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+The Project Gutenberg Etext The Pocket R.L.S., by R.L. Stevenson
+#39 in our series by Robert Louis Stevenson
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+Title:  The Pocket R.L.S.
+
+Author:  by Robert Louis Stevenson
+
+March, 2001  [Etext #2537]
+
+
+The Project Gutenberg Etext The Pocket R.L.S., by R.L. Stevenson
+******This file should be named pkrls10.txt or pkrls10.zip******
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+
+This Etext of THE POCKET R. L. S. scanned and proofread
+by Sean Hackett (shack@eircom.net)
+
+
+
+
+
+THE POCKET R. L. S.
+Being favourite passages from the works of Stevenson.
+
+
+
+
+SELECTED PASSAGES
+
+When you have read, you carry away with you a memory of the
+man himself; it is as though you had touched a loyal hand,
+looked into brave eyes, and made a noble friend; there is
+another bond on you thenceforward, binding you to life and
+to the love of virtue.
+
+*
+
+It is to some more specific memory that youth looks forward
+in its vigils.  Old kings are sometimes disinterred in all
+the emphasis of life, the hands untainted by decay, the
+beard that had so often wagged in camp or senate still
+spread upon the royal bosom; and in busts and pictures,
+some similitude of the great and beautiful of former days
+is handed down.  In this way, public curiosity may be
+gratified, but hardly any private aspiration after fame.
+It is not likely that posterity will fall in love with us,
+but not impossible that it may respect or sympathise; and
+so a man would rather leave behind him the portrait of his
+spirit than a portrait of his face, FIGURA ANIMI MAGIS
+QUAM CORPORIS.
+
+*
+
+The pleasure that we take in beautiful nature is
+essentially capricious.  It comes sometimes when we least
+look for it; and sometimes, when we expect it most
+certainly, it leaves us to gape joylessly for days
+together, in the very homeland of the beautiful.  We may
+have passed a place a thousand times and one; and on the
+thousand and second it will be transfigured, and stand
+forth in a certain splendour of reality from the dull
+circle of surroundings; so that we see it 'with a child's
+first pleasure,' as Wordsworth saw the daffodils by the
+lake-side.
+
+*
+
+But every one sees the world in his own way.  To some the
+glad moment may have arrived on other provocations; and
+their recollection may be most vivid of the stately gait of
+women carrying burthens on their heads; of tropical effect,
+with caves and naked rock and sunlight; of the relief of
+cypresses; of the troubled, busy-looking groups of
+sea-pines, that seem always as if they were being wielded and
+swept together by a whirlwind; of the air coming, laden
+with virginal perfumes, over the myrtles and the scented
+underwoods; of the empurpled hills standing up, solemn and
+sharp, out of the green-gold air of the east at evening.
+There go many elements, without doubt, to the making of one
+such moment of intense perception; and it is on the happy
+agreement of these many elements, on the harmonious
+vibration of many nerves, that the whole delight of the
+moment must depend.
+
+*
+
+You should have heard him speak of what he loved; of the
+tent pitched beside the talking water; of the stars
+overhead at night; of the blest return of morning, the peep
+of day over the moors, the awaking birds among the birches;
+how he abhorred the long winter shut in cities; and with
+what delight, at the return of the spring, he once more
+pitched his camp in the living out-of-doors.
+
+*
+
+It was one of the best things I got from my education as an
+engineer: of which, however, as a way of life, I wish to
+speak with sympathy.  It takes a man into the open air; it
+keeps him hanging about harbour-sides, which is the richest
+form of idling; it carries him to wild islands; it gives
+him a taste of the genial dangers of the sea; it supplies
+him with dexterities to exercise; it makes demands upon his
+ingenuity; it will go far to cure him of any taste (if ever
+he had one) for the miserable life of cities.  And when it
+has done so, it carries him back and shuts him in an
+office!  From the roaring skerry and the wet thwart of the
+tossing boat, he passes to the stool and desk; and with a
+memory full of ships, and seas, and perilous headlands, and
+the shining Pharos, he must apply his long-sighted eyes to
+the pretty niceties of drawing, or measure his inaccurate
+mind with several pages of consecutive figures.  He is a
+wise youth, to be sure, who can balance one part of genuine
+life against two parts of drudgery between four walls, and
+for the sake of the one, manfully accept the other.
+
+*
+
+No one knows the stars who has not slept, as the French
+happily put it, A LA BELLE ETOILE.  He may know all their
+names and distances and magnitudes, and yet be ignorant of
+what alone concerns mankind,--their serene and gladsome
+influence on the mind.  The greater part of poetry is about
+the stars; and very justly, for they are themselves the
+most classical of poets.
+
+*
+
+He surprised himself by a sudden impulse to write poetry--
+he did so sometimes, loose, galloping octosyllabics in the
+vein of Scott--and when he had taken his place on a
+boulder, near some fairy falls, and shaded by a whip of a
+tree that was already radiant with new leaves, it still
+more surprised him that he should find nothing to write.
+His heart perhaps beat in time to some vast indwelling
+rhythm of the universe.
+
+*
+
+No man can find out the world, says Solomon, from beginning
+to end, because the world is in his heart; and so it is
+impossible for any of us to understand, from beginning to
+end, that agreement of harmonious circumstances that
+creates in us the highest pleasure of admiration, precisely
+because some of these circumstances are hidden from us for
+ever in the constitution of our own bodies.  After we have
+reckoned up all that we can see or hear or feel, there
+still remains to be taken into account some sensibility
+more delicate than usual in the nerves affected, or some
+exquisite refinement in the architecture of the brain,
+which is indeed to the sense of the beautiful as the eye or
+the ear to the sense of hearing or sight.  We admire
+splendid views and great pictures; and yet what is truly
+admirable is rather the mind within us, that gathers
+together these scattered details for its delight, and
+snakes out of certain colours, certain distributions of
+graduated light and darkness, that intelligible whole which
+alone we call a picture or a view.  Hazlitt, relating in
+one of his essays how he went on foot from one great man's
+house to another's in search of works of art, begins
+suddenly to triumph over these noble and wealthy owners,
+because he was more capable of enjoying their costly
+possessions than they were; because they had paid the money
+and he had received the pleasure.  And the occasion is a
+fair one for self-complacency.  While the one man was
+working to be able to buy the picture, the other was
+working to be able to enjoy the picture.  An inherited
+aptitude will have been diligently improved in either case;
+only the one man has made for himself a fortune, and the
+other has made for himself a living spirit.  It is a fair
+occasion for self-complacency, I repeat, when the event
+shows a man to have chosen the better part, and laid out
+his life more wisely, in the long-run, than those who have
+credit for most wisdom.  And yet even this is not a good
+unmixed; and like all other possessions, although in a less
+degree, the possession of a brain that has been thus
+improved and cultivated, and made into the prime organ of a
+man's enjoyment, brings with it certain inevitable cares
+and disappointments.  The happiness of such an one comes to
+depend greatly upon those fine shades of sensation that
+heighten and harmonise the coarser elements of beauty.  And
+thus a degree of nervous prostration, that to other men
+would be hardly disagreeable, is enough to overthrow for
+him the whole fabric of his life, to take, except at rare
+moments, the edge off his pleasures, and to meet him
+wherever he goes with failure, and the sense of want, and
+disenchantment of the world and life.
+
+*
+
+THE VAGABOND
+
+(TO AN AIR OF SCHUBERT)
+
+Give to me the life I love,
+     Let the lave go by me,
+Give the jolly heaven above
+     And the byway nigh me.
+
+Bed in the bush with stars to see,
+     Bread I dip in the river--
+There's the life for a man like me,
+     There's the life for ever.
+
+Let the blow fall soon or late,
+     Let what will be o'er me;
+Give the face of earth around,
+     And the road before me.
+
+Wealth I ask not, hope nor love,
+     Nor a friend to know me;
+All I ask, the heaven above
+     And the road below me.
+
+*
+
+Every one who has been upon a walking or a boating tour,
+living in the open air, with the body in constant exercise
+and the mind in fallow, knows true ease and quiet.  The
+irritating action of the brain is set at rest; we think in
+a plain, unfeverish temper; little things seem big enough,
+and great things no longer portentous; and the world is
+smilingly accepted as it is.
+
+*
+
+For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go.  I
+travel for travel's sake.  The great affair is to move; to
+feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come
+down off this feather-bed of civilisation, and find the
+globe granite under foot and strewn with cutting flints.
+Alas, as we get up in life, and are more preoccupied with
+our affairs, even a holiday is a thing that must be worked
+for.  To hold a pack upon a pack-saddle against a gale
+out of the freezing north is no high industry, but it
+is one that serves to occupy and compose the mind.
+And when the present is so exacting who can annoy himself
+about the future?
+
+*
+
+A SONG OF THE ROAD
+
+The gauger walked with willing foot,
+And aye the gauger played the flute:
+And what should Master Gauger play
+But OVER THE HILLS AND FAR AWAY?
+
+Whene'er I buckle on my pack
+And foot it gaily in the track,
+O pleasant gauger, long since dead,
+I hear you fluting on ahead.
+
+You go with me the selfsame way--
+The selfsame air for me you play;
+For I do think and so do you
+It is the tune to travel to.
+
+For who would gravely set his face
+To go to this or t'other place?
+There's nothing under Heav'n so blue
+That's fairly worth the travelling to.
+
+On every hand the roads begin,
+And people walk with zeal therein;
+But wheresoe'er the highways tend,
+Be sure there's nothing at the end.
+
+Then follow you, wherever hie
+The travelling mountains of the sky.
+Or let the streams in civil mode
+Direct your choice upon a road;
+
+For one and all, or high or low,
+Will lead you where you wish to go;
+And one and all go night and day
+OVER THE HILLS AND FAR AWAY!
+
+*
+
+A walking tour should be gone upon alone, because freedom
+is of the essence; because you should be able to stop and
+go on, and follow this way or that, as the freak takes you;
+and because you must have your own pace, and neither trot
+alongside a champion walker, nor mince in time with a girl.
+And then you must be open to all impressions and let your
+thoughts take colour from what you see.  You should be as a
+pipe for any wind to play upon.
+
+*
+
+It must not be imagined that a walking tour, as some would
+have us fancy, is merely a better or worse way of seeing
+the country.  There are many ways of seeing landscape quite
+as good; and none more vivid, in spite of canting
+dilettantes, than from a railway train.  But landscape on a
+walking tour is quite accessory.  He who is indeed of the
+brotherhood does not voyage in quest of the picturesque,
+but of certain jolly humours--of the hope and spirit with
+which the march begins at morning, and the peace and
+spiritual repletion of the evening's rest.  He cannot tell
+whether he puts his knapsack on, or takes it off, with more
+delight.  The excitement of the departure puts him in key
+for that of the arrival.  Whatever he does is not only a
+reward in itself, but will be further rewarded in the
+sequel; and so pleasure leads on to pleasure in an endless
+chain.
+
+*
+
+Nor does the scenery any more affect the thoughts than the
+thoughts affect the scenery.  We see places through our
+humours as through differently-coloured glasses.  We are
+ourselves a term in the equation, a note of the chord, and
+make discord or harmony almost at will.  There is no fear
+for the result, if we can but surrender ourselves
+sufficiently to the country that surrounds and follows us,
+so that we are ever thinking suitable thoughts or telling
+ourselves some suitable sort of story as we go.  We become
+thus, in some sense, a centre of beauty; we are provocative
+of beauty, much as a gentle and sincere character is
+provocative of sincerity and gentleness in others.
+
+*
+
+There is nobody under thirty so dead but his heart will
+stir a little at sight of a gypsies' camp.  'We are not
+cotton-spinners all;' or, at least, not all through.  There
+is some life in humanity yet; and youth will now and again
+find a brave word to say in dispraise of riches, and throw
+up a situation to go strolling with a knapsack.
+
+*
+
+I began my little pilgrimage in the most enviable of all
+humours: that in which a person, with a sufficiency of
+money and a knapsack, turns his back on a town and walks
+forward into a country of which he knows only by the vague
+report of others.  Such an one has not surrendered his will
+and contracted for the next hundred miles, like a man on a
+railway.  He may change his mind at every finger-post, and,
+where ways meet, follow vague preferences freely and go the
+low road or the high, choose the shadow or the sunshine,
+suffer himself to be tempted by the lane that turns
+immediately into the woods, or the broad road that
+lies open before him into the distance, and shows him the
+far-off spires of some city, or a range of mountain-tops,
+or a run of sea, perhaps, along a low horizon.  In short,
+he may gratify his every whim and fancy, without a pang
+of reposing conscience, or the least jostle of his
+self-respect.  It is true, however, that most men do not
+possess the faculty of free action, the priceless gift of
+being able to live for the moment only; and as they begin to
+go forward on their journey, they will find that they have
+made for themselves new fetters.  Slight projects they may
+have entertained for a moment, half in jest, become iron
+laws to them, they know not why.  They will be led by the
+nose by these vague reports of which I spoke above; and the
+mere fact that their informant mentioned one village and
+not another will compel their footsteps with inexplicable
+power.  And yet a little while, yet a few days of this
+fictitious liberty, and they will begin to hear imperious
+voices calling on them to return; and some passion, some
+duty, some worthy or unworthy expectation, will set its
+hand upon their shoulder and lead them back into the old
+paths.  Once and again we have all made the experiment.  We
+know the end of it right well.  And yet if we make it for
+the hundredth time to-morrow, it will have the same charm
+as ever; our hearts will beat and our eyes will be bright,
+as we leave the town behind us, and we shall feel once
+again (as we have felt so often before) that we are cutting
+ourselves loose for ever from our whole past life, with all
+its sins and follies and circumscriptions, and go forward
+as a new creature into a new world.
+
+*
+
+Herein, I think, lies the chief attraction of railway
+travel.  The speed is so easy, and the train disturbs so
+little the scenes through which it takes us, that our heart
+becomes full of the placidity and stillness of the country;
+and while the body is borne forward in the flying chain of
+carriages, the thoughts alight, as the humour moves them,
+at unfrequented stations; they make haste up the poplar
+alley that leads towards town; they are left behind with
+the signalman as, shading his eyes with his hand, he
+watches the long train sweep away into the golden distance.
+
+*
+
+Now, there is no time when business habits are more
+mitigated than on a walking tour.  And so during these
+halts, as I say, you will feel almost free.
+. . . If the evening be fine and warm, there is nothing
+better in life than to lounge before the inn door in the
+sunset, or lean over the parapet of the bridge, to watch
+the weeds and the quick fishes.  It is then, if ever, that
+you taste joviality to the full significance of that
+audacious word.  Your muscles are so agreeably slack, you
+feel so clean and so strong and so idle, that whether you
+move or sit still, whatever you do is done with pride and a
+kingly sort of pleasure.  You fall in talk with any one,
+wise or foolish, drunk or sober.  And it seems as if a hot
+walk purged you, more than of anything else, of all
+narrowness and pride, and left curiosity to play its part
+freely, as in a child or a man of science.  You lay aside
+all your own hobbies to watch provincial humours develop
+themselves before you, now as a laughable farce, and now
+grave and beautiful like an old tale.
+
+*
+
+It is almost as if the millennium were arrived, when we
+shall throw our clocks and watches over the housetops, and
+remember time and seasons no more.  Not to keep hours for a
+lifetime is, I was going to say, to live for ever.  You
+have no idea, unless you have tried it, how endlessly long
+is a summer's day that you measure out only by hunger, and
+bring to an end only when you are drowsy.
+
+*
+
+I know a village where there are hardly any clocks, where
+no one knows more of the days of the week than by a sort of
+instinct for the fete on Sundays, and where only one person
+can tell you the day of the month, and she is generally
+wrong; and if people were aware how slow Time journeyed in
+that village, and what armfuls of spare hours he gives,
+over and above the bargain, to its wise inhabitants, I
+believe there would be a stampede out of London, Liverpool,
+Paris, and a variety of large towns, where the clocks lose
+their heads, and shake the hours out each one faster than
+the other, as though they were all in a wager.  And all
+these foolish pilgrims would each bring his own misery
+along with him, in a watch-pocket!
+
+*
+
+The bed was made, the room was fit,
+     By punctual eve the stars were lit;
+The air was still, the water ran;
+     No need there was for maid or man,
+     When we put us, my ass and I,
+At God's green caravanserai.
+
+*
+
+To wash in one of God's rivers in the open air seems to me
+a sort of cheerful solemnity or semi-pagan act of worship.
+To dabble among dishes in a bedroom may perhaps make
+clean the body; but the imagination takes no share in
+such a cleansing.
+
+*
+
+I own I like definite form in what my eyes are to rest
+upon; and if landscapes were sold, like the sheets of
+characters of my boyhood, one penny plain and twopence
+coloured, I should go the length of twopence every day of
+my life.
+
+*
+
+There should be some myth (but if there is, I know it not)
+founded on the shivering of the reeds.  There are not many
+things in nature more striking to man's eye.  It is such an
+eloquent pantomime of terror; and to see such a number of
+terrified creatures taking sanctuary in every nook along
+the shore is enough to infect a silly human with alarm.
+Perhaps they are only a-cold, and no wonder, standing waist
+deep in the stream.  Or, perhaps, they have never got
+accustomed to the speed and fury of the river's flux, or
+the miracle of its continuous body.  Pan once played upon
+their forefathers; and so, by the hands of his river, he
+still plays upon these later generations down all the
+valley of the Oise; and plays the same air, both sweet
+and shrill, to tell us of the beauty and the terror
+of the world.
+
+The reeds might nod their heads in warning, and with
+tremulous gestures tell how the river was as cruel as it
+was strong and cold, and how death lurked in the eddy
+underneath the willows.  But the reeds had to stand
+where they were; and those who stand still are always
+timid advisers.
+
+*
+
+The wholeday was showery, with occasional drenching plumps.
+We were soaked to the skin, then partially dried in the
+sun, then soaked once more.  But there were some calm
+intervals, and one notably, when we were skirting the
+forest of Mormal, a sinister name to the ear, but a place
+most gratifying to sight and smell.  It looked solemn along
+the riverside, drooping its boughs into the water, and
+piling them up aloft into a wall of leaves.  What is a
+forest but a city of nature's own, full of hardy and
+innocuous living things, where there is nothing dead and
+nothing made with the hands, but the citizens themselves
+are the houses and public monuments?  There is nothing so
+much alive and yet so quiet as a woodland; and a pair of
+people, swinging past in canoes, feel very small and
+bustling by comparison.
+
+I wish our way had always lain among woods.  Trees are the
+most civil society.  An old oak that has been growing where
+he stands since before the Reformation, taller than many
+spires, more stately than the greater part of mountains,
+and yet a living thing, liable to sicknesses and death,
+like you and me: is not that in itself a speaking lesson in
+history?  But acres on acres full of such.  patriarchs
+contiguously rooted, their green tops billowing in the
+wind, their stalwart younglings pushing up about their
+knees; a whole forest, healthy and beautiful, giving colour
+to the light, giving perfume to the air; what is this but
+the most imposing piece in nature's repertory?
+
+*
+
+But indeed it is not so much for its beauty that the forest
+makes a claim upon men's hearts, as for that subtle
+something, that quality of the air, that emanation from
+the old trees, that so wonderfully changes and renews
+a weary spirit.
+
+*
+
+With all this in mind, I have often been tempted to put
+forth the paradox that any place is good enough to live a
+life in, while it is only in a few, and those highly
+favoured, that we can pass a few hours agreeably.  For, if
+we only stay long enough, we become at home in the
+neighbourhood.  Reminiscences spring up, like flowers,
+about uninteresting corners.  We forget to some degree the
+superior loveliness of other places, and fall into a
+tolerant and sympathetic spirit which is its own reward and
+justification.
+
+*
+
+For when we are put down in some unsightly neighbourhood,
+and especially if we have come to be more or less dependent
+on what we see, we must set ourselves to hunt out beautiful
+things with all the ardour and patience of a botanist after
+a rare plant.  Day by day we perfect ourselves in the art
+of seeing nature more favourably.  We learn to live with
+her, as people learn to live with fretful or violent
+spouses: we dwell lovingly on what is good, and shut our
+eyes against all that is bleak or inharmonious.  We learn,
+also, to come to each place in the right spirit.  The
+traveller, as Brantome quaintly tells us, 'fait des
+discours en soi pour se soutenir en chemin.'
+
+*
+
+There is no end, indeed, to making books or experiments, or
+to travel, or to gathering wealth.  Problem gives rise to
+problem.  We may study for ever, and we are never as
+learned as we would.  We have never made a statue worthy of
+our dreams.  And when we have discovered a continent, or
+crossed a chain of mountains, it is only to find another
+ocean or another plain upon the farther side.  In the
+infinite universe there is room for our swiftest diligence
+and to spare.  It is not like the works of Carlyle, which
+can be read to an end.  Even in a corner of it, in a
+private park, or in the neighbourhood of a single hamlet,
+the weather and the seasons keep so deftly changing that
+although we walk there for a lifetime there will be always
+something to startle and delight us.
+
+*
+
+It is in virtue of his own desires and curiosities that any
+man continues to exist with even patience, that he is
+charmed by the look of things and people, and that he
+wakens every morning with a renewed appetite for work and
+pleasure.  Desire and curiosity are the two eyes through
+which he sees the world in the most enchanted colours: it
+is they that make women beautiful or fossils interesting:
+and the man may squander his estate and come to beggary,
+but if he keeps these two amulets he is still rich in the
+possibilities of pleasure.
+
+*
+
+To look on the happy side of nature is common, in their
+hours, to all created things.  Some are vocal under a good
+influence, are pleasing whenever they are pleased, and hand
+on their happiness to others, as a child who, looking upon
+lovely things, looks lovely.  Some leap to the strains with
+unapt foot, and make a halting figure in the universal
+dance.  And some, like sour spectators at the play, receive
+the music into their hearts with an unmoved countenance,
+and walk like strangers through the general rejoicing.  But
+let him feign never so carefully, there is not a man but
+has his pulses shaken when Pan trolls out a stave of
+ecstasy and sets the world a-singing.
+
+*
+
+Science writes of the world as if with the cold finger of a
+starfish; it is all true; but what is it when compared to
+the reality of which it discourses? where hearts beat high
+in April, and death strikes, and hills totter in the
+earthquake, and there is a glamour over all the objects of
+sight, and a thrill in all noises for the ear, and Romance
+herself has made her dwelling among men?  So we come back
+to the old myth, and hear the goat-footed piper making the
+music which is itself the charm and terror of things; and
+when a glen invites our visiting footsteps, fancy that Pan
+leads us thither with a gracious tremolo; or when our
+hearts quail at the thunder of the cataract, tell ourselves
+that he has stamped his hoof in the nigh thicket.
+
+*
+
+The Greeks figured Pan, the god of Nature, now terribly
+stamping his foot, so that armies were dispersed; now by
+the woodside on a summer noon trolling on his pipe until he
+charmed the hearts of upland ploughmen.  And the Greeks, in
+so figuring, uttered the last word of human experience.  To
+certain smoke-dried spirits matter and motion and elastic
+ethers, and the hypothesis of this or that other spectacled
+professor, tell a speaking story; but for youth and all
+ductile and congenial minds, Pan is not dead, but of
+all the classic hierarchy alone survives in triumph;
+goat-footed, with a gleeful and an angry look, the type of
+the shaggy world: and in every wood, if you go with a spirit
+properly prepared, you shall hear the note of his pipe.
+
+*
+
+To leave home in early life is to be stunned and quickened
+with novelties; but when years have come, it only casts a
+more endearing light upon the past.  As in those composite
+photographs of Mr. Galton's, the image of each new sitter
+brings out but the more clearly the central features of the
+race; when once youth has flown, each new impression only
+deepens the sense of nationality and the desire of native
+places.  So may some cadet of Royal Ecossais or the Albany
+Regiment, as he mounted guard about French citadels, so may
+some officer marching his company of the Scots-Dutch among
+the polders, have felt the soft rains of the Hebrides upon
+his brow, or started in the ranks at the remembered aroma
+of peat-smoke.  And the rivers of home are dear in
+particular to all men.  This is as old as Naaman, who was
+jealous for Abana and Pharpar; it is confined to no race
+nor country, for I know one of Scottish blood but a child
+of Suffolk, whose fancy still lingers about the hued
+lowland waters of that shire.
+
+*
+
+THE COUNTRY OF THE CAMISARDS
+
+We travelled in the print of olden wars;
+     Yet all the land was green;
+     And love we found, and peace,
+     Where fire and war had been.
+They pass and smile, the children of the sword--
+     No more the sword they wield;
+     And O, how deep the corn
+     Along the battlefield!
+
+*
+
+To reckon dangers too curiously, to hearken too intently
+for the threat that runs through all the winning music of
+the world, to hold back the hand from the rose because of
+the thorn, and from life because of death: this it is to be
+afraid of Pan.  Highly respectable citizens who flee life's
+pleasures and responsibilities and keep, with upright hat,
+upon the midway of custom, avoiding the right hand and the
+left, the ecstasies and the agonies, how surprised they
+would be if they could hear their attitude mythologically
+expressed, and knew themselves as tooth-chattering ones,
+who flee from Nature because they fear the hand of
+Nature's God!
+
+*
+
+The spice of life is battle; the friendliest relations are
+still a kind of contest; and if we would not forego all
+that is valuable in our lot, we must continually face some
+other person, eye to eye, and wrestle a fall whether in
+love or enmity.  It is still by force of body, or power of
+character or intellect, that we attain to worthy pleasures.
+
+*
+
+Extreme BUSYNESS, whether at school or college, kirk or
+market, is a symptom of deficient vitality; and a faculty
+for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense
+of personal identity.  There is a sort of dead-alive,
+hackneyed people about, who are scarcely conscious of
+living except in the exercise of some conventional
+occupation.  Bring these fellows into the country, or set
+them aboard ship, and you will see how they pine for their
+desk or their study.  They have no curiosity; they cannot
+give themselves over to random provocations; they do not
+take pleasure in the exercise of their faculties for its
+own sake; and unless Necessity lays about them with a
+stick, they will even stand still.  It is no good speaking
+to such folk: they CANNOT be idle, their nature is not
+generous enough; and they pass those hours in a sort of
+coma, which are not dedicated to furious moiling in the
+gold-mill.
+
+*
+
+If a person cannot be happy without remaining idle, idle he
+should remain.  It is a revolutionary precept; but thanks
+to hunger and the workhouse, one not easily to be abused;
+and within practical limits, it is one of the most
+incontestable truths in the whole Body of Morality.  Look
+at one of your industrious fellows for a moment, I beseech
+you.  He sows hurry and reaps indigestion; he puts a vast
+deal of activity out to interest, and receives a large
+measure of nervous derangement in return.  Either he
+absents himself entirely from all fellowship, and lives a
+recluse in a garret, with carpet slippers and a leaden
+inkpot; or he comes among people swiftly and bitterly,
+in a contraction of his whole nervous system, to discharge
+some temper before he returns to work.  I do not care
+how much or how well he works, this fellow is an evil
+feature in other people's lives.  They would be happier
+if he were dead.
