How strategic the period of youth! Then the chiefest forces of life flow together in sensitive conjunction. Then four great gifts like four great rivers unite in one majestic current to bear up the young man's enterprises, and sweep him on to fame and fortune. Opportune are all the days when health spills over at the eye and ear and laughs through the lips. Men worn out are like overshot wheels—the life trickles and the buckets are filled slowly by long rests and frequent vacations. Young men are like undershot wheels—always, by day and night, the water overflows the banks.
Each morning the young soul wakens to the supreme luxury of living. The world is a great beaker brimmed with wine of the gods. The truth and beauty of field and forest and river give a pleasure that is exquisite to a keenly sensitive and perfectly healthy youth. Like an Aeolian harp, the slightest breath avails for wakening melody midst its strings. But years multiply cares. Age increases heaviness. Time destroys its own children. The poet says: "In youth we carry the world like Atlas; in maturity we stoop and bend beneath it; in age it crushes us to the ground." For the overtaxed and invalided, the dew-drops do not sparkle as diamonds; the wet grass suggests red flannels and cough sirups. For the nervous the bird's song is a meaningless chatter. For the sickly the clouds are big black water-bottles, though time was when they were chariots for God's angels, curtains for hiding ministering spirits trooping homeward at night, leaving all the air sweetly perfumed. It is the body that grants the soul permission to be happy.
To the opportunity offered by health may be added the years lying in front of the young heart like a great estate, as yet unincumbered. Powerful enthusiasms, too, are the inheritance of youth. Noble feelings, fine aspirations then pass through the mind, as in May the perfumed winds from the South pass over the fields. These motives beat upon the mind as steam upon the iron piston. Workmen excavating at Pompeii threw up soil that had been covered for 1,800 years. Exposed to the sun, young trees sprang up. Without the force of light and heat and dew and rain these seeds were dormant or dead. Thus each mind is a dead mind until the full warmth of great impulses quickens the dormant energies. The hopes, the ambitions, the aspirations of youth all conspire to make this a most strategic period. Then all the forces of life unite in a great gulf stream for bearing the soul up and sweeping it forward to new climes and richer shores.
Strategic the hour of prosperity. Men discount the speech of poverty, but the rich man's words weigh a ton each. It has been said that the poor man's dollar is just as good as the rich man's only when both are anonymous, for the dollar with a million behind it will go further than the dollar with a thousand behind it. This is a proverb: "A bid from Rothschild electrifies the market." Each new achievement and success builds higher the tower of observation that lifts the great man into the presence of the nation. All eyes are upon the prospered individual, all ears are alert to his whisper. Prosperity's voice is the voice of an oracle, all her words are winged. Every successful venture in the world of commerce or statecraft quadruples influence over the nation's youth. This principle interprets the curiosity of the boy in store or bank, asking a thousand questions about his successful employer. It explains why the eager aspirant for political influence searches all the journals for some word from Gladstone or Castelar or Bismarck. A sentence from these great champions hath sufficed for reversing the policy of a government. The memory of many triumphs lies back of the great leader's words and lends them weight.
Success is an orator; it charms multitudes. Full oft one who is a veritable genius for making homely truths beautiful has accomplished less for his age than some prosperous man whose few stumbling words have sufficed for shaping national policies and guiding his generation. All the young are drawn into the wake of the successful. Wealth fulfills the story of Orpheus, whose sweet voice made the very stones and trees follow after him. Truly wealth is an evangelist, the almoner of bounty toward college and library and art gallery and liberty and religion. But its chief use is in this: It enables its possessor to repeat his industry, integrity and thrift in the children of a nation. All youthful hearts do well to covet wealth, wisdom and leverage power! But man should remember that the chief value of prosperity is in its capitalization of personality, and the rendering of others sensitive to example and precept. Should man forget this, earth will hear no sadder cry than his when, closing the life career, he exclaims: "While thy servant was busy here and there the opportune moment was gone."
