the lifting of the mists will disclose the most beautiful landscape. But there are more chances that the course one has steered in the fog will end in one of many shipwrecks. Therefore the “’teens” should be the age of the erotic prologue, not of the drama. For this reason also, that no one can decide to what degree the transient may injure the final relations of life; nor to what degree great love may be missed or spoiled, when accidental love has anticipated its rights, even though this happened in the full and frank belief that the accident was destiny. No part of the art of living is more important for youth than developing in one’s self the knowledge of a predestined fellowship which permits of waiting. People curse the hazards which separate lovers. But it is less the hazards which separate than those which unite at the wrong time, that ought to be cursed. First youth seldom loses in love anything but what is unimportant; the reality shows itself—when both are free—as what cannot be lost. Those who belong to each other come together in the end; those whom chance parts, never belonged to each other. A man may fail of happiness by finding out too late what is real in himself or others; not by abstaining from action before this discovery. Therefore youth should wait before making decisive plunges into its own and others’ destinies, since great love may resemble the Japanese divinity, to pray to whom more than once is a crime, since it answers prayer only once. But even when a young couple has the profoundest mutual sense of the permanence of their feeling, it does not follow that their love ought immediately to involve the rights and the accompanying responsibilities of a later age. For young trees break or bend under too heavy a weight of fruit, nor does the fruit attain its full value on trees that are too young. Here nature herself is the opponent of youthful marriages. Let us leave on one side the possibility of people being unwillingly bound together through the consequences of an over-hasty union, and deal only with the certainty that the young people in a profound sense continue to belong to each other. They will nevertheless as surely suffer through the possible or probable consequence of their action, the child. Their consciousness of not being able to bear this consequence will doubtless make them try to avoid it. But this is an ugly beginning to a life of love. Many consider that it also involves dangers. For those who have already given to the race their tribute of new life, or who ought never thus to give, the choice must be free between the two dangers. But for the opening of a life in common this resource may be equally unsafe and unwholesome, since the racial instinct as a whole is left unaccomplished. And thus love is robbed of a part of its spiritual meaning, and sensuousness of its natural restraint. But even if these consequences do not follow, “failure” may