of
answering objections is to knock out the brains that propound them. All
the instituted rights of men were accordingly violated in the fierce
desire to establish the abstract rights of man. A government founded on
reason was to be created by a preliminary and provisional government
founded on the guillotine. The ideals of Rousseau were to be realized by
practices learned in the school of Draco; and a celestial democracy of
thought was to spring from a demonized democracy of fact. Now we are
accustomed to call these wretches young men. But there was no youth in
them. Young in respect to age, their intellectually irritated egotism
made them as bigoted, as inhuman, as soulless as old familiars of the
Inquisition.

In truth, the real young man of that Revolution, as of our own
Revolution, was Lafayette. His convictions regarding the rights of man
were essentially the same as those held by Robespierre and St. Just; but
they were convictions that grew out of the inherent geniality,
benevolence, and rectitude of his nature, and were accordingly guided
and limited in their application by the sanity and sweetness of the
sentiments whence they drew their vitality. Whilst they made him capable
of any self-sacrifice for freedom and humanity, they made him incapable
of crime; and misfortune and failure never destroyed his faith in
freedom, because his faith in freedom had not been corrupted by
experience in blood.

In Nero and Caligula, in Alcibiades and Byron, in Robespierre and St.
Just, we have attempted to sketch the leading perversions of youthful
energy and intelligence. Let us now proceed to exhibit their more
wholesome, and, we trust, their more natural action. And first, in
respect to the emotions, these may all be included in the single word
enthusiasm, or that impulsive force which liberates the mental powers
from the ice of timidity as Spring unloosens the streams from the grasp
of Winter, and sends them forth in a rejoicing rush. The mind of youth,
when impelled by this original strength and enthusiasm of Nature, is
keen, eager, inquisitive, intense, audacious, rapidly assimilating facts
into faculties and knowledge into power, and above all teeming with that
joyous fulness of creative life which radiates thoughts as inspirations,
and magnetizes as well as informs. Now the limit of this youth of mind
observation decides to be commonly between thirty-five and forty; but
still it is not so properly marked by years as