be done. The desire to improve upon all former attainments is strong. Confidence in one's power to do that which one sees to be desirable is unshaken. The look is forward and upward and the best things are to come. But I am told by those who think they know that these are not necessarily the traits of youth. There are many who are not hopeful but critical, not genial but cynical. There are young people, I am told, who despise sentiment and affect a belief that the end of the century is a failure. It may be so. It may be that, through some perversion of culture and some aping of the disillusions of middle life, there are those who, young in years, are languid and without elastic hope and ambition. But that illustrates nothing; for while it is possible for an old person to be young in heart, it is also possible for a youth whose years are still few to be aged in spirit. As the result of a misspent youth one may be decrepit in body and mind, as old at twenty-five as another is in a well kept old age of seventy-five. The world just now greatly needs young, hopeful, and strong men and women, and for their own sakes they who must live and work need the renewal of the hope and elasticity of youth. There are so many great things to be done and so many new things to work with, that the outlook toward the future is inspiring. The test of your real age comes when these beautiful possibilities of the coming twentieth century are presented. If one says, "For your art, your science, your culture, your progress, I do not care, I am not interested," then is he antiquated already, although in the bloom of youth,-a fossil while still alive. But if the surprising and beautiful outlook toward the future of human life draws and charms one so that he longs and determines to have some part in it yet, then is he young, and will stay young, in spite of wrinkles and gray hair. When the beautiful new tasks of the new time are displayed and workers are called for, the division between the old and the young is made by their answer to the summons. The old say, "I cannot, I wish I could, but I cannot." They who so reply are old, although they be still in the freshness of physical youth. For the young in heart and spirit reply, "I can, and I will." Disillusions. Does not But are there not disillusions? one find when he has reached middle life that the dreams of his youth are now revealed to him as dreams, and that life has been to him a disappointment? Is not enthusiasm always a sign of ignorance? Is it not wise to reduce our expectations to that which we can accomplish? To all of which I answer, as my reading of the riddle of life, that such disillusion is a sign that one has not kept his power of growth. He has not renewed his ideal. He has kept the dream of his immaturity after he had outgrown it. But they who have been alert; who, for new occasions, have had new hopes; who, for new times, have taken on new duties; who have changed with the changing seasons, living in the spirit of the times, and not seeking their ideal in the past,-they have not found life to be a series of disillusions, but a scene of activity, in which one beautiful picture of life was displaced by another still more beautiful, in which one noble duty was displaced by another still more inspiring. A disillusion is an experience in which one begins with something in sight which is pleasing and inviting: he advances toward it, and it disappears or changes into something different and unpleasant. That is a common experience; but it is not necessary that it should be in any case the final experience. The real life, the advancing, growing, youthful life, has not one dream, but a hundred; not one hope, but successive waves of them. He who, at middle life, comes to nothing but disillusion, would do well to keep it to himself. For disillusion is confession. He has not renewed, as he might have done, the expectations of his youth. Gardens, conservatories, farms, plantations, and human minds need constant attention and renewal, that the good may be increased and the evil kept out. Two Worlds. Always, in everything, there are two worlds. There are always two classes who differ according to the world in which they live. They tell the truth who say, "This is an old, worn-out, weary, wicked world, full of sin and misery and disappointment." They also tell the truth who say, "This is a young, beautiful, growing world, with all its better days to come." They are right who say that poverty, crime, and treachery abound; that in art there is wickedness; that in literature there is licentiousness; that drunkenness and brutality in town and country abound, and often increase with the advance of civilization. It is a common ex perience for the optimist to be challenged by one who presents the facts, and says, “Come now, you are a believer in progress. How do you explain these facts and figures which show the increasing evil of the world?" There are two worlds: one is the world of the dying; the other is the world of the living. The processes of living and dying are going on together, and one can choose which shall occupy his thoughts. Shall it be the shortening day, the fading flower, the falling leaf? Or shall it be the ripening fruit, the maturing harvest, the freshening air, and the life which busy nature is packing away for future use? Both are here; and the whole outlook and atmosphere of our minds is determined by the view we