+
+*
+
+'We are all employed in commerce during the day; but in the
+evening, VOYEZ-VOUS, NOUS SOMMES SERIEUX.'
+These were the words.  They were all employed over the
+frivolous mercantile concerns of Belgium during the day;
+but in the evening they found some hours for the serious
+concerns of life.  I may have a wrong idea of wisdom, but I
+think that was a very wise remark.  People connected with
+literature and philosophy are busy all their days in
+getting rid of second-hand notions and false standards.  It
+is their profession, in the sweat of their brows, by dogged
+thinking, to recover their old fresh view of life, and
+distinguish what they really and originally like from what
+they have only learned to tolerate perforce.  And these
+Royal Nautical Sportsmen had the distinction still quite
+legible in their hearts.  They had still those clean
+perceptions of what is nice and nasty, what is interesting
+and what is dull, which envious old gentlemen refer to as
+illusions.  The nightmare illusion of middle age, the
+bear's hug of custom gradually squeezing the life out of a
+man's soul, had not yet begun for these happy-starr'd young
+Belgians.  They still knew that the interest they took in
+their business was a trifling affair compared to their
+spontaneous, long-suffering affection for nautical sports.
+To know what you prefer, instead of humbly saying Amen to
+what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have
+kept your soul alive.  Such a man may be generous; he may
+be honest in something more than the commercial sense; he
+may love his friends with an elective, personal sympathy,
+and not accept them as an adjunct of the station to which
+he has been called.  He may be a man, in short, acting on
+his own instincts, keeping in his own shape that God made
+him in; and not a mere crank in the social engine-house,
+welded on principles that he does not understand, and for
+purposes that he does not care for.
+
+*
+
+I suppose none of us recognise the great part that is
+played in life by eating and drinking.  The appetite is so
+imperious that we can stomach the least interesting viands,
+and pass off a dinner hour thankfully enough on bread and
+water; just as there are men who must read something, if it
+were only 'Bradshaw's Guide.' But there is a romance about
+the matter, after all.  Probably the table has more
+devotees than love; and I am sure that food is much more
+generally entertaining than scenery.  Do you give in, as
+Walt Whitman would say, that you are any the less immortal
+for that?  The true materialism is to be ashamed of what we
+are.  To detect the flavour of an olive is no less a piece
+of human perfection than to find beauty in the colours of
+the sunset.
+
+*
+
+For the country people to see Edinburgh on her hill-tops,
+is one thing; it is another for the citizen, from the thick
+of his affairs, to overlook the country.  It should be a
+genial and ameliorating influence in life; it should prompt
+good thoughts and remind him of Nature's unconcern: that he
+can watch from day to day, as he trots officeward, how the
+spring green brightens in the wood, or the field grows
+black under a moving ploughshare.  I have been tempted, in
+this connection, to deplore the slender faculties of the
+human race, with its penny-whistle of a voice, its dull
+ears, and its narrow range of sight.  If you could see as
+people are to see in heaven, if you had eyes such as you
+can fancy for a superior race, if you could take clear note
+of the objects of vision, not only a few yards, but a few
+miles from where you stand:--think how agreeably your sight
+would be entertained, how pleasantly your thoughts would be
+diversified, as you walk the Edinburgh streets!  For you
+might pause, in some business perplexity, in the midst of
+the city traffic, and perhaps catch the eye of a shepherd
+as he sat down to breathe upon a heathery shoulder of the
+Pentlands; or perhaps some urchin, clambering in a country
+elm, would put aside the leaves and show you his flushed
+and rustic visage; or as a fisher racing seaward, with
+the tiller under his elbow, and the sail sounding in
+the wind, would fling you a salutation from between
+Anst'er and the May.
+
+*
+
+So you sit, like Jupiter on Olympus, and look down from
+afar upon men's life.  The city is as silent as a city of
+the dead: from all its humming thoroughfares, not a voice,
+not a footfall, reaches you upon the hill.  The sea-surf,
+the cries of plough-men, the streams and the mill-wheels,
+the birds and the wind, keep up an animated concert through
+the plain; from farm to farm, dogs and crowing cocks
+contend together in defiance; and yet from this Olympian
+station, except for the whispering rumour of a train, the
+world has fallen into a dead silence, and the business of
+town and country grown voiceless in your ears.  A crying
+hill-bird, the bleat of a sheep, a wind singing in the dry
+grass, seem not so much to interrupt, as to accompany, the
+stillness; but to the spiritual ear, the whole scene makes
+a music at once human and rural, and discourses pleasant
+reflections on the destiny of man.  The spiry habitable
+city, ships, the divided fields, and browsing herds, and
+the straight highways, tell visibly of man's active and
+comfortable ways; and you may be never so laggard and never
+so unimpressionable, but there is something in the view
+that spirits up your blood and puts you in the vein for
+cheerful labour.
+
+*
+
+The night, though we were so little past midsummer, was as
+dark as January.  Intervals of a groping twilight
+alternated with spells of utter blackness; and it was
+impossible to trace the reason of these changes in the
+flying horror of the sky.  The wind blew the breath out of
+a man's nostrils; all heaven seemed to thunder overhead
+like one huge sail; and when there fell a momentary lull on
+Aros, we could hear the gusts dismally sweeping in the
+distance.  Over all the lowlands of the Ross the wind must
+have blown as fierce as on the open sea; and God only knows
+the uproar that was raging around the head of Ben Kyaw.
+Sheets of mingled spray and rain were driven in our faces.
+All round the isle of Aros, the surf, with an incessant,
+hammering thunder, beat upon the reefs and beaches.  Now
+louder in one place, now lower in another, like the
+combinations of orchestral music, the constant mass of
+sound was hardly varied for a moment.  And loud above all
+this hurly-burly I could hear the changeful voices of the
+Roost and the intermittent roaring of the Merry Men.  At
+that hour there flashed into my mind the reason of the name
+that they were called.  For the noise of them seemed almost
+mirthful, as it out-topped the other noises of the night;
+or if not mirthful, yet instinct with a portentous
+joviality.  Nay, and it seemed even human.  As when savage
+men have drunk away their reason, and, discarding speech
+bawl together in their madness by the hour; so, to my ears,
+these deadly breakers shouted by Aros in the night.
+
+*
+
+I was walking one night in the verandah of a small house in
+which I lived, outside the hamlet of Saranac.  It was
+winter; the night was very dark; the air extraordinary
+clear and cold, and sweet with the purity of forests.  From
+a good way below, the river was to be heard contending with
+ice and boulders; a few lights, scattered unevenly among
+the darkness, but so far away as not to lessen the sense of
+isolation.  For the making of a story here were fine
+conditions.
+
+*
+
+On all this part of the coast, and especially near Aros,
+these great granite rocks that I have spoken of go down
+together in troops into the sea, like cattle on a summer's
+day.  There they stand, for all the world like their
+neighbours ashore; only the salt water sobbing between them
+instead of the quiet earth, and clots of sea-pink blooming
+on their sides instead of heather; and the great sea-conger
+to wreathe about the base of them instead of the poisonous
+viper of the land.  On calm days you can go wandering
+between them in a boat for hours, echoes following you
+about the labyrinth; but when the sea is up, Heaven help
+the man that hears that caldron boiling.
+
+*
+
+It had snowed overnight.  The fields were all sheeted up;
+they were tucked in among the snow, and their shape was
+modelled through the pliant counterpane, like children
+tucked in by a fond mother.  The wind had made ripples and
+folds upon the surface, like what the sea, in quiet
+weather, leaves upon the sand.  There was a frosty stifle
+in the air.  An effusion of coppery light on the summit of
+Brown Carrick showed where the sun was trying to look
+through; but along the horizon clouds of cold fog had
+settled down, so that there was no distinction of sky and
+sea.  Over the white shoulders of the headlands, or in
+the opening of bays, there was nothing but a great vacancy
+and blackness; and the road as it drew near the edge of
+the cliff, seemed to skirt the shores of creation and
+void space.
+
+*
+
+When we are looking at a landscape we think ourselves
+pleased; but it is only when it comes back upon us by the
+fire o' nights that we can disentangle the main charm from
+the thick of particulars.  It is just so with what is
+lately past.  It is too much loaded with detail to be
+distinct; and the canvas is too large for the eye to
+encompass.  But this is no more the case when our
+recollections have been strained long enough through the
+hour-glass of time; when they have been the burthen of so
+much thought, the charm and comfort of so many a vigil.
+All that is worthless has been sieved and sifted out of
+them.  Nothing remains but the brightest lights and the
+darkest shadows.
+
+*
+
+Burns,  too proud and honest not to work, continued through
+all reverses to sing of poverty with a light, defiant note.
+Beranger waited till he was himself beyond the reach of
+want before writing the OLD VAGABOND or JACQUES.  Samuel
+Johnson, although he was very sorry to be poor, 'was a
+great arguer for the advantages of poverty' in his ill
+days.  Thus it is that brave men carry their crosses, and
+smile with the fox burrowing in their vitals.
+
+*
+
+Now, what I like so much in France is the clear,
+unflinching recognition by everybody of his own luck.  They
+all know on which side their bread is buttered, and take a
+pleasure in showing it to others, which is surely the
+better part of religion.  And they scorn to make a poor
+mouth over their poverty, which I take to be the better
+part of manliness.
+
+*
+
+If people knew what an inspiriting thing it is to hear a
+man boasting, so long as he boasts of what he really has,
+I believe they would do it more freely and with a
+better grace.
+
+*
+
+A girl at school in France began to describe one of our
+regiments on parade to her French school-mates, and as she
+went on she told me the recollection grew so vivid, she
+became so proud to be the countrywoman of such soldiers,
+and so sorry to be in another country, that her voice
+failed her and she burst into tears.  I have never
+forgotten that girl, and I think she very nearly deserves a
+statue.  To call her a young lady, with all its niminy
+associations, would be to offer her an insult.  She may
+rest assured of one thing, although she never should marry
+a heroic general, never see any great or immediate result
+of her life, she will not have lived in vain for her
+native land.
+
+*
+
+As I went, I was thinking of Smethurst with admiration; a
+look into that man's mind was like a retrospect over the
+smiling champaign of his past life, and very different from
+the Sinai-gorges up which one looks for a terrified moment
+into the dark souls of many good, many wise, and many
+prudent men.  I cannot be very grateful to such men for
+their excellence, and wisdom, and prudence.  I find myself
+facing as stoutly as I can a hard, combative existence,
+full of doubt, difficulties, defeats, disappointments, and
+dangers, quite a hard enough life without their dark
+countenances at my elbow, so that what I want is a
+happy-minded Smethurst placed here and there at ugly
+corners of my life's wayside, preaching his gospel of
+quiet and contentment.
+
+*
+
+There is a certain critic, not indeed of execution but of
+matter, whom I dare be known to set before the best: a
+certain low-browed, hairy gentleman, at first a percher in
+the fork of trees, next (as they relate) a dweller in
+caves, and whom I think I see squatting in cave-mouths, of
+a pleasant afternoon, to munch his berries--his wife, that
+accomplished lady, squatting by his side: his name I never
+heard, but he is often described as Probably Arboreal,
+which may serve for recognition.  Each has his own tree of
+ancestors, but at the top of all sits Probably Arboreal;
+in all our veins there run some minims of his old, wild,
+tree-top blood; our civilised nerves still tingle with his
+rude terrors and pleasures; and to that which would have
+moved our common ancestors, all must obediently thrill.
+
+*
+
+This is an age when genealogy has taken a new lease of
+life, and become for the first time a human science; so
+that we no longer study it in quest of the Guaith Voeths,
+but to trace out some of the secrets of descent and
+destiny; and as we study, we think less of Sir Bernard
+Burke and more of Mr. Galton.  Not only do our character
+and talents lie upon the anvil and receive their temper
+during generations; but the very plot of our life's story
+unfolds itself on a scale of centuries, and the biography
+of the man is only an episode in the epic of the family.
+
+*
+
+But our ancestral adventures are beyond even the arithmetic
+of fancy; and it is the chief recommendation of long
+pedigrees, that we can follow backward the careers of our
+HOMUNCULUS and be reminded of our antenatal lives.  Our
+conscious years are but a moment in the history of the
+elements that build us.
+
+*
+
+What is mine, then, and what am I?  If not a curve in this
+poor body of mine (which you love, and for the sake of
+which you dotingly dream that you love me), not a gesture
+that I can frame, not a tone of my voice, not a look from
+my eyes, no, not even now when I speak to him I love, but
+has belonged to others?  Others, ages dead, have wooed
+other men with my eyes; other men have heard the pleadings
+of the same voice that now sounds in your ears.  The hands
+of the dead are in my bosom; they move me, they pluck me,
+they guide me; I am a puppet at their command; and I but
+re-inform features and attributes that have long been laid
+aside from evil in the quiet of the grave.  Is it me you
+love, friend? or the race that made me?  The girl who does
+not know and cannot answer for the least portion of
+herself? or the stream of which she is a transitory eddy,
+the tree of which she is the passing fruit?  The race
+exists; it is old, it is ever young, it carries its eternal
+destiny in its bosom; upon it, like waves upon the sea,
+individual succeeds individual, mocked with a semblance of
+self-control, but they are nothing.  We speak of the soul,
+but the soul is in the race.
+
+*
+
+The future is nothing; but the past is myself, my own
+history, the seed of my present thoughts, the mould of my
+present disposition.  It is not in vain that I return to
+the nothings of my childhood; for every one of them has
+left some stamp upon me or put some fetter on my boasted
+free-will.  In the past is my present fate; and in the past
+also is my real life.
+
+*
+
+For as the race of man, after centuries of civilisation,
+still keeps some traits of their barbarian fathers, so man
+the individual is not altogether quit of youth, when he is
+already old and honoured, and Lord Chancellor of England.
+We advance in years somewhat in the manner of an invading
+army in a barren land; the age that we have reached, as the
+phrase goes, we but hold with an outpost, and still keep
+open our communications with the extreme rear and first
+beginnings of the march.  There is our true base; that is
+not only the beginning, but the perennial spring of our
+faculties; and grandfather William can retire upon occasion
+into the green enchanted forest of his boyhood.
+
+*
+
+The regret we have for our childhood is not wholly
+justifiable: so much a man may lay down without fear of
+public ribaldry; for although we shake our heads over the
+change, we are not unconscious of the manifold advantages
+of our new state.  What we lose in generous impulse we more
+than gain in the habit of generously watching others; and
+the capacity to enjoy Shakespeare may balance a lost
+appetite for playing at soldiers.
+
+*
+
+If a man lives to any considerable age, it cannot be denied
+that he laments his imprudences, but I notice he often
+laments his youth a deal more bitterly and with a more
+genuine intonation.
+
+*
+
+There is something irreverent in the speculation, but
+perhaps the want of power has more to do with wise
+resolutions of age than we are always willing to admit.
+
+*
+
+People may lay down their lives with cheerfulness in the
+sure expectation of a blessed immortality; but that is a
+different affair from giving up youth, with all its
+admirable pleasures, in the hope of a better quality of
+gruel in a more than problematical, nay, more than
+improbable, old age.
+
+*
+
+Childhood must pass away, and then youth, as surely as, age
+approaches.  The true wisdom is to be always seasonable,
+and to change with a good grace in changing circumstances.
+To love playthings well as a child, to lead an adventurous
+and honourable youth, and to settle when the time arrives,
+into a green and smiling age, is to be a good artist in
+life and deserve well of yourself and your neighbour.
+
+*
+
+Age asks with timidity to be spared intolerable pain;
+youth, taking fortune by the beard, demands joy like a
+right.
+
+*
+
+It is not possible to keep the mind in a state of accurate
+balance and blank; and even if you could do so, instead of
+coming ultimately to the right conclusion, you would be
+very apt to remain in a state of balance and blank to
+perpetuity.  Even in quite intermediate stages, a dash of
+enthusiasm is not a thing to be ashamed of in the
+retrospect: if St. Paul had not been a very zealous
+Pharisee, he would have been a colder Christian.  For my
+part, I look back to the time when I was a Socialist with
+something like regret.  I have convinced myself (for the
+moment) that we had better leave these great changes to
+what we call blind forces; their blindness being so much
+more perspicacious than the little, peering, partial
+eyesight of men.  I seem to see that my own scheme would
+not answer; and all the other schemes I ever heard
+propounded would depress some elements of goodness just as
+much as they encouraged others.  Now I know that in thus
+turning Conservative with years, I am going through the
+normal cycle of change and travelling in the common orbit
+of men's opinions.
+
+Those who go the devil in youth, with anything like a fair
+chance, were probably little worth saving from the first;
+they must have been feeble fellows--creatures made of putty
+and pack-thread, without steel or fire, anger or true
+joyfulness, in their composition; we may sympathise with
+their parents, but there is not much cause to go into
+mourning for themselves; for to be quite honest, the weak
+brother is the worst of mankind.
+
+*
+
+The follies of youth have a basis in sound reason, just as
+much as the embarrassing questions put by babes and
+sucklings.  Their most anti-social acts indicate the
+defects of our society.  When the torrent sweeps the man
+against a boulder, you must expect him to scream, and you
+need not be surprised if the scream is sometimes a theory.
+. . . But it is better to be a fool than to be dead.  It is
+better to emit a scream in the shape of a theory than to be
+entirely insensible to the jars and incongruities of life
+and take everything as it comes in a forlorn stupidity.
+Some people swallow the universe like a pill; they travel
+on through the world, like smiling images pushed from
+behind.  For God's sake give me the young man who has
+brains enough to make a fool of himself!  As for the
+others, the irony of facts shall take it out of their
+hands, and make fools of them in downright earnest, ere the
+farce be over.  There shall be such a mopping and a mowing
+at the last day, and such blushing and confusion of
+countenance for all those who have been wise in their own
+esteem, and have not learnt the rough lessons that youth
+hands on to age.  If we are indeed here to perfect and
+complete our own natures, and grow larger, stronger, and
+more sympathetic against some nobler career in the future,
+we had all best bestir ourselves to the utmost while we
+have the time.  To equip a dull, respectable person with
+wings would be but to make a parody of an angel.
+
+*
+
+Had he but talked--talked freely--let himself gush out in
+words (the way youth loves to do, and should) there might
+have been no tale to write upon the Weirs of Hermiston.
+
+*
+
+A young man feels himself one too many in the world; his is
+a painful situation; he has no calling; no obvious utility;
+no ties but to his parents, and these he is sure to
+disregard.  I do not think that a proper allowance has been
+made for this true cause of suffering in youth; but by the
+mere fact of a prolonged existence, we outgrow either the
+fact or else the feeling.  Either we become so callously
+accustomed to our own useless figure in the world, or
+else--and this, thank God, in the majority of cases--we so
+collect about us the interest or the love of our fellows,
+so multiply our effective part in the affairs of life,
+that we need to entertain no longer the question of our
+right to be.
+
+*
+
+It had been long his practice to prophesy for his second
+son a career of ruin and disgrace.  There is an advantage
+in this artless parental habit.  Doubtless the father is
+interested in his son; but doubtless also the prophet grows
+to be interested in his prophecies.  If the one goes wrong
+the others come true.
+
+*
+
+When the old man waggles his head and says, 'Ah, so I
+thought when I was your age,' he has proved the youth's
+case.  Doubtless, whether from growth of experience or
+decline of animal heat, he thinks so no longer; but he
+thought so while he was young; and all men have thought so
+while they were young, since there was dew in the morning
+or hawthorn in May; and here is another young man adding
+his vote to those of previous generations and riveting
+another link to the chain of testimony.  It is as natural
+and as right for a young man to be imprudent and
+exaggerated, to live in swoops and circles, and beat about
+his cage like any other wild thing newly captured, as it is
+for old men to turn grey, or mothers to love their
+offspring, or heroes to die for something worthier
+than their lives.
+
+*
+
+Youth is the time to go flashing from one end of the world
+to the other both in mind and body; to try the manners of
+different nations; to hear the chimes at midnight; to see
+sunrise in town and country; to be converted at a revival;
+to circumnavigate the metaphysics, write halting verses,
+run a mile to see a fire, and wait all day long in the
+theatre to applaud HERNANI.  There is some meaning in the
+old theory about wild oats; and a man who has not had his
+green-sickness and got done with it for good is as little
+to be depended on as an unvaccinated infant.
+
+*
+
+When we grow elderly, how the room brightens and begins to
+look as it ought to look, on the entrance of youth, grace,
+health and comeliness!  You do not want them for yourself,
+perhaps not even for your son, but you look on smiling; and
+when you recall their images--again it is with a smile.  I
+defy you to see or think of them and not smile with an
+infinite and intimate but quite impersonal pleasure.
+
+*
+
+To speak truth there must be moral equality or else no
+respect; and hence between parent and child intercourse is
+apt to degenerate into a verbal fencing-bout, and
+misapprehensions to become engrained.  And there is another
+side to this, for the parent begins with an imperfect
+notion of the child's character, formed in early years or
+during the equinoctial gales of youth; to this he adheres,
+noting only the facts which suit with his pre-conception;
+and wherever a person fancies himself unjustly judged, he
+at once and finally gives up the effort to speak truth.
+
+*
+
+So, as we grow old, a sort of equable jog-trot of feeling
+is substituted for the violent ups and downs of passion and
+disgust; the same influence that restrains our hopes quiets
+our apprehensions; if the pleasures are less intense, the
+troubles are milder and more tolerable; and in a word, this
+period for which we are asked to hoard up everything as for
+a time of famine, is, in its own right, the richest,
+easiest, and happiest of life.  Nay, by managing its own
+work and following its own happy inspiration, youth is
+doing the best it can to endow the leisure of age.  A full,
+busy youth is your only prelude to a self-contained
+and independent age; and the muff inevitably develops
+into a bore.
+
+*
+
+To know what you like is the beginning of wisdom and of old
+age.  Youth is wholly experimental.  The essence and charm
+of that unquiet and delightful epoch is ignorance of self
+as well as ignorance of life.
+
+*
+
+The schoolboy has a keen sense of humour.  Heroes he learns
+to understand and to admire in books; but he is not forward
+to recognise the heroic under the traits of any
+contemporary.
+
+*
+
+Discredited as they are in practice, the cowardly proverbs
+hold their own in theory; and it is another instance of the
+same spirit, that the opinions of old men about life have
+been accepted as final.  All sorts of allowances are made
+for the illusions of youth; and none, or almost none, for
+the disenchantments of age.  It is held to be a good taunt,
+and somehow or other to clinch the question logically, when
+an old gentleman waggles his head and says: 'Ah, so I
+thought when I was your age.' It is not thought an answer
+at all, if the young man retorts: My venerable sir, so I
+shall most probably think when I am yours.'  And yet the
+one is as good as the other: pass for pass, tit for tat, a
+Roland for an Oliver.
+
+*
+
+What shall we be when we grow really old?  Of yore, a man
+was thought to lay on restrictions and acquire new
+deadweight of mournful experience with every year, till
+he looked back on his youth as the very summer of impulse
+and freedom.
+
+*
+
+And it may be worth while to add that these clouds rolled
+away in their season, and that all clouds roll away at
+last, and the troubles of youth in particular are things
+but of a moment.
+
+*
+
+Through what little channels, by what hints and
+premonitions, the consciousness of the man's art dawns
+first upon the child, it should be not only interesting but
+instructive to inquire.  A matter of curiosity to-day, it
+will become the ground of science to-morrow.  From the mind
+of childhood there is more history and more philosophy to
+be fished up than from all the printed volumes in a
+library.
+
+*
+
+I could not finish THE PIRATE when I was a child, I have
+never finished it yet; PEVERIL OF THE PEAK dropped half way
+through from my schoolboy hands, and though I have since
+waded to an end in a kind of wager with myself, the
+exercise was quite without enjoyment.  There is something
+disquieting in the considerations.  I still think the visit
+to Ponto's the best part of the BOOK OF SNOBS: does that
+mean that I was right when I was a child, or does it mean
+that I have never grown since then, that the child is not
+the man's father, but the man? and that I came into the
+world with all my faculties complete, and have only learned
+sinsyne to be more tolerant of boredom?
+
+*
+
+The child thinks much in images, words are very live
+to him, phrases that imply a picture eloquent beyond
+their value.
+
+*
+
+Somehow my playmate had vanished, or is out of the story,
+as the sagas say, but I was sent into the village on an
+errand; and, taking a book of fairy tales, went down alone
+through a fir-wood, reading as I walked.  How often since
+then has it befallen me to be happy even so; but that was
+the first time: the shock of that pleasure I have never
+since forgot, and if my mind serves me to the last, I never
+shall; for it was then I knew I loved reading.
+
+*
+
+The remainder of my childish recollections are all of the
+matter that was read to me, and not of any manner in the
+words.  If these pleased me, it was unconsciously; I
+listened for news of the great vacant world upon whose
+edge I stood; I listened for delightful plots that I might
+re-enact in play, and romantic scenes and circumstances
+that I might call up before me, with closed eyes, when I
+was tired of Scotland, and home, and that weary prison of
+the sick-chamber in which I lay so long in durance.
+
+*
+
+I rose and lifted a corner of the blind.  Over the black
+belt of the garden I saw the long line of Queen Street,
+with here and there a lighted window.  How often before had
+my nurse lifted me out of bed and pointed them out to me,
+while we wondered together if, there also, there were
+children that could not sleep, and if these lighted oblongs
+were signs of those that waited like us for the morning.
+
+*
+
+There never was a child but has hunted gold, and been a
+pirate, and a military commander, and a bandit of the
+mountains; but has fought, and suffered shipwreck and
+prison, and imbrued its little hands in gore, and gallantly
+retrieved the lost battle, and triumphantly protected
+innocence and beauty.
+
+*
+
+None more than children are concerned for beauty, and,
+above all, for beauty in the old.
+
+*
+
+So in youth, like Moses from the mountain, we have sights
+of that House Beautiful of art which we shall never enter.
+They are dreams and unsubstantial; visions of style that
+repose upon no base of human meaning; the last heart-throb
+of that excited amateur who has to die in all of us before
+the artist can be born.  But they come in such a rainbow of
+glory that all subsequent achievement appears dull and
+earthly in comparison.  We are all artists; almost all in
+the age of illusion, cultivating an imaginary genius, and
+walking to the strains of some deceiving Ariel; small
+wonder, indeed, if we were happy!  But art, of whatever
+nature, is a kind of mistress; and though these dreams of
+youth fall by their own baselessness, others succeed, grave
+and more substantial; the symptoms change, the amiable
+malady endures; and still at an equal distance, the House
+Beautiful shines upon its hill-top.
+
+*
+
+Children, for instance, are able enough to see, but they
+have no great faculty for looking; they do not use their
+eyes for the pleasure of using them, but for by-ends of
+their own; and the things I call to mind seeing most
+vividly were not beautiful in themselves, but merely
+interesting or enviable to me, as I thought they might be
+turned to practical account in play.
+
+*
+
+The true parallel for play is not to be found, of course,
+in conscious art, which, though it be derived from play, is
+itself an abstract, impersonal thing, and depends largely
+upon philosophical interests beyond the scope of childhood.
