about the earliest griefs lies the source also of the pains of youth. The
young man is an undeveloped power; he is largely ignorant of his own
capacity, often without inward guidance towards his vocation; he is
unadjusted to the society in which he must find a place for himself. He is
full of energy and aspiration, but he does not know how to expend the one
or realise the other. His soul has wings, but he cannot fly, because, like
the eagle, he must have space on the ground before he rises in the air. If
his imagination is active he has moments of rapture, days of exaltation,
when the world seems to lie before him clear from horizon to horizon. His
hours of study overflow with the passion for knowledge, and his hours of
play are haunted by beautiful or noble dreams. The world is full of wonder
and mystery, and the young explorer is impatient to be on his journey. No
plan is then too great to be accomplished, no moral height too difficult
to be attained. After all that has been said, the rapture of youth, when
youth means opportunity, remains unexpressed. No poet will ever entirely
compass it, as no poet will ever quite ensnare in speech the measureless
joy of those festival mornings in June when Nature seems on the point of
speaking in human language.

But this rapture is inward; it has its source in the earliest perception
of the richness of life and man's capacity to appropriate it. It is the
rapture of discovery, not of possession; the rapture of promise, not of
achievement. It is without the verification of experience or the
corroborative evidence of performance. Youth is possibility; that is its
charm, its joy, and its power; but it is also its limitation. There lies
before it the real crisis through which every man of parts and power
passes: the development of the inward force and the adjustment of the
personality to the order of life. The shadow of that crisis is never quite
absent from those radiant skies which the poets love to recall; the
uncertainty of that supreme issue in experience is never quite out of