Friday, April 4 @ 8:19 AM Youth Youth is one thing worth living. Some day when you are old and wrinkled and ugly, and when thought had seared your forehead with lines, and when passion branded your lips with its hideous fires, you will feel it terribly. Beauty is a form of Genius; it is higher, indeed, than Genius, as it needs no explanation. It is one of the greatest facts of the world, like sunlight, or spring-time, or the reflection in dark waters of that silver shell we call moon. It cannot be questioned. It has its divine right of sovereignty. People say sometimes that Beauty is only superficial. However, Beauty is a wonders of wonders. It is only the shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible. The gods have been good to the beautiful ones. But what the gods give, they quickly take away. You have only a few years in which to live really, perfectly and fully. When your youth goes, your beauty will go with it, and then you discover that there are no triumphs left for you, or you have to content yourself with those mean triumphs that the memory of your past make more bitter than defeats. Every month as it wanes brings you nearer to something dreadful. Time is jealous of you, and wars against your lilies and your roses. You will become sallow, and hollow-cheeked, and dull-eyed. You will suffer horribly... Realize your youth while you have it. Don't squander the gold of your days, listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless failure, or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar. These are the sickly aims, the false ideals, of our age. Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching fornew sensations. Be afraid of nothing. . . For there is such a little time that your youth will last--such a little time. The common hill-flowers wither, but they blossom again. The laburnum will be as yellow next June as it is now. In a month there will be purple stars on the clematis, and year after year the green night of its leaves will hold its purple stars. But we never get back our youth. The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty becomes sluggish. Our limbs fail, our senses rot. We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to. Youth! Youth! There is absolutely nothing in the world but youth! Back to top.