+It is when we make castles in the air and personate the
+leading character in our own romances, that we return to
+the spirit of our first years.  Only, there are several
+reasons why the spirit is no longer so agreeable to
+indulge.  Nowadays, when we admit this personal element
+into our divagations, we are apt to stir up uncomfortable
+and sorrowful memories, and remind ourselves sharply of old
+wounds.  .Alas! when we betake ourselves to our
+intellectual form of play, sitting quietly by the fire or
+lying prone in bed, we rouse many hot feelings for which we
+can find no outlet.  Substitutes are not acceptable to the
+mature mind, which desires the thing itself; and even to
+rehearse a triumphant dialogue with one's enemy, although
+it is perhaps the most satisfactory piece of play still
+left within our reach, is not entirely satisfying, and is
+even apt to lead to a visit and an interview which may be
+the reverse of triumphant after all.
+
+Whatever we are to expect at the hands of children, it
+should not be any peddling exactitude about matters of
+fact.  They walk in a vain show, and among mists and
+rainbows; they are passionate after dreams and unconcerned
+about realities; speech is a difficult art not wholly
+learned; and there is nothing in their own tastes or
+purposes to teach them what we mean by abstract
+truthfulness.  When a bad writer is inexact, even if he can
+look back on half a century of years, we charge him with
+incompetence and not, with dishonesty.  And why not extend
+the same allowance to imperfect speakers?  Let a
+stockbroker be dead stupid about poetry, or a poet inexact
+in the details of business, and we excuse them heartily
+from blame.  But show us a miserable, unbreeched, human
+entity, whose whole profession it is to take a tub for a
+fortified town and a shaving-brush for the deadly stiletto,
+and who passes three-fourths of his time in a dream and the
+rest in open self-deception, and we expect him to be as
+nice upon a matter of fact as a scientific expert bearing
+evidence.  Upon my heart, I think it less than decent: you
+do not consider how little the child sees, or how swift he
+is to weave what he has seen into bewildering fiction; and
+that he cares no more for what you call truth, than you for
+a gingerbread dragoon.
+It would be easy to leave them in their native cloudland,
+where they figure so prettily--pretty like flowers and
+innocent like dogs.  They will come out of their gardens
+soon enough, and have to go into offices and the
+witness-box.  Spare them yet a while, O conscientious parent!
+Let them doze among their playthings yet a little! for who
+knows what a rough, warfaring existence lies before them
+in the future?
+
+*
+
+'You are a friend of Archie Weir's?' said one to Frank  Innes;
+and Innes replied, with his usual flippancy and more than his
+usual insight: 'I know Weir, but I never met Archie.' No one
+had met Archie, a malady most incident to only sons.  He flew
+his private signal, and none heeded it;  It seemed he was abroad
+in a world from which the very hope of intimacy was banished;
+and he looked round about him on the concourse of his
+fellow-students, and forward to the trivial days and acquaintances
+that were to come, without hope or interest.
+
+*
+
+'My poor, dear boy!' observed Glenalmond.  'My poor, dear
+and, if you will allow me to say so, very foolish boy!  You
+are only discovering where you are; to one of your
+temperament, or of mine, a painful discovery.  The world
+was not made for us; it was made for ten hundred millions
+of me, all different from each other and from us; there's
+no royal road, we just have to sclamber and tumble.'
+
+*
+
+Alas and alas! you may take it how you will, but the
+services of no single individual are indispensable.  Atlas
+was just a gentleman with a protracted nightmare!  And yet
+you see merchants who go and labour themselves into a great
+fortune and thence into the bankruptcy court; scribblers
+who keep scribbling at little articles until their temper
+is a cross to all who come about them, as though Pharaoh
+should set the Israelites to make a pin instead of a
+pyramid; and fine young men who work themselves into a
+decline, and are driven off in a hearse with white plumes
+upon it.  Would you not suppose these persons had been
+whispered, by the Master of the Ceremonies the promise of
+some momentous destiny? and that this Lukewarm bullet on
+which they play their farces was the bull's-eye and
+centrepoint of all the universe?  And yet it is not so.
+The ends for which they give away their priceless youth,
+for all they know, may be chimerical, or hurtful; the glory
+and riches they expect may never come, or may find them
+indifferent; and they and the world they inhabit are so
+inconsiderable that the mind freezes at the thought.
+
+*
+
+As we go catching and catching at this or that corner of
+knowledge, now getting a foresight of generous
+possibilities, now chilled with a glimpse of prudence, we
+may compare the headlong course of our years to a swift
+torrent in which a man is carried away; now he is dashed
+against a boulder, now he grapples for a moment to a
+trailing spray; at the end, he is hurled out and
+overwhelmed in a dark and bottomless ocean.  We have no
+more than glimpses and touches; we are torn away from our
+theories; we are spun round and round and shown this or the
+other view of life, until only fools or knaves can hold to
+their opinions.... All our attributes are modified or changed;
+and it will be a poor account of us if our views do not
+modify and change in a proportion.  To hold the same views
+at forty as we held at twenty is to have been stupefied for
+a score of years, and take rank, not as a prophet, but as
+an unteachable brat, well birched and none the wiser.  It
+is as if a ship captain should sail to India from the Port
+of London; and having brought a chart of the Thames on deck
+at his first setting out, should obstinately use no other
+for the whole voyage.
+
+*
+
+It is good to have been young in youth and, as years go on,
+to grow older.  Many are already old before they are
+through their teens; but to travel deliberately through
+one's ages is to get the heart out of a liberal education.
+Times change, opinions vary to their opposite, and still
+this world appears a brave gymnasium, full of sea-bathing,
+and horse exercise, and bracing, manly virtues; and what
+can be more encouraging than to find the friend who was
+welcome at one age, still welcome at another?  Our
+affections and beliefs are wiser than we; the best that is
+in us is better than we can understand; for it is grounded
+beyond experience, and guides us, blindfold but safe, from
+one age on to another.
+
+*
+
+But faces have a trick of growing more and more
+spiritualised and abstract in the memory, until nothing
+remains of them but a look, a haunting expression; just
+that secret quality in a face that is apt to slip out
+somehow under the cunningest painter's touch, and leave the
+portrait dead for the lack of it.
+
+*
+
+Pitiful is the case of the blind, who cannot read the face;
+pitiful that of the deaf who cannot follow the changes of
+the voice.  And there are others also to be pitied; for
+there are some of an inert, uneloquent nature, who have
+been denied all the symbols of communication, who have
+neither a lively play of facial expression, nor speaking
+gestures, nor a responsive voice, nor yet the gift of
+frank, explanatory speech: people truly made of clay,
+people tied for life into a bag which no one can undo.
+They are poorer than the gipsy, for their heart can speak
+no language under heaven.
+
+*
+
+For my part, I can see few things more desirable, after the
+possession of such radical qualities as honour and humour
+and pathos, than to have a lively and not a stolid
+countenance; to have looks to correspond with every
+feeling; to be elegant arid delightful in person, so that
+we shall please even in the intervals of active pleasing,
+and may never discredit speech with uncouth manners or
+become unconsciously our own burlesques.  But of all
+unfortunates there is one creature (for I will not call him
+man) conspicuous in misfortune.  This is he who has
+forfeited his birthright of expression, who has cultivated
+artful intonations, who has taught his face tricks, like a
+pet monkey, and on every side perverted or cut off his
+means of communication with his fellow-men.  The body is a
+house of many windows: there we all sit, showing ourselves
+and crying on the passersby to come and love us.  But this
+fellow has filled his windows with opaque glass, elegantly
+coloured.  His house may be admired for its design, the
+crowd may pause before the stained windows, but meanwhile
+the poor proprietor must lie languishing within,
+uncomforted, unchangeably alone.
+
+*
+
+The lads go forth pricked with the spirit of adventure and
+the desire to rise in Life, and leave their homespun elders
+grumbling and wondering over the event.  Once, at a village
+called Lausanne, I met one of these disappointed parents: a
+drake who had fathered a wild swan and seen it take wing
+and disappear.  The wild swan in question was now an
+apothecary in Brazil.  He had flown by way of Bordeaux, and
+first landed in America, bare-headed and bare-footed, and
+with a single halfpenny in his pocket.  And now he was an
+apothecary!  Such a wonderful thing is an adventurous life!
+I thought he might as well have stayed at home; but you
+never can tell wherein a man's life consists, nor in what
+he sets his pleasure: one to drink, another to marry, a
+third to write scurrilous articles and be repeatedly caned
+in public, and now this fourth, perhaps, to be an
+apothecary in Brazil.  As for his old father, he could
+conceive no reason for the lad's behaviour.  'I had always
+bread for him,' he said; 'he ran away to annoy me.  He
+loved to annoy me.  He had no gratitude.'  But at heart he
+was swelling with pride over his travelled offspring, and
+he produced a letter out of his pocket, where, as he said,
+it was rotting, a mere lump of paper rags, and waved it
+gloriously in the air.  'This comes from America,' he
+cried, 'six thousand leagues away!'  And the wine-shop
+audience looked upon it with a certain thrill.
+
+*
+
+The fame of other lands had reached them; the name of the
+eternal city rang in their ears; they were not colonists,
+but pilgrims; they travelled towards wine and gold and
+sunshine, but their hearts were set on something higher.
+That divine unrest, that old stinging trouble of humanity
+that makes all high achievements and all miserable
+failures, the same that spread wings with Icarus, the same
+that sent Columbus into the desolate Atlantic, inspired and
+supported these barbarians on their perilous march.
+
+*
+
+There is more adventure in the life of the working man who
+descends as a common soldier into the battle of life, than
+in that of the millionaire who sits apart in an office,
+like Von Moltke, and only directs the manoeuvres by
+telegraph.  Give me to hear about the career of him who is
+in the thick of the business; to whom one change of market
+means an empty belly, and another a copious and savoury
+meal.  This is not the philosophical, but the human side of
+economics; it interests like a story; and the life of all
+who are thus situated partakes in a small way of the charm
+of Robinson Crusoe; for every step is critical, and human
+life is presented to you naked and verging to its
+lowest terms.
+
+*
+
+An aspiration is a joy for ever, a possession as solid as a
+landed estate, a fortune which we can never exhaust and
+which gives us year by year a revenue of pleasurable
+activity.  To have many of these is to be spiritually rich.
+
+*
+
+To be wholly devoted to some intellectual exercise is to
+have succeeded in life; and perhaps only in law and the
+higher mathematics may this devotion be maintained, suffice
+to itself without reaction, and find continual rewards
+without excitement.
+
+*
+
+Study and experiment, to some rare natures, is the unbroken
+pastime of a life.  These are enviable natures; people shut
+in the house by sickness often bitterly envy them; but the
+commoner man cannot continue to exist upon such altitudes:
+his feet itch for physical adventure; his blood boils for
+physical dangers, pleasures, and triumphs; his fancy, the
+looker after new things, cannot continue to look for them
+in books and crucibles, but must seek them on the breathing
+stage of life.
+
+*
+
+Life goes before us, infinite in complication; attended by
+the most various and surprising meteors; appealing at once
+to the eye, to the ear, to the mind--the seat of wonder, to
+the touch--so thrillingly delicate, and to the belly--so
+imperious when starved.  It combines and employs in its
+manifestation the method and material, not of one art only,
+but of all the arts.  Music is but an arbitrary trifling
+with a few of life's majestic chords; painting is but a
+shadow of its pageantry of light and colour; literature
+does but drily indicate that wealth of incident, of moral
+obligation, of virtue, vice, action, rapture and agony,
+with which it teems.  To 'compete with life,' whose sun we
+cannot look upon, whose passions and diseases waste and
+slay us--to compete with the flavour of wine, the beauty of
+the dawn, the scorching of fire, the bitterness of death
+and separation here is, indeed, a projected escalade of
+heaven; here are, indeed, labours for a Hercules in a dress
+coat, armed with a pen and a dictionary to depict the
+passions, armed with a tube of superior flake-white to
+paint the portrait of the insufferable sun.  No art is true
+in this sense: none can 'compete with life': not even
+history, built indeed of indisputable facts, but these
+facts robbed of their vivacity and sting; so that even when
+we read of the sack of a city or the fall of an empire, we
+are surprised, and justly commend the author's talent, if
+our pulse be quickened.  And mark, for a last differentia,
+that this quickening of the pulse is, in almost every case,
+purely agreeable; that these phantom reproductions of
+experience, even at their most acute, convey decided
+pleasure; while experience itself, in the cockpit of life,
+can torture and slay.
+
+*
+
+Into how many houses would not the note of the monastery
+bell, dividing the day into manageable portions, bring
+peace of mind and healthful activity of body! We speak of
+hardships, but the true hardship is to be a dull fool, and
+permitted to mismanage life in our own dull and foolish
+manner.
+
+*
+
+But struggle as you please, a man has to work in this
+world.  He must be an honest man or a thief, Loudon.
+
+*
+
+Industry is, in itself and when properly chosen, delightful
+and profitable to the worker; and when your toil has been a
+pleasure, you have not earned money merely, but money,
+health, delight, and moral profit, all in one.
+
+*
+
+'The cost of a thing,' says he, 'is the amount OF WHAT I
+WILL CALL LIFE which is required to be exchanged for it,
+immediately or in the long-run.'  I have been accustomed to
+put it to myself, perhaps more clearly, that the price we
+have to pay for money is paid in liberty.  Between these
+two ways of it, at least, the reader will probably not fail
+to find a third definition of his own; and it follows, on
+one or other, that a man may pay too dearly for his
+livelihood, by giving, in Thoreau's terms, his whole life
+for it, or, in mine, bartering for it the whole of his
+available liberty, and becoming a slave till death.  There
+are two questions to be considered--the quality of what we
+buy, and the price we have to pay for it.  Do you want a
+thousand a year, a two thousand a year, or a ten thousand a
+year livelihood? and can you afford the one you want?  It
+is a matter of taste; it is not in the least degree a
+question of duty, though commonly supposed so.  But there
+is no authority for that view anywhere.  It is nowhere in
+the Bible.  It is true that we might do a vast amount of
+good if we were wealthy, but it is also highly improbable;
+not many do; and the art of growing rich is not only quite
+distinct from that of doing good, hut the practice of the
+one does not at all train a man for practising the other.
+
+*
+
+We may escape uncongenial toil, only to devote ourselves to
+that which is congenial.  It is only to transact some
+higher business that even Apollo dare play the truant
+from Admetus.  We must all work for the sake of work;
+we must all work, as Thoreau says again, in any 'absorbing
+pursuit--it does not much matter what, so it be honest';
+but the most profitable work is that which combines into one
+continued effort the largest proportion of the powers and
+desires of a man's nature; that into which he will plunge
+with ardour, and from which he will desist with reluctance;
+in which he will know the weariness of fatigue, but not
+that of satiety; and which will be ever fresh, pleasing and
+stimulating to his taste.  Such work holds a man together,
+braced at all points; it does not suffer him to doze or
+wander; it keeps him actively conscious of himself, yet
+raised among superior interests; it gives him the profit of
+industry with the pleasures of a pastime.  This is what his
+art should be to the true artist, and that to a degree
+unknown in other and less intimate pursuits.  For other
+professions stand apart from the human business of life;
+but an art has the seat at the centre of the artist's
+doings and sufferings, deals directly with his experiences,
+teaches him the lessons of his own fortunes and mishaps,
+and becomes a part of his biography.
+
+*
+
+Farewell fair day and fading light!
+The clay-born here, with westward sight,
+Marks the huge sun now downward soar.
+Farewell.  We twain shall meet no more.
+
+Farewell.  I watch with bursting sigh
+My late contemned occasion die.
+I linger useless in my tent:
+Farewell, fair day, so foully spent!
+
+Farewell, fair day.  If any God
+At all consider this poor clod,
+He who the fair occasion sent
+Prepared and placed the impediment.
+
+Let him diviner vengeance take--
+Give me to sleep, give me to wake
+Girded and shod, and bid me play
+The hero in the coming day!
+
+*
+
+Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business, is
+only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other
+things.  And it is not by any means certain that a man's
+business is the most important thing he has to do.  To an
+impartial estimate it will seem clear that many of the
+wisest, most virtuous, and most beneficent parts that are
+to be played upon the Theatre of Life are filled by
+gratuitous performers, and pass, among the world at large,
+as phases of idleness.  For in that Theatre, not only the
+walking gentlemen, singing chambermaids, and diligent
+fiddlers in the orchestra, but those who look on and clap
+their hands from the benches, do really play a part and
+fulfil important offices towards the general result.
+
+*
+
+The fact is, fame may be a forethought and an afterthought,
+but it is too abstract an idea to move people greatly in
+moments of swift and momentous decision.  It is from
+something more immediate, some determination of blood to
+the head, some trick of the fancy, that the breach is
+stormed or the bold word spoken.  I am sure a fellow
+shooting an ugly weir in a canoe has exactly as much
+thought about fame as most commanders going into battle;
+and yet the action, fall out how it will, is not one of
+those the muse delights to celebrate.  Indeed, it is
+difficult to see why the fellow does a thing so nameless
+and yet so formidable to look at, unless on the theory that
+he likes it.
+
+*
+
+It is but a lying cant that would represent the merchant
+and the banker as people disinterestedly toiling for
+mankind, and then most useful when absorbed in their
+transactions; for the man is more important than
+his services.
+
+*
+
+It was my custom, as the hours dragged on, to repeat the
+question, 'When will the carts come in?' and repeat it
+again and again until at last those sounds arose in the
+street that I have heard once more this morning.  The road
+before our house is a great thoroughfare for early carts.
+I know not, and I never have known, what they carry, whence
+they come, or whither they go.  But I know that, long ere
+dawn, and for hours together, they stream continuously
+past, with the same rolling and jerking of wheels, and the
+same clink of horses' feet.  It was not for nothing that
+they made the burthen of my wishes all night through.  They
+are really the first throbbings of life, the harbingers of
+day; and it pleases you as much to hear them as it must
+please a shipwrecked seaman once again to grasp a hand of
+flesh and blood after years of miserable solitude.  They
+have the freshness of the daylight life about them.  You
+can hear the carters cracking their whips and crying
+hoarsely to their horses or to one another; and sometimes
+even a peal of healthy, harsh horse-laughter comes up to
+you through the darkness.  There is now an end to mystery
+and fear.  Like the knocking at the door in MACBETH, or the
+cry of the watchman in the TOUR DE NESLE, they show that
+the horrible caesura is over, and the nightmares have fled
+away, because the day is breaking and the ordinary life of
+men is beginning to bestir itself among the streets.
+
+*
+
+She was as dead an old woman as ever I saw; no more than
+bone and parchment, curiously put together.  Her eyes, with
+which she interrogated mine, were vacant of sense.  It
+depends on what you call seeing, whether you might not call
+her blind.  Perhaps she had known love; perhaps borne
+children, suckled them, and given them pet names.  But now
+that was all gone by, and had left her neither happier nor
+wiser; and the best she could do with her mornings was to
+come up here into the cold church and juggle for a slice of
+heaven.  It was not without a gulp that I escaped into the
+streets and the keen morning air.  Morning? why, how tired
+of it she would be before night! and if she did not sleep,
+how then?  It is fortunate that not many of us are brought
+up publicly to justify our lives at the bar of threescore
+years and ten; fortunate that such a number are knocked
+opportunely on the head in what they call the flower of
+their years, and go away to suffer for their follies in
+private somewhere else.  Otherwise, between sick children
+and discontented old folk, we might be put out of all
+conceit of life.
+
+*
+
+When I was going, up got my old stroller, and off with his
+hat.  'I am afraid,' said he, 'that monsieur will think me
+altogether a beggar; but I have another demand to make upon
+him.'  I began to hate him on the spot.  'We play again
+to-night,' he went on.  'Of course I shall refuse to accept
+any more money from monsieur and his friends, who have been
+already so liberal.  But our programme of to-night is
+something truly creditable; and I cling to the idea that
+monsieur will honour us with his presence.  And then, with
+a shrug and a smile: 'Monsieur understands--the vanity of
+an artist!'  Save the mark!  The vanity of an artist!
+That is the kind of thing that reconciles me to life:
+a ragged, tippling, incompetent old rogue, with the
+manners of a gentleman and the vanity of an artist,
+to keep up his self-respect!
+
+*
+
+Time went on, and the boy's health still slowly declined.
+The Doctor blamed the weather, which was cold and
+boisterous.  He called in his CONFRERE from Burron, took a
+fancy for him, magnified his capacity, and was pretty soon
+under treatment himself--it scarcely appeared for what
+complaint.  He and Jean-Marie had each medicine to take at
+different periods of the day.  The Doctor used to lie in
+wait for the exact moment, watch in hand.  'There is
+nothing like regularity,' he would say, fill out the doses,
+and dilate on the virtues of the draught; and if the boy
+seemed none the better, the Doctor was not at all the
+worse.
+
+*
+
+'I lead you,' he would say, 'by the green pastures.  My
+system, my beliefs, my medicines, are resumed in one
+phrase--to avoid excess.  Blessed nature, healthy,
+temperate nature, abhors and exterminates excess.  Human
+law in this matter imitates at a great distance her
+provisions; and we must strive to supplement the efforts of
+the law.  Yes, boy, we must be a law to ourselves and for
+our neighbours--LEX ARMATA--armed, emphatic, tyrannous law.
+If you see a crapulous human ruin snuffing, dash from him
+his box!  The judge, though in a way an admission of
+disease, is less offensive to me than either the doctor or
+the priest.  Above all, the doctor--the doctor and the
+purulent trash and garbage of his pharmacopoeia!  Pure
+air--from the neighbourhood of a pinetum for the sake of the
+turpentine--unadulterated wine, and the reflections of an
+unsophisticated spirit in the presence of the works of
+nature--these, my boy, are the best medical appliances and
+the best religious comforts.  Devote yourself to these.
+Hark! there are the bells of Bourron (the wind is in the
+North, it will be fair).  How clear and airy is the sound!
+The nerves are harmonised and quieted; the mind attuned to
+silence; and observe how easily and regularly beats the
+heart!  Your unenlightened doctor would see nothing in
+these sensations; and yet you yourself perceive they are a
+part of health.  Did you remember your cinchona this
+morning?  Good.  Cinchona also is a work of nature; it is,
+after all, only the bark of a tree which we might gather
+for, ourselves if we lived in the locality.'
+
+*
+
+The accepted novelist may take his novel up and put it
+down, spend days upon it in vain, and write not any more
+than he makes haste to blot.  Not so the Beginner.  Human
+nature has certain rights ; instinct--the instinct of
+self-preservation--forbids that any man (cheered and supported
+by the consciousness of no previous victory) should endure
+the miseries of unsuccessful literary toil beyond a period
+to be measured in weeks.  There must be something for hope
+to feed upon.  The beginner must have a slant of wind, a
+lucky vein must be running, he must be in one of those
+hours when the words come and the phrases balance
+themselves--EVEN TO BEGIN.  And having begun, what a dread
+looking forward is that until the book shall he
+accomplished!  For so long a time the slant is to continue
+unchanged, the vein to keep running, for so long a time you
+must keep at command the same quality of style: for so long
+a time your puppets are to be always vital, always
+consistent, always vigorous!
+
+*
+
+What is this fortunate circumstance, my friend? inquired
+Anastasie, not heeding his protest, which was of daily
+recurrence.
+
+'That we have no children, my beautiful,' replied the
+Doctor.  'I think of it more and more as the years go on,
+and with more and more gratitude towards the Power that
+dispenses such afflictions.  Your health, my darling, my
+studious quiet, our little kitchen delicacies, how they
+would all have suffered, how they would all have been
+sacrificed!  And for what?  Children are the last word of
+human imperfection.  Health flees before their face.  They
+cry, my dear; they put vexatious questions; they demand to
+be fed, to be washed, to be educated, to have their noses
+blowed; and then, when the time comes, they break our
+hearts, as I break this piece of sugar.  A pair of
+professed egoists, like you and me, should avoid offspring,
+like an infidelity.'
+
+'Indeed!' said she; and she laughed.  'Now, that is like
+you--to take credit for the thing you could not help.'
+
+*
+
+
+I have been made to learn that the doom and burthen of our
+life is bound for ever on man s shoulders, and when the
+attempt is made to cast it off, it but returns upon us with
+more unfamiliar and more awful pressure.
+
+*
+
+
+Forth from the casement, on the plain
+Where honour has the world to gain,
+Pour forth and bravely do your part,
+O knights of the unshielded heart!
+'Forth and for ever forward! --out
+From prudent turret and redoubt,
+And in the mellay charge amain,
+To fall, but yet to rise again!
+Captive?  Ah, still, to honour bright,
+A captive soldier of the right!
+Or free and fighting, good with ill?
+Unconquering but unconquered still!
+
+O to be up and doing, O
+Unfearing and unshamed to go
+In all the uproar and the press
+About my human business!
+My undissuaded heart I hear
+Whisper courage in my ear.
+With voiceless calls, the ancient earth
+Summons me to a daily birth.
+
+*
+
+Yet it is to this very responsibility that the rich are
+born.  They can shuffle off the duty on no other; they are
+their own paymasters on parole; and must pay themselves
+fair wages and no more.  For I suppose that in the course
+of ages, and through reform and civil war and invasion,
+mankind was pursuing some other and more general design
+than to set one or two Englishmen of the nineteenth century
+beyond the reach of needs and duties.  Society was scarce
+put together, and defended with so much eloquence and
+blood, for the convenience of two or three millionaires and
+a few hundred other persons of wealth and position.  It is
+plain that if mankind thus acted and suffered during all
+these generations, they hoped some benefit, some ease, some
+wellbeing, for themselves and their descendants; that if
+they supported law and order, it was to secure fair-play
+for all; that if they denied themselves in the present,
+they must have had some designs on the future.  Now a great
+hereditary fortune is a miracle of man's wisdom and
+mankind's forbearance; it has not only been amassed and
+handed down, it has been suffered to be amassed and handed
+down; and surely in such consideration as this, its
+possessor should find only a new spur to activity and
+honour, that with all this power of service he should not
+prove unserviceable, and that this mass of treasure should
+return in benefits upon the race.  If he bad twenty, or
+thirty, or a hundred thousand at his banker's, or if all
+Yorkshire or all California were his to manage or to sell,
+he would still be morally penniless, and have the world to
+begin like Whittington, until he had found some way of
+serving mankind.  His wage is physically in his own hand;
+but, in honour, that wage must still be earned.  He is only
+steward on parole of what is called his fortune.  He must
+honourably perform his stewardship.  He must estimate his
+own services and allow himself a salary in proportion, for
+that will be one among his functions.  And while he will
+then be free to spend that salary, great or little, on his
+own private pleasures, the rest of his fortune he but holds
+and disposes under trust for mankind; it is not his,
+because he has not earned it; it cannot be his, because his
+services have already been paid; but year by year it is his
+to distribute, whether to help individuals whose birthright
+and outfit has been swallowed up in his, or to further
+public works and institutions.
