he "comes to himself." It is not only after periods of recklessness or
infatuation, when he has played the spendthrift or the fool, that a man
comes to himself. He comes to himself after experiences of which he alone
may be aware: when he has left off being wholly preoccupied with his own
powers and interests and with every petty plan that centers in himself;
when he has cleared his eyes to see the world as it is, and his own true
place and function in it.

It is a process of disillusionment. The scales have fallen away. He sees
himself soberly, and knows under what conditions his powers must act, as
well as what his powers are. He has got rid of earlier prepossessions about
the world of men and affairs, both those which were too favorable and those
which were too unfavorable--both those of the nursery and those of a young
man's reading. He has learned his own paces, or, at any rate, is in a fair
way to learn them; has found his footing and the true nature of the "going"
he must look for in the world; over what sorts of roads he must expect to
make his running, and at what expenditure of effort; whither his goal lies,
and what cheer he may expect by the way. It is a process of
disillusionment, but it disheartens no soundly made man. It brings him into
a light which guides instead of deceiving him; a light which does not make
the way look cold to any man whose eyes are fit for use in the open, but
which shines wholesomely, rather, upon the obvious path, like the honest
rays of the frank sun, and makes traveling both safe and cheerful.

There is no fixed time in a man's life at which he comes to himself, and
some men never come to themselves at all. It is a change reserved for the
thoroughly sane and healthy, and for those who can detach themselves from
tasks and drudgery long and often enough to get, at any rate once and
again, view of the proportions of life and of the stage and plot of its
action. We speak often with amusement, sometimes with distaste and
uneasiness, of men who "have no sense of humor," who take themselves too
seriously, who are intense, self-absorbed, over-confident in matters of
opinion, or else go plumed with conceit, proud of we cannot tell what,
enjoying, appreciating, thinking of nothing so much as themselves. These
are men who have not suffered that wholesome change. They have not come to
themselves. If they be serious men, and real forces in the world, we may
conclude that they have been too muc