In the meantime he will avoid the hospital doors, the pale faces,
the cripple, the sweet whiff of chloroform - for there, on the most
thoughtless, the pains of others are burned home; but he will
continue to walk, in a divine self-pity, the aisles of the
forgotten graveyard. The length of man's life, which is endless to
the brave and busy, is scorned by his ambitious thought. He cannot
bear to have come for so little, and to go again so wholly. He
cannot bear, above all, in that brief scene, to be still idle, and
by way of cure, neglects the little that he has to do. The parable
of the talent is the brief epitome of youth. To believe in
immortality is one thing, but it is first needful to believe in
life. Denunciatory preachers seem not to suspect that they may be
taken gravely and in evil part; that young men may come to think of
time as of a moment, and with the pride of Satan wave back the
inadequate gift. Yet here is a true peril; this it is that sets
them to pace the graveyard alleys and to read, with strange
extremes of pity and derision, the memorials of the dead.
Books were the proper remedy: books of vivid human import, forcing
upon their minds the issues, pleasures, busyness, importance and
immediacy of that life in which they stand; books of smiling or
heroic temper, to excite or to console; books of a large design,
shadowing the complexity of that game of consequences to which we
all sit down, the hanger-back not least.
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