of our years to
a swift torrent in which a man is carried away; now he is dashed against
a boulder, now he grapples for a moment to a trailing spray; at the end
he is hurled out and overwhelmed in a dark and bottomless ocean. We have
no more than glimpses and touches; we are torn away from our theories;
we are spun round and round and shown this or the other view of life,
until only fools or knaves can hold to their opinions. We take a sight
at a condition in life, and say we have studied it; our most elaborate
view is no more than an impression. If we had breathing space, we should
take the occasion to modify and adjust; but at this breakneck hurry, we
are no sooner boys than we are adult, no sooner in love than married or
jilted, no sooner one age than we begin to be another, and no sooner in
the fulness of our manhood than we begin to decline towards the grave.
It is in vain to seek for consistency or expect clear and stable views
in a medium so perturbed and fleeting. This is no cabinet science, in
which things are tested to a scruple; we theorise with a pistol to our
head; we are confronted with a new set of conditions on which we have
not only to pass a judgment, but to take action, before the hour is at
an end. And we cannot even regard ourselves as a constant; in this flux
of things, our identity itself seems in a perpetual variation; and not
infrequently we find our own disguise the strangest in the masquerade.
In the course of time we grow to love things we hated and hate things we
loved. Milton is not so dull as he once was, nor perhaps Ainsworth so
amusing. It is decidedly harder to climb trees, and not nearly so hard
to sit still. There is no use pretending; even the thrice royal game of
hide and seek has somehow lost in zest. All our attributes are modified
or changed; and it will be a poor account of us if our views do not
modify and change in a proportion. To hold the same views at forty as we
held at twenty is to have been stupefied for a score of years, and take
rank, not as a prophet, but as an unteachable brat, well birched, and
none the wiser. It is as if a ship captain should sail to India from the
Port of London; and having brought a chart of the Thames on deck at his
first setting out, should obstinately use no other for the whole voyage.

And mark you, it would be no less foolish to begin at Gravesend with a
chart of the Red Sea. _Si Jeunesse savait, si Vieillesse pouvait_, is a
very pretty senti