Consider her as the person whose interests may be more closely allied
with your own than those of any other soul on earth. It certainly cannot
lessen your respect for the high relation she sustains toward your life
and your happiness. Counsel her in exceeding kindness, for you will
find her inclined to retort, as did _Ophelia_ to her brother _Laertes_,
at the head of this chapter, bidding you be sure you "reck your own
rede" which was an ancient form of admonishing one to heed his own
advice.
[Illustration]
YOUTH
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The soul that riseth with us, our life's Star,
Hath elsewhere had its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter darkness,
But trailing clouds of glory, do we come
From God who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy.--Wordsworth.
"Like virgin parchment," says Montaigne, "youth is
capable of any inscription." Let us have only those inscriptions which
will do us honor in the long years that the parchment will unroll before
us.
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