What a terrible thing it is to try to let off a little bit of truth into this miserable humbug of a world! - Nathaniel Hawthorne

Man’s own youth is the world’s youth; at least, he feels as if it were, and imagines that the earth’s granite substance is something not yet hardened, and which he can mould into whatever shape he likes. So it was with Holgrave. He could talk sagely about the world’s old age, but never actually believed what he said; he was a young man still, and therefore looked upon the world — that graybearded and wrinkled profligate, decrepit, without being venerable — as a tender stripling, capable of being improved into all that it ought to be, but scarcely yet had shown the remotest promise of becoming. He had that sense, or inward prophecy, — which a young man had better never have been born than not to have, and a mature man had better die at once than utterly to relinquish, — that we are not doomed to creep on forever in the old bad way, but that, this very now, there are the harbingers abroad of a golden era, to be accomplished in his own lifetime.

Some attribute had departed from her, the permanence of which had been essential to keep her a woman. Such is frequently the fate, and such the stern development, of the feminine character and person, when the woman has encountered, and lived through, an experience of peculiar severity. If she be all tenderness, she will die. If she survive, the tenderness will either be crushed out of her, or — and the outward semblance is the same — crushed so deeply into her heart that it can never show itself more. The latter is perhaps the truest theory. She who has once been a woman, and ceased to be so, might at any moment become a woman again, if there were only the magic touch to effect the transformation.

He had that sense, or inward prophecy, — which a young man had better never have been born than not to have, and a mature man had better die at once than utterly to relinquish, — that we are not doomed to creep on forever in the old bad way, but that, this very now, there are harbingers abroad of a golden era, to be accomplished in his own lifetime.