+
+*
+
+'Tis a fine thing to smart for one's duty; even in the
+pangs of it there is contentment.
+
+*
+
+We all suffer ourselves to be too much concerned about a
+little poverty; but such considerations should not move us
+in the choice of that which is to be the business and
+justification of so great a portion of our lives and like
+the missionary, the patriot, or the philosopher, we should
+all choose that poor and brave career in which we can do
+the most and best for mankind.
+
+*
+
+The salary in any business under heaven is not the only,
+nor indeed the first, question.  That you should continue
+to exist is a matter for your own consideration; but that
+your business should be first honest, and second useful,
+are points in which honour and morality are concerned.
+
+*
+
+There is only one wish realisable on the earth; only one
+thing that can be perfectly attained: Death.  And from a
+variety of circumstances we have no one to tell us whether
+it be worth attaining.
+
+A strange picture we make on our way to our chimaeras,
+ceaselessly marching, grudging ourselves the time for rest;
+indefatigable, adventurous pioneers.  It is true that we
+shall never reach the goal; it is even more than probable
+that there is no such place; and if we lived for centuries
+and were endowed with the powers of a god, we should find
+ourselves not much nearer what we wanted at the end.  O
+toiling hands of mortals! O unwearied feet, travelling ye
+know not whither! Soon, soon, it seems to you,' you must
+come forth on some conspicuous hilltop, and but a little
+way further, against the setting sun, descry the spires of
+El Dorado.  Little do ye know your own blessedness; for to
+travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the
+true success is to labour.
+
+*
+
+A man who must separate himself from his neighbours' habits
+in order to be happy, is in much the same case with one who
+requires to take opium for the same purpose.  What we want
+to see is one who can breast into the world, do a man's
+work, and still preserve his first and pure enjoyment
+of existence.
+
+There is apt to be something unmanly, something almost
+dastardly, in a life that does not move with dash and
+freedom, and that fears the bracing contact of the world.
+
+*
+
+You cannot run away from a weakness; you must some time
+fight it out or perish; and if that be so, why not now, and
+where you stand?
+
+*
+
+Life as a matter of fact, partakes largely of the nature of
+tragedy.  The gospel according to Whitman, even if it be
+not so logical, has this advantage over the gospel
+according to Pangloss, that it does not utterly disregard
+the existence of temporal evil.  Whitman accepts the fact
+of disease and wretchedness like an honest man; and instead
+of trying to qualify it in the interest of his optimism,
+sets himself to spur people up to be helpful.
+
+*
+
+Indeed, I believe this is the lesson; if it is for fame
+that men do brave actions, they are only silly fellows
+after all.
+
+*
+
+To avoid an occasion for our virtues is a worse degree of
+failure than to push forward pluckily and make a fall.  It
+is lawful to pray God that we be not led into temptation;
+but not lawful to skulk from those that come to us.
+
+*
+
+To be honest, to be kind--to earn a little and to spend a
+little less, to make upon the whole a family happier for
+his presence, to renounce when that shall be necessary and
+not to be embittered, to keep a few friends, but these
+without capitulation--above all, on the same grim
+conditions, to keep friends with himself--here is a task
+for all that a man has of fortitude and delicacy.
+
+*
+
+As we dwell, we living things, in our isle of terror and
+under the imminent hand of death, God forbid it should
+be man the erected, the reasoner, the wise in his own
+eyes'--God forbid it should be man that wearies in welldoing,
+that despairs of unrewarded effort, or utters the language
+of complaint.  Let it be enough for faith, that the whole
+creation groans in mortal frailty, strives with
+unconquerable constancy: surely not all in vain.
+
+*
+
+I find I never weary of great churches.  It is my favourite
+kind of mountain scenery.  Mankind was never so happily
+inspired as when it made a cathedral: a thing as single and
+specious as a statue to the first glance, and yet, on
+examination, as lively and interesting as a forest in
+detail.  The height of spires cannot be taken by
+trigonometry; they measure absurdly short, but how tall
+they are to the admiring eye!  And where we have so many
+elegant proportions, growing one out of the other, and all
+together into one, it seems as if proportion transcended
+itself and became something different and more imposing.  I
+could never fathom how a man dares to lift up his voice to
+preach in a cathedral.  What is he to say that will not be
+an anti-climax?  For though I have heard a considerable
+variety of sermons, I never yet heard one that was so
+expressive as a cathedral.  'Tis the best preacher itself,
+and preaches day and night; not only telling you of man's
+art and aspirations in the past, but convicting your own
+soul of ardent sympathies; or rather, like all good
+preachers, it sets you preaching to yourself--and every man
+is his own doctor of divinity in the last resort.
+
+*
+
+As the business man comes to love the toil, which he only
+looked upon at first as a ladder towards other desires and
+less unnatural gratifications, so the dumb man has felt the
+charm of his trade and fallen captivated before the eyes of
+sin.  It is a mistake when preachers tell us that vice is
+hideous and loathsome; for even vice has her Horsel and her
+devotees, who love her' for her own sake.
+
+Between these two, I now felt I had to choose.  My two
+natures had memory in common, but all other faculties were
+most unequally shared between them.  Jekyll (who was
+composite) now with the most sensitive apprehensions, now
+with a greedy gusto, projected and shared in the pleasures
+and adventures of Hyde; but Hyde was indifferent to Jekyll,
+or but remembered him as the mountain bandit remembers the
+cavern in which he conceals himself from pursuit.  Jekyll
+had more than a father's interest; Hyde had more than a
+son's indifference.  To cast in my lot with Jekyll was to
+die to those appetites which I had long secretly indulged,
+and had of late begun to pamper.  To cast it in with Hyde
+was to die to a thousand interests and aspirations, and to
+become, at a blow and for ever, despised and friendless.
+The bargain might appear unequal; but there was still
+another consideration in the scale ; for while Jekyll would
+suffer smartingly in the fires of abstinence, Hyde would be
+not even conscious of all that he had lost.  Strange as my
+circumstances were, the terms of this debate are as old and
+commonplace as man; much the same inducements and alarms
+cast the die for any tempted and trembling sinner; and it
+fell out with me, as it falls with so vast a majority of my
+fellows, that I chose the better part, and was found
+wanting in the strength to keep to it.
+
+*
+
+Many a man would have even blazoned such irregularities as
+I was guilty of; but from the high views that I had set
+before me, I regarded and hid them with an almost morbid
+sense of shame.  It was thus rather the exacting nature of
+my aspirations than any particular degradation in my faults
+that made me what I was, and, with even a deeper trench
+than in the majority of men, severed in me those provinces
+of good and ill which divide and compound man's dual
+nature.  In this case I was driven to reflect deeply and
+inveterately on that hard law of life, which lies at the
+root of religion and is one of the most plentiful springs
+of distress.  Though so profound a double dealer, I was in
+no sense a hypocrite; both sides of me were in dead
+earnest; I was no more myself when I laid aside restraint
+and plunged in shame, than when I laboured, in the eye of
+day, at the furtherance of knowledge or the relief of
+sorrow and suffering.  And it chanced that the direction of
+my scientific studies, which led wholly towards the mystic
+and the transcendental, reacted and shed a strong light on
+this consciousness of the perennial war among my members.
+With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the
+moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to
+that truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed
+to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one,
+but truly two.
+
+*
+
+It may be argued again that dissatisfaction with our life's
+endeavour springs in some degree from dulness.  We require
+higher tasks because we do not recognise the height of
+those we have.  Trying to be kind and honest seems an
+affair too simple and too inconsequential for gentlemen of
+our heroic mould; we had rather set ourselves something
+bold, arduous, and conclusive; we had rather found a schism
+or suppress a heresy, cut off a hand or mortify an
+appetite.  But the task before us, which is to co-endure
+with our existence, is rather one of microscopic fineness,
+and the heroism required is that of patience.  There is no
+cutting of the Gordian knots of life; each must be
+smilingly unravelled.
+
+*
+
+It is perhaps a more fortunate destiny to have a taste for
+collecting shells than to be born a millionaire.  Although
+neither is to be despised, it is always better policy to
+learn an interest than to make a thousand pounds; for the
+money will soon be spent, or perhaps you may feel no joy in
+spending it; but the interest remains imperishable and ever
+new.  To become a botanist, a geologist, a social
+philosopher, an antiquary, or an artist, is to enlarge
+one's possessions in the universe by an incalculably higher
+degree, and by a far surer sort of property, than to
+purchase a farm of many acres.
+
+*
+
+He who has learned to love an art or science has wisely
+laid up riches against the day of riches; if prosperity
+come, he will not enter poor into his inheritance; he will
+not slumber and forget himself in the lap of money, or
+spend his hours in counting idle treasures, but be up and
+briskly doing; he will have the true alchemic touch, which
+is not that of Midas, but which transmutes dead money into
+living delight and satisfaction.  ETRE ET PAS AVOIR--to be,
+not to possess--that is the problem of life.  To be
+wealthy, a rich nature is the first requisite and money but
+the second.  To be of a quick and healthy blood, to share
+in all honourable curiosities, to be rich in admiration and
+free from envy, to rejoice greatly in the good of others,
+to love with such generosity of heart that your love is
+still a dear possession in absence or unkindness--these are
+the gifts of fortune which money cannot buy, and without
+which money can buy nothing.
+
+*
+
+An aim in life is the only fortune worth the finding;
+and it is not to be found in foreign lands, but in the
+heart itself.
+
+*
+
+'Mr. Archer was telling me in some strange land they used
+to run races each with a lighted candle, and the art was to
+keep the candle burning.  Well, now, I thought that was
+like life; a man's good conscience is the flame he gets to
+carry, and if he comes to the winning-post with that still
+burning, why, take it how you will, the man is a hero--even
+if he was low-born like you and me.'
+
+*
+
+Hope, they say, deserts us at no period of our existence.
+From first .to last, and in the face of smarting
+disillusions, we continue to expect good fortune, better
+health, and better conduct; and that so confidently, that
+we judge it needless to deserve them.
+
+*
+
+'Do I, indeed, lack courage?' inquired Mr. Archer of
+himself.  'Courage, the footstool of the virtues, upon
+which they stand?  Courage, that a poor private carrying a
+musket has to spare of; that does not fail a weasel or a
+rat; that is a brutish faculty?  I to fail there, I wonder?
+But what is courage?  The constancy to endure oneself or to
+see others suffer?  The itch of ill-advised activity: mere
+shuttle-wittedness, or to be still and patient?  To inquire
+of the significance of words is to rob ourselves of what we
+seem to know, and yet, of all things, certainly to stand
+still is the least heroic.'
+
+*
+
+To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of
+becoming, is the only end of life.
+
+*
+
+But let the man learn to love a woman as far as he is
+capable of love; and for this random affection of the body
+there is substituted a steady determination, a consent of
+all his powers and faculties, which supersedes, adopts, and
+commands the others.  The desire survives, strengthened,
+perhaps, but taught obedience, and changed in scope and
+character.  Life is no longer a tale of betrayals and
+regrets; for the man now lives as a whole; his
+consciousness now moves on uninterrupted like a river;
+through all the extremes and ups and downs of passion, he
+remains approvingly conscious of himself.
+
+Now to me, this seems a type of that righteousness which
+the soul demands.  It demands that we shall not live
+alternately with our opposing tendencies in continual
+see-saw of passion and disgust, but seek some path on which
+the tendencies shall no longer oppose, but serve each other
+to a common end.  It demands that we shall not pursue broken
+ends, but great and comprehensive purposes, in which soul
+and body may unite, like notes in a harmonious chord.  That
+were indeed a way of peace and pleasure, that were indeed a
+heaven upon earth.  It does not demand, however, or, to
+speak in measure, it does not demand of me, that I should
+starve my appetites for no purpose under heaven but as a
+purpose in itself; or, if in a weak despair, pluck out the
+eye that I have not learned to guide and enjoy with wisdom.
+The soul demands unity of purpose, not the dismemberment of
+man; it seeks to roll up all his strength and sweetness,
+all his passion and wisdom, into one, and make of him a
+perfect man exulting in perfection.  To conclude
+ascetically is to give up, and not to solve, the problem.
+
+*
+
+The best teachers are the aged.  To the old our mouths are
+always partly closed; we must swallow our obvious retorts
+and listen.  They sit above our heads, on life's raised
+dais, and appeal at once to our respect and pity.  A
+flavour of the old school, a touch of something different
+in their manner--which is freer and rounder, if they come
+of what is called a good family, and often more timid and
+precise if they are of the middle class--serves, in these
+days, to accentuate the difference of age and, add a
+distinction to grey hairs.  But their superiority is
+founded more deeply than by outward marks or gestures.
+They are before us in the march of man; they have more or
+less solved the irking problem; they have battled through
+the equinox of life; in good and evil they have held their
+course; and now, without open shame, they near the crown
+and harbour.  It may be we have been struck with one of
+fortune's darts; we can scarce be civil, so cruelly is our
+spirit tossed.  Yet long before we were so much as thought
+upon, the like calamity befel the old man or woman that
+now, with pleasant humour, rallies us upon our inattention,
+sitting composed in the holy evening of man's life, in the
+clear shining after rain.  We grow ashamed of our
+distresses, new and hot and coarse, like villainous
+roadside brandy; we see life in aerial perspective, under
+the heavens of faith; and out of the worst, in the mere
+presence of contented elders, look forward and take
+patience.  Fear shrinks before them 'like a thing
+reproved,' not the flitting and ineffectual fear of death,
+but the instant, dwelling terror of the responsibilities
+and revenges of life.  Their speech, indeed, is timid; they
+report lions in the path; they counsel a meticulous
+footing; but their serene, marred faces are more eloquent
+and tell another story.  'Where they have gone, we will go
+also, not very greatly fearing; what they have endured
+unbroken, we also, God helping us, will make a shift
+to bear.
+
+*
+
+If you teach a man to keep his eyes upon what others think
+of him, unthinkingly to lead the life and hold the
+principles of the majority of his contemporaries, you must
+discredit in his eyes the authoritative voice of his own
+soul.  He may be a docile citizen; he will never be a man.
+It is ours, on the other hand, to disregard this babble and
+chattering of other men better and worse than we are, and
+to walk straight before us by what light we have.  They may
+be right; but so, before heaven, are we.  They may know;
+but we know also, and by that knowledge we must stand or
+fall.  There is such a thing as loyalty to a man's own
+better self; and from those who have not that, God help me,
+how am I to look for loyalty to others? The most dull, the
+most imbecile, at a certain moment turn round, at a certain
+point will hear no further argument, but stand unflinching
+by their own dumb, irrational sense of right.  It is not
+only by steel or fire, but through contempt and blame, that
+the martyr fulfils the calling of his dear soul.  Be glad
+if you are not tried by such extremities.  But although all
+the world ranged themselves in one line to tell 'This is
+wrong,' be you your own faithful vassal and the ambassador
+of God--throw down the glove and answer, 'This is right.'
+Do you think you are only declaring yourself? Perhaps in
+some dim way, like a child who delivers a message not fully
+understood, you are opening wider the straits of prejudice
+and preparing mankind for some truer and more spiritual
+grasp of truth; perhaps, as you stand forth for your own
+judgment, you are covering a thousand weak ones with your
+body; perhaps, by this declaration alone, you have avoided
+the guilt of false witness against humanity and the little
+ones unborn.  It is good, I believe, to be respectable, but
+much nobler to respect oneself and utter the voice of God.
+
+I think it worth noting how this optimist was acquainted
+with pain.  It will seem strange only to the superficial.
+The disease of pessimism springs never from real troubles,
+which it braces men to bear, which it delights men to bear
+well.  Nor does it readily spring at all, in minds that
+have conceived of life as a field of ordered duties, not as
+a chase in which to hunt for gratifications.
+
+*
+
+But the race of man, like that iudomitable nature whence it
+sprang, has medicating virtues of its own; the years and
+seasons bring various harvests; the sun returns after the
+rain; and mankind outlives secular animosities, as a single
+man awakens from the passions of a day.  We judge our
+ancestors from a more divine position; and the dust
+being a little laid with several centuries, we can see
+both sides adorned with human virtues and fighting with
+a show of right.
+
+*
+
+It is a commonplace that we cannot answer for ourselves
+before we have been tried.  But it is not so common a
+reflection, and surely more consoling, that we usually find
+ourselves a great deal braver and better than we thought.
+I believe this is every one's experience; but an
+apprehension that they may belie themselves in the future
+prevents mankind from trumpeting this cheerful sentiment
+abroad.  I wish sincerely, for it would have saved me much
+trouble, there had been some one to put me in a good heart
+about life when I was younger; to tell sue how dangers are
+most portentous on a distant sight; and how the good in a
+man's spirit will not suffer itself to be overlaid, and
+rarely or never deserts him in the hour of need.  But we
+are all for tootling on the sentimental flute in
+literature; and not a man among us will go to the head of
+the march to sound the heady drums.
+
+*
+
+It is a poor heart, and a poorer age, that cannot accept
+the conditions of life with some heroic readiness.
+
+*
+
+I told him I was not much afraid of such accidents; and at
+any rate judged it unwise to dwell upon alarms or consider
+small perils in the arrangement of life.  Life itself I
+submitted, was a far too risky business as a whole to make
+each additional particular of danger worth regard.
+
+*
+
+There is nothing but tit for tat in this world, though
+sometimes it be a little difficult to trace; for the scores
+are older than we ourselves, and there has never yet been a
+settling day since things were.  You get entertainment
+pretty much in proportion as you give.  As long as we were
+a sort of odd wanderers, to be stared at and followed like
+a quack doctor or a caravan, we had no want of amusement in
+return; but as soon as we sunk into commonplace ourselves,
+all whom we met were similarly disenchanted.  And here is
+one reason of a dozen why the world is dull to dull
+persons.
+
+*
+
+All literature, from Job and Omar Khayam to Thomas Carlyle
+or Walt Whitman, is but an attempt to look upon the human
+state with such largeness of view as shall enable us to
+rise from the consideration of living to the Definition of
+Life.  And our sages give us about the best satisfaction in
+their power when they say that it is a vapour, or a show,
+or made out of the same stuff with dreams.  Philosophy, in
+its more rigid sense, has been at the same work for ages;
+and after a myriad bald heads have wagged over the problem,
+and piles of words have been heaped one upon another into
+dry and cloudy volumes without end, philosophy has the
+honour of laying before us, with modest pride, her
+contribution towards the subject: that life is a Permanent
+Possibility of Sensation.  Truly a fine result! A man may
+very well love beef, or hunting, or a woman; but surely,
+surely, not a Permanent Possibility of Sensation!  He may
+be afraid of a precipice, or a dentist, or a large enemy
+with a club, or even an undertaker's man; but not certainly
+of abstract death.  We may trick with the word life in its
+dozen senses until we are weary of tricking; we may argue
+in terms of all the philosophies on earth, but one fact
+remains true throughout--that we do not love life in the
+sense that we are greatly preoccupied about its
+conservation; that we do not, properly speaking, love life
+at all, but living.
+
+*
+
+Whether we regard life as a lane leading to a dead wall--a
+mere bag's end, as the French say--or whether we think of
+it as a vestibule or gymnasium, where we wait our turn and
+prepare our faculties for some more noble destiny; whether
+we thunder in a pulpit, or pule in little atheistic poetry-
+books, about its vanity and brevity; whether we look justly
+for years of health and vigour, or are about to mount into
+a bath-chair, as a step towards the hearse; in each and all
+of these views and situations there is but one conclusion
+possible: that a man should stop his ears against
+paralysing terror, and run the race that is set before him
+with a single mind.
+
+As courage and intelligence are the two qualities best
+worth a good man's cultivation, so it is the first part of
+intelligence to recognise our precarious estate in life,
+and the first part of courage to be not at all abashed
+before the fact.  A frank and somewhat headlong carriage,
+not looking too anxiously before, not dallying in maudlin
+regret over the past, stamps the man who is well armoured
+for this world.
+
+*
+
+It is not over the virtues of a curate-and-tea-party novel
+that people are abashed into high resolutions.  It may be
+because their hearts are crass, but to stir them properly
+they must have men entering into glory with sonic pomp
+and circumstance.  And that is why these stories of our
+sea-captains, printed, so to speak, in capitals, and full of
+bracing moral influence, are more valuable to England than
+any material benefit in all the books of political economy
+between Westminster and Birmingham.  Greenville chewing
+wine-glasses at table makes no very pleasant figure, any
+more than a thousand other artists when they are viewed in
+the body, or met in private life; but his work of art, his
+finished tragedy, is an elegant performance; and I contend
+it ought not only to enliven men of the sword as they go
+into battle, but send back merchant-clerks with more heart
+and spirit to their book-keeping by double entry.
+
+*
+
+It is said that a poet has died young in the breast of the
+most stolid.  'It may be contended, rather, that this
+(somewhat minor) bard in almost every case survives, and is
+the spice of life to his possessor.  Justice is not done to
+the versatility and the unplumbed childishness of man's
+imagination.  His life from without may seem but a rude
+mound of mud; there will be some golden chamber at the
+heart of it, in which he dwells delighted; and for as dark
+as his pathway seems to the observer, he will have some
+kind of a bull's-eye at his belt.
+
+*
+
+For, to repeat, the ground of a man's joy is often hard to
+hit.  It may hinge at times upon a mere accessory, like the
+lantern; it may reside, like Dancer's in the mysterious
+inwards of psychology.  It may consist with perpetual
+failure, and find exercise in the continued chase.  It has
+so little bond with externals (such as the observer
+scribbles in his notebook) that it may even touch them not;
+and the man's true life, for which he consents to live, lie
+altogether in the field of fancy.  The clergyman in his
+spare hours may be winning battles, the farmer sailing
+ships, the banker reaping triumph in the arts: all leading
+another life, plying another trade from that they chose;
+like the poet's house-builder, who, after all, is
+cased in stone,
+  'By his fireside, as impotent fancy prompts,
+   Rebuilds it to his liking.'
+
+In such a case the poetry runs underground.  The observer
+(poor soul, with his documents!) is all abroad.  For to
+look at the man is but to court deception.  We shall see
+the trunk from which he draws his nourishment; but he
+himself is above and abroad in the green dome of foliage,
+hummed through by winds and nested in by nightingales.  And
+the true realism were that of the poets, to climb up after
+him like a squirrel, and catch some glimpse of the heaven
+for which he lives.  And the true realism, always and
+everywhere, is that of the poets: to find out where joy
+resides, and give it voice beyond singing.
+
+*
+
+He who shall pass judgment on the records of our life is
+the same that formed us in frailty.
+
+*
+
+We are all so busy, and have so many far-off projects to
+realise, and castles in the fire to turn into solid
+habitable mansions on a gravel soil, that we can find no
+time for pleasure trips into the Land of Thought and among
+the Hills of Vanity.  Changed times, indeed, when we must
+sit all night, beside the fire, with folded hands; and a
+changed world for most of us, when we find we can pass the
+hours without discontent, and be happy thinking.  We are in
+such haste to be doing, to be writing, to be gathering
+gear, to make our voice audible a moment in the derisive
+silence of eternity, that we forget that one thing, of
+which these are but the parts--namely, to live.  We fall in
+love, we drink hard, we run to and fro upon the earth like
+frightened sheep.  And now you are to ask yourself if, when
+all is done, you would not have been better to sit by the
+fire at home, and be happy thinking.  To sit still and
+contemplate--to remember the faces of women without desire,
+to be pleased by the great deeds of men without envy, to be
+everything and everywhere in sympathy, and yet content to
+remain where and what you are--is not this to know both
+wisdom and virtue, and to dwell with happiness?
+
+*
+
+Of those who fail, I do not speak--despair should be
+sacred; but to those who even modestly succeed, the changes
+of their life bring interest: a job found, a shilling
+saved, a dainty earned, all these are wells of pleasure
+springing afresh for the successful poor; and it is not
+from these, but from the villa-dweller, that we hear
+complaints of the unworthiness of life.
+
+*
+
+I shall be reminded what a tragedy of misconception and
+misconduct man at large presents: of organised injustice,
+cowardly violence and treacherous crime; and of the damning
+imperfections of the best.  They cannot be too darkly
+drawn.  Man is indeed marked for failure in his efforts to
+do right.  But where the best consistently miscarry, how
+tenfold more remarkable that all should continue to strive;
+and surely we should find it both touching and inspiriting,
+that in a field from which success is banished, our race
+should not cease to labour.
+
+*
+
+Poor soul, here for so little, cast among so many
+hardships, filled with desires so incommensurate and so
+inconsistent, savagely surrounded, savagely descended,
+irremediably condemned to prey upon his fellow lives: who
+should have blamed him had he been of a piece with his
+destiny and a being merely barbarous?  And we look and
+behold him instead filled with imperfect virtues:
+infinitely childish, often admirably valiant, often
+touchingly kind; sitting down amidst his momentary life, to
+debate of right and wrong and the attributes of the deity;
+rising up to do battle for an egg or die for an idea;
+singling out his friends and his mate with cordial
+affection; bringing forth in pain, rearing, with
+long-suffering solicitude, his young.  To touch the heart
+of his mystery, we find in him one thought, strange to the
+point of lunacy: the thought of duty, the thought of
+something owing to himself, to his neighbour, to his God:
+an ideal of decency, to which he would rise if it were
+possible; a limit of shame, below which, if it be possible,
+he will not stoop.
+       
+*
+
+There are two just reasons for the choice any way of life:
+the first is inbred taste in the chooser; the second some
+high utility in the industry selected.
+
+*
+
+There is an idea abroad among moral people that they
+should make their neighbours good.  One person I have to
+make good: myself.  But my duty to my neighbour is much
+more nearly expressed by saying that I have to make him
+happy--if I may.
+
+*
+
+In his own life, then, a man is not to expect happiness,
+only to profit by it gladly when it shall arise; he is on
+duty here; he knows not how or why, and does not need to
+know; he knows not for what hire, and must not ask.
+Somehow or other, though he does not know what goodness
+is, he must try to be good; somehow or other, though he
+cannot tell what will do it, he must try to give happiness
+to others.
+
+*
+
+Of this one thing I am sure: that every one thawed and
+became more humanised and conversible as soon as these
+innocent people appeared upon the scene.  I would not
+readily trust the travelling merchant with any extravagant
+sum of money, but I am sure his heart was in the
+right place.
+
+In this mixed world, if you can find one or two sensible
+places in a man; above all, if you should find a whole
+family living together on such pleasant terms, you may
+surely he satisfied, and take the rest for granted; or,
+what is a great deal better, boldly make up your mind that
+you can do perfectly well without the rest, and that ten
+thousand bad traits cannot make a single good one any the
+less good.
+
+*
+
+His was, indeed, a good influence in life while he was
+still among us; he had a fresh laugh; it did you good to
+see him; and, however sad he may have been at heart, he
+always bore a bold and cheerful countenance and took
+fortune's worst as it were the showers of spring.
+
+*
+
+Pleasures are more beneficial than duties because, like the
+quality of mercy, they are not strained, and they are twice
+blest.  There must always be two in a kiss, and there may
+be a score in a jest; but wherever there is an element of
+sacrifice, the favour is conferred with pain, and, among
+generous people, received with confusion.
