alous of slight, of insult,
of the least suspicion of restraint or leading. It belongs to strong
young nations as well as to strong young men. By it they flaunt
defiance in the face of the world and are afraid of the imputation of
prudence. It is what you can see in the faces of any group of eager
young men as you pass them on the street. Sometimes it makes them
attractive and sometimes it makes them detestable. It turns the noble
youth into a hero and the mean youth into a bully. A fine nature it
leads into the most exquisite tastes and encircles it with art and
music. A coarse nature it plunges into the vilest debauchery and vice.
In good fortune it makes the temper carelessly benignant. In bad
fortune it makes the temper recklessly defiant. It works these very
different effects but is always the one same spirit still,--the pride
of life. The gift of life which came from God, taken possession of by
the world and tamed into self-sufficiency, a thing not of the Father,
but of the world, who does not know in himself, or see in somebody
he watches, something of this pure pride in life? Just to live is so
attractive that the higher ends and responsibilities of living drift
away out of sight. This instinctive almost physical selfishness is the
philosophy of more than we think both of the good and of the bad that
is in young people.

I have seen too much of it to undervalue the sweet and sober piety of
old age. There is a beauty in it that is all its own. A softness and
tenderness and patience and repose in the western sky that the bolder
glories of the east where the morning breaks never can attain. Many
and many of the best men we have known have been old men, but no one
looks at men's progress without feeling that a great deal of what
passes for growth in goodness as men grow old is in reality only the
deadening of the pride of life from the dying-down of the life itself.
Many and many a man who passes for a sober, conscientious, religious
sort of man at fifty, if you put back into his cooled blood the hot
life he had at twenty-five would be the same reckless, profligate,
arrogant sinner that he was then. It is the life, not the pride, that
he has lost. Many and many a man thinks that he has saved his house
from conflagration because he, sees no flame, when really the flame
is hidden only because the house is burnt down and the fire is still
lurking among the ashes, hunting out any little prey that is left and
hungrily w