Of the later writings of this kind the best are Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress,” a book from the great Puritan days in England, and the “Homesickness” of Jung-Stilling, written about a hundred years ago. In reality, the biographies of distinguished men should render this service of pointing out the way to their contemporaries and successors; but there are, unhappily, but few good and really true writings of this sort. For the biographers do not always understand the inmost experiences of those whose lives they are describing, many of which experiences really can not be made comprehensible to them in their full significance, since they were small occurrences with great consequences. Yet the autobiographies, which could tell all this, are usually marred with vanity and are sometimes the least true of biographies. It will therefore be well, on the whole, to recognize that in all these writings the individual character preponderates and that there is no “method” that reveals the proper course of life. The most useful thing about them, perhaps, is the very practical observations that might serve to encourage the wanderer on this much-travelled, yet universally unknown, way when he is likely to become weary, or to enlighten him when the continuation of the journey appears too uncertain or too much deflected from the presumably proper direction. It is first of all to be said that every life has steps, and that no life runs from beginning to end in unchanging uniformity like a clear, murmuring meadow-brook, or in a straight direction, like an artificially contrived canal. But no life perfectly resembles another in its course, and even the apparently most natural steps often happen in the reverse order, so that there are men who in their youth are preternaturally wise, and have their youthful qualities only when old. Yet there is never an inwardly healthy human life that shows no visible development at all, or that has spurts or pauses in it that are wholly arbitrary. A life that proceeds in a perfectly normal way is just as rare, but in every life there are mistakes that could have been avoided, and gaps that later it is no longer possible to fill out. For every period in life has its purpose and its task. In spring the tree must do little more than grow and blossom, but not bear fruit as yet. The fruits one produces on the modern dwarfed trees, purposely hindered in their natural growth and designed merely for a speedy production of fruit, acquire neither the good quality nor, apparently, the soundness of fruits ripened on trees that have attained their natural full growth.