six miles to borrow a grammar, he returned
home and burned one shaving after another while he studied the precious
prize.

Gilbert Becket, an English Crusader, was taken prisoner and became a
slave in the palace of a Saracen prince, where he not only gained the
confidence of his master, but also the love of his master's fair
daughter. By and by he escaped and returned to England, but the
devoted girl determined to follow him. She knew but two words of the
English language--_London_ and _Gilbert_; but by repeating the first
she obtained passage in a vessel to the great metropolis, and then she
went from street to street pronouncing the other--"Gilbert." At last
she came to the street on which Gilbert lived in prosperity. The
unusual crowd drew the family to the window, when Gilbert himself saw
and recognized her, and took to his arms and home his far-come princess
with her solitary fond word.

The most irresistible charm of youth is its bubbling enthusiasm. Youth
sees no darkness ahead,--no defile that has no outlet,--it forgets that
there is such a thing as failure in the world, and believes that
mankind has been waiting all these centuries for him to come and be the
liberator of truth and energy and beauty.

Of what use was it to forbid the boy Handel to touch a musical
instrument, or to forbid him going to school, lest he learn the gamut?
He stole midnight interviews with a dumb spinet in a secret attic. The
boy Bach copied whole books of studies by moonlight, for want of a
candle churlishly denied. Nor was he disheartened when these copies
were taken from him. The painter West began in a garret, and plundered
the family cat for bristles to make his brushes.

It is the enthusiasm of youth which cuts the Gordian knot age cannot
untie. "People smile at the enthusiasm of youth," says Charles
Kingsley; "that enthusiasm which they themselves secretly look back to
with a sigh, perhaps unconscious that it is partly their own fault that
they ever lost it."

How much the world owes to the enthusiasm of Dante!

Tennyson wrote his first volume at eighteen, and at nineteen gained a
medal at Cambridge.

"The most beautiful works of all art were done in youth," says Ruskin.
"Almost everything that is great has been done by youth," wrote
Disraeli. "The world's interests are, under God, in the hands of the
young," say