+
+There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being
+happy.  By being happy, we sow anonymous benefits upon the
+world, which remain unknown even to ourselves, or when they
+are disclosed, surprise nobody so much as the benefactor.
+
+*
+
+A happy man or woman is a better thing to find than a
+five-pound note.  He or she is a radiating focus of goodwill;
+and their entrance into a room is as though another candle
+had been lighted.  We need not care whether they could
+prove the forty-seventh proposition; they do a better thing
+than that, they practically demonstrate the great Theorem
+of the Liveableness of Life.
+
+*
+
+Mme. Bazin came out after a while; she was tired with her
+day's work, I suppose; and she nestled up to her husband
+and laid her head upon his breast.  He had his arm about
+her and kept gently patting her on the shoulder.  I think
+Bazin was right, and he was really married.  Of how few
+people can the same be said!
+
+Little did the Bazins know how much they served us.  We
+were charged for candles, for food and drink, and for the
+beds we slept in.  But there was nothing in the bill for
+the husband's pleasant talk; nor for the pretty spectacle
+of their married life.  And there was yet another item
+uncharged.  For these people's, politeness really set us up
+again in our own esteem.  We had a thirst for
+consideration; the sense of insult was still hot in our
+spirits; and civil usage seemed to restore us to our
+position in the world.
+
+How little we pay our way in life! Although we have our
+purses continually in our hand, the better part of service
+goes still unrewarded.  But I like to fancy that a grateful
+spirit gives as good as it gets.  Perhaps the Bazins knew
+how much I liked them? perhaps they, also, were healed of
+some slights by the thanks that I gave them in my manner?
+
+*
+
+No art, it may be said, was ever perfect, and not many
+noble, that has not been mirthfully conceived.  And no man,
+it may be added, was ever anything but a wet blanket and a
+cross to his companions who boasted not a copious spirit of
+enjoyment.
+
+*
+
+There is yet another class who do not depend on corporal
+advantages, but support the winter in virtue of a brave and
+merry heart.  One shivering evening, cold enough for frost,
+but with too high a wind, and a little past sundown, when
+the Lamps were beginning to enlarge their circles in the
+growing dusk, a brace of barefooted lassies were seen
+coming eastward in the teeth of the wind.  If the one was
+as much as nine, the other was certainly not more than
+seven.  They were miserably clad; and the pavement was so
+cold, you would have thought no one could lay a naked foot
+on it unflinching.  Yet they came along waltzing, if you
+please, while the elder sang a tune to give them music.
+The person who saw this, and whose heart was full of
+bitterness at the moment, pocketed a reproof which has been
+of use to him ever since, and which he now hands on, with
+his good wishes, to the reader.
+
+*
+
+Happiness, at least, is not solitary; it joys to
+communicate; it loves others, for it depends on them for
+its existence; it sanctions and encourages to all delights
+that are not unkind in themselves; if it lived to a
+thousand, it would not make excision of a single humorous
+passage; and while the self-improver dwindles toward the
+prig, and, if he be not of an excellent constitution, may
+even grow deformed into an Obermann, the very name and
+appearance of a happy man breathe of good-nature, and help
+the rest of us to live.
+
+*
+
+It is never a thankful office to offer advice; and advice
+is the more unpalatable, not only from the difficulty of
+the service recommended, but often from its very
+obviousness.  We are fired with anger against those who
+make themselves the spokesmen of plain obligations; for
+they seem to insult us as they advise.
+
+*
+
+We are not all patient Grizzels, by good fortune, but
+the most of us human beings with feelings and tempers
+of our own.
+
+*
+
+Men, whether lay or clerical, suffer better the flame of
+the stake than a daily inconvenience or a pointed sneer,
+and will not readily be martyred without some external
+circumstance and a concourse looking on.
+
+*
+
+An imperturbable demeanour comes from perfect patience.
+Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened, but go on in
+fortune or misfortune at their own private pace, like a
+clock during a thunderstorm.
+
+*
+
+The ways of men seem always very trivial to us when we find
+ourselves alone on a church top, with the blue sky and a
+few tall pinnacles, and see far below us the steep roofs
+and foreshortened buttresses, and the silent activity of
+the city streets.
+
+*
+
+Nevertheless, there is a certain frame of mind to which a
+cemetery is, if not an antidote, at least an alleviation.
+If you are in a fit of the blues, go nowhere else.
+
+*
+
+Honour can survive a wound; it can live and thrive without
+member.  The man rebounds from his disgrace; he begins
+fresh foundations on the ruins of the old; and when his
+sword is broken, he will do valiantly with his dagger.
+
+*
+
+It is easy to be virtuous when one's own convenience is not
+affected; and it is no shame to any man to follow the
+advice of an outsider who owns that, while he sees which is
+the better part, he might not have the courage to profit
+himself by this opinion.
+
+*
+
+As soon as prudence has begun to grow up in the brain, like
+a dismal fungus, it finds its expression in a paralysis of
+generous acts.
+
+*
+
+The man who cannot forgive any mortal thing is a green
+hand in life.
+
+*
+
+It is a useful accomplishment to be able to say NO, but
+surely it is the essence of amiability to prefer to say YES
+where it is possible.  There is something wanting in the
+man who does not hate himself whenever he is constrained to
+say no.  And there was a great deal wanting in this born
+dissenter.  He was almost shockingly devoid of weaknesses;
+he had not enough of them to be truly polar with humanity;
+whether you call him demi-god or demi-man, he was at least
+not altogether one of us, for he was not touched with a
+feeling of our infirmities.  The world's heroes have room
+for all positive qualities, even those which are
+disreputable, in the capacious theatre of their
+dispositions.  Such can live many lives; while a Thoreau
+can live but one, and that only with perpetual foresight.
+
+*
+
+We can all be angry with our neighbour; what we want is to
+be shown, not his defects, of which we are too conscious,
+but his merits, to which we are too blind.
+
+*
+
+And methought that beauty and terror are only one, not two;
+And the world has room for love, and death, and thunder,
+and dew;
+And all the sinews of hell slumber in summer air;
+And the face of God is a rock, but the face of the rock
+is fair.
+Beneficent streams of tears flow at the finger of pain;
+And out of the cloud that smites, beneficent rivers
+of rain.
+
+*
+
+'The longest and most abstruse flight of a philosopher
+becomes clear and shallow, in the flash of a moment, when
+we suddenly perceive the aspect and drift of his intention.
+The longest argument is but a finger pointed; once we get
+our own finger rightly parallel, and we.  see what the man
+meant, whether it be a new Star or an old street-lamp.  And
+briefly, if a saying is hard to understand, it is because
+we are thinking of something else.
+
+*
+
+I have seen wicked men and fools, a great many of both;
+and I believe they both get paid in the end, but the
+fools first.
+
+*
+
+Whether people's gratitude for the good gifts that come to
+them be wisely conceived or dutifully expressed is a
+secondary matter, after all, so long as they feel
+gratitude.  The true ignorance is when a man does not know
+that he has received a good gift, or begins to imagine that
+he has got it for himself.  The self-made man is the
+funniest windbag after all! There is a marked difference
+between decreeing light in chaos, and lighting the gas in a
+metropolitan back parlour with a box of patent matches;
+and, do what we will, there is always something made to our
+hand, if it were only our fingers.
+
+*
+
+Benjamin Franklin went through life an altered man, because
+he once paid too dearly for a penny whistle.  My concern
+springs usually from a deeper source, to wit, from having
+bought a whistle when I did not want one.
+
+*
+
+I believe in a better state of things, that there will be
+no more nurses, and that every mother will nurse her own
+offspring; for what can be more hardening and demoralising
+than to call forth the tenderest feelings of a woman's
+heart and cherish them yourself as long as you need them,
+as long as your children require a nurse to love them, and
+then to blight and thwart and destroy them, whenever your
+own use for them is at an end.
+
+*
+
+We had needs invent heaven if it had not been revealed
+to us; there are some things that fall so bitterly ill on
+this side time!
+
+*
+
+To write with authority about another man, we must have
+fellow-feeling and some common ground of experience with
+our subject.  We may praise or blame according as we find
+him related to us by the best or worst in ourselves; but it
+is only in virtue of some relationship that we can be his
+judges, even to condemn.  Feelings which we share and
+understand enter for us into the tissue of the man's
+character; those to which we are strangers in our own
+experience we are inclined to regard as blots, exceptions,
+inconsistencies, and excursions of the diabolic; we
+conceive them with repugnance, explain them with
+difficulty, and raise our hands to heaven in wonder when we
+find them in conjunction with talents that we respect or
+virtues that we admire.
+
+*
+
+To the best of my belief, Mr. Shandy is the first who
+fairly pointed out the incalculable influence of
+nomenclature upon the whole life--who seems first to have
+recognised the one child, happy in an heroic appellation,
+soaring upwards on the wings of fortune, and the other,
+like the dead sailor in his shotted hammock, haled down by
+sheer weight of name into the abysses of social failure.
+
+*
+
+It would be well if nations and races could communicate
+their qualities; but in practice when they look upon each
+other, they have an eye to nothing but defects.
+
+*
+
+Many a man's destiny has been settled by nothing apparently
+more grave than a pretty face on the opposite side of the
+street and a couple of bad companions round the corner.
+
+*
+
+So kindly is the world arranged, such great profit may
+arise from a small degree of human reliance on oneself, and
+such, in particular, is the happy star of this trade of
+writing, that it should combine pleasure and profit to both
+parties, and be at once agreeable, like fiddling, and
+useful, like good preaching.
+
+*
+
+In all garrison towns, guard-calls, and reveilles, and such
+like, make a fine, romantic interlude in civic business.
+Bugles, and drums, and fifes are of themselves most
+excellent things in nature, and when they carry the mind to
+marching armies and the picturesque vicissitudes of war
+they stir up something proud in the heart.
+
+*
+
+To pass from hearing literature to reading it is to take a
+great and dangerous step.  With not a few, I think a large
+proportion of their pleasure then comes to an end; 'the
+malady of not marking' overtakes them; they read
+thenceforward by the eye alone and hear never again the
+chime of fair words or the march of the stately period.
+NON RAGIONIAM of these.  But to all the step is dangerous;
+it involves coming of age; it is even a kind of second
+weaning.  In the past all was at the choice of others; they
+chose, they digested, they read aloud for us and sang to
+their own tune the books of childhood.  In the future we
+are to approach the silent, inexpressive type alone, like
+pioneers; and the choice of what we are to read is in our
+own hands thenceforward.
+
+*
+
+It remains to .be seen whether you can prove yourselves as
+generous as you have been wise and patient.
+
+*
+
+'If folk dinna ken what ye're doing, Davie, they're
+terrible taken up with it; but if they think they ken, they
+care nae mair for it than what I do for pease porridge.'
+
+*
+
+And perhaps if you could read in my soul, or I could
+read in yours, our own composure might seem little
+less surprising.
+
+*
+
+For charity begins blindfold; and only through a series of
+misapprehensions rises at length into a settled principle
+of love and patience, and a firm belief in all our
+fellow-men.
+
+*
+
+There is no doubt that the poorer classes in our country
+are much more charitably disposed than their superiors in
+wealth.  And I fancy it must arise a great deal from the
+comparative indistinction of the easy and the not so easy
+in these ranks.  A workman or a pedlar cannot shutter
+himself off from his less comfortable neighbours.  If he
+treats himself to a luxury, he must do it in the face of a
+dozen who cannot.  And what should more directly lead to
+charitable thoughts?  Thus the poor man, camping out in
+life, sees it as it is, and knows that every mouthful he
+puts in his belly has been wrenched out of the fingers of
+the hungry.
+
+But at a certain stage of prosperity, as in a balloon
+ascent, the fortunate person passes through a zone of
+clouds, and sublunary matters are thenceforward hidden from
+his view.  He sees nothing but the heavenly bodies, all in
+admirable order, and positively as good as new.  He finds
+himself surrounded in the most touching manner by the
+attentions of Providence, and compares himself
+involuntarily with the lilies and the skylarks.  He does
+not precisely sing, of course; but then he looks so
+unassuming in his open laudau!  If all the world dined
+at one table, this philosophy would meet with some
+rude knocks.
+
+*
+
+Forgive me, if I seem to teach, who am as ignorant as the
+trees of the mountain; but those who learn much do but skim
+the face of knowledge; they seize the laws, they conceive
+the dignity of the design--the horror of the living fact
+fades from the memory.  It is we who sit at home with evil
+who remember, I think, and are warned and pity.
+
+*
+
+Look back now, for a moment, on your own brief experience
+of life; and although you lived it feelingly in your own
+person, and had every step of conduct burned in by pains
+and joys upon your memory, tell me what definite lesson
+does experience hand on from youth to manhood, or from both
+to age?  The settled tenor which first strikes the eye is
+but the shadow of a delusion.  This is gone; that never
+truly was; and you yourself are altered beyond recognition.
+Times and men and circumstances change about your changing
+character, with a speed of which no earthly hurricane
+affords an image.  What was the best yesterday, is it still
+the best in this changed theatre of a to-morrow?  Will your
+own Past truly guide you in your own violent and unexpected
+Future?  And if this be questionable, with what humble,
+with what hopeless eyes, should we not watch other men
+driving beside us on their unknown careers, seeing with
+unlike eyes, impelled by different gales, doing and
+suffering in another sphere of things?
+
+*
+
+The problem of education is twofold: first to know, and
+then to utter.  Every one who lives any semblance of an
+inner life thinks more nobly and profoundly than he speaks;
+and the best teachers can impart only broken images of the
+truth which they perceive.  Speech which goes from one to
+another between two natures, and, what is worse, between
+two experiences, is doubly relative.  The speaker buries
+his meaning; it is for the hearer to dig it up again; and
+all speech, written or spoken, is in a dead language until
+it finds a willing and prepared hearer.
+
+*
+
+Culture is not measured by the greatness of the field which
+is covered by our knowledge, but by the nicety with which
+we can perceive relations in that field, whether great
+or small.
+
+*
+
+We are accustomed nowadays to a great deal of puling over
+the circumstances in which we are placed.  The great
+refinement of many poetical gentlemen has rendered them
+practically unfit for the jostling and ugliness of life,
+and they record their unfitness at considerable length.
+The bold and awful poetry of Job's complaint produces too
+many flimsy imitators; for there is always something
+consolatory in grandeur, but the symphony transposed for
+the piano becomes hysterically sad.  This literature of
+woe, as Whitman calls it, this MALADIE DE RENE, as we like
+to call it in Europe, is in many ways a most humiliating
+and sickly phenomenon.  Young gentlemen with three or four
+hundred a year of private means look down from a pinnacle
+of doleful experience on all the grown and hearty men who
+have dared to say a good word for life since the beginning
+of the world.  There is no prophet but the melancholy
+Jacques, and the blue devils dance on all our literary
+wires.
+
+It would be a poor service to spread culture, if this be
+its result, among the comparatively innocent and cheerful
+ranks of men.  When our little poets have to be sent to
+look at the ploughman and learn wisdom, we must be careful
+how we tamper with our ploughmen.  Where a man in not the
+best of circumstances preserves composure of mind, and
+relishes ale and tobacco, and his wife and children, in the
+intervals of dull and unremunerative labour; where a man in
+this predicament can afford a lesson by the way to what are
+called his intellectual superiors, there is plainly
+something to be lost, as well as something to be gained, by
+teaching him to think differently.  It is better to leave
+him as he is than to teach him whining.  It is better that
+he should go without the cheerful lights of culture, if
+cheerless doubt and paralysing sentimentalism are to be the
+consequence.  Let us, by all means, fight against that
+hide-bound stolidity of sensation and sluggishness of mind
+which blurs and decolorises for poor natures the wonderful
+pageant of consciousness; let us teach people, as much as
+we can, to enjoy, and they will learn for themselves to
+sympathise; but let us see to it, above all, that we give
+these lessons in a brave, vivacious note, and build the man
+up in courage while we demolish its substitute,
+indifference.
+
+*
+
+All opinions, properly so called, are stages on the road to
+truth.  It does not follow that a man will travel any
+further; but if he has really considered the world and
+drawn a conclusion, he has travelled so far.  This does not
+apply to formulae got by rote, which are stages on the road
+to nowhere but second childhood and the grave.  To have a
+catchword in your mouth is not the same thing as to hold an
+opinion; still less is it the same thing as to have made
+one for yourself.
+
+*
+
+It is surely beyond a doubt that people should be a good
+deal idle in youth.  For though here and there a Lord
+Macaulay may escape from school honours with all his wits
+about him, most boys pay so dear for their medals that they
+never afterwards have a shot in their locker, and begin the
+world bankrupt.  And the same holds true during all the
+time a lad is educating himself, or suffering others to
+educate him.... Books are good enough in their own way, but
+they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life.  It seems
+a pity to sit, like the Lady of Shalott, peering into a
+mirror, with your back turned on all the bustle and glamour
+of reality.  And if a man reads very hard, as the old
+anecdote reminds us, he will have little time for thought.
+
+*
+
+It is supposed that all knowledge is at the bottom of a
+well, or the far end of a telescope.  As a matter of fact,
+an intelligent person, looking out of his eyes and
+hearkening in his ears, with a smile on his face all the
+time, will get more true education than many another in a
+life of heroic vigils.  There is certainly some chill and
+arid knowledge to be found upon the summits of formal and
+laborious science; but it is all round about you, and for
+the trouble of looking, that you will acquire the warm and
+palpitating facts of life.  While others are filling their
+memory with a lumber of words, one-half of which they will
+forget before the week is out, your truant may learn some
+really useful art: to play the fiddle, or to speak with
+ease and opportunity to all varieties of men.  Many who
+have 'plied their book diligently,' and know all about some
+one branch or another of accepted lore, come out of the
+study with an ancient and owl-like demeanour, and prove
+dry, stockish, and dyspeptic in all the better and brighter
+parts of life.  Many make a large fortune who remain
+underbred and pathetically stupid to the last.  And
+meantime there goes the idler, who began life along with
+them--by your leave, a different picture.  He has had time
+to take care of his health and his spirits; he has been a
+great deal in the open air, which is the most salutary of
+all things for both body and mind; and if he has never read
+the great Book in very recondite places, he has dipped into
+it and skimmed it over to excellent purpose.  Might not the
+student afford some Hebrew roots, and the business man some
+of his half-crowns, for a share of the idler's knowledge of
+life at large, and Art of Living?
+
+*
+
+Nay, and the idler has another and more important quality
+than these.  I mean his wisdom.  He who has much looked on
+at the childish satisfaction of other people in their
+hobbies, will regard his own with only a very ironical
+indulgence.  He will not be heard among the dogmatists.
+He will have a great and cool allowance for all sorts of
+people and opinions.  If he finds no out-of-the-way truths,
+he will identify himself with no very burning falsehood.
+His way takes him along a by-road, not much frequented, but
+very even and pleasant, which is called Commonplace Lane,
+and leads to the Belvedere of Commonsense.  Thence he shall
+command an agreeable, if no very noble prospect; and while
+others behold the East and West, the Devil and the sunrise,
+he will be contentedly aware of a sort of morning hour upon
+all sublunary things, with an army of shadows running
+speedily and in many different directions into the great
+daylight of Eternity.
+
+*
+
+I begin to perceive that it is necessary to know some one
+thing to the bottom-- were it only literature.  And yet,
+sir, the man of the world is a great feature of this age;
+he is possessed of an extraordinary mass and variety of
+knowledge; he is everywhere at home; he has seen life in
+all its phases ; and it is impossible but that this great
+habit of existence should bear fruit.
+
+*
+
+I am sorry indeed that I have no Greek, but I should be
+sorrier still if I were dead; nor do I know the name of
+that branch of knowledge which is worth acquiring at the
+price of a brain fever.  There are many sordid tragedies in
+the life of the student, above all if he be poor, or
+drunken, or both; but nothing more moves a wise man s pity
+than the case of the lad who is in too much hurry to be
+learned.
+
+*
+
+'My friend,' said I, 'it is not easy to say who know the
+Lord; and it is none of our business.  Protestants and
+Catholics, and even those who worship stones, may know Him
+and be known by Him; for He has made all.'
+
+*
+
+Cheylard scrapes together halfpence or the darkened souls
+in Edinburgh; while Balquhidder and Dunrossness bemoans the
+ignorance of Rome.  Thus, to the high entertainment of the
+angels, do we pelt each other with evangelists, like
+schoolboys bickering in the snow.
+
+*
+
+For courage respects courage; but where a faith has been
+trodden out, we may look for a mean and narrow population.
+
+*
+
+Its not only a great flight of confidence for a man to
+change his creed and go out of his family for heaven's
+sake; but the odds are--nay, and the hope is--that, with
+all this great transition in the eyes of man, he has not
+changed himself a hairbreadth to the eyes of God.  Honour
+to those who do so, for the wrench is sore.  But it argues
+something narrow, whether of strength or weakness, whether
+of the prophet or the fool, in those who can take a
+sufficient interest in such infinitesimal and human
+operations, or who can quit a friendship for a doubtful
+operation of the mind.  And I think I should not leave my
+old creed for another, changing only words for words; but
+by some brave reading, embrace it in spirit and truth, and
+find wrong as wrong for me as for the best of other
+communions.
+
+*
+
+It is not a basketful of law-papers, nor the hoofs and
+pistol-butts of a regiment of horse, that can change one
+tittle of a ploughman's thoughts.  Outdoor rustic people
+have not many ideas, but such as they have are hardy
+plants, and thrive flourishingly in persecution.  One who
+has grown a long while in the sweat of laborious noons, and
+under the stars at night, a frequenter of hills and
+forests, an old honest countryman, has, in the end, a sense
+of communion with the powers of the universe, and amicable
+relations towards his God.  Like my mountain Plymouth
+Brother, he knows the Lord.  His religion does not repose
+upon a choice of logic; it is the poetry of the man's
+existence, the philosophy of the history of his life.  God,
+like a great power, like a great shining sun, has appeared
+to this simple fellow in the course of years, and become
+the ground and essence of his least reflections; and you
+may change creeds and dogmas by authority, or proclaim, a
+new religion with the sound of trumpets, if you will; but
+here is a man who has his own thoughts, and will stubbornly
+adhere to them in good and evil.  He is a Catholic, a
+Protestant, or a Plymouth Brother, in the same indefeasible
+sense that a man is not a woman, or a woman is not a man.
+For he could not vary from his faith, unless he could
+eradicate all memory of the past, and, in a strict and not
+conventional meaning, change his mind.
+
+*
+
+For still the Lord is Lord of might;
+In deeds, in deeds, he takes delight;
+The plough, the spear, the laden barks,
+The field, the founded city, marks;
+He marks the smiler of the streets,
+The singer upon garden seats;
+He sees the climber in the rocks:
+To him, the shepherd folds his flocks.
+For those he loves that underprop
+With daily virtues Heaven's top,
+And bear the falling sky with ease,
+Unfrowning caryatides.
+Those he approves that ply the trade,
+That rock the child, that wed the maid,
+That with weak virtues, weaker hands,
+Sow gladness on the peopled lands,
+And still with laughter, song and shout,
+Spin the great wheel of earth about.
+
+*
+
+The shadow of a great oak lies abroad upon the ground at
+noon, perfect, clear, and stable like the earth.  But let a
+man set himself to mark out the boundary with cords and
+pegs, and were he never so nimble and never so exact, what
+with the multiplicity of the leaves and the progression of
+the shadow as it flees before the travelling sun, long ere
+he has made the circuit the whole figure will have changed.
+Life may be compared, not to a single tree, but to a great
+and complicated forest; circumstance is more swiftly
+changing than a shadow, language much more inexact than the
+tools of a surveyor; from day to day the trees fall and are
+renewed; the very essences are fleeting as we look; and the
+whole world of leaves is swinging tempest-tossed among the
+winds of time.  Look now for your shadows.  O man of
+formulae, is this a place for you?  Have you fitted the
+spirit to a single case?  Alas, in the cycle of the ages
+when shall such another be proposed for the judgment of
+man?  Now when the sun shines and the winds blow, the wood
+is filled with an innumerable multitude of shadows,
+tumultuously tossed and changing; and at every gust the
+whole carpet leaps and becomes new.  Can you or your heart
+say more?
+
+*
+
+Indeed, I can see no dishonesty in not avowing a
+difference; and especially in these high matters, where we
+have all a sufficient assurance that, whoever may be in the
+wrong, we ourselves are not completely right....  I know
+right well that we are all embarked upon a troublesome
+world, the children of one Father, striving in many
+essential points to do and to become the same.
+
+*
+
+The word 'facts' is, in some ways, crucial.  I have spoken
+with Jesuits and Plymouth Brethren, mathematicians and
+poets, dogmatic republicans and dear old gentlemen in
+bird's-eye neckcloths; and each understood the word 'facts'
+in an occult sense of his own.  Try as I might, I could get
+no nearer the principle of their division.  What was
+essential to them, seemed to me trivial or untrue.  We
+could come to no compromise as to what was, or what was
+not, important in the life of man.  Turn as we pleased, we
+all stood back to back in a big ring, and saw another
+quarter of the heavens, with different mountain-tops along
+the sky-line and different constellations overhead.  We had
+each of us some whimsy in the brain, which we believed more
+than anything else, and which discoloured all experience to
+its own shade.  How would you have people agree, when one
+is deaf and the other blind?
+
+*
+
+The average man lives, and must live, so wholly in
+convention, that gunpowder charges of the truth are more
+apt to discompose than to invigorate his creed.  Either
+he cries out upon blasphemy and indecency, and crouches
+the closer round that little idol of part-truth and
+part-conveniences which is the contemporary deity, or
+he is convinced by what is new, forgets what is old,
+and becomes truly blasphemous and indecent himself.  New
+truth is only wanted to expand, not to destroy, our civil
+and often elegant conventions.  He who cannot judge had
+better stick to fiction and the daily papers. There he
+will get little harm, and, in the first at least, some good.
+       
+*
+
+The human race is a thing more ancient than the ten
+commandments; and the bones and the revolutions of the
+Kosmos in whose joints we are but moss and fungus, more
+ancient still.
+
+*
+
+The canting moralist tells us of right and wrong; and we
+look abroad, even on the face of our small earth, and find
+them change with every climate, and no country where some
+action is not honoured for a virtue and none where it is
+not branded for a vice; and we look into our experience,
+and find no vital congruity in the wisest rules, but at the
+best a municipal fitness.  It is not strange if we are
+tempted to despair of good.  We ask too much.  Our
+religions and moralities have been trimmed to flatter us,
+till they are all emasculate and sentimentalised, and only
+please and weaken.  Truth is of a rougher strain.  In the
+harsh face of life, faith can read a bracing gospel.
+
+*
+
+Gentleness and cheerfulness, these come before all
+morality; they are the perfect duties.... If your morals
+make you dreary, depend upon it they are wrong.  I do not
+say 'give them up,' for they may be all you have; but
+conceal them like a vice, lest they should spoil the lives
+of better and simpler people.
