Young

“ As if any effort in the world could deprive of its charm the word ‘young,’ this essential notion of all that is blooming and fresh, this note of the dawn and the spring, and transform it into a term of reproach and insult! ”

“ Strong erect young men, sons of America, who perceive, with the clearness of the spirit, the problems of the future and who, with the red blood of youth coursing in their veins and the glow of enthusiasm lingering in their eyes, will take up the task of solving them. ”

“ Indeed, we remember no mind in poetic literature that seems to have absorbed less of the beauty and the healthy breath of the common landscape than Young’s. His images, often grand and finely presented—witness that sublimely sudden leap of thought,
“Embryos we must be till we burst the shell,
Yon ambient azure shell, and spring to life”—
lie almost entirely within that circle of observation which would be familiar to a man who lived in town, hung about the theatres, read the newspaper, and went home often by moon and starlight. ”

“ There is eternal feud between those two camps of misunderstanding, age and youth. This play, written by a young man, shows the feud from the point of view of youth. The play of King Lear shows it from the point of view of age. This play of youth is as lovely and as feverish as love itself. Youth is bright and beautiful, like the animals. Age is too tired to care for brightness, too cold to care for beauty. ”

“ The years of childhood and the subjection of school were behind us; the age of youth was spread out broadly, as a rich, flowery steppe, with an endless horizon,—a curious and unknown land into which we had started on a journey with good omens, youthful, strong, almost with wings on our shoulders, like young eagles. ”

“ How good it was to be young! No wonder men had so desperately sought the secret of Eternal Youth! Who would not be young for ever, for such dreams and such an appetite?
Here of course was the very heaven-sent confidant for such an enterprise as mine. I told him all about my whim, just for the pleasure of watching his face light up with youth's generous worship of all such fantastic nonsense. ”

“ Even while quaffing the third draught of the Fountain of Youth, they were almost awed by the expression of his mysterious visage.
But, the next moment, the exhilarating gush of young life shot through their veins. They were now in the happy prime of youth. Age, with its miserable train of cares, and sorrows, and diseases, was remembered only as the trouble of a dream, from which they had joyously awoke. ”

“ But the poet who gathered this circle of young people about him, holding them by the charm of his personality, who said that the way to keep young was to be with the young, who delighted in youth even to the last, giving evidence in himself that age is but the youth of immortality, was yet to youth, as he was to maturity, a leader—his judgment, not theirs, dominated. ”

“ The pure but ignorant boy going for the first time into the new life of the school, looking up to the older boys with that peculiar veneration the younger boy almost always feels for the older, moved in his senses by what he hears and sees, may speedily forget such home warnings as seem vague and pointless, and he may yield himself to a course most disastrous to his future. ”

“ I want young children as well as others, older only by accident of years, but whose hearts are always young—which is the eternal youth—to know the greatest French writer of his day, when, by the magic of his pen, he, like them, becomes young, gentle and charming. ”

“ He picked up the suitcase—an expensive suitcase it was, elaborately strapped and buckled, with a telescope back and gold fittings—and hastened toward the wagon. Mr. Young had just picked up the reins.
“Oh,—oh, I say!” faltered the boy. We have called him “the boy” all this time, but he did not consider himself a boy, he esteemed himself a man, if not full-grown physically, certainly so mentally. A man, with all a man's wisdom, and more besides—the great, the all-embracing wisdom of his age, or youth. ”

“ Young—as young as I am, at all events—tall, very tall (his head showing above others in a crowd) with clean-cut face, brown complexion, skin soft and clear, hands like a woman's, and large, beaming black eyes as frank as a child's. ”

“ But, whatever the Biographia choose to relate, the son of Young experienced no dismission from his college either lasting or temporary.
Yet, were nature to indulge him with a second youth, and to leave him at the same time the experience of that which is past, he would probably spend it differently—who would not?—he would certainly be the occasion of less uneasiness to his father. But, from the same experience, he would as certainly, in the same case, be treated differently by his father. Young was a poet: poets, with reverence be it spoken, do not make the best parents. ”

