s ways both of thought and of
action. He finds a new sort of fitness demanded of him, executive,
thoroughgoing, careful of details, full of drudgery and obedience to
orders. Everybody is ahead of him. Just now he was a senior, at the top of
a world he knew and reigned in, a finished product and pattern of good
form. Of a sudden he is a novice again, as green as in his first school
year, studying a thing that seems to have no rules--at sea amid
cross-winds, and a bit seasick withal. Presently, if he be made of stuff
that will shake into shape and fitness, he settles to his tasks and is
comfortable. He has come to himself: understands what capacity is, and what
it is meant for; sees that his training was not for ornament, or personal
gratification, but to teach him how to use himself and develop faculties
worth using. Henceforth there is a zest in action, and he loves to see his
strokes tell.

The same thing happens to the lad come from the farm into the city, a big
and novel field, where crowds rush and jostle, and a rustic boy must stand
puzzled for a little how to use his placid and unjaded strength. It
happens, too, though in a deeper and more subtle way, to the man who
marries for love, if the love be true and fit for foul weather. Mr. Bagehot
used to say that a bachelor was "an amateur in life," and wit and wisdom
are married in the jest. A man who lives only for himself has not begun to
live--has yet to learn his use, and his real pleasure too, in the world. It
is not necessary he should marry to find himself out, but it is necessary
he should love. Men have come to themselves serving their mothers with an
unselfish devotion, or their sisters, or a cause for whose sake they
forsook ease and left off thinking of themselves. It is unselfish action,
growing slowly into the high habit of devotion, and at last, it may be,
into a sort of consecration, that teaches a man the wide meaning of his
life, and makes of him a steady professional in living, if the motive be
not necessity, but love. Necessity may make a mere drudge of a man, and no
mere drudge ever made a professional of himself; that demands a higher
spirit and a finer incentive than his.

Surely a man has come to himself only when he has found the best that is in
him, and has satisfied his heart with the highest achievement he is fit
for. It is only then that he knows of what he is capable and what his heart
demands. And, assuredly, no thoughtful man ever came t