音频下载[点击右键另存为][00:00.66]Passage 67 The Pain of Youth (Ⅰ)

[00:06.12]It is the habit of the poets, and of many who are poets neither in vision nor in faculty,

[00:14.55]to speak of youth as if it were a period of unshadowed gaiety and pleasure,

[00:21.66]with no consciousness of responsibility and no sense of care.

[00:27.24]The freshness of feeling, the delight in experience, the joy of discovery,

[00:34.46]the unspent vitality which welcomes every morning as a challenge to one's strength,

[00:41.90]invest youth with a charm which art is always striving to preserve,

[00:48.36]and which men who have parted from it remember with a sense of pathos;

[00:53.94]for the morning of life comes but once, and when it fades something goes which never returns.

[01:02.25]There are ample compensations, there are higher joys and deeper insights and relationships;

[01:10.57]but a magical charm which touches all things and turns them to gold, vanishes with the morning.

[01:18.99]All this is true of youth, which in many ways symbolises the immortal part of man's nature,

[01:27.64]and must be, therefore, always beautiful and sacred to him.

[01:32.67]But it is untrue that the sky of youth has no clouds and the spirit of youth no cares;

[01:40.88]on the contrary, no period of life is in many ways more painful.

[01:47.22]The finer the organisation and the greater the ability,

[01:52.03]the more difficult and trying the experiences through which the youth passes.

[01:57.40]George Eliot has pointed out a striking peculiarity of childish grief in the statement

[02:05.38]that the child has no background of other griefs

[02:09.65]against which the magnitude of its present sorrow may be measured.

[02:14.02]While that sorrow lasts it is complete, absolute, and hopeless,

[02:20.26]because the child has no memory of other trials endured, of other sorrows survived.

[02:27.81]In this fact about the earliest griefs lies the source also of the pains of youth.

[02:35.47]The young man is an undeveloped power;

[02:38.86]he is largely ignorant of his own capacity, often without inward guidance towards his vocation;

[02:46.30]he is unadjusted to the society in which he must find a place for himself.

[02:52.10]He is full of energy and aspiration,

[02:55.71]but he does not know how to expend the one or realise the other.

[03:01.84]His soul has wings, but he cannot fly, because, like the eagle,

[03:08.18]he must have space on the ground before he rises in the air.