"Arrogance," said Goethe, "is natural to youth. A man believes, in his youth, that the world properly began with him, and that all exists for his sake. In the East, there was a man who, every morning, collected his people about him, and never would go to work till he had commanded the sun to arise. But he was wise enough not to speak his command till the sun of its own accord was ready to appear." "At the outset of life," says Hazlitt, "our imagination has a body to it. We are in a state between sleeping and waking, and have indistinct but glorious glimpses of strange shapes, and there is always something to come better than what we see. As in our dreams the fullness of the blood gives warmth and reality to the coinage of the brain, so in youth our ideas are clothed, and fed, and pampered with our good spirits; we breathe thick with thoughtless happiness, the weight of future years presses on the strong pulses of the heart, and we repose with undisturbed faith in truth and good. As we advance, we exhaust our fund of enjoyment and of hope. We are no longer wrapped in lamb's-wool, lulled in Elysium. As we taste the pleasures of life, their spirit evaporates, the sense palls, and nothing is left but the phantoms, the lifeless shadows of what has been!"
"There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparel'd in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it has been of yore;
Turn wheresoe'er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.
"The rainbow comes and goes,
And lovely is the rose;
The moon doth with delight
Look round her when the heavens are bare;
Waters on a starry night
Are beautiful and fair;
The sunshine is a glorious birth;
But yet I know, where'er I go,
That there hath passed away a glory from the earth."
"Why," asks Souvestre, "is there so much confidence at first, so much doubt at last? Has, then, the knowledge of life no other end but to make it unfit for happiness? Must we condemn ourselves to ignorance if we would preserve hope? Is the world, and is the individual man, intended, after all, to find rest only in an eternal childhood?"
"If the world does improve on the whole," said Goethe, "yet youth must always begin anew, and go through the stages of culture from the beginning." But, "'tis a great advantage of rank," said Pascal, "that a man at eighteen or twenty shall be allowed the same esteem and deference which another purchaseth by his merit at fifty. Here are thirty years gained at a stroke."
"The whole employment of men's lives," said the same thinker, "is to improve their fortunes; and yet the title by which they hold all, if traced to its origin, is no more than the pure fancy of the legislators: but their possession is still more precarious than their right, and at the mercy of a thousand accidents: nor are the treasures of the mind better insured; while a fall, or a fit of sickness, may bankrupt the ablest understanding.... Cæsar was too old, in my opinion, to amuse himself with projecting the conquest of the world. Such an imagination was excusable in Alexander, a prince full of youth and fire, and not easy to be checked in his hopes. But Cæsar ought to have been more grave."
"Knowledge has two extremities, which meet and touch each other," says Pascal, again. "The first of them is pure, natural ignorance, such as attends every man at his birth. The other is the perfection attained by great souls, who, having run through the circle of all that mankind can know, find at length that they know nothing, and are contented to return to that ignorance from which they set out. Ignorance that thus knows itself is a wise and learned ignorance."
"That is ever the difference," said Emerson, "between the wise and the unwise: the latter wonders at what is unusual, the wise man wonders at the usual."
It has been said that the visitor, climbing the white roof of the Milan cathedral, and gazing on the forest of statues, "feels as though a flight of angels had alighted there and been struck to marble." "At the top of his mind," says Alger, "the devout scholar has a holy of holies, a little pantheon set round with altars and the images of the greatest men. Every day, putting on a priestly robe, he retires into this temple and passes before its shrines and shapes. Here he feels a thrill of awe; there he lays a burning aspiration; farther on he swings a censer of reverence. To one he lifts a look of love; at the feet of another he drops a grateful tear; and before another still, a flush of pride and joy suffuses him. They smile on him: sometimes they speak and wave their solemn hands. Always they look up to the Highest. Purified and hallowed, he gathers his soul together, and comes away from the worshipful intercourse, serious, serene, glad, and strong."