SCHOOLMATES slip out of sight and knowledge, and are forgotten; or if you meet them they bear another character; the boy is not there. It is a new acquaintance that you make, with nothing of your fellow upon the benches but the name. Though the eye and face cleave to your memory, and you meet them afterward, and think you have met a friend—the voice or the action will break down the charm, and you find only—another man. But with your classmates in that later school, where form and character were both nearer ripeness, and where knowledge, labored for together, bred the first manly sympathies—it is different. And as you meet them, or hear of them, the thought of their advance makes a measure of your own—it makes a measure of the NOW. You judge of your happiness by theirs—of your progress by theirs, and of your prospects by theirs. If one is happy, you seek to trace out the way by which he has wrought his happiness; you consider how it differs from your own; and you think with sighs how you might possibly have wrought the same; but _now_ it has escaped. If another has won some honorable distinction, you fall to thinking how the man—your old equal, as you thought, upon the college benches—has outrun you. It pricks to effort, and teaches the difference between now and then. Life, with all its duties and hopes, gathers upon your present like a great weight, or like a storm ready to burst. It is met anew; it pleads more strongly; and action that has been neglected rises before you—a giant of remorse. Stop not, loiter not, look not backward, if you would be among the foremost! The great Now, so quick, so broad, so fleeting, is yours—in an hour it will belong to the eternity of the past. The temper of life is to be made good by big, honest blows; stop striking, and you will do nothing; strike feebly, and you will do almost as little. Success rides on every hour; grapple it, and you may win; but without a grapple it will never go with you. Work is the weapon of honor, and who lacks the weapon will never triumph.