THE MELANCHOLY OF YOUTH.

Waikato Times, Volume XXX, Issue 2492, 30 June 1888, Page 1 (Supplement)

THE MELANCHOLY OF YOUTH.

Tub editor of a leading journal recently remarked that most of the educated young men who came to him for employment wore gloomy countenances and apparently thought life not worth living.

"Why," he asked, "should the young look upon melancholy as a luxury? It is the middle-aged man, who has real troubles to fight every hour, who is shrewd, practical, ready to joke or laugh." Boswell draws a pathetic picture of Johnson, with his big, awkward frame and homely face, among the fashionable young men at college, avoiding them, hiding in solitary corners, a prey to a morbid melancholy.

There arc young people who will read thef-e lines who suffer acutely from an unaccountable sense of loneliness and melai choly. They are ready to complain that tlicy do not find in life what they sock, that their companions are frivolous and their aims ignoble. Yet the young 1 who at nineteen delights in solitude and melancholy poetry will probably at thirty-nino bo a healthy, cheerful labourer in the harness with the very people whose shallowness he now scorns.

The cause of this melancholy of youth is perhaps, the uncertainty which the young man feels about his own powers and place, Ill's companions, and his future. If he has high impulses, his mind is filled with shadowy ambitions and plans. He hoars nothing of such ambitions or longings from the people whom he meets every day and who are too busy to think about such things.