nd and character, hope is placed where hope must
pine. Love, then, is doomed to be tragic. The youth "attains to be
denied." But he sounds his depth. Thereafter, he knows what to expect of
himself. He has a precedent. After this he will count it a sin to
forget, and to accept the solace of mediocrity. In this lies the value
of the tragedy.

I sometimes think that whatever is youngest is best. It is the young
that, timid and bold, pay greatest reverence to knowledge, receiving
without chill of prejudice and shameful cowardice of quibbling the brave
new thought. Wisdom may be of age, but passion for scholarships,
trail-breaking, and hardy prospecting in the treasure mines of research,
is of young pioneerhood alone. It is a youth who dares be radical, who
dares, in splendid largess, build mistake upon mistake, bleeding his
life out in service. And it is a youth, standing tiptoe upon the earth,
now waiting in unperturbed ease, now searching with unbridled zeal, who
is lover and mystic. "The best is yet to be," says Rabbi Ben Ezra, "the
last of life, for which the first is made." Yes, the last of life will
be good, but only if it is like youth, beating with its pulse and
instinct with its spirit.

The unhappy youth is left on the battle-field but not to die. The
sword-thrusts challenge him to put forth greater strength in fiercer
wars. He learns hard and well.

Indeed, I cannot leave this subject of first love. How do you know it
was not good for you to love as you did? It is strange you should
resolve to love no more because at one time you loved deeply enough
almost to remain in love. It cannot be that you have grown old and that
nature is resolving for you. You tell me of your experiences in order
that I may be convinced that you know whereof you speak and I listen in
wonder. Your conclusions are unwonted.

Then something was amiss, for you have outgrown and forgotten, but how
is it with you in the present when your indifference waits not upon
time? You approach your future wife clothed in indifference as in mail,
and you do violence. How can I show you? I speak as I would to a child
to whom it is necessary to explain that it is bad to abandon an
education. Life is a school, and to me it seems that you are about to
resign long before diploma and degree, so I interpose. I was taught by
first love, and I honour that time beyond any other. I was Ellen's. I
have been lonely. For the mere human need, for the sake of that w