+
+*
+
+There is no quite good book without a good morality; but
+the world is wide, and so are morals.  Out of two people
+who have dipped into Sir Richard Burton's Thousand and One
+Nights, one shall have been offended by the animal details;
+another to whom these were harmless, perhaps even pleasing,
+shall yet have been shocked in his turn by the rascality
+and cruelty of all the characters.  Of two readers, again,
+one shall have been pained by the morality of a religious
+memoir, one by that of the VICOMTE DE BRAGELONNE.  And the
+point is that neither need be wrong.  We shall always shock
+each other both in life and art; we cannot get the sun into
+our pictures, nor the abstract right (if there be such a
+thing) into our books; enough if, in the one, there glimmer
+some hint of the great light that blinds us from heaven;
+enough if, in the other, there shine, even upon foul
+details, a spirit of magnanimity.
+
+*
+
+For to do anything because others do it, and not because
+the thing is good, or kind, or honest in its own right, is
+to resign all moral control and captaincy upon yourself,
+and go post-haste to the devil with the greater number.
+The respectable are not led so much by any desire of
+applause as by a positive need for countenance.  The weaker
+and the tamer the man, the more will he require this
+support; and any positive quality relieves him, by just so
+much, of this dependence.
+
+*
+
+Happiness and goodness, according to canting moralists,
+stand in the relation of effect and cause.  There was never
+anything less proved or less probable: our happiness is
+never in our own hands; we inherit our constitutions; we
+stand buffet among friends and enemies; we may be so built
+as to feel a sneer or an aspersion with unusual keenness,
+and so circumstanced as to be unusually exposed to them; we
+may have nerves very sensitive to pain, and be afflicted
+with a disease more painful.  Virtue will not help us, and
+it is not meant to help us.  It is not even its own reward,
+except for the self-centred and--I had almost said--the
+unamiable.
+
+*
+
+Noble disappointment, noble self-denial, are not to be
+admired, not even to be pardoned, if they bring bitterness.
+It is one thing to enter the kingdom of heaven maim;
+another to maim yourself and stay without.
+
+*
+
+To make our idea of morality centre on forbidden acts is to
+defile the imagination and to introduce into our judgments
+of our fellow-men a secret element of gusto.  If a thing is
+wrong for us, we should not dwell upon the thought of it;
+or we shall soon dwell upon it with inverted pleasure.
+
+*
+
+There is a certain class, professors of that low morality
+so greatly more distressing than the better sort of vice,
+to whom you must never represent an act that was virtuous
+in itself, as attended by any other consequences than a
+large family and fortune.
+
+*
+
+All have some fault.  The fault of each grinds down
+the hearts of those about him, and--let us not blink the
+truth--hurries both him and them into the grave.  And when
+we find a man persevering indeed, in his fault, as all of
+us do, and openly overtaken, as not all of us are, by its
+consequences, to gloss the matte over, with too polite
+biographers, is to do the work of the wrecker disfiguring
+beacons on a perilous seaboard; but to call him bad, with a
+self-righteous chuckle, is to be talking in one's sleep
+with Heedless and Too-bold in the arbour.
+
+*
+
+The most influential books, and the truest in their
+influence, are works of fiction.  They do not pin the
+reader to a dogma, which he must afterwards discover to be
+inexact; they do not teach a lesson, which he must
+afterwards unlearn.  They repeat, they rearrange, they
+clarify the lessons of life; they disengage us from
+ourselves, they constrain us to the acquaintance of others;
+and they show us the web of experience, not as we can see
+it for ourselves, but with a singular change--that
+monstrous, consuming ego of ours being, for the nonce,
+struck out.  To be so, they must be reasonably true to the
+human comedy; and any work that is so serves the turn of
+instruction.
+
+*
+
+Nature is a good guide through life, and the love of simple
+pleasures next, if not superior, to virtue.
+
+*
+
+The soul asks honour and not fame; to be upright, not to be
+successful; to be good, not prosperous; to be essentially,
+not outwardly, respectable.
+
+*
+
+Practice is a more intricate and desperate business than
+the toughest theorising; life is an affair of cavalry,
+where rapid judgment and prompt action are alone possible
+and right.
+
+*
+
+Each man should learn what is within him, that he may
+strive to mend; he must be taught what is without him, that
+he may be kind to others.  It can never be wrong to tell
+him the truth; for, in his disputable state, weaving as he
+goes his theory of life, steering himself, cheering or
+reproving others, all facts are of the first importance to
+his conduct; and even if a fact shall discourage or corrupt
+him, it is still best that he should know it; for it is in
+this world as it is, and not in a world made easy by
+educational suppression, that he must win his way to shame
+or glory.
+
+*
+
+A generous prayer is never presented in vain; the petition
+may be refused, but the petitioner is always, I believe,
+rewarded by some gracious visitation.
+
+*
+
+EVENSONG
+
+The embers of the day are red
+Beyond the murky hill.
+The kitchen smokes: the bed
+In the darkling house is spread:
+The great sky darkens overhead,
+And the great woods are shrill.
+So far have I been led,
+Lord, by Thy will:
+So far I have followed, Lord, and wondered still.
+
+The breeze from the enbalmed land
+Blows sudden toward the shore,
+And claps my cottage door.
+I hear the signal, Lord--I understand.
+The night at Thy command
+Comes.  I will eat and sleep and will not question more.
+
+*
+
+It is not at all a strong thing to put one's reliance upon
+logic.; and our own logic particularly, for it is generally
+wrong.  We never know where we are to end if once we begin
+following words or doctors.  There is an upright stock in a
+man's own heart that is trustier than any syllogism; and
+the eyes, and the sympathies, and appetites know a thing or
+two that have never yet been stated in controversy.
+Reasons are as plentiful as blackberries; and, like
+fisticuffs, they serve impartially with all sides.
+Doctrines do not stand or fall by their proofs, and are
+only logical in so far as they are cleverly put.  An able
+controversialist no more than an able general demonstrates
+the justice of his cause.
+
+*
+
+To any man there may come at times a consciousness that
+there blows, through all the articulations of his body, the
+wind of a spirit not wholly his; that his mind rebels; that
+another girds him and carries him whither he would not.
+
+*
+
+The child, the seed, the grain of corn,
+The acorn on the hill,
+Each for some separate end is born
+In season fit, and still
+Each must in strength arise to work the almighty will.
+
+So from the hearth the children flee,
+By that almighty hand
+Austerely led; so one by sea
+Goes forth, and one by land;
+Nor aught of all man's sons escapes from that command.
+
+So from the sally each obeys
+The unseen almighty nod;
+So till the ending all their ways
+Blindfolded loth have trod:
+Nor knew their task at all, but were the tools of God.
+
+*
+
+A few restrictions, indeed, remain to influence the
+followers of individual branches of study.  The DIVINITY,
+for example, must be an avowed believer; and as this, in
+the present day, is unhappily considered by many as a
+confession of weakness, he is fain to choose one of two
+ways of gilding the distasteful orthodox bolus.  Some
+swallow it in a thin jelly of metaphysics; for it is even a
+credit to believe in God on the evidence of some crack-jaw
+philosopher, although it is a decided slur to believe in
+Him on His own authority.  Others again (and this we think
+the worst method), finding German grammar a somewhat dry
+morsel, run their own little heresy as a proof of
+independence; and deny one of the cardinal doctrines that
+they may hold the others without being laughed at.
+
+*
+
+In particular, I heard of clergymen who were employing
+their time in explaining to a delighted audience the
+physics of the Second Coming.  It is not very likely any of
+us will be asked to help.  If we were, it is likely we
+should receive instructions for the occasion, and that on
+more reliable authority.  And so I can only figure to
+myself a congregation truly curious in such flights of
+theological fancy, as one of veteran and accomplished
+saints, who have fought the good fight to an end and
+outlived all worldly passion, and are to be regarded rather
+as a part of the Church Triumphant than the poor, imperfect
+company on earth.
+
+*
+
+The whole creation groaneth and travaileth together.  It is
+the common and the god-like law of life.  The browsers, the
+biters, the barkers, the hairy coats of field and forest,
+the squirrel in the oak, the thousand-footed creeper in the
+dust, as they share with us the gift of life, share with us
+the love of an ideal; strive like us--like us are tempted
+to grow weary of the struggle--to do well; like us receive
+at times unmerited refreshment, visitings of support,
+returns of courage; and are condemned like us to be
+crucified between that double law of the members and the
+will.  Are they like us, I wonder, in the timid hope of
+some reward, some sugar with the drug?  Do they, too, stand
+aghast at unrewarded virtues, at the sufferings of those
+whom, in our partiality, we take to be just, and the
+prosperity of such as in our blindness we call wicked?
+
+*
+
+But to be a true disciple is to think of the same things as
+our prophet, and to think of different things in the same
+order.  To be of the same mind with another is to see all
+things in the same perspective; it is not to agree in a few
+indifferent matters near at hand and not much debated; it
+is to follow him in his farthest flights, to see the force
+of his hyperboles, to stand so exactly in the centre of his
+vision that whatever he may express, your eyes will light
+at once on the original, that whatever he may see to
+declare, your mind will at once accept....
+
+Now, every now and then, and indeed surprisingly often,
+Christ finds a word that transcends all commonplace
+morality; every now and then He quits the beaten track to
+pioneer the unexpressed, and throws out a pregnant and
+magnanimous hyperbole; for it is only by some bold poetry
+of thought that men can be strung up above the level of
+everyday conceptions to take a broader look upon experience
+or accept some higher principle of conduct.  To a man who
+is of the same mind that was in Christ, who stand at some
+centre not too far from His, and looks at the world and
+conduct from some not dissimilar or, at least, not opposing
+attitude--or, shortly, to a man who is of Christ's
+philosophy--every such saying should come home with a
+thrill of joy and corroboration; he should feel each one
+below his feet as another sure foundation in the flux of
+time and chance; each should be another proof that in the
+torrent of the years and generations, where doctrines and
+great armaments and empires are swept away and swallowed,
+he stands immovable, holding by the eternal stars.
+
+*
+
+Those who play by rule will never be more than tolerable
+players; and you and I would like to play our game in life
+to the noblest and the most divine advantage....For no
+definite precept can be more than an illustration, though
+its truth were resplendent like the sun, and it was
+announced from heaven by the voice of God.  And life is so
+intricate and changing, that perhaps not twenty times, or
+perhaps not twice in the ages, shall we find that nice
+consent of circumstances to which alone it can apply....
+
+It is to keep a man awake, to keep him alive to his own
+soul and its fixed design of righteousness, that the better
+part of moral and religious education is directed; not only
+that of words and doctors, but the sharp ferule of calamity
+under which we are all God's scholars till we die.  If, as
+teachers, we are to say anything to the purpose, we must
+say what will remind the pupil of his soul; we must speak
+that soul's dialect; we must talk of life and conduct as
+his soul would have him think of them.  If, from some
+conformity between us and the pupil, or perhaps among all
+men, we do in truth speak in such a dialect and express
+such views, beyond question we shall touch in him a spring;
+beyond question he will recognise the dialect as one that
+he himself has spoken in his better hours; beyond question
+he will cry, 'I had forgotten, but now I remember; I too
+have eyes, and I had forgot to use them!  I too have a soul
+of my own, arrogantly upright, and to that I will listen
+and conform.' In short, say to him anything that he has
+once thought, or been upon the point of thinking, or show
+him any view of life that he has once clearly seen, or been
+on the point of clearly seeing; and you have done your part
+and may leave him to complete the education for himself.
+
+*
+
+God, if there be any God, speaks daily in a new language,
+by the tongues of men; the thoughts and habits of each
+fresh generation and each new-coined spirit throw another
+light upon the universe, and contain another commentary on
+the printed Bibles; every scruple, every true dissent,
+every glimpse of something new, is a letter of God's
+alphabet; and though there is a grave responsibility for
+all who speak, is there none for those who unrighteously
+keep silent and conform?  Is not that also to conceal and
+cloak God's counsel?
+
+*
+
+Mankind is not only the whole in general, but every one in
+particular.  Every man or woman is one of mankind's dear
+possessions; to his or her just brain, and kind heart, and
+active hands, mankind intrusts some of its hopes for the
+future; he or she is a possible wellspring of good acts and
+source of blessings to the race.
+
+*
+
+Morals are a personal affair; in the war of righteousness
+every man fights for his own hand; all the six hundred
+precepts of the Mishna cannot shake my private judgment; my
+magistracy of myself is an indefeasible charge, and my
+decisions absolute for the time and case.  The moralist is
+not a judge of appeal, but an advocate who pleads at my
+tribunal.  He has to show not the law, but that the law
+applies.  Can he convince me? then he gains the cause.  And
+thus you find Christ giving various counsels to varying
+people, and often jealously careful to avoid definite
+precept.  Is He asked, for example, to divide a heritage?
+He refuses; and the best advice that He will offer is but a
+paraphrase of the tenth commandment which figures so
+strangely among the rest.  Take heed, and beware of
+covetousness.  If you complain that this is vague, I have
+failed to carry you along with me in my argument.  For no
+definite precept can be more than an illustration, though
+its truth were resplendent like the sun, and it was
+announced from heaven by the voice of God.  And life is so
+intricate and changing, that perhaps not twenty times, or
+perhaps not twice in the ages, shall we find that nice
+consent of circumstances to which alone it can apply.
+
+*
+
+But if it is righteousness thus to fuse together our
+divisive impulses and march with one mind through life,
+there is plainly one thing more unrighteous than all
+others, and one declension which is irretrievable and draws
+on the rest.  And this is to lose consciousness of oneself.
+In the best of times, it is but by flashes, when our whole
+nature is clear, strong, and conscious, and events conspire
+to leave us free, that we enjoy communion with our soul.
+At the worst we are so fallen and passive that we may say
+shortly we have none.  An arctic torpor seizes upon men.
+Although built of nerves, and set adrift in a stimulating
+world, they develop a tendency to go bodily to sleep;
+consciousness becomes engrossed among the reflex and
+mechanical parts of life; and soon loses both the will and
+power to look higher considerations in the face.  This is
+ruin; this is the last failure in life; this is temporal
+damnation, damnation on the spot and without the form of
+judgment: 'What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole
+world and LOSE HIMSELF?'
+
+*
+
+To ask to see some fruit of our endeavour is but a
+transcendental way of serving for reward; and what we take
+to be contempt of self is only greed of hire.
+
+*
+
+We are are all such as He was--the inheritors of sin; we
+must all bear and expiate a past which was not ours; there
+is in all of us--ay, even in me--a sparkle of the divine.
+Like Him, we must endure for a little while, until morning
+returns, bringing peace.
+
+*
+
+A human truth, which is always very much a lie, hides as
+much of life as it displays.  It is men who hold another
+truth, or, as it seems to us, perhaps, a dangerous lie, who
+can extend our restricted field of knowledge, and rouse our
+drowsy consciences.
+
+*
+
+Truth of intercourse is something more difficult than to
+refrain from open lies.  It is possible to avoid falsehood
+and yet not tell the truth.  It is not enough to answer
+formal questions.  To.  reach the truth by yea and nay
+communications implies a questioner with a share of
+inspiration, such as is often found in mutual love.  YEA
+and NAY mean nothing; the meaning must have been related in
+the question.  Many Words are often necessary to convey a
+very simple statement; for in this sort of exercise we
+never hit the gold; the most that we can hope is by many
+arrows, more or less far off on different sides, to
+indicate, in the course of time, for what target we are
+aiming, and after an hour's talk, back and forward, to
+convey the purport of a single principle or a single
+thought.
+
+*
+
+The cruellist lies are often told in silence.  A man may
+have sat in a room for hours and not opened his teeth, and
+yet come out of that room a disloyal friend or a vile
+calumniator.  And how many loves have perished because,
+from pride, or spite, or diffidence, or that unmanly shame
+which withholds a man from daring to betray emotion, a
+lover, at the critical point of the relation, has but hung
+his head and held his tongue?  And, again, a lie may be
+told by a truth, or a truth conveyed through a lie.  Truth
+to facts is not always truth to sentiment; and part of the
+truth, as often happens in answer to a question, may be the
+foulest calumny.  A fact may be an exception; but the
+feeling is the law, and it is that which you must neither
+garble nor belie.  The whole tenor of a conversation is a
+part of the meaning of each separate statement; the
+beginning and the end define and travesty the intermediate
+conversation.  You never speak to God; you address a
+fellow-man, full of his own tempers: and to tell truth,
+rightly understood, is not to state the true facts, but to
+convey a true impression ; truth in spirit, not truth to
+letter, is the true veracity.
+
+*
+
+He talked for the pleasure of airing himself.  He was
+essentially glib, as becomes the young advocate, and
+essentially careless of the truth, which is the mark of the
+young ass; and so he talked at random.  There was no
+particular bias, but that one which is indigenous and
+universal, to flatter himself, and to please and interest
+the present friend.
+
+*
+
+How wholly we all lie at the mercy of a single prater, not
+needfully with any malign purpose!  And if a man but talk
+of himself in the right spirit, refers to his virtuous
+actions by the way, and never applies to them the name of
+virtues, how easily his evidence is accepted in the court
+of public opinion!
+
+*
+
+In one word, it must always be foul to tell what is false;
+and it can never be safe to suppress what is true.
+
+*
+
+Conclusions, indeed, are not often reached by talk any more
+than by private thinking.  That is not the profit.  The
+profit is in the exercise, and above all in the experience;
+for when we reason at large on any subject, we review our
+state and history in life.  From time to time, however, and
+specially, I think, in talking art, talk becomes effective,
+conquering like war, widening the boundaries of knowledge
+like an exploration.
+
+*
+
+Natural talk, like ploughing, should turn up a large
+surface of life, rather than dig mines into geological
+strata.  Masses of experience, anecdote, incident,
+cross-lights, quotation, historical instances, the whole
+flotsam and jetsam of two minds forced in and in upon the
+matter in hand from every point of the compass, and from
+every degree of mental elevation and abasement--these are
+the material with which talk is fortified, the food on which
+the talkers thrive.  Such argument as is proper to the exercise
+should still be brief and seizing.  Talk should proceed by
+instances; by the apposite, not the expository.  It should
+keep close along the lines of humanity, near the bosoms and
+businesses of men, at the level where history, fiction, and
+experience intersect and illuminate each other.
+
+*
+
+There can be no fairer ambition than to excel in talk; to
+be affable, gay, ready, clear and welcome; to have a fact,
+a thought, or an illustration, pat to every subject; and
+not only to cheer the flight of time among our intimates,
+but bear our part in that great international congress,
+always sitting, where public wrongs are first declared,
+public errors first corrected, and the course of public
+opinion shaped, day by day, a little nearer to the right.
+No measure comes before Parliament but it has been long ago
+prepared by the grand jury of the talkers; no book is
+written that has not been largely composed by their
+assistance.  Literature in many of its branches is no other
+than the shadow of good talk; but the imitation falls far
+short of the original in life, freedom, and effect.  There
+are always two to a talk, giving and taking, comparing
+experience and according conclusions.  Talk is fluid,
+tentative, continually 'in further search and progress';
+while written words remain fixed, become idols even to the
+writer, found wooden dogmatisms, and preserve flies of
+obvious error in the amber of the truth.  Last and chief,
+while literature, gagged with linsey-woolsey, can only deal
+with a fraction of the life of man, talk goes fancy free
+and may call a spade a spade.  Talk has none of the
+freezing immunities of the pulpit.  It cannot, even if it
+would, become merely aesthetic or merely classical like
+literature.  A jest intervenes, the solemn humbug is
+dissolved in laughter, and speech runs forth out of the
+contemporary groove into the open fields of nature, cheery
+and cheering, like schoolboys out of school.  And it is in
+talk alone that we can learn our period and ourselves.  In
+short, the first duty of a man is to speak; that is his
+chief business in this world; and talk, which is the
+harmonious speech of two or more, is by far the most
+accessible of pleasures.  It costs nothing in money; it is
+all profit; it completes our education, founds and fosters
+our friendships, and can be enjoyed at any age and in
+almost any state of health.
+
+*
+
+And it happens that literature is, in some ways, but an
+indifferent means to such an end.  Language is but a poor
+bull's-eye lantern wherewith to show off the vast cathedral
+of the world; and yet a particular thing once said in words
+is so definite and memorable, that it makes us forget the
+absence of.  the many which remain unexpressed; like a
+bright window in a distant view, which dazzles and confuses
+our sight of its surroundings.  There are not words enough
+in all Shakespeare to express the merest fraction of a
+man's experience in an hour.  The speed of the eyesight and
+the hearing, and the continual industry of the mind,
+produce; in ten minutes, what it would require a laborious
+volume to shadow forth by comparisons and roundabout
+approaches.  If verbal logic were sufficient, life would be
+as plain sailing as a piece of Euclid.  But, as a matter of
+fact, we make a travesty of the simplest process of thought
+when we put it into words; for the words are all coloured
+and forsworn, apply inaccurately, and bring with them, from
+former uses, ideas of praise and blame that have nothing to
+do with the question in hand.  So we must always see to it
+nearly, that we judge by the realities of life and not by
+the partial terms that represent them in man's speech; and
+at times of choice, we must leave words upon one side, and
+act upon those brute convictions, unexpressed and perhaps
+inexpressible, which cannot be flourished in an argument,
+but which are truly the sum and fruit of our experience.
+Words are for communication, not for judgment.  This is
+what every thoughtful man knows for himself, for only fools
+and silly schoolmasters push definitions over far into the
+domain of conduct; and the majority of women, not learned
+in these scholastic refinements, live all-of-a-piece and
+unconsciously, as a tree grows, without caring to put a
+name upon their acts or motives.
+
+*
+
+The correction of silence is what kills; when you know you
+have transgressed, and your friend says nothing and avoids
+your eye.  If a man were made of gutta-percha, his heart
+would quail at such a moment.  But when the word is out,
+the worst is over; and a fellow with any good-humour at all
+may pass through a perfect hail of witty criticism, every
+bare place on his soul hit to the quick with a shrewd
+missile, and reappear, as if after a dive, tingling with a
+fine moral reaction, and ready, with a shrinking readiness,
+one-third loath, for a repetition of the discipline.
+
+*
+
+All natural talk is a festival of ostentation; and by the
+laws of the game each accepts and fans the vanity of the
+other.  It is from that reason that we venture to lay
+ourselves so open, that we dare to be so warmly eloquent,
+and that we swell in each other's eyes to such a vast
+proportion.  For talkers, once launched, begin to overflow
+the limits of their ordinary selves, tower up to the height
+of their secret pretensions, and give themselves out for
+the heroes, brave, pious, musical, and wise, that in their
+most shining moments they aspire to be.  So they weave for
+themselves with words and for a while inhabit a palace of
+delights, temple at once and theatre, where they fill the
+round of the world's dignities, and feast with the gods,
+exulting in Kudos.  And when the talk is over, each goes
+his way, still flushed with vanity and admiration, still
+trailing clouds of glory; each declines from the height of
+his ideal orgie, not in a moment, but by slow declension.
+
+*
+
+No man was ever so poor that he could express all he has in
+him by words, looks, or actions; his true knowledge is
+eternally incommunicable, for it is a knowledge of himself;
+and his best wisdom comes to him by no process of the mind,
+but in a supreme self-dictation, which keeps varying from
+hour to hour in its dictates with the variation of events
+and circumstances.
+
+*
+
+Overmastering pain--the most deadly and tragical element in
+life--alas! pain has its own way with all of us; it breaks
+in, a rude visitant, upon the fairy garden where the child
+wanders in a dream, no less surely than it rules upon the
+field of battle, or sends the immortal war-god whimpering
+to his father; and innocence, no more than philosophy, can
+protect us from this sting.
+
+*
+
+Where did you hear that it was easy to be honest?  Do you
+find that in your Bible?  Easy?  It is easy to be an ass
+and follow the multitude like a blind, besotted bull in a
+stampede; and that, I am well aware, is what you and Mrs.
+Grundy mean by being honest.  But it will not bear the
+stress of time nor the scrutiny of conscience.
+
+*
+
+Though I have all my life been eager for legitimate
+distinction, I can lay my hand upon my heart, at the end of
+my career, and declare there is not one--no, nor yet life
+itself--which is worth acquiring or preserving at the
+slightest cost of dignity.
+
+*
+
+For surely, at this time of the day in the nineteenth
+century, there is nothing that an honest man should fear
+more timorously than getting and spending more than he
+deserves.
+
+*
+
+It remains to be seen, by each man who would live a true
+life to himself and not a merely specious life to society,
+how many luxuries he truly wants and to how many he merely
+submits as to a social propriety; and all these last he
+will immediately forswear.  Let him do this, and he will be
+surprised to find how little money it requires to keep him
+in complete contentment and activity of mind and senses.
+Life at any level among the easy classes is conceived upon
+a principle of rivalry, where each man and each household
+must ape the tastes and emulate the display of others.
+One is delicate in eating, another in wine, a third in
+furniture or works of art or dress; and I, who care
+nothing for any of these refinements, who am perhaps a
+plain athletic creature and love exercise, beef, beer,
+flannel-shirts, and a camp bed, am yet called upon to
+assimilate all these other tastes and make these foreign
+occasions of expenditure my own.  It may be cynical; I am
+sure I will be told it is selfish; but I will spend my money
+as I please and for my own intimate personal gratification,
+and should count myself a nincompoop indeed to lay out the
+colour of a halfpenny on any fancied social decency or duty.
+I shall not wear gloves unless my hands are cold, or unless
+I am born with a delight in them.  Dress is my own affair,
+and that of one other in the world; that, in fact, and for
+an obvious reason, of any woman who shall chance to be in
+love with me.  I shall lodge where I have a mind.  If I
+do not ask society to live with me, they must be silent;
+and even if I do, they have no further right but to
+refuse the invitation.
+
+*
+
+To a gentleman is to be one all the world over, and in
+every relation and grade of society.  It is a high calling,
+to which a man must first be born, and then devote himself
+for life.  And, unhappily, the manners of a certain
+so-called upper grade have a kind of currency, and meet
+with a certain external acceptation throughout all the
+others, and this tends to keep us well satisfied with
+slight acquirements and the amateurish accomplishments
+of a clique.  But manners, like art, should be human
+and central.
+
+*
+
+Respectability is a very thing in its way, but it does not
+rise superior to all considerations.  I would not for a
+moment venture to hint that it was a matter of taste; but I
+think I will go as far as this: that if a position is
+admittedly unkind, uncomfortable, unnecessary, and
+superfluously useless, although it were as respectable as
+the Church of England, the sooner a man is out of it, the
+better for himself and all concerned.
+
+*
+
+After all, I thought, our satirist has just gone far enough
+into his neighbours to find that the outside is false,
+without caring to go farther and discover what is really
+true.  He is content to find that things are not what they
+seem, and broadly generalises from it that they do not
+exist at all.  He sees our virtues are not what they
+pretend they are; and, on the strength of that, he denies
+us the possession of virtue altogether.  He has learned the
+first lesson, that no man is wholly good; but he has not
+even suspected that there is another equally true, to wit,
+that no man is wholly bad.