“ Such is ever Youth's account of battle with Age. Youth is a devil of a smart fellow, behind whom Age blunders along in the most ridiculous fashion. Later this young blood takes his place in the blundering ranks and then does learn that indeed he was right—Age knows nothing. For with years we begin to realise our ignorance, and the lesson is not complete when the grave slams the book. ”

“ If, furthermore, as I have ever held, the test of clearness of intellect and greatness of soul be Success, at any price and under any circumstances, none but a transcendental Windbag or a pedantic Baccalaureus will doubt my assertion that Young is a stupendous intellectual, ethical, and political Force—a Master-Spirit—a Colossal Being, a moral Architect of sublime cunning—as such to be reverenced by every right-thinking Man under the Sun. ”

“ Young, he is, of course, and still awaiting the development which life's deeper experiences are to bring, but nevertheless he is not again to taste the joy, the zest, or the enthusiasm which come to careless boyhood. ”

“ Assuming, then, as a polite writer should, that our readers know everything about Young, it will be a direct sequitur from that assumption that we should proceed as if they knew nothing, and recall the incidents of his biography with as much particularity as we may without trenching on the space we shall need for our main purpose—the reconsideration of his character as a moral and religious poet. ”

“ I love to see our young men wide awake, ready for anything in the line of right, having their minds bent in the channel of truth. They learn the truth from their childhood, and know but little else, if their parents have done their duty in properly directing the growth of the young branches. ”

“ The youths were for the most part genuinely young, but the women were of all ages. There were girls of fourteen, pert or simpering, with premature glances for the dusty, doubtfully collared young men; there were young women with the independence of their generation, and scorn or frank comradeship for men ”

“ But, discarding any inferences from such uncertain evidence, the outline of Young’s character is too distinctly traceable in the well-attested facts of his life, and yet more in the self-betrayal that runs through all his works, for us to fear that our general estimate of him may be false. ”

“ In a pause between the verses of a song Young heard, far off in the distance, the quick eager: "Ray! Ray! Ray! Tiger, siss, boom, ah!" of the short cheer. It was much more sharply and crisply given than the cheers he had joined in, and on the end of it came the numerals of the Sophomore class.
Now, he had understood vaguely that there was to be some sort of contest between his class and the Sophomores, but this blatant, confident cheer away off somewhere in the distant, indefinite darkness, gave him a start ”

“ Young, no doubt, deserves that kind of glory in a high degree. What I wish to do is to call attention to the fact that he was also a human being—or what in our disagreeable modern slang is called a 'personality'—of great interest. ”

“ Our young folks who have arrived at years of maturity should think and act for themselves. They are citizens of the earth; they have a share here, and have a part to bear—a character to form and frame and present to the world, or they will sink into oblivion and forgetfulness. ”

“ The young write in full sympathy with, as well as for, the young, they have a pensive satisfaction in feeling and depicting the full pathos of a tragedy, and on the other hand they delight in their own mirth, and fully share it with the beings of their imagination, or they work out great questions with the unhesitating decision of their youth. ”

“ But it is as a social and political observer that Young is now best known to the reading public, and the books which have established his reputation in these departments—his Tour in Ireland and Travels in France—are still full of interest and instruction. ”

“ Like certain young men of the beginning of the present century and the end of the last, who became illustrious at an early age, he looked excessively young, and was as fresh as a school-girl, though he had his hours of pallor. ”

“ There are, in fact, numbers on numbers of enthusiastic young people—they are nearly all of them young—who from sunrise to sunset spend their lives in adding to the sum of beauty that there is on earth. ”

“ Edward Young in his Night Thoughts says: 'Were man to live coeval with the sun, the patriarch-pupil would be learning still.' Young was undoubtedly right: some of the most forceful and penetrating lessons of life are given to us long after we have cast our text-books into some dusty corner, never to be opened more. ”

