This is the time to teach children to begin their essays without preamble, by something that they really want to say, and to finish them leaving something still unsaid that they would like to have expressed, so as not to pour out to the last drop their mind or their fancy on any subject.
This discipline of promptitude in beginning and restraint at the end will tell for good upon the quality of their writing.
But the work of the imagination may also betray something unreal and morbid--this is a more serious fault and means trouble coming.

It generally points to a want of focus in the mind; because self predominates in the affections feeling and interest are self-centred.
Then the whole development of mind comes to a disappointing check--the mental power remains on the level of unstable sixteen years old, and the selfish side develops either emotionally or frivolously--according to taste, faster than it can be controlled.
There are cross-roads at about sixteen in a girl's life.

After two or three troublesome years she is going to make her choice, not always consciously and deliberately, but those who are alive to what is going on may expect to hear about this time her speech from the throne, announcing what the direction of her life is going to be.

It is not necessarily the choice of a vocation in life, that belongs to an order of things that has neither day nor hour determined for it, but it is when the mental outlook takes a direction of its own, literary, or artistic, or philosophical, or worldly, or turning towards home; it may sometimes be the moment of decisive vocation to leave all things for God, or, as has so often happened in the lives of the Saints, the time when a child's first desire, forgotten for a while, asserts itself again.

In any case it is generally a period of new awakenings, and if things are as they ought to be, generally a time of deep happiness--the ideal hour in the day of our early youth.