take, and the facts which we put in the foreground of our meditations. Not far from a railway is a town, beautiful for situation. It lies on a hillside, and shines afar. Close beside it, also plainly to be seen, is the silent city of the dead. About equal in number are the graves of the dead and the homes of the living. Now, one can imagine two men or women who, in equal degree, have suffered loss. But, standing between the graveyard and the town, one would face toward the living, the other toward the dead. One would say, "All my hope is buried there." The other would say, "Old hopes are dead, but I still have welcome and pleasure at the hearths of the living." The one is hopelessly old; the other is still young. The difference is in the attitude of the mind, and not in the facts of experience. Is the world growing better or worse? Both. It is ten times as bad as it was a thousand years ago, but it is a hundred times better. The two worlds-the rapidlygrowing, good world, and the slowly-growing, bad world—are all around us. We can live in one or the other as we please. We can move from one to the other if we choose. We can let the one or the other take up our thought, and shape our estimate of human life and character. Any youth who gives How many goodly creatures are there here! If the young, beautiful, good, and growing world were a much smaller part of the Universe than it is, it would be the part of wisdom to search for it, to get up exploring expeditions as men plan to find that North Pole which as yet no one ever visited. They who advertise the bad world, and insist that it is the only world there is, do much harm even when their hope is to reform it. He who makes flowers bloom, and fruits ripen, and increases the store of wholesome food, serves his generation. The weeds die out where the grain grows, and the cultivation of useful things is fatal to noxious weeds and poisonous plants. A crop of wheat will kill more weeds than a thousand men. More Life. The conclusion of the whole matter then is that, if you would have a growing life, you must associate more with the living than the dead. If you would help on the good and destroy the evil of the institutions of society you must make the good to abound that the evil may perish like the weeds in fruitful gardens. If you would keep the sunny temper of unspotted youth and the cheerful outlook of a hopeful expectation you must remember that where death abounds life must be strong, that where the sense of evil is present there virtue must flourish, and that you can change the world in which you live by turning your face toward beauty or toward ugliness, toward virtue or toward vice, toward the fresh opportunity that is coming in to-day or toward that lost one that went out last night. For comfort in trouble, for strength in adversity, for courage to stand up and fight the good fight of progress, to keep the heart warm, the sympathies fresh, it is our duty as it is our privilege to keep in the current of progress and brighten our minds with the sunshine of perpetual youth. The young who see nothing good in the world, who profess to have discovered that it is all a sham and a deceit, and who therefore take no interest in anything, who are hopeless, listless, and without enthusiasm,they are not uncommonly wise; they are simply superannuated. But they who keep their sympathies fresh, their consciences tender, their hope strong, they are young, and they are greatly needed; for all of lasting good that has come down to us from the past has been wrought by such as these, and all the good the future is to bring will come from their hopeful, wise endeavor. What youthful energy there is in that description of the old man Paul, crying, not "It is all over, I have given my life to the cause of Christian progress, and all that I get for it is disappointment and a cruel death," not that, but a shout of triumph, "I have fought the good fight, I have finished the course, I have kept the faith: henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness." That is the spirit of immortal youth which Jesus awoke in his followers and which ever since, leading all the better life of the ages, invites us now to our work, our inspiration, and our satisfaction. A MORNING WITH OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. A stay-at-home during the summer of 1896, it being too hot and dusty to enjoy driving often, I look back on reading the "Life and Letters of O. W. Holmes" as the pleasantest break in its monotony. The vivid personality of the "Life" (that is of the public life, for the details of the private life are too few) is its greatest merit. Holmes was not a precocious child; but that he was a remarkable youth is evident from his early letters. After a short trial of the study of law, he promptly decided that medicine was his true field of labor. He seemed to take the sacrifices of his parents, in the necessary "paring" of home expenses to meet the demands of his Paris life, with philosophy. Undoubtedly his steady pursuit of knowledge amply repaid them. His biographer says: "He was, I fancy, the first person to express a profound respect for talk. 