And the last of these virtues, redolent of the old Greek time, when men walked boldly, when the world was still young, and gods and nymphs not all dead, is wisdom. To be wise is simply to have blended and harmonized one’s experience, to have fused it together into a “philosophy of life.” Wisdom is a matter not of quantity, but of quality of experience. It means getting at the heart of it, and obtaining the same clear warm impression of its meaning that the artist does of the æsthetic idea that he is going to represent. Wisdom in youth or early middle life may be far truer than in later life. One’s courage may weaken under repeated failure, one’s sense of justice be dulled by contact with the wrong relations between men and classes, one’s belief in democracy destroyed by the seeming failure of experiments. But this gathering cynicism does not mean the acquiring of wisdom, but the losing of it. The usefulness and practicability of these virtues of youth are not really vitiated by the struggles they have in carrying themselves through into practice; what is exhibited is merely the toughness of the old forces of prejudice and tradition, and the “pig-headedness” of the old philosophy of timorousness and distrust. True wisdom is faith in love, in justice, in democracy; youth has this faith in largest measure; therefore youth is most wise. Middle age steals upon a youth almost before he is aware. He will recognize it at first, perhaps, by a slight paling of his enthusiasms, or by a sudden consciousness that his early interests have been submerged in the flood of routine work and family cares. The later years of youth and the early years of middle life are in truth the dangerous age, for then may be lost the virtues that were acquired in youth. Or, if not lost, many will be felt to be superfluous. There is danger that the peculiar bias of the relish of right and wrong that the virtues of youth have given one may be weakened, and the soul spread itself too thin over life. Now one of the chief virtues of middle life is to conserve the values of youth, to practice in sober earnest the virtues that came so naturally in the enthusiasm of youth, but which take on a different hue when exposed to what seem to be the crass facts of the workaday world. But there is no reason why work, ambition, the raising of a family, should dull the essential spirit of youthful idealism. It may not be so irrepressible, so freakish, so intolerant, but it should not be different in quality and significance. The burdens of middle life are not a warrant for the releasing of the spiritual obligations of youth. They do not give one the right to look back with amused regret to the dear follies of the past. For as soon as the spirit of youth begins to leave the soul, that soul begins to die. Middle-aged people are too much inclined to speak of youth as a sort of spiritual play. They forget that youth feels that it itself has the serious business of life, the real crises to meet.