Youth is gone,--bright, hopeful youth, when you counted the years with
jewelled numbers, and hung lamps of ambition on your path, which lighted
the palace of renown; when the days were woven into weeks of blithe
labor, and the weeks were rolled into harvest months of triumph, and the
months were bound into golden sheaves of years,--all gone!
The strength and pride of manhood is gone; your heart and soul have
stamped their deepest dye; the time of power is past; your manliness has
told its tale henceforth your career is _down_;--hitherto you have
journeyed _up_. You look back upon a decade as you once looked upon a
half score of months; a year has become to your slackened memory, and to
your dull perceptions, like a week of childhood. Suddenly and swiftly
come past you great whirls of gone-by thought, and wrecks of vain labor,
eddying upon the stream that rushes to the grave. The sweeping outlines
of life, that lay once before the vision,--rolling into wide billows of
years, like easy lifts of a broad mountain-range,--now seem close-packed
together as with a Titan hand, and you see only crowded, craggy
heights,--like Alpine fastnesses,--parted with glaciers of grief, and
leaking abundant tears!
Your friends are gone; they who counselled and advised you, and who
protected your weakness, will guard it no more forever.
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