and stone is endowed with life; to the grown-up everything is dead. So the child’s thoughts are alive and the grown-up’s are dead. The child’s thoughts being alive have power to move him—truly, “he is full of life.” But the grown-up is full of death and Brain-Ash.

Because the child’s thoughts are alive he is so interested in the Now that it is easy to forget the past and ignore the future. The grown-up’s thoughts being dead, he takes refuge from the stench—he seeks again the live thoughts of his youth.

The cure of Age is interest, enthusiasm and their consequent activity of mind and body.

“Assume a virtue if you have it not,” and thus re-call it. Play with your work. Wipe out the past, forget the future, and play. Live now. Be a child now. Endow with life all things you touch. Permit nothing to remain cut and dried. Cut it by another pattern, your own brand new one. Talk to it, smile at it, imagine things to it, and of it. Quit being serious. “Dignity is a peculiar carriage invented to cover up the defects of the mind.” Quit covering up anything. Be a child, smiling.

Oh, but you can’t feel so? Nobody asked you to feel it. Just Do it, DO it, DO IT !—and never mind feeling. Practice makes perfect and feeling follows. Go in to win and keep at it, until you are the happiest kid in the bunch.

* * * * *

Mr. Flower says you cannot have youth and wisdom. He intimates that wisdom goes with Age. Dearie, don’t you believe

it. The wisdom which goes with Age is a dirty little wooden­hogshead counterfeit. Only in proportion as one stays young is he wise. Real wisdom is in The Limitless. It is in the electric atmosphere which is breathed by children and fools. In the hogshead it is deadened by the heavy effluvia of dead things. All true wisdom, all poetry, all art, all invention, comes to the child-brain in The Limitless. Only as poets, artists, inventors get out of the hogshead do they find that which lives, and stirs the dead things within.

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