Youth expresses itself by falling in love. Whether it be art, a girl, socialism, religion, the sentiment is the same; the youth is swept away by a flood of love. He has learned to value, and how superlative and magnificent are his values! The little child hardly seems to love; indeed, his indifference to grown people, even to his own parents, is often amazing. He has the simple affection of a young animal, but how different his cool regard from the passionate flame of youth! Love is youth’s virtue, and it is wide as well as deep. There is no tragic antithesis between a youth’s devotion to a cause and his love for a girl. They are not mutually exclusive, as romanticists often love to think, but beautifully compatible. They tend to fuse, and they stimulate and ennoble each other. The first love of youth for anything is pure and ethereal and disinterested. It is only when thwarted that love turns sensual, only when mocked that enthusiasm becomes fanatical or mercenary. Worldly opinion seems to care much more for personal love than for the love of ideals. Perhaps it is instinctively more interested in the perpetuation of the race than in its progress. It gives its suffrage and approval to the love of a youth for a girl, but it mocks and discredits the enthusiast. It just grudgingly permits the artist to live, but it piles almost insurmountable obstacles in the path of the young radical. The course of true love may never run smooth, but what of the course of true idealism? The springs that feed this love are found, of course, in hero-worship. Sexual love is objectified in some charming and appealing girl, love for ideals in some teacher or seer or the inspiring personality of a friend. It is in youth that we can speak of real influence. Then is the soul responsive to currents and ideas. The embargo which kept the child’s mind immune to theory and opinion and tastes is suddenly lifted. In childhood, our imitation is confined to the external; we copy ways of acting, but we are insensitive to the finer nuances of personality. But in youth we become sensitive to every passing tone and voice. Youth is the season when, through this sensitiveness, the deadly pressures get their purchase on the soul; it is also the season for the most momentous and potent influences for good. In youth, if there is the possibility that the soul be permanently warped out of shape, there is also the possibility that it receive the nourishment that enables it to develop its own robust beauty. It is by hero-worship that we copy not the externals of personality, as in childhood, but the inner spirit. We feel ourselves somehow merged with the admired persons, and we draw from them a new stimulating grace. We find ourselves in them. It is not yielding to a pressure that would force us to a type, but a drawing up of ourselves to a higher level, through the aid of one who possesses all those qualities which have been all along, we feel, our vague and hitherto unexpressed ideal.