iew.
What, to them, is the assured possession of fame, compared with that
direct perception of truth and that immediate consciousness of power?

But the question arises, Cannot this youth be preserved, or, at least,
perpetually renewed? We have seen, in this rapid glance at history, that
it is preserved as long as the mind retains its hold on the life of
things; and we have seen, both in men of action and in men of
meditation, this hold weakened by age. But would it be weakened, if the
loftiest meditation issued in deeds instead of thoughts? Would youth
depart, if the will acted on the same high level that the mind
conceived? This, also, is a question which has been historically
answered. It has been answered by heroes, reformers, saints, and
martyrs,--by men who have demonstrated, that, the higher the life, the
more distant the approaches of age,--by men whose souls on earth have
glanced into that region of spiritual ideas and spiritual persons where
youth is perpetual, where ecstasy is no transient mood, but a permanent
condition, and where dwell the awful forces which radiate immortal life
into the will. In these men, contemplation, refusing to abide in the act
by which it mounts _above_ the world, reacts with tenfold force _on_ the
world. Using human _ends_ simply as divine _means_, they wield war,
statesmanship, literature, art, science, and philosophy with almost
superhuman energy in the service of supernatural ideas; and history
gleams with an imperfect passage, through human agents, of the life of
God into the life of man. The subject is too vast, the agents too
various and numerous, to be more than hinted here; and in the limitation
of our theme, not only to the young in years, but to the male in sex, we
are precluded from celebrating one who stands in history as perhaps the
loveliest human embodiment of all that is more winning and inspiring in
youth,--one whose celestial elevation of sentiment, ecstatic ardor of
imagination, and power at once to melt the heart and amaze the
understanding, will forever associate the saintliest heroic genius with
the name of Joan of Arc. But among the crowd of great men in this
exalted sphere of influence, let us select one who was the head and
heart of the most memorable movement of modern times,--the German
peasant, Martin Luther. With a nature originally rougher, more
earth-born, and of less genial goodness than that of Joan of Arc, but
with a shaping imagination of the same