twenty years has fortified us to bear unnerved the disappointments of the greatest expectations. Then, if our confidence has been misplaced, it only furnishes another example of the fickleness of human integrity to which we have become accustomed, and the world undergoes no especial change in our eyes. But it is not thus when the young imagination finds for the first time that things are not what they seem. When the veneering drops off, the sight is ugly in the extreme, and the sensation a chilling one.
It is almost as if a portion of our own souls is taken from us and the void filled by painful illusions. Then for a time skepticism of all men's motives prevails, and we look around in vain for some one to trust. Sometimes in desperation all faith in human goodness is cast off, and the high resolves with which we had started to make it felt as a power for the accomplishment of some noble purpose are bitterly cast aside as a vain delusion.
When in the solemn and mysterious hour of dissolution immortality claims its own, and we are permitted to look only on what is mortal of a departed friend, whose glazed eyes and rigid lips are forever sealed to the gushings of our sympathies or the loving impulses of our affections, it is little we know of the deepest pathos in life, the most sacred sorrow, when the world closes like a desolate tomb around us, as we waken to the delusion that all the fair visions of joy and happiness, love and devotion, that have risen before us like some enchanted garden are but deceitful shadows, and they to whom we have looked up in reverence,—around whom our affections have