Friendship yields these plastic moments and unique opportunities. For the most part the soul dwells in a castle locked and barred against outsiders. No man can keep open-house for every passer-by. But friendship is an open sesame, drawing every bar and bolt. How the heart leaps when the friend crosses the threshold! His shadow always falls behind him. His coming is summer in the soul; his presence is peace. Friendship glorifies everything it touches. When on a stormy night our friend comes in he seems to warm the very fire upon the hearth; he sweetens the sweet singer's voice; lends new meaning to the wise man's words; gives reminiscence an added charm; makes old stories new; makes the laughter and smiles come twice as often and stay twice as long. Friendship lies upon the heart like a warm fire upon the hearth. By reason of friendship history exhibits every great man as leaving his school of thought and a group of disciples behind him. His spirit lingers with men long after his form has disappeared from the streets, as the sun lingers in the clouds after the day is done, as the melody lingers in the ear long after the song is sung. Longfellow, after a day and a night with Emerson, literally emitted poems and plays. He was stimulated by friendship as bees by rose liquor and the sweet pea wine. Friendship always makes the heart plastic. Then the mental furrows are all open and mellow; sympathy falls like dew and rain; then the heart saith to its friend: "Here am I, all plastic to your touch; work upon me your will; for good or ill—I am thine." Therefore, friendship imposes frightful responsibilities; in asking and receiving it we assume charge of another's destiny. This is the very genius of the teacher's influence over his pupil, the parent's over his child, the general's over his soldier, the patriot's over his people. Better a thousand times never open the furrow than to leave it unfertilized.
How strategic life's better hours! One of God's precious gifts is the luminous hour that denies the lower animal mood. Mind is not always at its best. Full oft our thought is sodden and dull. Then duty seems a maze without a clew and life's skeins all a tangle. The mind is uneasy, confused and troubled. Then men live to the eye and the ear and physical comforts; they live for houses and beautiful things in them; for shelves and rich goods upon them; for factories and large profits by them. Responsibility to God seems like the faint shadow of a vaguely remembered dream. The voice of conscience is in the ear like the far-off murmuring of the sea. The soul is sordid and the finer senses indurated. The angel of the better nature is bondslave to the worst. Then enters some element that nurtures the nobler impulse. Some misfortune, earthquake-like, cleaves through the hard crust. Or some gentle event, like the coming of an old friend or the returning to the old homestead, stirs old memories and kindles new thoughts.
Slowly the heart passes out of the penumbra. The mind, too long obscured like a sun eclipsed by clouds, searches out some rift. Suddenly reason comes into the clear. God rises like an untroubled sun upon the soul's horizon. How crystalline life looks! The mind literally exhales fancies and pictures, and each stick and stone is as full of suggestions and ideas as the forest is full of birds. Old problems become clear as noonday. Difficult questions lie clearly revealed before the mind like landscapes from which the fogs are lifted. Once the mind crawled tortoise-like through its work. Now it soars like an eagle. The soul seems a sweet-spiced shrub, and every leaf is perfumed. If in dull, obscure hours the soul was like a wooden beehive drifted o'er with snow, in its vision-hours the soul is like a glass hive out of which the bees go singing into sweet clover-fields. In these hours how unworthy the material life! How insubstantial the things of iron, wood and stone! Bodily things seem evanescent, as frost pictures on the window on a winter's morn. Then honor, integrity, kindness, generosity alone seem permanent and worth one's while. How easy then to do right. All habits that fettered the faculties like iron cuffs are now felt to be but ice fetters, quickly melting. Then the nobler self, using no whip of cords, looks upon meanness and selfishness, and by a look drives them from the heart and life.
Then years are fulfilled in a single hour. Then from its judgment-seat the soul reviews its past career, searches out secret sins and scorns them. How unworthy are vanity and pride and selfishness. In what garments of beauty and attraction are truth and purity clothed. The soul looks longingly unto the heavenly heights, as desert pilgrims long for oases and springs of water. Unspeakably precious are these strategic hours of opportunity. God sends them; divineness is in them; they cleanse and fertilize the soul; they are like the overflowing Nile. Men should watch for them and lay out the life-course by them, as captains ignore the clouds and headlands and steer by the stars for a long voyage and a distant harbor.