Youth

Younth is not a time of life, it's a taste of mind; it is a temper of will of will, a quality of imagnation, a virgor of emotiom, a predomiance of courage over timedity, of the appetite for adventure over love of ease. Nody grows old by merely living a number of years; people grow old only deserting their ideals. Years wrinkle the skin , but to give up enthusiasm, wrinkle the soul, worry, doubt, self-distrust, fear, and despair these are the long, long years that bow the head and turn the growing spirit back to dust, whatever seventy or sixteen, there is every being heart the love of wonder. The sweet amazement at the stars and starlike things and thoughts, the undaunted challenge of events, the unfailing childlike appetite for what next, and the joy and the game of life; you are as young as your faith, as old as your doubt, as young as yourself-confidence, as old as your despair; so long as your heart receives messages of beauty, cheer, courage, grandeur and power from the earth; from man and from infinite, so long you are young when the wires are all down and all the central place of your heart is covered with snows of pessimism and the ice of cynicism, then you are grown old inneed and may God have mercy on your soul...........by Samuel Ullman