I have often thought on this matter, and brought up many objections to my mind. Would not (I represented to myself), a more thorough school colleague, when thy Gustavus was lying on his back on the grass and dreaming to sink upward into the blue crater of the heavens, or with wings on his shoulder-blades to swim through the universe, drive him with his cane to a useful book? And, (said I), if I should say to the more thorough colleague it was all one on what a child's fancy wound its way upward, whether on a lackered staff, or on a living elm or on a black smoker's-tube, would not the colleague wittily reply, for that very reason it was _all one_?
Meanwhile I, on my part, should also possess wit of my own; I should hit upon the reply: "Do you believe, then, Sir Confrater, that between the greatest knave and the greatest comic poet, whom you produce, there is any difference? Certainly, a good plan of a Cartouche differs from a good plan of the Poet Goldoni's in this, that the first acts, himself, the comedy, which the latter gets acted by players."
Gustavus was now in the midst of the fairest and most momentous decade of man's flight to the grave, namely, the second. This decade of life consists of the longest and hottest days; and--as the torrid zone increases at once the size and the venom of the beasts--so at the glow of youth there ripen, indeed, love, friendship, zeal for truth, the spirit of poesy, but also the passions with their poison-teeth and poison-bags. In this decade the maiden steals away out of the years she has laughed through, and hides her sadder eye under the same weeping-willow beneath which the still youth cools his breast and his sighs, which rise for something nearer than moon and nightingale. Happy youth! at this moment all graces take thy hand, the poetic, the female, and nature herself, and lay aside their invisibleness and draw thee into a charmed circle of angels. I said, nature herself; for about her there glow still higher charms than the picturesque; and man, for whose eye she was a mile-long portrait full of enchantments, can bring with him to her a heart which shall make out of her a Pygmalion's image that has a thousand souls and with them all embraces one.... Oh, it never, never comes back again, the second decade of our poor life, which has more than three high festival days; when it has once gone by, a cold hand has touched our breast and eye; what still finds its way into that, what still forces its way out from both, has lost the first morning-charm and the eye of the old man opens then only to a higher world where he will perhaps again become a youth!