晨读英语美文100篇 Passage 67 The Pain of Youth (Ⅰ)
 音频下载[点击右键另存为][00:00.66]Passage 67 The Pain of Youth (Ⅰ)[00:06.12]It is the habit of the poets, and of many who are poets neither in vision nor in faculty, [00:14.55]to speak of youth as if it were a period of unshadowed gaiety and pleasure, [00:21.66]with no consciousness of responsibility and no sense of care. [00:27.24]The freshness of feeling, the delight in experience, the joy of discovery, [00:34.46]the unspent vitality which welcomes every morning as a challenge to one's strength, [00:41.90]invest youth with a charm which art is always striving to preserve, [00:48.36]and which men who have parted from it remember with a sense of pathos; [00:53.94]for the morning of life comes but once, and when it fades something goes which never returns. [01:02.25]There are ample compensations, there are higher joys and deeper insights and relationships; [01:10.57]but a magical charm which touches all things and turns them to gold, vanishes with the morning. [01:18.99]All this is true of youth, which in many ways symbolises the immortal part of man's nature, [01:27.64]and must be, therefore, always beautiful and sacred to him. [01:32.67]But it is untrue that the sky of youth has no clouds and the spirit of youth no cares; [01:40.88]on the contrary, no period of life is in many ways more painful. [01:47.22]The finer the organisation and the greater the ability, [01:52.03]the more difficult and trying the experiences through which the youth passes. [01:57.40]George Eliot has pointed out a striking peculiarity of childish grief in the statement [02:05.38]that the child has no background of other griefs [02:09.65]against which the magnitude of its present sorrow may be measured. [02:14.02]While that sorrow lasts it is complete, absolute, and hopeless, [02:20.26]because the child has no memory of other trials endured, of other sorrows survived. [02:27.81]In this fact about the earliest griefs lies the source also of the pains of youth. [02:35.47]The young man is an undeveloped power; [02:38.86]he is largely ignorant of his own capacity, often without inward guidance towards his vocation; [02:46.30]he is unadjusted to the society in which he must find a place for himself. [02:52.10]He is full of energy and aspiration, [02:55.71]but he does not know how to expend the one or realise the other. [03:01.84]His soul has wings, but he cannot fly, because, like the eagle, [03:08.18]he must have space on the ground before he rises in the air. |