'Re The member,' he said, 'that talking is one of the fine arts, the noblest, the most important, and the most difficult,-and that its fluent harmonies may be spoiled by the intrusion of a single harsh note.' He had also a curious theory about his own talking. idea,' he said, 'of a man's interviewing himself is rather odd. But then that is what we are all of us doing every day. I talk half the time to find out my own thoughts, as a schoolboy turns his pockets inside out to see what is in them. One brings to light all sorts of personal property he had forgotten in his inventory.' And again, 'Talk, to me, is only spading up the ground for crops of thought. I can't answer for what will turn up.'' But the wise men thought that this spading was more fascinating to witness than was the subsequent reaping of the crop in the shape of printed words. Mr. Edmund Gosse says: "Perhaps no man of modern times has given his contemporaries a more extraordinary impression of wit in conversation. We are told that he never overpowered his companions, never held the talk in monologue; but that he listened as brilliantly as he spoke, taking up every challenge, capping every anecdote, rippling over with an illuminated cascade of fancy and humor and repartee." It is a familiar story that Bret Harte, in his youth, sent the manuscript of some of his early poems to the doctor, who replied with decided commendation; but that, since the communication had been anonymous, he never knew whom he had encouraged until one day when Bret Harte walked into his library and developed the story. Mr. Aldrich said, at the famous Atlantic Breakfast: "Twenty years ago, I printed a volume of boyish verse; the first copy that came from the binder's hand was despatched to the Autocrat of the Breakfasttable, as if he had been waiting for it. In return I received the kindest letter ever written by a celebrity to an obscurity. It virtually told me not to make any more verses unless I could make better ones. told me this, but with such delicate frankness of phrase, that it seemed to me as if the writer had laid his hand in tender reproof on my shoulder, as an elder brother might have done. It "The fresh and subtle learning of the Autocrat, the humor and pathos of the poet, the skylark quality of note in his lyrics, he could not have perfected all these precious gifts, if God had not given him the most sympathetic of human hearts. Dr. Mitchell well and wittily said to him that he was not a man of letters, but a man of notes. . . . But his notes were almost sure to contain some bit of wit, some cleverly turned expression or happy simile, something which showed its origin as different from the ordinary." The doctor was delightfully funny over his own photographs. He says: "It is only fair to say that I do not pride myself particularly on any show that my portraits make. That is not my fault, however, and I look the camera in the face as good-naturedly as if it were going to make an Adonis of me. The photograph is a fair portrait enough, but I do not think my face is a flattering likeness of myself. I have always considered my face a convenience rather than an ornament. I am very glad that you liked my photograph. It is certainly less disagreeable than some I have seen; but Nature did not ask my advice about my features, and I take what was given me, and am glad that it is no worse." In writing Emerson's biography, Dr. Holmes saw "with delightful appreciation that fine humor which ran like a delicate, luminous golden thread through the subtle braid of Emerson's expression, and which escaped the notice of many of the seriousminded and high-souled idolaters at the Concord shrine." The doctor wrote to J. R. Lowell: "I find the study of Emerson curiously interesting. Few, I think, can bear study into all his mental, moral, personal conditions as he does." His biographer remarks, "This really was odd,—not that Holmes was influenced by Emerson, but that he did not seem to have been influenced by him in the very slightest degree." Dr. Holmes says: 66 If I had my will, I would never write anybody's biography or memoir; for we all want to draw perfect ideals, and all the coin that comes from Nature's mint is more or less clipped, filed, 'sweated,' or bruised and bent and worn, even if it was pure metal when stamped, and which is more than we claim, I suppose, for anything human." Mr. Morse says: "One thing is noteworthy. The biographer got to the end of his work without once telling to his reader any of his own secrets. What he himself held for truth or probability as to the matters dealt with by Emerson, what faith or what feeling he himself had toward mysticism and transcendentalism, toward God and man and the universe and all the points of religion interwoven therewith, he had managed to keep carefully to himself. "The curiosity to get at some definite notion of the doctor's actual beliefs remained unsatisfied, to the great disappointment of many a reader who made his way through the volume, not in order to find out what Dr. Holmes thought that Emerson thought, but to find out what Dr. Holmes himself thought, and who was no wiser on this point when he closed than when he opened the book. The astute biographer had evaded even this trap and extreme temptation. He would never take his recipes and formulas out of the province of medicine into that of religion. . . . "Over the Teacups,' was really a magnificent tour de force of a spirited old man, unyielding, holding his own against the column of the hostile years. . . . The most remarkable in these papers is the poem of The Broomstick Train,' so humorous in conception, so spirited and lifting in execution." After James Freeman Clarke's