O youth! youth! You go your way heedless, uncaring — as if you owned all the treasures of the world; even grief elates you, even sorrow sits well upon your brow. You are self-confident and insolent and you say, ‘I alone am alive — behold!’ even while your own days fly past and vanish without trace and without number, and everything within you melts away like wax in the sun…like snow…and perhaps the whole secret of your enchantment lies not, indeed, in your power to do whatever you may will, but in your power to think that there is nothing you will not do; it is this that you scatter to the winds — gifts which you could never have used to any other purpose. Each of us feels most deeply convinced that he has been too prodigal of his gifts — that he has a right to cry, ‘Oh, what could I not have done, if only I had not wasted my time.’ And here am I…what did I hope — what did I expect? What rich promise did the future seem to hold out to me, when with scarcely a sigh — only a bleak sense of utter desolation — I took my leave from the brief phantom, risen for a fleeting instant, of my first love? What has come of it all — of all that I had hoped for? And now when the shades of evening are beginning to close in upon my life, what have I left that is fresher, dearer to me than the memories of that brief storm that came and went so swiftly one morning in the spring?