Take neither the one path nor the other, but retain, I beseech you, when
the time comes, that quality of sacredness of which I speak, for there
is no alternative. Some trouble fell upon our race, and all of us must
take upon ourselves the business and the burden. If you will attempt any
way out at all it will but lead you to some worse thing. We have not all
choices before us, but only one of very few, and each of those few choices
is mortal, and all but one is evil.
You should remember this also, dear little child, that at the beginning--
oh, only at the very beginning of life--even your reason that God gave
may lead you wrong. For with those memories strong upon you of perfect
will, of clear intelligence, and of harmonious beauty all about, you will
believe the world in which you stand to be the world from which you have
come and to which you are also destined. You have but to treat this world
for but a very little while as though it were the thing you think it to
find it is not so.
Do you know that that which smells most strongly in this life of
immortality, and which a poet has called "the ultimate outpost of
eternity," is insecure and perishes? I mean the passionate affection of
early youth. If that does not remain, what then do you think can remain?
I tell you that nothing which you take to be permanent round about you
when you are very young is more than the symbol or clothes of permanence.
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