Childhood is the dim Colchis where the Golden Fleece lies hidden; youth is the Jason that brings thence the "Argosy." Childhood is the sweet shadowy Hesperides, lying dreamily in the tropic sunshine, where the golden fruit ripens silently among the dark and glossy leaves. Youth is the Hero who penetrates the garden and makes it alive with human music, and wins the fruit and bears it forth into the free wide world. If childhood is the golden age, youth is the heroic age, when the heart beats high with the first consciousness of power, and the first stir of half-conscious hopes; when the earth lies before us as a field of glorious adventure, and the heaven spreads above us a space for boundless flight; before we have learned how mixed earth's armies are, how slow the conquests of truth; how seldom we can fight any battle here without wounding some we would fain succour; or win any victory in which some things precious as those borne aloft before us in triumph, are not trailed in the dust behind us, dishonoured and lost. Not that the most vivid and golden hopes of youth are delusions. God forbid that I should blaspheme His writing on the heart by thinking so for an instant! It is but that the Omniscient, who knows the glorious End that is to be, sets us in youth on the mountain-tops to breathe the pure air of heaven, foreshortening the intervening distance from these heights of hope and by its sunny haze, as eternity foreshortens it to Him; that, forgetting the things that are behind, and overspanning the things that are between, every brave and trusting heart may go down into the battle-field strong in the promise of the End, of the Triumph of Truth that shall yet surely be, and of the Kingdom of Righteousness that shall one day surely come. Such, at least, was youth to us; to Lettice Davenant, and Roger, and me. And, looking back, this sunny time of youth seems all gathered up into those six months before the beginning of the Civil War. For we were continually meeting through that summer; and the land was quiet. At least so it seemed to us at Netherby. The king had granted Triennial Parliaments; had granted that this Parliament should never be dissolved like its predecessors by his arbitrary will, but only with its own consent; had seemed, indeed, ready to grant anything. Strafford, the strong prop of his despotism, had fallen; Archbishop Laud, his instigator to all the petty irritations of tyranny, which had well-nigh driven the nation mad, lay helpless in the Tower; the unjust judges, who had decreed the evil decrees about ship-money, had fled, disgraced, beyond the seas. What then might not be hoped, if not from the king's active good-will, at least from his passive consent? There had, indeed, been an attempt to bring Pym and Hampden into the royal councils, and if this had not quite succeeded, at least the patriot St. John was solicitor-general.