Ebook The Middle Years

F the author of this meandering record has noted elsewhere1 that an event occurring early in 1870 was to mark the end of his youth, he is moved here at once to qualify in one or two respects that emphasis. Every thing depends in such a view on what one means by one's youth — so shifting a con sciousness is this, and so related at the same time to many different matters. We are never 'old, that is we never cease easily to be young, for all life at the same time: youth is an army, the whole battalion of our facul ties and our freshnesses, our passions and our illusions, on a considerably reluctant march into the enemy's country, the country of the general lost freshness; and I think it throws out at least as many stragglers be hind as skirmishers ahead — stragglers who often catch up but belatedly with the main body, and even in many a case never catch 1 Notes of a Son and Brother, 1914.