Excerpt from The Yale Literary Magazine, Vol. 45: June, 1880 The casement slowly grows a glimmering square, So sad, so strange, the days that are no more. Yes, sad and strange, and wild with all regret, these days of youth that are no more. There is nothing deeper, nothing more full of awe in this human life, as it has come to me, than this - which like life itself never grows trite of that Past which is our very Selves, with the irrevocable ness, all its joys and sorrows and errors, errors of ignorance and of necessity, as well as those of will, each one of which must yet live on in us through all time. We can not live over our lives, we can not profit by the wisdom we have so dearly bought, often we can not even commend it to others. Yet how blind and how helpless we seem, how moulded by influence of birth and early environments, how subject to slightest whim, or lightest chance, how governed by laws of whose very existence we are in ignorance! But not of this, nor of my own peculiar boyhood, do I wish to write, although I have sometimes thought that college writing would be stronger, and col lege conversation of more meaning and worth if we did not go so far out of ourselves for topics. Looking back over my life, I have seemed to see forces at work in it, general in their scope. To these I would ask your thoughts. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.