conditions so free and prosperous that the choice of work is made almost
instinctively and unconsciously, and apprenticeship merges into mastery
without any intervening agitation or uncertainty. At long intervals Nature
not only sends a great talent into the world, but provides in advance for
its training and for its steady direction and unfolding; but Nature is not
often so minute in her provision for her children. Those who receive most
generously from her hand are, for the most part, compelled to discover
their gifts and find their places in the general order as the result of
much searching, and often of many failures.

And even in the most harmonious natures the elements of agitation and
ferment are rarely absent. The forces which go to the making of a powerful
man can rarely be adjusted and blended without some disturbance of
relations and conditions. This disturbance is sometimes injurious, because
it affects the moral foundations upon which character rests; and for this
reason the significance of the experience in its relation to development
ought to be sympathetically studied. The birth of the imagination and of
the passions, the perception of the richness of life, and the
consciousness of the possession of the power to master and use that
wealth, create a critical moment in the history of youth,--a moment richer
in possibilities of all kinds than comes at any later period. Agitation
and ferment of soul are inevitable in that wonderful moment. It is as idle
to ask youth to be calm and contented in that supreme moment as to ask the
discoverer who is catching his first glimpse of a new continent to avoid
excitement. There are times when agitation is as normal as is self-control
at other and less critical times. There are days in June when Nature seems
to betray an almost riotous prodigality of energy; but that prodigality is
always well within the limits of order. In youth that which is to be
feared is not the explosive force of vitality, but its wrong direction;
and it is at this crisis that youth so often makes its mute and unavailing