and uneasiness, of men who “have no sense of humor,” who take themselves too seriously, who are intense, self-absorbed, over-confident in matters of opinion, or else go plumed with conceit, proud of we cannot tell what, enjoying, appreciating, thinking of nothing so much as themselves.  These are men who have not suffered that wholesome change.  They have not come to themselves.  If they be serious men, and real forces in the world, we may conclude that they have been too much and too long absorbed; that their tasks and responsibilities long ago rose about them like a flood, and have kept them swimming with sturdy stroke the years through, their eyes level with the troubled surface—­no horizon in sight, no passing fleets, no comrades but those who struggled in the flood like themselves.  If they be frivolous, light-headed, men without purpose or achievement, we may conjecture, if we do not know, that they were born so, or spoiled by fortune, or befuddled by self-indulgence.  It is no great matter what we think of them.

It is enough to know that there are some laws which govern a man’s awakening to know himself and the right part to play.  A man is the part he plays among his fellows.  He is not isolated; he cannot be.  His life is made up of the relations he bears to others—­is made or marred by those relations, guided by them, judged by them, expressed in them.  There is nothing else upon which he can spend his spirit—­ nothing else that we can see.  It is by these he gets his spiritual growth; it is by these we see his character revealed, his purpose and his gifts.  Some play with a certain natural passion, an unstudied directness, without grace, without modulation, with no study of the masters or consciousness of the pervading spirit of the plot; others gives all their thought to their costume and think only of the audience; a few act as those who have mastered the secrets of a serious art, with deliberate subordination of themselves to the great end and motive of the play, spending themselves like good servants, indulging no wilfulness, obtruding no eccentricity, lending heart and tone and gesture to the perfect progress of the action.  These have “found themselves,” and have all the ease of a perfect adjustment.

Adjustment is exactly what a man gains when he comes to himself.  Some men gain it late, some early; some get it all at once, as if by one distinct act of deliberate accommodation; others get it by degrees and quite imperceptibly.  No doubt to most men it comes by slow processes of experience—­at each stage of life a little.  A college man feels the first shock of it at graduation, when the boy’s life has been lived out and the man’s life suddenly begins.  He has measured himself with boys; he knows their code and feels the spur of their ideals of achievement.  But what the expects of him he has yet to find out, and it works, when he has discovered, a veritable revolution in his ways both of thought