Youth Author:Charles Wagner Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Book First. INHERITANCE. What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul ? Jesus. There are more things in heaven and earth,... more » Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. — Shakespeare. chapter{Section 4YOUTH. CHAPTER I. THE CONQUESTS OF THE CENTURY. often see, toward the end of winter, the gardener full of anxious care walking among his espaliers and trellises. He notes the condition of the buds and the wood, and with a careful eye examines the mysterious coverings which the sap of spring will soon swell and burst. These walks, where anxiety is always mingled with hope, suggest to me by analogy another walk, more disquieting still and more interesting,— that which the thinker preoccupied with the future may take among youth. There, also, sleeps, veiled and yet apparent beneath the veil that covers it, the great question of to-morrow. It germinates and grows in the heart of youth; it sets in ferment in their brain things more significant than those which the gardener tries to discover under the covering of his buds. Always interesting and always worthy of the most sympathetic attention, youth should especially attract H-v -:;::",:;"-."-! - Youth. us at critical epochs when changes announce, themselves in the mental attitude. Does it not seem that this should be the case at the end of the present century ? Doubtless it is a vulgar error to confound periods of human evolution with the arbitrary chronological divisions called centuries. To the centuries are attributed a youth and an old age ; one speaks of their dawn and decline. Nothing is further from the truth. Powerful movements have marked the end of some centuries; others have begun in decay and senility. It is none the less true that there may be a coincidence between...« less