their tender hearts were pressed and saddened by fear. They are now set on fire by a sense of great redemption. They are prisoners pardoned.

For scholars the world is peopled only with saints, philosophers, and poets, and the studious boy seeks his own amid their large activity. So much of it meets his want, yet the whole does not meet all his want. He must combine and balance and embrace conflicting qualities. Every day his view enlarges. What was noble last year will now by no means content his conscience. Duty and beauty have risen.

The Ideal Tendency characterizes man, affords the only definition of him; and it is a perpetual, irresistible expansion. No matter on what it fastens, it will not stay, but spreads and soars like light in the morning sky.

To-day we are charmed with our partners, and think we can never tire of Alfred and Emily. To-morrow we discover without shame, after all our protestations and engagements, that their future seems incommensurate with our own. To our surprise, they also feel their paths diverging from ours. We part with a show of regret, but real joy to be free.

Both parties have gained from their intercourse a certainty of power and promise of greater power. Silly people fill the world with lamentation over human inconstancy; but if we follow love, we cannot cling to the beloved. We must love onward, and only when our friends go before us can we be true both to friendship and to them.

How eager and tremulous his excitement when at last the youth encounters all beauty in a maiden! Now he is on his trial. Can he move her? for he must be to her nothing or all. How stately and far-removed she seems in her crystal sphere! All her relations are fair and poetic. Her book is not like another book. Her soft and fragrant attire, can it be woven of ribbons and silk? She, too, has dreamed of the coming man, heroic, lyrical, impassioned; the beat of his blood a pæan and triumphal march; a man able to cut paths for her and lead her to all that is worthiest in life. Her day is an expectation; her demand looks out of proud eyes. Can he move this stately creature, pure and high above him as the clear moon yonder, never turning from her course,—this Diana, who will love upward and stoop to no Endymion? Now it will appear whether he can pass with another for all he is to himself. This will be the victory for which he was born, or blackest defeat. If she could love him! If he should, after all, be to her only such another as her cousin Thomas, who comes and goes with all his pretensions as unregarded as Rover the house-dog! Between these ifs he vacillates, swung like a ship on stormy waters, touching heaven and hell.

Meanwhile the maiden dares hardly look toward this generous new-comer, whose destiny lies broad open in his courage and desire. Others she could conciliate and gently allure, but she will not play with the lion. She will throw no web around his strength to tear her heart away, if it does not hold him. For the first time she guards her fancy. She will not think of the career that awaits him, of the help there is in him for men, and the honor that will follow him from them,—of the high studies, tasks, and companionship to which he is hastening. What avails this avoidance, this turning-away of the head? A fancy that must be kept is already lost. She read his quality in the first glance of deep-meaning eyes. When at last he speaks, she sees suddenly how beyond all recovery he had carried away her soul in that glance. They marry each the expectation of the other. It was a promise in either that shone so fair. Happy lovers, if only as wife and husband they can go on to fulfil the promise! For love cannot be repeated; every day it must have fresh food in a new object; and unless character is renewed, love must leave it behind and wander on.

If the wife is still aspiring,—if she lays growing demands on her hero,—if her thought enlarges and she stands true to it, separate from him in integrity as he saw her first, following not his, but her own native estimate,—she will always be his mistress. She will still have that charm of remoteness which belongs only to those who do not lean and borrow, to natures centred for themselves in the deep. There is something incalculable in such independence. It is full of surprise for the most intimate. In one breast the true wife prepares for her husband a course of loves. Every day she offers a new heart to be won. Every day the woman he could reach is gone, and there again before him is the inaccessible maiden who will not accept to-day the behavior of yesterday. This withdrawal and advancement from height to height is true virginity, which never lies down with love but keeps him always on foot and girded for fresh pursuit. Noble lovers rely on no pledges, point to no past engagements, but prefer to renew their relation from hour to hour. The heroic woman will command, and not solicit love. Let him go, when I cease to be all to him, when I can no longer fill the horizon of his imagination and satisfy his heart. But if there is less ascension in a woman, she is no mate for an advancing man. He must leave her; he walks by her side alone. So we pass many dear companions, outgrowing alike our loves and our fears.

Once or twice in youth we meet a man of sounding reputation or real wisdom, whose secret is hid above our discovery. His manners are formidable while we do not understand them. In his presence our tongues are tied, our limbs are paralyzed. Thought dies out before him, the will is unseated and vacillates, we are cowed like Antony beside Cæsar. In solitude we are ashamed of this cowardice and resolve to put it away; but when the great man returns, our knees knock and we are as weak as before. It is suicide to fly from such mortification. A brave boy faces it as well as he can. By-and-by the dazzle abates, he sees some flaw, some coarseness or softness, in this shining piece of metal; he begins to fathom the motives and measure the orbit of this tyrannous benefactor. They are the true friends who daunt and overpower us, to whom for a little we yield more than their due.

This rule is universal, that no man can admire downward. All enthusiasm rises and lifts the subject of it. That which seems to you so base an activity is lifted above low natures. What matter, then, where the standard floats at this moment, since it cannot remain fixed?

Perfection retreats, as the horizon withdraws before a traveller, and lures us on and on. It even travels faster than our best endeavors can follow, and so beckons to us from farther and farther away. We may give ourselves to the ideal, or we may turn aside to appetite and sleep; but in every moment of returning sanity we are again on our feet and again upon an endless ascending road.

When a man has tasted power, when he sees the supply there is so near in Nature for all need, he hungers for reinforcement. That desire is prayer. It opens its own doors and takes supplies from God's hand. No wise man can grudge the necessary use of the mind to serve the body with shelter and food, for we go merrily to Nature, and with our milk we drink order, justice, beauty, and benignity. We cannot take the husks on which our bodies are fed, without expressing these juices also, which circulate as sap and blood through the sphere. We cannot touch any object but some spark of vital electricity is shot through us. Every creature is a battery, charged not with mere vegetable or animal, but with moral life. Our metaphysical being is fed from something hidden in rocks and woods, in streams and skies, in fire, water, earth, and air. While we dig roots, and gather nuts, and hunt and roast our meat, our blood is quickened not in the heart alone. Deeper currents are swelled. The springs of our humanity are opened in Nature; for that which streams through the landscape, and comes in at the eye and ear, is plainly the same fluid which enters as consciousness,