to speak) is only growing into the ox,—­while the clever boy, with his absurd opinions and feverish feelings and fancies, is developing into the mature and sober-minded man.  And if I could but rightly set out the thoughts which have at many different times occurred to me on this matter, if one could catch and fix the vague glimpses and passing intuitions of solid unchanging truth, if the subject on which one has thought long and felt deeply were always that on which one could write best, and could bring out to the sympathy of others what a man himself has felt, what an excellent essay this would be!  But it will not be so; for, as I try to grasp the thoughts I would set out, they melt away and elude me.  It is like trying to catch and keep the rainbow hues you have seen the sunshine cast upon the spray of a waterfall, when you try to catch the tone, the thoughts, the feelings, the atmosphere of early youth.

There can be no question at all as to the fact, that clever young men and women, when their minds begin to open, when they begin to think for themselves, do pass through a stage of mental development which they by-and-by quite outgrow, and entertain opinions and beliefs, and feel emotions, on which afterwards they look back with no sympathy or approval.  This is a fact as certain as that a calf grows into an ox, or that veal, if spared to grow, will become beef.  But no analogy between the material and the moral must be pushed too far.  There are points of difference between material and moral Veal.  A calf knows it is a calf.  It may think itself bigger and wiser than an ox, but it knows it is not an ox.  And if it be a reasonable calf, modest, and free from prejudice, it is well aware that the joints it will yield after its demise will be very different from those of the stately and well-consolidated ox which ruminates in the rich pasture near it.  But the human boy often thinks he is a man, and even more than a man.  He fancies that his mental stature is as big and as solid as it will ever become.  He fancies that his mental productions—­the poems and essays he writes, the political and social views he forms, the moods of feeling with which he regards things—­are just what they may always be, just what they ought always to be.  If spared in this world, and if he be one of those whom years make wiser, the day comes when he looks back with amazement and shame on those early mental productions.  He discerns now how immature, absurd, and extravagant they were,—­in brief, how Vealy.  But at the time, he had not the least idea that they were so.  He had entire confidence in himself,—­not a misgiving as to his own ability and wisdom.  You, clever young student of eighteen years old, when you wrote your prize essay, fancied that in thought and style it was very like Macaulay,—­and not Macaulay in that stage of Vealy brilliancy in which he wrote his essay on Milton, not Macaulay the fairest and most promising of calves, but Macaulay the stateliest and most beautiful of oxen.  Well,