ge, there will be the personal
disappointment, which is probably a lighter thing. The racial
disappointment is expressed in what used to be called, somewhat
untranslatably, _Weltschmerz_. This was peculiarly the appanage of
youth, being the anticipative melancholy, the pensive foreboding,
distilled from the blighted hopes of former generations of youth. Mixed
with the effervescent blood of the young heart, it acted like a subtle
poison, and eventuated in more or less rhythmical deliriums, in cynical
excesses of sentiment, in extravagances of behavior, in effects which
commonly passed when the subject himself became ancestor, and
transmitted his inherited burden of _Weltschmerz_ to his posterity. The
old are sometimes sad, on account of the sins and follies they have
personally committed and know they will commit again, but for pure
gloom--gloom positive, absolute, all but palpable--you must go to youth.
That is not merely the time of disappointment, it is in itself
disappointment; it is not what it expected to be; and it finds nothing
which confronts it quite, if at all, responsive to the inward vision.
The greatest, the loveliest things in the world lose their iridescence
or dwindle before it. The old come to things measurably prepared to see
them as they are, take them for what they are worth; but the young are
the prey of impassioned prepossessions which can never be the true
measures.

* * * * *

The disadvantage of an opening like this is that it holds the same
quality, if not quantity, of disappointment as those other sublime
things, and we earnestly entreat the reader to guard himself against
expecting anything considerable from it. Probably the inexperienced
reader has imagined from our weighty prologue something of signal
importance to follow; but the reader who has been our reader through
thick and thin for many years will have known from the first that we
were not going to deal with anything more vital, say, than a few
emotions and memories, prompted, one night of the other winter, by
hearing one of the old-fashioned Italian operas which a more than
commonly inspired management had been purveying to an over-Wagnered
public. In fact, we had a sense that this sort of reader was there with
us the night we saw "L'Elisir d'Amore," and that it was in his
personality we felt and remembered many things which we could have
fancied personal only to ourselves.

He began to take the aff