+
+*
+
+Or take the case of men of letters.  Every piece of work
+which is not as good as you can make it, which you have
+palmed off imperfect, meagrely thought, niggardly in
+execution, upon mankind, who is your paymaster on parole,
+and in a sense your pupil, every hasty or slovenly or
+untrue performance, should rise up against you in the court
+of your own heart and condemn you for a thief.
+
+*
+
+Sympathy is a thing to be encouraged, apart from humane
+considerations, because it supplies us with the materials
+for wisdom.  It is probably more instructive to entertain a
+sneaking kindness for any unpopular person.... than to give
+way to perfect raptures of moral indignation against his
+abstract vices.
+
+*
+
+In the best fabric of duplicity there is some weak point,
+if you can strike it, which will loosen all.
+
+*
+
+It is at best but a pettifogging, pickthank business to
+decompose actions into little personal motives, and explain
+heroism away.  The Abstract Bagman will grow like an
+Admiral at heart, not by ungrateful carping, but in a heat
+of admiration.
+
+*
+
+After an hospital, what uglier piece is there in
+civilisation than a court of law?  Hither come envy,
+malice, and all uncharitableness to wrestle it out in
+public tourney; crimes, broken fortunes, severed
+households, the knave and his victim, gravitate to this low
+building with the arcade.  To how many has not St.  Giles's
+bell told the first hour after ruin?  I think I see them
+pause to count the strokes and wander on again into the
+moving High Street, stunned and sick at heart.
+
+*
+
+There are two things that men should never weary of--
+goodness and humility.
+
+*
+
+It is not enough to have earned our livelihood.  Either the
+earning itself should have been serviceable to mankind, or
+something else must follow.  To live is sometimes very
+difficult, but it is never meritorious in itself; and we
+must have a reason to allege to our own conscience why we
+should continue to exist upon this crowded earth.  If
+Thoreau had simply dwelt in his house at Walden, a lover of
+trees, birds, and fishes, and the open air and virtue, a
+reader of wise books, an idle, selfish self-improver, he
+would have managed to cheat Admetus, but, to cling to
+metaphor, the devil would have had him in the end.  Those
+who can avoid toil altogether and dwell in the Arcadia of
+private means, and even those who can, by abstinence,
+reduce the necessary amount of it to some six weeks a year,
+having the more liberty, have only the higher moral
+obligation to be up and doing in the interest of man.
+
+*
+
+A man may have done well for years, and then he may fail;
+he will hear of his failure.  Or he may have done well for
+years, and still do well, but the critic may have tired of
+praising him, or there may have sprung up some new idol of
+the instant, some 'dust a little gilt,' to whom they now
+prefer to offer sacrifice.  Here is the obverse and the
+reverse of that empty and ugly thing called popularity.
+Will any man suppose it worth gaining?
+
+*
+
+Among sayings that have a currency in spite of being wholly
+false upon the face of them for the sake of a half-truth
+upon another subject which is accidentally combined with
+the error, one of the grossest and broadest conveys the
+monstrous proposition that it is easy to tell the truth and
+hard to tell a lie.  I wish heartily it were.  But the
+truth is one; it has first to be discovered, then justly
+and exactly uttered.
+
+*
+
+For such things as honour and love and faith are not only
+nobler than food and drink, but indeed I think that we
+desire them more, and suffer more sharply for their
+absence.
+
+*
+
+There is a strong feeling in favour of cowardly and
+prudential proverbs.  The sentiments of a man while he is
+full of ardour and hope are to be received, it is supposed,
+with some qualification.  But when the same person has
+ignominiously failed and begins to eat up his words, he
+should be listened to like an oracle.  Most of our pocket
+wisdom is conceived for the use of mediocre people, to
+discourage them from ambitious attempts, and generally
+console them in their mediocrity.  And since mediocre
+people constitute the bulk of humanity, this is no doubt
+very properly so.  But it does not follow that the one sort
+of proposition is any less true than the other, or that
+Icarus is not to be more praised, and perhaps more envied,
+than Mr. Samuel Budgett the successful merchant.
+
+*
+
+'You know it very well, it cannot in any way help that you
+should brood upon it, and I sometimes wonder whether you
+and I--who are a pair of sentimentalists--are quite good
+judges of plain men.'
+
+*
+
+For, after all, we are vessels of a very limited content.
+Not all men can read all books; it is only in a chosen few
+that any man will find his appointed food; and the fittest
+lessons are the most, palatable, and make themselves
+welcome to the mind.
+
+*
+
+It is all very fine to talk about tramps and morality.  Six
+hours of police surveillance (such as I have had) or one
+brutal rejection from an inn-door change your views upon
+the subject like a course of lectures.  As long as you keep
+in the upper regions, with all the world bowing to you as
+you go, social arrangements have a very handsome air; but
+once get under the wheels and you wish society were at the
+devil.  I will give most respectable men a fortnight of
+such a life, and then I will offer them twopence for what
+remains of their morality.
+
+*
+
+I hate cynicism a great deal worse than I do the devil;
+unless, perhaps, the two were the same thing?  And yet 'tis
+a good tonic; the cold tub and bath-towel of the
+sentiments; and positively necessary to life in cases of
+advanced sensibility.
+
+*
+
+Most men, finding themselves the authors of their own
+disgrace, rail the louder against God or destiny.  Most
+men, when they repent, oblige their friends to share the
+bitterness of that repentance.
+
+*
+
+Delay, they say, begetteth peril; but it is rather this
+itch of doing that undoes men.
+
+*
+
+Every man has a sane spot somewhere.
+
+*
+
+That is never a bad wind that blows where we want to go.
+
+*
+
+It is a great thing if you can persuade people that they
+are somehow or other partakers in a mystery.  It makes them
+feel bigger.
+
+*
+
+But it is an evil age for the gypsily inclined among men.
+He who can sit squarest on a three-legged stool, he it is
+who has the wealth and glory.
+
+*
+
+For truth that is suppressed by friends is the
+readiest weapon of the enemy.
+
+*
+
+But O, what a cruel thing is a farce to those
+engaged in it!
+
+*
+
+It is not always the most faithful believer who
+makes the cunningest apostle.
+
+*
+
+Vanity dies hard; in some obstinate cases
+it outlives the man.
+
+*
+
+A man may live in dreams, and yet be unprepared
+for their realisation.
+
+*
+
+'Be soople, Davie, in things immaterial.'
+
+*
+
+No class of man is altogether bad; but each
+has its own faults and virtues.
+
+*
+
+But it is odd enough, the very women who profess
+most contempt for mankind as a sex seem to find even
+its ugliest particulars rather lively and high-minded
+in their own sons.
+
+*
+
+To cling to what is left of any damaged quality
+is virtue in the man.
+
+*
+
+But we have no bravery nowadays, and, even in books,
+must all pretend to be as dull and foolish
+as our neighbours.
+
+*
+
+It always warms a man to see a woman brave.
+
+*
+
+Condescension is an excellent thing, but it is strange
+how one-sided the pleasure of it is!
+
+*
+
+Some strand of our own misdoing is involved
+in every quarrel.
+
+*
+
+There was never an ill thing made better by meddling.
+
+*
+
+Let any man speak long enough, he will get believers.
+
+*
+
+Every one lives by selling something, whatever
+be his right to it.
+
+*
+
+A man dissatisfied with endeavour is a man
+tempted to sadness.
+
+*
+
+Drama is the poetry of conduct, romance the
+poetry of circumstance.
+
+*
+
+It is one of the most common forms of depreciation to throw
+cold water on the whole by adroit over-commendation of a
+part, since everything worth judging, whether it be a man,
+a work of art, or only a fine city, must be judged upon its
+merits as a whole.
+
+*
+
+I wonder, would a negative be found enticing? for, from the
+negative point of view, I flatter myself this volume has a
+certain stamp.  Although it runs to considerably over a
+hundred pages, it contains not a single reference to the
+imbecility of God's universe, nor so much as a single hint
+that I could have made a better one myself--I really do not
+know where my head can have been.
+
+*
+
+It's deadly commonplace, but, after all, the commonplaces
+are the great poetic truths.
+
+*
+
+Those who try to be artists use, time after time, the
+matter of their recollections, setting and resetting little
+coloured memories of men and scenes, rigging up (it may be)
+some especial friend in the attire of a buccaneer, and
+decreeing armies to manoeuvre, or murder to be done, on the
+playground of their youth.  But the memories are a fairy
+gift which cannot be worn out in using.  After a dozen
+services in various tales, the little sunbright pictures of
+the past still shine in the mind's eye with not a lineament
+defaced, not a tint impaired.  GLUCK UND UNGLUCK WIRD
+GESANG, if Goethe pleases; yet only by endless avatars, the
+original re-embodying after each.  So that a writer, in
+time, begins to wonder at the perdurable life of these
+impressions; begins, perhaps, to fancy that he wrongs them
+when he weaves them in with fiction; and looking back on
+them with ever-growing kindness, puts them at last,
+substantive jewels, in a setting of their own.
+
+*
+
+Place them in a hospital, put them in a jail in
+yellow overalls, do what you will, young Jessamy
+finds young Jenny.
+
+*
+
+'You fret against the common law,' I said.  'You rebel
+against the voice of God, which He has made so winning to
+convince, so imperious to command.  Hear it, and how it
+speaks between us!  Your hand clings to mine, your heart
+leaps at my touch, the unknown elements of which we are
+compounded awake and run together at a look; the clay of
+the earth remembers its independent life, and yearns to
+join us; we are drawn together as the stars are turned
+about in space, or as the tides ebb and flow; by things
+older and greater than we ourselves.'
+
+*
+
+'Olalla,' I said, 'the soul and the body are one, and
+mostly so in love.  What the body chooses, the soul loves;
+where the body clings, the soul cleaves; body for body,
+soul to soul, they come together at God's signal; and the
+lower part (if we can call aught low) is only the footstool
+and foundation of the highest.'
+
+*
+
+She sent me away, and yet I had but to call upon her name
+and she came to me.  These were but the weaknesses of
+girls, from which even she, the strangest of her sex, was
+not exempted.
+
+*
+
+For even in love there are unlovely humours; ambiguous
+acts, unpardonable words, may yet have sprung from a kind
+sentiment.  If the injured one could read your heart,
+you may be sure that he would understand and pardon;
+but, alas! the heart cannot be shown--it has to be
+demonstrated in words.
+
+*
+
+There is no greater wonder than the way the face of a
+young woman fits in a man's mind, and stays there, and
+he could never tell you why; it just seems it was the
+thing he wanted.
+
+*
+
+There are many matters in which you may waylay Destiny, and
+bid him stand and deliver.  Hard work, high thinking,
+adventurous excitement, and a great deal more that forms a
+part of this or the other person's spiritual bill of fare,
+are within the reach of almost any one who can dare a
+little and be patient.  But it is by no means in the way of
+every one to fall in love....A wet rag goes safely by the
+fire; and if a man is blind, he cannot expect to be much
+impressed by romantic scenery.  Apart from all this, many
+lovable people miss each other in the world, or meet under
+some unfavourable star.
+
+*
+
+To deal plainly, if they only married when they fell in
+love, most people would die unwed; and among the others,
+there would be not a few tumultuous households.  The Lion
+is the King of Beasts, but he is scarcely suitable for a
+domestic pet.  In the same way, I suspect love is rather
+too violent a passion to make, in all cases, a good
+domestic sentiment.  Like other violent excitements, it
+throws up not only what is best, but what is worst and
+smallest, in men's characters.  Just as some people are
+malicious in drink, or brawling and virulent under the
+influence of religious feeling, some are moody, jealous,
+and exacting when they are in love, who are honest,
+downright, good-hearted fellows enough in the everyday
+affairs and humours of the world.
+
+*
+
+There is only one event in life which really astonishes a
+man and startles him out of his prepared opinions.
+Everything else befalls him very much as he expected.
+Event succeeds to event, with an agreeable variety indeed,
+but with little that is either startling or intense; they
+form together no more than a sort of background, or running
+accompaniment to the man's own reflections; and he falls
+naturally into a cool, curious, and smiling habit of mind,
+and builds himself up in a conception of life which expects
+to-morrow to be after the pattern of to-day and yesterday.
+He may be accustomed to the vagaries of his friend and
+acquaintances under the influence of love.  He may sometime
+look forward to it for himself with an incomprehensible
+expectation.  But it is a subject in which neither
+intuition nor the behaviour of others will help the
+philosopher to the truth.  There is probably nothing
+rightly thought or rightly written on this matter of love
+that is not a piece of the person's experience.
+
+*
+
+It is the property of things seen for the first time, or
+for the first time after long, like the flowers in spring,
+to re-awaken in us the sharp edge of sense, and that
+impression of mystic strangeness which otherwise passes out
+of life with the coming years; but the sight of a loved
+face is what renews a man's character from the fountain
+upwards.
+
+*
+
+Nothing is given for nothing in this world; there can be no
+true love, even on your own side, without devotion;
+devotion is the exercise of love, by which it grows; but if
+you will give enough of that, if you will pay the price in
+a sufficient 'amount of what you call life,' why then,
+indeed, whether with wife or comrade, you may have months
+and even years of such easy, natural, pleasurable, and yet
+improving intercourse as shall make time a moment and
+kindness a delight.
+
+*
+
+Love is not blind, nor yet forgiving.  'O yes, believe me,'
+as the song says, 'Love has eyes!'  The nearer the
+intimacy, the more cuttingly do we feel the unworthiness of
+those we love; and because you love one, and would die for
+that love to-morrow, you have not forgiven, and you never
+will forgive that friend's misconduct.  If you want a
+person's faults, go to those who love him.  They will
+not tell you, but they know.  And herein lies the
+magnanimous courage of love, that it endures this
+knowledge without change.
+
+*
+
+Certainly, whatever it may be with regard to the world at
+large, this idea of beneficent pleasure is true as between
+the sweethearts.  To do good and communicate is the lover's
+grand intention.  It is the happiness of the other that
+makes his own most intense gratification.  It is not
+possible to disentangle the different emotions, the pride,
+humility, pity, and passion, which are excited by a look of
+happy love or an unexpected caress.  To make one's self
+beautiful, to dress the hair, to excel in talk, to do
+anything and all things that puff out the character and
+attributes and make them imposing in the eyes of others,
+is not only to magnify one's self, but to offer the most
+delicate homage at the same time.  And it is in this latter
+intention that they are done by lovers, for the essence of
+love is kindness; and, indeed, it may be best defined as
+passionate kindness; kindness, so to speak, run mad and
+become importunate and violent.
+
+*
+
+What sound is so full of music as one's own name uttered
+for the first time in the voice of her we love!
+
+*
+
+We make love, and thereby ourselves fall the deeper in it.
+It is with the heart only that one captures a heart.
+
+*
+
+O, have it your own way; I am too old a hand to argue with
+young gentlemen who choose to fancy themselves in love;
+I have too much experience, thank you.
+
+*
+
+And love, considered as a spectacle, must have attractions
+for many who are not of the confraternity.  The sentimental
+old maid is a commonplace of the novelists; and he must be
+rather a poor sort of human being, to be sure, who can look
+on at this pretty madness without indulgence and sympathy.
+For nature commends itself to people with a most
+insinuating art; the busiest is now and again arrested
+by a great sunset; and you may be as pacific or as
+cold-blooded as you will, but you cannot help some emotion
+when you read of well-disputed battles, or meet a pair of
+lovers in the lane.
+
+*
+
+Jealousy, at any rate, is one of the consequences of love;
+you may like it or not, at pleasure; but there it is.
+
+*
+
+With our chosen friends, on the other hand, and still more
+between lovers (for mutual understanding is love's
+essence), the truth is easily indicated by the one and
+aptly comprehended by the other.  A hint taken, a look
+understood, conveys the gist of long and delicate
+explanations; and where the life is known even YEA and NAY
+become luminous.  In the closest of all relations--that of
+a love well founded and equally shared-speech is half
+discarded, like a roundabout, infantile process or a
+ceremony of formal etiquette; and the two communicate
+directly by their presences, and with few looks and fewer
+words contrive to share their good and evil and uphold each
+other's hearts in joy.
+
+*
+
+And yet even while I was exulting in my solitude I became
+aware of a strange lack.  I wished a companion to lie near
+me in the starlight, silent and not moving, but ever within
+touch.  For there is a fellowship more quiet even than
+solitude, and which, rightly understood, is solitude made
+perfect.  And to live out of doors with the woman a man
+loves is of all lives the most complete and free.
+
+*
+
+The flower of the hedgerow and the star of heaven satisfy
+and delight us: how much more the look of the exquisite
+being who was created to bear and rear, to madden and
+rejoice mankind!
+
+*
+
+So strangely are we built: so much more strong is the love
+of woman than the mere love of life.
+
+*
+
+You think that pity--and the kindred sentiments-have the
+greatest power upon the heart.  I think more nobly of
+women.  To my view, the man they love will first of all
+command their respect; he will be steadfast-proud, if you
+please; dry-possibly-but of all things steadfast.  They
+will look at him in doubt; at last they will see that stern
+face which he presents to all of the rest of the world
+soften to them alone.  First, trust, I say.  It is so that
+a woman loves who is worthy of heroes.
+
+*
+
+The sex likes to pick up knowledge and yet preserve its
+superiority.  It is good policy, and almost necessary in
+the circumstances.  If a man finds a woman admires him,
+were it only for his acquaintance with geography, he will
+begin at once to build upon the admiration.  It is only by
+unintermittent snubbing that the pretty ones can keep us in
+our place.  Men, as Miss Howe or Miss Harlowe would have
+said, 'are such encroachers.' For my part, I am body and
+soul with the women; and after a well-married couple, there
+is nothing so beautiful in the world as the myth of the
+divine huntress.  It is no use for a man to take to the
+woods; we know him; Anthony tried the same thing long ago,
+and had a pitiful time of it by all accounts.  But there is
+this about some women, which overtops the best gymnosophist
+among men, that they suffice themselves, and can walk in a
+high and cold zone without the countenance of any trousered
+being.  I declare, although the reverse of a professed
+ascetic, I am more obliged to women for this ideal than I
+should be to the majority of them, or indeed to any but
+one, for a spontaneous kiss.  There is nothing so
+encouraging as the spectacle of self-sufficiency.  And when
+I think of the slim and lovely maidens, running the woods
+all night to the note of Diana's horn; moving among the old
+oaks, as fancy-free as they; things of the forest and the
+starlight, not touched by the commotion of man's hot and
+turbid life-although there are plenty other ideals that I
+should prefer--I find my heart beat at the thought of this
+one.  'Tis to fail in life, but to fail with what a grace!
+That is not lost which is not regretted.  And where--here
+slips out the male--where would be much of the glory of
+inspiring love, if there were no contempt to overcome?
+
+*
+
+The drawing-room is, indeed, an artificial place; it is so
+by our choice and for our sins.  The subjection of women;
+the ideal imposed upon them from the cradle, and worn, like
+a hair-shirt, with so much constancy; their motherly,
+superior tenderness to man's vanity and self-importance;
+their managing arts-the arts of a civilised slave among
+good-natured barbarians-are all painful ingredients and all
+help to falsify relations.  It is not till we get clear of
+that amusing artificial scene that genuine relations are
+founded, or ideas honestly compared.  In the garden, on the
+road or the hillside, or TETE-A-TETE and apart from
+interruptions, occasions arise when we may learn much from
+any single woman; and nowhere more often than in married
+life.  Marriage is one long conversation, chequered by
+disputes.  The disputes are valueless; they but ingrain the
+difference; the heroic heart of woman prompting her at once
+to nail her colours to the mast.  But in the intervals,
+almost unconsciously and with no desire to shine, the whole
+material of life is turned over and over, ideas are struck
+out and shared, the two persons more and more adapt their
+notions one to suit the other, and in process of time,
+without sound of trumpet, they conduct each other into new
+worlds of thought.
+
+*
+
+Kirstie was now over fifty, and might have sat to a
+sculptor.  Long of limb, and still light of foot,
+deep-breasted, robust-loined, her golden hair not yet mingled
+with any trace of silver, the years had but caressed and
+embellished her.  By the lines of a rich and vigorous
+maternity, she seemed destined to be the bride of heroes
+and the mother of their children.
+
+*
+
+And lastly, he was dark and she fair, and he was male and
+she female, the everlasting fountain of interest.
+
+*
+
+The effervescency of her passionate and irritable nature
+rose within her at times to bursting point.  This is the
+price paid by age for unseasonable ardours of feeling.
+
+*
+
+Weir must have supposed his bride to be somewhat suitable;
+perhaps he belonged to that class of men who think a weak
+head the ornament of women--an opinion invariably punished
+in this life.
+
+*
+
+Never ask women folk.  They're bound to answer 'No.' God
+never made the lass that could resist the temptation.
+
+*
+
+It is an odd thing how happily two people, if there are
+two, can live in a place where they have no acquaintance.
+I think the spectacle of a whole life in which you have no
+part paralyses personal desire.  You are content to become
+a mere spectator.  The baker stands in his door; the
+colonel with his three medals goes by to the CAFE at night;
+the troops drum and trumpet and man the ramparts as bold as
+so many lions.  It would task language to say how placidly
+you behold all this.  In a place where you have taken some
+root you are provoked out of your indifference; you have a
+hand in the game--your friends are fighting with the army.
+But in a strange town, not small enough to grow too soon
+familiar, nor so large as to have laid itself out for
+travellers, you stand so far apart from the business that
+you positively forget it would be possible to go nearer;
+you have so little human interest around you that you do
+not remember yourself to be a man.
+
+*
+
+Pity was her weapon and her weakness.  To accept the loved
+one's faults, although it has an air of freedom, is to kiss
+the chain.
+
+*
+
+Marriage is a step so grave and decisive that it attracts
+light-headed, variable men by its very awfulness.  They
+have been so tried among the inconstant squalls and
+currents, so often sailed for islands in the air or lain
+becalmed with burning heart, that they will risk all for
+solid ground below their feet.  Desperate pilots, they run
+their sea-sick, weary bark upon the dashing rocks.  It
+seems as if marriage were the royal road through life, and
+realised, on the instant, what we have all dreamed on
+summer Sundays when the bells ring, or at night when we
+cannot sleep for the desire of living.  They think it will
+sober and change them.  Like those who join a brotherhood,
+they fancy it needs but an act to be out of the coil and
+clamour for ever.  But this is a wile of the devil's.  To
+the end, spring winds will sow disquietude, passing faces
+leave a regret behind them, and the whole world keep
+calling and calling in their ears.  For marriage is like
+life in this-that it is a field of battle, and not a bed of
+roses.
+
+*
+
+For there is something in marriage so natural and inviting,
+that the step has an air of great simplicity and ease; it
+offers to bury for ever many aching preoccupations; it is
+to afford us unfailing and familiar company through life;
+it opens up a smiling prospect of the blest and passive
+kind of love, rather than the blessing and active; it is
+approached not only through the delights of courtship, but
+by a public performance and repeated legal signatures.  A
+man naturally thinks it will go hard within such august
+circumvallations.
+And yet there is probably no other act in a man's life so
+hot-headed and foolhardy as this one of marriage.
+
+*
+
+Again, when you have married your wife, you would think you
+were got upon a hilltop, and might begin to go downward by
+an easy slope.  But you have only ended courting to begin
+marriage.  Falling in love and winning love are often
+difficult tasks to overbearing and rebellious spirits; but
+to keep in love is also a business of some importance, to
+which both man and wife must bring kindness and goodwill.
+The true love story commences at the altar, when there lies
+before the married pair a most beautiful contest of wisdom
+and generosity, and a life-long struggle towards an
+unattainable ideal.  Unattainable? Ay, surely unattainable,
+from the very fact that they are two instead of one.
+
+*
+
+When the generation is gone, when the play is over, when
+the thirty years' panorama has been withdrawn in tatters
+from the stage of the world, we may ask what has become of
+these great, weighty, and undying loves and the sweethearts
+who despised mortal conditions in a fine credulity; and
+they can only show us a few songs in a bygone taste, a few
+actions worth remembering, and a few children who have
+retained some happy stamp from the disposition of their
+parents.
+
+*
+
+Hope looks for unqualified success; but Faith counts
+certainly on failure, and takes honourable defeat to be a
+form of victory.  In the first, he expects an angel for a
+wife; in the last, he knows that she is like himself-
+erring, thoughtless, and untrue; but like himself also,
+filled with a struggling radiancy of better things, and
+adorned with ineffective qualities.  You may safely go to
+school with hope; but, ere you marry, should have learned
+the mingled lesson of the world: that dolls are stuffed
+with sawdust, and yet are excellent playthings; that hope
+and love address themselves to a perfection never realised,
+and yet, firmly held, become the salt and staff of life;
+that you yourself are compacted of infirmities, perfect,
+you might say, in imperfections, and yet you have a
+something in you lovable and worth preserving; and that,
+while the mass of mankind lies under this scurvy
+condemnation, you will scarce find one but, by some
+generous reading, will become to you a lesson, a model, and
+a noble spouse through life.  So thinking, you will
+constantly support your own unworthiness, and easily
+forgive the failings of your friend.  Nay, you will be
+wisely glad that you retain the sense of blemishes; for the
+faults of married people continually spur up each of them,
+hour by hour, to do better and to meet and love upon a
+higher ground.  And ever, between the failures, there will
+come glimpses of kind virtues to encourage and console.
+
+*
+
+But it is the object of a liberal education not only to
+obscure the knowledge of one sex by another, but to magnify
+the natural differences between the two.  Man is a creature
+who lives not upon bread alone, but principally by
+catchwords; and the little rift between the sexes is
+astonishingly widened by simply teaching one set of
+catchwords to the girls and another to the boys.  To the
+first, there is shown but a very small field of experience,
+and taught a very trenchant principle for judgment and
+action; to the other, the world of life is more largely
+displayed, and their rule of conduct is proportionally
+widened.  They are taught to follow different virtues, to
+hate different vices, to place their ideal, even for each
+other, in different achievements.  What should be the
+result of such a course?  When a horse has run away, and
+the two flustered people in the gig have each possessed
+themselves of a rein, we know the end of that conveyance
+will be in the ditch.  So, when I see a raw youth and a
+green girl, fluted and fiddled in a dancing measure into
+that most serious contract, and setting out upon life's
+journey with ideas so monstrously divergent, I am not
+surprised that some make shipwreck, but that any
+come to port.
+
+*
+
+Those who have a few intimates are to be avoided; while
+those who swim loose, who have their hat in their hand all
+along the street, who can number an infinity of
+acquaintances, and are not chargeable with any one friend,
+promise an easy disposition and no rival to the wife's
+influence.  I will not say they are the best of men, but
+they are the stuff out of which adroit and capable women
+manufacture the best husbands.
+
+*
+
+A ship captain is a good man to marry if it is a marriage
+of love, for absences are a good influence in love, and
+keep it bright and delicate; but he is just the worst man
+if the feeling is more pedestrian, as habit is too
+frequently torn open and the solder has never time to set.