“ His soul kindles, triumphs, exults under the midnight canopy. As the Tartar horse when led forth from his stable to the free steppes and free firmament of the desert, bounds, prances, and caracoles for joy, so does Young, in the last part of his poem. Escaped from dark and mournful contemplations on Man, Death, Infidelity, and Earth’s “melancholy map,” he sees the stars like bright milestones on the way to heaven, and his spirit is glad within him, and tumultuous is the grandeur, and fierce and rapid the torrent, of his song. ”

“ Young was accustomed in after years to attribute, in no slight degree, the formation of those determined habits of perseverance which gave him the power of effecting any object upon which he was engaged, and by which he was enabled to work out his own education almost from infancy, and with little comparative assistance from others. ”

“ No one reads Young nowadays, and so every one who sees this, one of the most hackneyed of quotations, ascribes it to Shakespeare. Alas, poor Young!
Young erected a sundial in his garden here, with the motto, “Eheu, fugaces!” “Alas, how fleeting!” It was not long before some midnight robbers came, and, carrying it off, justified the inscription. Nowadays, besides the avenue and the votive urn, all that remains to tell of him is the tablet to his memory on the south wall of the aisle. ”

“ Young men again were here of various social origins, young Americans, treasonable clerks from other concerns, university young men, keen-looking, most of them, resolute, reserved, but on a sort of hair trigger, ready at any moment to be most voluble, most persuasive. ”

“ But, for a reflection of Young’s moral personality on a colossal scale, we must turn to those passages where his rhetoric is at its utmost stretch of inflation—where he addresses the Deity, discourses of the Divine operations, or describes the last judgment. ”

“ Young has some lines on this subject which are by some much admired.—But tho’ the subject be the same, it is differently circumstanced.—Young’s is a general description of the last judgment, Quarles describes its effect on a single being who is supposed to have lived fearless of such an event. ”

“ If I were a young man And young was my Lily, A smart girl, a bold young man, Both of us silly. And though from time before I knew She'd stab me with pain, Though well I knew she'd not be true, I'd love her again. ”

“ Some say we ought never to refer to such things to corrupt the minds of the young. Such people are so simple-minded, as to have forgotten all about the inquisitiveness or the passions of their own youth. The young! They know too much, taught by the example of their elders and the vicious stories in novels, of the intrigues and seductions in society life. They are attracted, allured, rather than repulsed and warned of danger. ”

“ How, in the swift sequence of the parties, we managed so often to find the young ladies at home remains one of the mysteries which age must leave youth to solve. Possibly in that sharply foreshortened perspective of the past the parties show of closer succession than they really were. ”

“ For young people, to give them knowledge and discretion. Youth is the learning age, catches at instructions, receives impressions, and retains what is then received; it is therefore of great consequence that the mind be then seasoned well, nor can it receive a better tincture than from Solomon's proverbs. ”

“ Those who were beginning to grow old had an air of youth, while there was something mature in the faces of the young. ”

“ A wise friend once wrote to Shelley: 'You are still very young, and in certain essential respects you do not yet sufficiently perceive that you are so.' It is seldom that the young know what youth is, till they have got beyond its period ”

“ Pathetic and spectral, they cannot persuade the callowest undergraduate that they are of his kind, for between them is fixed a great gulph—they have passed their examinations, and they wear the snowy ermine of the Bachelor’s gown.”
“But I,” his voice thrilled, “I shall be ever of the company of the Young, a happy, happy youth, for ever fair, immutable in my sempiternal adolescence....” ”

“ The greatest influence of the old upon the young has, from time immemorial, been near the dawn of puberty, when almost every race initiates youth into manhood. This, too, is still the age of most conversions and church confirmations. Here education culminates and here, too, in a sense, it began and extended slowly upward toward the university and downward toward the kindergarten as civilization advanced. ”