stroke for stroke with them. Every new situation and employment dazzles till we find out the trick of it. The boy longs to escape from a farm to college, from college to the city and practical life. Then he looks up from his desk, or from the pit in the theatre, to the gay world of fashion,—harder to conquer than even the world of thought. At last he makes his way upward into the sacred circle, and finds there a little original power and a great deal of routine. These fine parts are like those of players, learned by heart. The men who invented them, with whom they were spontaneous, seem to have died out and left their manners with their wardrobes to narrow-breasted children, whom neither clothes nor courtesies will fit. So in every department we find the snail freezing in an oyster-shell. The judges do not know the meaning of justice. The preacher thinks religion is a spasm of desire and fear. A young man soon loses all respect for titles, wigs, and gowns, and looks for a muscular master-mind. Somebody wrote the laws, and set the example of noble behavior, and founded every religion. Only a man capable of originating can understand, sustain, or use any institution. The Church, the State, the Social System come tumbling ruinous over the heads of bunglers, who cannot uphold, because they never could have built them, and the rubbish obstructs every path in life. An honest, vigorous thinker will clear away these ruins and begin anew at the earth. When the boy has broken loose from home, and fairly entered the world that allured him, he finds it not fit to live in without revolutions. He is as much cramped in it as he was in the ways of the old homestead. Feeding the pigs and picking up chips did not seem work for a man, but he finds that almost all the activity of the race amounts to nothing more; no more thought or purpose goes into it. Men find Church and State and Custom ready-made, and they fall into the procession, ask no searching questions, but take things for granted without reason; and their imitation is as easy as picking up chips. It is no doing, but merely sliding down hill. The way of the world will not suit a valiant boy. To make elbow-room and get breathing-space, he becomes a reformer; and when now he can find no new worlds to conquer, he will make a world, laying in truth and justice every stone. The same seeker, who was so fired by the sight of his eyes, looking out from a mill-yard or a shoe-shop on the many-colored activity of his kind, who ran such a round of arts and sciences, pursuing the very secret of his being in each new enterprise, is now discontented with all that has been done. He begins again to look forward,—he becomes a prophet, instead of the historian he was. He easily sees that a true manhood would disuse our ways of teaching and worshipping, would unbuild and rebuild every town and house, would tear away the jails and abolish pauperism as well as slavery. He sees the power of government lying unused and unsuspected in spelling-books and Bibles. Now he has found a work, not for one finger, but for fighting Hercules and singing Apollo, worthy of Minerva and of Jove. He will try what man can do for man.
The history of every brave girl is parallel with that of her play-fellow and yoke-fellow. She sighs for sympathy, for a gallant company of youths and maidens worthy of all desire. Her music, drawing, and Italian are only doors which she hopes to open upon such a company. She longs for society to make the hours lyrical, for tasks to make them epic and heroic. The attitudes and actions of imaginative young persons are exalted every moment by the invisible presence of lovers, poets, inspired and inspiring companions. Such as they are we also shall be; when we walk among them and with them, we shall wash our hands of all injustice, meanness, and pretension. Women are as tired as men of our silly civilization, its compliments, restraints, and compromises. They feel the burden of routine as heavily, and keep their elasticity under it as long as
