Man's own youth is the world's youth; at least, he feels as if it
were, and imagines that the earth's granite substance is something
not yet hardened, and which he can mould into whatever shape he
likes. So it was with Holgrave. He could talk sagely about the
world's old age, but never actually believed what he said; he was
a young man still, and therefore looked upon the world--that
gray-bearded and wrinkled profligate, decrepit, without being
venerable--as a tender stripling, capable of being improved into
all that it ought to be, but scarcely yet had shown the remotest
promise of becoming. He had that sense, or inward prophecy,
--which a young man had better never have been born than not
to have, and a mature man had better die at once than utterly
to relinquish,--that we are not doomed to creep on forever in
the old bad way, but that, this very now, there are the harbingers
abroad of a golden era, to be accomplished in his own lifetime.
It seemed to Holgrave,--as doubtless it has seemed to the hopeful
of every century since the epoch of Adam's grandchildren,--that
in this age, more than ever before, the moss-grown and rotten Past
is to be torn down, and lifeless institutions to be thrust out of
the way, and their dead corpses buried, and everything to begin anew.
As to the main point,--may we never live to doubt it!--as to the
better centuries that are coming, the artist was surely right.
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