mind. Siegfried must meet the dragon before he can climb those heights on
which, encircled by fire, his ideal is to take the form and substance of
reality; and the prelusive notes of that fateful struggle are heard long
before the sword is forged or the hour of destiny has come.

There is no test of character more severe or difficult to bear than the
suspense of waiting. The man who can act eases his soul under the greatest
calamities; but he who is compelled to wait, unless he be of hardy fibre,
eats his heart out in a futile despair. Troops will endure losses when
they are caught up in the stir of a charge which would demoralise and
scatter them if they were compelled to halt under the relentless guns of
masked batteries. Now, the characteristic trial of youth is this
experience of waiting at a moment when the whole nature craves expression
and the satisfaction of action. The greater the volume of energy in the
man who has yet to find his vocation and place, the more trying the
ordeal. There are moments in the life of the young imagination when the
very splendour of its dreams fills the soul with despair, because there
seems no hope of giving them outward reality; and the clearer the
consciousness of the possession of power, the more poignant the feeling
that it may find no channel through which to add itself to the impulsion
which drives forward the work of society.

The reality of this crisis in spiritual experience--the adjustment between
the personality and the physical, social, and industrial order in which it
must find its place and task--is the measure of its possible painfulness.
It is due, perhaps, to the charm which invests youth, as one looks back
upon it from maturity or age, that its pain is forgotten and that sympathy
withheld which youth craves often without knowing why it craves. A helpful
comprehension of the phase of experience through which he is passing is
often the supreme need of the ardent young spirit. His pain has its roots