The most irresistible charm of youth is its bubbling enthusiasm. Youth sees no darkness ahead,—no defile that has no outlet,—it forgets that there is such a thing as failure in the world, and believes that mankind has been waiting all these centuries for him to come and be the liberator of truth and energy and beauty.
Of what use was it to forbid the boy Handel to touch a musical instrument, or to forbid him going to school, lest he learn the gamut? He stole midnight interviews with a dumb spinet in a secret attic. The boy Bach copied whole books of studies by moonlight, for want of a candle churlishly denied. Nor was he disheartened when these copies were taken from him. The painter West began in a garret, and plundered the family cat for bristles to make his brushes.
It is the enthusiasm of youth which cuts the Gordian knot age cannot untie. "People smile at the enthusiasm of youth," says Charles Kingsley; "that enthusiasm which they themselves secretly look back to with a sigh, perhaps unconscious that it is partly their own fault that they ever lost it."
How much the world owes to the enthusiasm of Dante!
Tennyson wrote his first volume at eighteen, and at nineteen gained a medal at Cambridge.
"The most beautiful works of all art were done in youth," says Ruskin. "Almost everything that is great has been done by youth," wrote Disraeli. "The world's interests are, under God, in the hands of the young," says Dr. Trumbull.
It was the youth Hercules that performed the Twelve Labors. Enthusiastic youth faces the sun, it shadows all behind it. The heart rules youth; the head, manhood. Alexander was a mere youth when he rolled back the Asiatic hordes that threatened to overwhelm European civilization almost at its birth. Napoleon had conquered Italy at twenty-five. Byron and Raphael died at thirty-seven, an age which has been fatal to many a genius, and Poe lived but a few months longer. Romulus founded Rome at twenty. Pitt and Bolingbroke were ministers almost before they were men. Gladstone was in Parliament in early manhood. Newton made some of his greatest discoveries before he was twenty-five. Keats died at twenty-five, Shelley at twenty-nine. Luther was a triumphant reformer at twenty-five. It is said that no English poet ever equaled Chatterton at twenty-one. Whitefield and Wesley began their great revival as students at Oxford, and the former had made his influence felt throughout England before he was twenty-four. Victor Hugo wrote a tragedy at fifteen, and had taken three prizes at the Academy and gained the title of Master before he was twenty.
Many of the world's greatest geniuses never saw forty years. Never before has the young man, who is driven by his enthusiasm, had such an opportunity as he has to-day. It is the age of young men and young women. Their ardor is their crown, before which the languid and the passive bow.
But if enthusiasm is irresistible in youth, how much more so is it when carried into old age! Gladstone at eighty had ten times the weight and power that any man of twenty-five would have with the same ideals. The glory of age is only the glory of its enthusiasm, and the respect paid to white hairs is reverence to a heart fervent, in spite of the torpid influence of an enfeebled body. The "Odyssey" was the creation of a blind old man, but that old man was Homer.
The contagious zeal of an old man, Peter the Hermit, rolled the chivalry of Europe upon the ranks of Islam.