The toy of her dream, every morning she bound to her pale forehead the nuptial crown and hung from her head the nuptial veil. With a sweet smile she then prepared to receive an imaginary bridegroom, all through the day to

the shadows of the night, which put an end to the vain hope, and brought again disillusion to the heart. Then first her madness took a tint of melancholy; but her ingenuous trust reappeared with each aurora, and with no memory of the disenchantment of the evening, murmuring, “It’s to-day that he comes,” she turned again to bind herself with the nuptial veil and crown, smiling once more with the hope of the promised one.

It is thus, not as with the loss of an ideal that has died, that humanity clothes itself each era with its nuptial dress and expects with renewed faith the realization of the dreamed ideal — a persistent but "Touching folly. And to provoke this renewal, unalterable as the rhythm of nature, has been in all times the function and the work of youth. Of the souls of each human springtime is woven that bridal dress for mankind; and when one tries to suppress that sublime stubbornness of hope which is born all winged from the very breast of delusion, all pessimisms are in vain, as well those which are based on reason as those which come from experience. They have to confess themselves powerless to contravene that lofty quand même which springs from the depth of human life. There are times in which, by an apparent alteration of the triumphal rhythm, human history crosses generations destined to personify from the very cradle vacillation and disillusion. But these times pass—not perhaps without having had their own ideal like the others, though in negative form and of unconscious love— and again is lit up in the spirit of mankind the hope of the long-desired bridegroom; him whose image, sweet and radiant as in the ivory verses of the mystics, suffices to maintain the interest and content of life, although never to be incarnated in reality.

Youth, which thus signifies, in the soul of individuals and of generations, light, love, energy, exists and with the same meaning in the evolutionary processes of societies. Among these peoples who feel and look on life as you do, fecundity and force will always be the dominion of the future. Now there was an age when the attributes of man's youth made themselves more than in any other age the attributes of the whole people, the marks of an entire civilization, and in which a breath of youth’s enchantment passed softly and touched the serene front of a whole race. When Greece was born, the gods awarded her the secret of youth inextinguishable; Greece is the soul when young. “He who in Delphi contemplates the pointed masses of the pines”—says one of the Homeric hymns—“imagines to himself that they must never grow old.” Greece did mighty things because it had of youth the gaiety which is the atmosphere of action, and the enthusiasm which is the omnipotent lever. The Egyptian priest with whom Solon spoke in the temple of Sais, said to the Athenian legislator, pitying the Greeks for their exuberant volubility: “You are only children.” And Michelet has compared the activity of the Greek soul to a happy game, about which are grouped smiling all other nations on the earth. But of that divine game of children on the beaches of the Archipelago and in the shadow of the olives of Ionia, were bom art, and philosophy, and free thought, and the curiosity of all investigation, and the consciousness of human dignity—all those God-given spurs which are yet our only inspiration and our pride. Absorbed in its hieratic austerity the country of the Egyptian priest represented only old age, old age given but to introspection, as if to practise for the repose of eternity, and waving aside any frivolous dream as with disdainful finger. Grace, inquietude, are proscribed from the attitudes of its soul, as was all action from its images of life. And when posterity turns its gaze upon Egypt, it meets only the sterile notion of order regulating the growth of a civilization which lived but to weave itself a shroud and build its tombs; the shadow of a sundial reaching out far over the sands of the desert.

The gifts of the youthful spirit—enthusiasm and hope—correspond in the harmonies of history and natural history to movement and to light. Wherever you shall turn your eyes you will find these, the natural atmosphere in which move all things that are strong and beautiful. Lift your eyes to the example most lofty of all, the idea of Christianity, over which even has weighed some accusation of having saddened the earth by proscribing the gaiety of paganism. Christianity itself is essentially an inspiration of youth, or was before it wandered from its cradle. Newborn Christianity was in the interpretation of Renan—which I hold only the more true that it is the more poetic—a picture of youth unsullied. Of the youth of the soul, or, as is the same thing, of a living dream of grace and purity, is made that divine fragrance which floats over the slow journeying^ of the Master across the Adds of Galilee; over his sermons, which are developed, free of any penitent sadness, near by a lovely lake, in valleys full of fruit; heard by the birds of heaven and the “lilies of the field,” which thus adorn his parables; preaching the happiness of the “Kingdom of God” to a sweetly smiling nature. From that happy picture are far absent the ascetics who accompanied ill his solitude the penitences of John the Baptist. When Jesus speaks of those who follow him, he compares them to the. guests and bridesmaids of a weddings And that is the impression, one still of divine contentment, which, embodied in the essence of the new faith, one feels persist through all the Odyssey of the evangelists ; which sheds a radiant joy about the spirit of the first Christian communities, an ingenuous joy of living, and which, going to Rome, opened easy passage to the hearts of the ignorant proselytes of the Transtevere. It triumphed by opposing the enchantment of the youth within them — embalsamed, as it were, by the libation of a new wine—to the severity of the Stoics and the decrepitude of the people of the Roman world.

Therefore, be ye conscious possessors of the blessed power you contain within yourselves. But do you never forget that this power is no more exempt than other virtuous impulses from weakening and disappearing if it be not carried into action. The gift of the precious treasure is from Nature; but on your own ideas depend whether it be fruitful or be vainly wasted, so scattered and dispersed among individual consciousnesses as never to appear a beneficent force on the life of human societies in general.

A profound critic has recently called attention in the pages of a novel—that immense surface mirror which seems to reflect the only image of our life these last hundred dizzy years—to the difference that exists between the soul of youth as portrayed in the time of “René ” of Chateaubriand and the modern French novel. His analysis found a progressive diminution of “internal youth” and energy, between the heroes of romanticism and the enervated in heart and will, as shown in “A Rebours,” or “Le Disciple.”, Yet a slight renascence of animation he hopefully noted in some more recent novels still, as in those of Lemaître, Wizewa, Rod, or even in “David Grieve,” which shows in the title character all the troubles and unquiet ideals of several generations, only to resolve them at last in the supreme disentanglement of a happy love.

Shall this hope in truth be fulfilled? You, who like workmen to the factory are about to pass under the portals of the twentieth century—shall you shed over the arts you study images brighter and more glorious than were left by us who are about to leave you? If that divine age when youthful minds gave model to the dialogues of Plato were only possible in the short springtime of the world; if it is the rule “ not to think on the Gods," as Forquias instructs the choir of captives in the second part of “Faust”—may we not at least dream of the coming of a human generation which shall return to life a sense of the ideal; a grand enthusiasm, when feeling may become a power, and when a vigorous rebirth of will-energy may expel from the bottom of our souls with shouts of victory those moral cowardices which are nurtured in our breasts by disappointment and by doubt? Shall again be youth the reality of our collective life, as it is that of the individuals ?

That is the question which troubles me as I look upon you.