In the fight of life we all behave much as the soldiers do in the crash
and hurry of battle. If we reason the matter out with a semblance of
logic, we all know that we must move toward the shadows; but, even after
we are mortally stricken by disease or age, we persist in acting and
thinking as if there were no end. In youth we go almost further; we are
too apt to live as though we were immortal, and as though there were
absolutely nothing to result from human action or human inaction. To the
young man and the young woman the future is not a blind lane with a
grave at the end; it is a spacious plain reaching away towards a far-off
horizon; and that horizon recedes and recedes as they move forward,
leaving magnificent expanses to be crossed in joyous freedom. A pretty
delusion! The youth harks onward, singing merrily and rejoicing in
sympathy with the mystic song of the birds; there is so much space
around him--the very breath of life is a joy--and he is content to taste
in glorious idleness the ecstasy of living. The evening closes in, and
then the horizon seems to be narrowing; like the walls of the deadly
chamber in the home of the Inquisition, the skies shrink inward--and the
youth has misgivings.
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