days are still to come. If you gird yourselves now strictly and austerely for the tasks of springtime, it is more than likely that after the age of twenty-five you will find the years growing, for all their shocks and accidents, steadily richer and sweeter in their main substance, to the end. I think it hardly doubtful that most of you are now, in the early twenties, in your most restless and unhappy period. Why? Well, for a most interesting reason: because, as Emerson says, "All young persons thirst for a real existence for an object—for something great and good which they shall do with their heart."
You are at precisely the period when one casts about most earnestly for something great and good to do with one's heart. You have considered many possibilities, yet you hang in the doldrums of indecision. As yet, you have not found any object within your reach which seems great and good enough to command a life's devotion. You sigh for definite objects which you know are not for you, or you seethe with vague desires for dim unattainable things. You are unhappy because you still stand with arms wide-outstretched to embrace the infinite. You have not yet soberly reflected upon the elementary physical and spiritual truth that it is only by closing your arms and resolutely