death Dr. Holmes says, "A precious memory has taken the place of a beloved and noble presence. We must be thankful that we have enjoyed so large a share of a life which belonged to the world as one of its most cherished and rarest possessions. We know not who among us will be the last survivor; but whoever he is, he will be the heir of a great wealth of memories, among which none will be sweeter, none freer from blemish or short-coming. ... Old age... in lightening our responsibilities (which President Walker spoke of as one of its chief blessings) rids us of many of our worries. At seventy we are objects. of veneration; at eighty, of curiosity; at ninety, of wonder; and, if we reach a hundred we are candidates for a side-show attached to Barnum's great exhibition.... "Our hearts lie between two forces,-the near ones of home and family, and those that belong to the rest of the universe. A little magnet holds its armature against the dragging of our own planet and all the spheres." Holmes writing to Motley says, "But you remain an idealist, as all generous natures do and must. I sometimes think it is the only absolute line of division between men, that which separates the men who hug the actual from those who stretch their arms to embrace the possible." Holmes said of Grant, "Of all the considerable personages I have seen, he appears to me to be the least capable of vanity. . . . His entire sincerity and homely truthfulness of manner struck me greatly. I cannot get over the impression he made on me. I have got something like it from women sometimes, hardly ever from men, that of entire loss of self-hood in a great aim which made all the common influences which stir up other people nothing to him.... So you see I have told you of small local and personal matters, not so well as a lively woman would have done, but as they came up to my mind. I read somewhere lately of a great personage then abroad-I think it was old John Adams-in which he begs for a letter full of trifling home matters. He gets enough that strains him to read, and he wants undress talk.... [1871] I went to the club last Saturday and met some of the friends you always like to hear of. I sat by the side of Emerson, who always charms me with his delicious voice, his fine sense and wit, and the delicate way he steps about among the words of his vocabulary,—if you have seen a cat picking her footsteps in wet weather, you have seen the picture of Emerson's exquisite intelligence, feeling for its phrase or epithet. Sometimes I think of an ant-eater singling out his insects, as I see him looking about, and at last seizing his noun or adjective, the best, the only which would serve the need of his thought. . . . "But I suppose it is not worth one's while to think too much about what we might have done or might have been. Our self determination is, I suspect, much more limited than we are in the habit of considering it. . . . We never know each other until we have come together in the hour of trial, . . . going down into those depths of consciousness where all of us bury out of sight our hopes, our fears, our memories, our dreams, that pleasant shadowy world of ours, into which it is the supreme privilege of friend ship to be admitted. No, not pale or shadowy to men of strong natures and quick sensibilities. "Mrs. Sally Gardiner-older than myself, unmarried, fastidious, a lover of Emerson's writings, a good and delicately organized woman, on whose gravestone I read, 'She loved much'-once said to me, or one of my friends, there was a poem of mine she often read the last thing at night as children say, 'Now I lay me.' [This poem was 'The Chambered Nautilus.']... Our better moments, that lift infirmer natures for the time, at least, to the level of those whom they admire and reverence! What yearning there is in tender natures, knitted in with the life of others, often nobler and purer than themselves, for that unquestioning childlike belief which is so largely a divine gift, and for which many pray without ever reaching it! Dr. Edward H. Clarke,-what sermons his bedside preaches! Pity! I feel as if that would be all that would be left of me, if I live but a few years longer. . . . I sometimes think that I might almost have a vocation to visit the sick and suffering, were I self-denying enough, which I fear I am not. But I do have the satisfaction of knowing that I have done something of late to lighten the burden of others in their sorrow, not much, very little compared with what hundreds of women are doing all the time. I go and sit now and then with Dr. Jacob Bigelow, Senior, now close upon ninety years old, stone-blind, utterly helpless and bed-ridden. Would you believe it? He is one of the most cheerful, lively, and seemingly happy, or at least serenely tranquil, persons I ever met. If all suffering and privation were borne as he and Dr. Clarke bear theirs, it would be easier to contemplate human existence. "I was writing this morning to an unknown English correspondent, a lady who has twice written me very interesting letters, not the mere commonplace ones of mere expression of liking and all that, but serious, though most kindly questionings,— whether I had not been sometimes too sharp in speaking of unmarried women; all which I took to heart, as I hope I do every well-intended criticism, especially if I think it may be just. I told her, what is true, that I like to face the accusing angel. |