+
+*
+
+A certain sort of talent is almost indispensable for people
+who would spend years together and not bore themselves to
+death.  But the talent, like the agreement, must be for and
+about life.  To dwell happily together,.  they should be
+versed in the niceties of the heart, and born with a
+faculty for willing compromise.  The woman must be talented
+as a woman, and it will not much matter although she is
+talented in nothing else.  She must know HER METIER DE
+FEMME, and have a fine touch for the affections.  And it is
+more important that a person should be a good gossip, and
+talk pleasantly and smartly of common friends and the
+thousand and one nothings of the day and hour, than that
+she should speak with the tongues of men and angels; for a
+while together by the fire happens more frequently in
+marriage than the presence of a distinguished foreigner to
+dinner....  You could read Kant by yourself, if you wanted;
+but you must share a joke with some one else.  You can
+forgive people who do not follow you through a
+philosophical disquisition; but to find your wife laughing
+when you had tears in your eyes, or staring when you
+were in a fit of laughter, would go some way towards a
+dissolution of the marriage.
+
+*
+
+Now this is where there should be community between man and
+wife.  They should be agreed on their catchword in FACTS OF
+RELIGION, OR FACTS OF SCIENCE, OR SOCIETY, MY DEAR; for
+without such an agreement all intercourse is a painful
+strain upon the mind....
+For there are differences which no habit nor affection can
+reconcile, and the Bohemian must not intermarry with the
+Pharisee.  Imagine Consuelo as Mrs. Samuel Budgett, the
+wife of the successful merchant!  The best of men and the
+best of women may sometimes live together all their lives,
+and, for want of some consent on fundamental questions,
+hold each other lost spirits to the end.
+
+*
+
+Marriage is of so much use to women, opens out to her so
+much more of life, and puts her in the way of so much more
+freedom and usefulness, that, whether she marry ill or
+well, she can hardly miss some benefit.  It is true,
+however, that some of the merriest and most genuine of
+women are old maids; and that those old maids, and wives
+who are unhappily married, have often most of the true
+motherly touch.
+
+*
+
+The fact is, we are much more afraid of life than our
+ancestors, and cannot find it in our hearts either to marry
+or not to marry.  Marriage is terrifying, but so is a cold
+and forlorn old age.  People who share a cell in the
+Bastile, or are thrown together on an uninhabited isle, if
+they do not immediately fall to fisticuffs, will find some
+possible ground of compromise.  They will learn each
+other's ways and humours, so as to know where they must go
+warily, and where they may lean their whole weight.  The
+discretion of the first years becomes the settled habit of
+the last; and so, with wisdom and patience, two lives may
+grow indissolubly into one.
+
+*
+
+'Well, an ye like maids so little, y'are true natural man;
+for God made them twain by intention, and brought true love
+into the world, to be man's hope and woman's comfort.'
+
+*
+
+There are no persons so far away as those who are both
+married and estranged, so that they seem out of earshot, or
+to have no common tongue.
+
+*
+
+My idea of man's chief end was to enrich the world with
+things of beauty, and have a fairly good time myself while
+doing so.
+
+*
+
+But the gymnast is not my favourite; he has little or no
+tincture of the artist in his composition; his soul is
+small and pedestrian, for the most part, since his
+profession makes no call upon it, and does not accustom him
+to high ideas.  But if a man is only so much of an actor
+that he can stumble through a farce, he is made free of a
+new order of thoughts.  He has something else to think
+about beside the money-box.  He has a pride of his own,
+and, what is of far more importance, he has an aim before
+him that he can never quite attain.  He has gone upon a
+pilgrimage that will last him his life long, because there
+is no end to it short of perfection.  He will better
+himself a little day by day; or, even if he has given up
+the attempt, he will always remember that once upon a time
+he had conceived this high ideal, that once upon a time he
+fell in love with a star.  'Tis better to have loved and
+lost.' Although the moon should have nothing to say to
+Endymion, although he should settle down with Audrey and
+feed pigs, do you not think he would move with a better
+grace and cherish higher thoughts to the end?  The louts he
+meets at church never had a fancy above Audrey's snood; but
+there is a reminiscence in Endymion's heart that, like a
+spice, keeps it fresh and haughty.
+
+People do things, and suffer martyrdom, because they have
+an inclination that way.  The best artist is not the man
+who fixes his eye on posterity, but the one who loves the
+practice of his art.  And instead of having a taste for
+being successful merchants and retiring at thirty, some
+people have a taste for high and what we call heroic forms
+of excitement.
+
+*
+
+These are predestined; if a man love the labour of any
+trade, apart from any question of success or fame, the gods
+have called him.
+
+*
+
+The incommunicable thrill of things, that is the tuning-
+fork by which we test the flatness of our art.  Here it is
+that Nature teaches and condemns, and still spurs us up to
+further effort and new failure.
+
+*
+
+To please is to serve; and so far from its being difficult
+to instruct while you amuse, it is difficult to do the one
+thoroughly without the other.
+
+*
+
+We shall never learn the affinities of beauty, for they lie
+too deep in nature and too far back in the mysterious
+history of man.
+
+*
+
+Mirth, lyric mirth, and a vivacious contentment are of the
+very essence of the better kind of art.
+
+*
+
+This is the particular crown and triumph of the artist--not
+to be true merely, but to be lovable; not simply to
+convince, but to enchant.
+
+*
+
+Life is hard enough for poor mortals, without having it
+indefinitely embittered for them by bad art.
+
+*
+
+So that the first duty of any man who is to write is
+intellectual.  Designedly or not, he has so far set himself
+up for a leader in the minds of men; and he must see that
+his own mind is kept supple, charitable, and bright.
+Everything but prejudice should find a voice through him;
+he should see the good in all things; where he has even a
+fear that he does not wholly understand, there he should be
+wholly silent; and he should recognise from the first that
+he has only one tool in his workshop, and that tool
+is sympathy.
+
+*
+
+Through no art beside the art of words can the kindness of
+a man's affections be expressed.  In the cuts you shall
+find faithfully paraded the quaintness and the power, the
+triviality and the surprising freshness of the author's
+fancy; there you shall find him outstripped in ready
+symbolism and the art of bringing things essentially
+invisible before the eyes: but to feel the contact of
+essential goodness, to be made in love with piety, the book
+must be read and not the prints examined.
+
+*
+
+And then I had an idea for John Silver from which I
+promised myself funds of entertainment: to take an admired
+friend of mine (whom the reader very likely knows and
+admires as much as I do), to deprive him of all his finer
+qualities and higher graces of temperament, to leave him
+with nothing but his strength, his courage, his quickness,
+and his magnificent geniality, and to try to express these
+in terms of the culture of a raw tarpaulin, such physical
+surgery is, I think, a common way of 'making character';
+perhaps it is, indeed, the only way.  We can put in the
+quaint figure that spoke a hundred words with us yesterday
+by the wayside; but do we know him?  Our friend with his
+infinite variety and flexibility, we know-but can we put
+him in?  Upon the first, we must engraft secondary and
+imaginary qualities, possibly all wrong; from the second,
+knife in hand, we must cut away and deduct the needless
+arborescence of his nature, but the trunk and the few
+branches that remain we may at least be fairly sure of.
+
+*
+
+In anything fit to be called by the name of reading, the
+process itself should be absorbing and voluptuous; we
+should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves,
+and rise from the perusal, our mind filled with the
+busiest, kaleidoscopic dance of images, incapable of sleep
+or of continuous thought.  The words, if the book be
+eloquent, should run thenceforward in our ears like the
+noise of breakers, and the story, if it be a story, repeat
+itself in a thousand coloured pictures to the eye.
+
+*
+
+The obvious is not of necessity the normal; fashion rules
+and deforms; the majority fall tamely into the contemporary
+shape, and thus attain, in the eyes of the true observer,
+only a higher power of insignificance; and the danger is
+lest, in seeking to draw the normal, a man should draw the
+null, and write the novel of society instead of the romance
+of man.
+
+*
+
+There is a kind of gaping admiration that would fain roll
+Shakespeare and Bacon into one, to have a bigger thing to
+gape at; and a class of men who cannot edit one author
+without disparaging all others.
+
+*
+
+Style is the invariable mark of any master; and for the
+student who does not aspire so high as to be numbered with
+the giants, it is still the one quality in which he may
+improve himself at will.  Passion, wisdom, creative force,
+the power of mystery or colour, are allotted in the hour of
+birth, and can be neither learned nor stimulated.  But the
+just and dexterous use of what qualities we have, the
+proportion of one part to another and to the whole, the
+elision of the useless, the accentuation of the important,
+and the preservation of a uniform character end to end--
+these, which taken together constitute technical
+perfection, are to some degree within the reach of industry
+and intellectual courage.
+
+*
+
+The love of words and not a desire to publish new
+discoveries, the love, of form and not a novel reading of
+historical events, mark the vocation of the writer and the
+painter.
+
+*
+
+The life of the apprentice to any art is both unstrained
+and pleasing; it is strewn with small successes in the
+midst of a career of failure, patiently supported; the
+heaviest scholar is conscious of a certain progress; and if
+he come not appreciably nearer to the art of Shakespeare,
+grows letter-perfect in the domain of A-B, ab.
+
+*
+
+The fortune of a tale lies not alone in the skill of him
+that writes, but as much, perhaps, in the inherited
+experience of him who reads; and when I hear with a
+particular thrill of things that I have never done or seen,
+it is one of that innumerable army of my ancestors
+rejoicing in past deeds.  Thus novels begin to touch not
+the fine DILETTANTI but the gross mass of mankind, when
+they leave off to speak of parlours and shades of manner
+and still-born niceties of motive, and begin to deal with
+fighting, sailoring, adventure, death or childbirth; and
+thus ancient outdoor crafts and occupations, whether Mr.
+Hardy wields the shepherd's crook or Count Tolstoi swings
+the scythe, lift romance into a near neighbourhood with
+epic.  These aged things have on them the dew of man's
+morning; they lie near, not so much to us, the semi-
+artificial flowerets, as to the trunk and aboriginal
+taproot of the race.  A thousand interests spring up in the
+process of the ages, and a thousand perish; that is now an
+eccentricity or a lost art which was once the fashion of an
+empire; and those only are perennial matters that rouse us
+to-day, and that roused men in all epochs of the past.
+
+*
+
+L'ART DE BIEN DIRE is but a drawing-room accomplishment
+unless it be pressed into the service of the truth.  The
+difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what
+you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him
+precisely as you wish.  This is commonly understood in the
+case of books or set orations; even in making your will, or
+writing an explicit letter, some difficulty is admitted by
+the world.  But one thing you can never make Philistine
+natures understand; one thing, which yet lies on the
+surface, remains as unseizable to their wits as a high
+flight of metaphysics-namely, that the business of life is
+mainly carried on by means of this difficult art of
+literature, and according to a man's proficiency in that
+art shall be the freedom and fulness of his intercourse
+with other men.  Anybody, it is supposed, can say what he
+means; and, in spite of their notorious experience to the
+contrary, people so continue to suppose.
+
+*
+
+Even women, who understand men so well for practical
+purposes, do not know them well enough for the purposes of
+art.  Take even the very best of their male creations, take
+Tito Melema, for instance, and you will find he has an
+equivocal air, and every now and again remembers he has a
+comb in the back of his head.  Of course, no woman will
+believe this, and many men will be so polite as to humour
+their incredulity.
+
+*
+
+A dogma learned is only a new error--the old one was
+perhaps as good; but a spirit communicated is a perpetual
+possession.  These best teachers climb beyond teaching to
+the plane of art; it is themselves, and what is best in
+themselves, that they communicate.
+
+*
+
+In this world of imperfections we gladly welcome even
+partial intimacies.  And if we find but one to whom we can
+speak out our heart freely, with whom we can walk in love
+and simplicity without dissimulation, we have no ground of
+quarrel with the world or God.
+
+*
+
+But we are all travellers in what John Bunyan calls the
+wilderness of this world-all, too, travellers with a
+donkey; and the best that we find in our travels is an
+honest friend.  He is a fortunate voyager who finds many.
+We travel, indeed, to find them.  They are the end and the
+reward of life.  They keep us worthy of.  ourselves; and
+when we are alone, we are only nearer to the absent.
+
+*
+
+We are all INCOMPRIS, only more or less concerned for the
+mischance; all trying wrongly to do right; all fawning at
+each other's feet like dumb, neglected lap-dogs.  Sometimes
+we catch an eye-this is our opportunity in the ages-and we
+wag our tail with a poor smile.  'IS THAT ALL?'  All?  If
+you only knew!  But how can they know?  They do not love
+us; the more fools we to squander life on the indifferent.
+But the morality of the thing, you will be glad to hear,
+is excellent; for it is only by trying to understand
+others that we can get our own hearts understood; and
+in matters of human feeling the clement judge is the
+most successful pleader.
+
+*
+
+There is no friendship so noble, but it is the product of
+the time; and a world of little finical observances, and
+little frail proprieties and fashions of the hour, go to
+make or to mar, to stint or to perfect, the union of
+spirits the most loving and the most intolerant of such
+interference.  The trick of the country and the age steps
+in even between the mother and her child, counts out their
+caresses upon niggardly fingers, and says, in the voice of
+authority, that this one thing shall be a matter of
+confidence between them, and this other thing shall not.
+
+*
+
+There is not anything more bitter than to lose a
+fancied friend.
+
+*
+
+The habitual liar may be a very honest fellow, and live
+truly with his wife and friends; while another man who
+never told a formal falsehood in his life may yet be
+himself one lie-heart and face, from top to bottom.  This
+is the kind of lie which poisons intimacy.  And, vice
+versa, veracity to sentiment, truth in a relation, truth to
+your own heart and your friends, never to feign or falsify
+emotion -that is the truth which makes love possible and
+mankind happy.
+
+*
+
+But surely it is no very extravagant opinion that it is
+better to give than to receive, to serve than to use our
+companions; and, above all, where there is no question of
+service upon either side, that it is good to enjoy their
+company like a natural man.
+
+*
+
+A man who has a few friends, or one who has a dozen (if
+there be any one so wealthy on this earth), cannot forget
+on how precarious a base his happiness reposes; and how by
+a stroke or two of fate--a death, a few light words, a
+piece of stamped paper, or a woman's bright eyes--he may be
+left in a month destitute of all.
+
+*
+
+In these near intimacies, we are ninety-nine times
+disappointed in our beggarly selves for once that we are
+disappointed in our friend; that it is we who seem most
+frequently undeserving of the love that unites us; and that
+it is by our friend's conduct that we are continually
+rebuked and yet strengthened for a fresh endeavour.
+
+*
+
+'There are some pains,' said he, 'too acute for
+consolation, or I would bring them to my kind consoler.'
+
+*
+
+But there are duties which come before gratitude and
+offences which justly divide friends, far more
+acquaintances.
+
+*
+
+Life, though largely, is not entirely carried on by
+literature.  We are subject to physical passions and
+contortions; the voice breaks and changes, and speaks by
+unconscious and winning inflections; we have legible
+countenances, like an open book; things that cannot be said
+look eloquently through the eyes; and the soul, not locked
+into the body as a dungeon, dwells ever on the threshold
+with appealing signals.  Groans and tears, looks and
+gestures, a flush or a paleness, are often the most clear
+reporters of the heart, and speak more directly to the
+hearts of others.
+
+*
+
+We are different with different friends; yet if we look
+closely we shall find that every such relation reposes on
+some particular apotheosis of oneself; with each friend,
+although we could not distinguish it in words from any
+other, we have at least one special reputation to preserve:
+and it is thus that we run, when mortified, to our friend
+or the woman that we love, not to hear ourselves called
+better, but to be better men in point of fact.  We seek
+this society to flatter ourselves with our own good
+conduct.  And hence any falsehood in the relation, any
+incomplete or perverted understanding, will spoil even the
+pleasure of these visits.
+
+But it follows that since they are neither of them so good
+as the other hopes, and each is, in a very honest manner,
+playing a part above his powers, such an intercourse must
+often be disappointing to both.
+
+*
+
+It is the mark of a modest man to accept his friendly
+circle ready-made from the hands of opportunity; and that
+was the lawyer's way.  His friends were those of his own
+blood, or those whom he had known the longest; his
+affections, like ivy, were the growth of time, they implied
+no aptness in the object.
+
+*
+
+Of those who are to act influentially on their fellows, we
+should expect always something large and public in their
+way of life, something more or less urbane and
+comprehensive in their sentiment for others.  We should not
+expect to see them spend their sympathy in idyls, however
+beautiful.  We should not seek them among those who, if
+they have but a wife to their bosom, ask no more of
+womankind, just as they ask no more of their own sex, if
+they can find a friend or two for their immediate need.
+They will be quick to feel all the pleasures of our
+association-not the great ones alone, but all.  They will
+know not love only, but all those other ways in which man
+and woman mutually make each other happy-by sympathy, by
+admiration, by the atmosphere they bear about them-down to
+the mere impersonal pleasure of passing happy faces in the
+street.  For, through all this gradation, the difference of
+sex makes itself pleasurably felt.  Down to the most
+lukewarm courtesies of life, there is a special chivalry
+due and a special pleasure received, when the two sexes are
+brought ever so lightly into contact.  We love our mothers
+otherwise than we love our fathers; a sister is not as a
+brother to us; and friendship between man and woman, be it
+never so unalloyed and innocent, is not the same as
+friendship between man and man.  Such friendship is not
+even possible for all.  To conjoin tenderness for a woman
+that is not far short of passionate with such
+disinterestedness and beautiful gratuity of affection as
+there is between friends of the same sex, requires no
+ordinary disposition in the man.  For either it would
+presuppose quite womanly delicacy of perception, and, as it
+were, a curiosity in shades of differing sentiment; or it
+would mean that he had accepted the large, simple divisions
+of society: a strong and positive spirit robustly virtuous,
+who has chosen a better part coarsely, and holds to it
+steadfastly, with all its consequences of pain to himself
+and others; as one who should go straight before him on a
+journey, neither tempted by wayside flowers nor very
+scrupulous of small lives under foot.
+
+*
+
+I could have thought he had been eaves-dropping at the
+doors of my heart, so entire was the coincidence between
+his writing and my thought.
+
+*
+
+A knowledge that another has felt as we have felt, and seen
+things, even as they are little things, not much otherwise
+than we have seen them, will continue to the end to be one
+of life's choicest pleasures.
+
+*
+
+The morning drum-call on my eager ear
+Thrills unforgotten yet; the morning dew
+Lies yet undried along my field of noon.
+But now I pause at whiles in what I do,
+And count the bell, and tremble lest I hear
+(My work untrimmed) the sunset gun too soon.
+
+*
+
+The ground of all youth's suffering, solitude, hysteria,
+and haunting of the grave, is nothing else than naked,
+ignorant selfishness.  It is himself that he sees dead;
+those are his virtues that are forgotten; his is the vague
+epitaph.  Pity him but the more, if pity be your cue; for
+where a man is all pride, vanity, and personal aspiration,
+he goes through fire unshielded.  In every part and corner
+of our life, to lose oneself is to be gainer; to forget
+oneself is to be happy; and this poor, laughable, and
+tragic fool has not yet learned the rudiments; himself,
+giant Prometheus, is still ironed on the peaks of Caucasus.
+But by and by his truant interests will leave that tortured
+body, slip abroad and gather flowers.  Then shall death
+appear before him in an altered guise; no longer as a doom
+peculiar to himself, whether fate's crowning injustice or
+his own last vengeance upon those who fail to value him;
+but now as a power that wounds him far more tenderly, not
+without solemn compensations, taking and giving, bereaving
+and yet storing up.
+
+*
+
+The interests of youth are rarely frank; his passions, like
+Noah's dove, come home to roost.  The fire, sensibility,
+and volume of his own nature, that is all that he has
+learned to recognise.  The tumultuary and gray tide of
+life, the empire of routine, the unrejoicing faces of his
+elders, fill him with contemptuous surprise; there also he
+seems to walk among the tombs of spirits; and it is only in
+the course of years, and after much rubbing with his
+fellow-men, that he begins by glimpses to see himself from
+without and his fellows from within: to know his own for
+one among the thousand undenoted countenances of the city
+street, and to divine in others the throb of human agony
+and hope.  In the meantime he will avoid the hospital
+doors, the pale faces, the cripple, the sweet whiff of
+chloroform-for there, on the most thoughtless, the pains of
+others are burned home; but he will continue to walk, in a
+divine self-pity, the aisles of the forgotten graveyard.
+The length of man's life, which is endless to the brave and
+busy, is scorned by his ambitious thought.  He cannot bear
+to have come for so little, and to go again so wholly.  He
+cannot bear, above all, in that brief scene, to be still
+idle, and by way of cure, neglects the little that he has
+to do.  The parable of the talent is the brief, epitome of
+youth.  To believe in immortality is one thing, but it is
+first needful to believe in life.  Denunciatory preachers
+seem not to suspect that they may be taken gravely and in
+evil part; that young men may come to think of time as of a
+moment, and with the pride of Satan wave back the
+inadequate gift.  Yet here is a true peril; this it is that
+sets them to pace the graveyard alleys and to read, with
+strange extremes of pity and derision, the memorials
+of the dead.
+
+Books were the proper remedy: books of vivid human import,
+forcing upon their minds the issues, pleasures, busyness,
+importance, and immediacy of that life in which they stand;
+books of smiling or heroic temper, to excite or to console;
+books of a large design, shadowing the complexity of that
+game of consequences to which we all sit down, the hanger-
+back not least.  But the average sermon flees the point,
+disporting itself in that eternity of which we know, and
+need to know, so little; avoiding the bright, crowded, and
+momentous fields of life where destiny awaits us.
+
+*
+
+And so in the majority of cases, a man who fancies himself
+dying will get cold comfort from the very youthful view
+expressed in this essay.  He, as a living man, has some to
+help, some to love, some to correct; it may be some to
+punish.  These duties cling, not upon humanity, but upon
+the man himself.  It is he, not another, who is one woman's
+son and a second woman's husband, and a third woman's
+father.  That life which began so small has now grown, with
+a myriad filaments, into the lives of others.  It is not
+indispensable; another will take the place and shoulder the
+discharged responsibilities; but the better the man and the
+nobler his purposes, the more will he be tempted to regret
+the extinction of his powers and the deletion of his
+personality.  To have lived a generation is not only to
+have grown at home in that perplexing medium, but to have
+assumed innumerable duties.  To die at such an age has,
+for all but the entirely base, something of the air
+of a betrayal.
+
+*
+
+Even if death catch people, like an open pitfall, and in
+mid-career, laying out vast projects, and planning
+monstrous foundations, flushed with hope, and their mouths
+full of boastful language, they should be at once tripped
+up and silenced: is there not something brave and spirited
+in such a termination? and does not life go down with a
+better grace, foaming in full body over a precipice, than
+miserably straggling to an end in sandy deltas?  When the
+Greeks made their fine saying that those whom the gods love
+die young, I cannot help believing they had this sort of
+death also in their eye.  For, surely, at whatever age it
+overtake the man, this is to die young.
+
+*
+
+And so they were at last in 'their resting graves.' So long
+as men do their duty, even if it be greatly in a
+misapprehension, they will be leading pattern lives; and
+whether or not they come to lie beside a martyrs' monument,
+we may be sure they will find a safe haven somewhere in the
+providence of God.  It is not well to think of death,
+unless we temper the thought with that of heroes who
+despised it.  Upon what ground, is of small account; if it
+be only the bishop who was burned for his faith in the
+antipodes, his memory lightens the heart and makes us walk
+undisturbed among graves.  And so the martyrs' monument is
+a wholesome spot in the field of the dead; and as we look
+upon it, a brave influence comes to us from the land of
+those who have won their discharge, and in another phrase
+of Patrick Walker's, got 'cleanly off the stage.'
+
+*
+
+It is not only our enemies, those desperate characters-it
+is we ourselves who know not what we do;-thence springs the
+glimmering hope that perhaps we do better than we think:
+that to scramble through this random business with hands
+reasonably clean, to have played the part of a man or woman
+with some reasonable fulness, to have often resisted the
+diabolic, and at the end to be still resisting it, is for
+the poor human soldier to have done right well.
+
+*
+
+We are not content to pass away entirely from the scenes of
+our delight; we would leave, if but in gratitude, a pillar
+and a legend.
+
+*
+
+There are many spiritual eyes that seem to spy upon our
+actions-eyes of the dead and the absent, whom we imagine to
+behold us in our most private hours, and whom we fear and
+scruple to offend: our witnesses and judges.
+
+*
+
+How unsubstantial is this projection of a man s existence,
+which can lie in abeyance for centuries and then be brushed
+up again and set forth for the consideration of posterity
+by a few dips in an antiquary's ink-pot!  This precarious
+tenure of fame goes a long way to justify those (and they
+are not few) who prefer cakes and cream in the immediate
+present.
+
+*
+
+But I beard the voice of a woman singing some sad, old
+endless ballad not far off.  It seemed to be about love and
+a BEL AMOUREUX, her handsome sweetheart; and I wished I
+could have taken up the strain and answered her, as I went
+on upon my invisible woodland way, weaving, like Pippa in
+the poem, my own thoughts with hers.  What could I have
+told her?  Little enough; and yet all the heart requires.
+How the world gives and takes away, and brings sweethearts
+near only to separate them again into distant and strange
+lands; but to love is the great amulet which makes the
+world a garden; and 'hope, which comes to all,' outwears
+the accidents of life, and reaches with tremulous hand
+beyond the grave and death.  Easy to say: yea, but also, by
+God's mercy, both easy and grateful to believe!
+
+*
+
+As a matter of fact, although few things are spoken of with
+more fearful whisperings than this prospect of death, few
+have less influence on conduct under healthy
+circumstances....  If we clung as devotedly as some
+philosophers pretend we do to the abstract idea of life, or
+were half as frightened as they make out we are, for the
+subversive accident that ends it all, the trumpets might
+sound by the hour and no one would follow them into battle--
+the blue-peter might fly at the truck, but who would climb
+into a sea-going ship?  Think (if these philosophers were
+right) with what a preparation of spirit we should affront
+the daily peril of the dinner-table: a deadlier spot than
+any battle-field in history, where the far greater
+proportion of our ancestors have miserably left their
+bones!  What woman would ever be lured into marriage, so
+much more dangerous than the wildest sea?  And what would
+it be to grow old?
+
+*
+
+If a man knows he will sooner or later be robbed upon a
+journey, he will have a bottle of the best in every inn,
+and look upon all his extravagances as so much gained upon
+the thieves.  And, above all, where, instead of simply
+spending, he makes a profitable investment for some of his
+money when it will be out of risk of loss.  So every bit of
+brisk living, and, above all, when it is healthful, is just
+so much gained upon the wholesale filcher, death.  We shall
+have the less in our pockets, the more in our stomachs,
+when he cries, 'Stand and deliver.'
+
+*
+
+It is better to lose health like a spendthrift than to
+waste it like a miser.  It is better to live and be done
+with it, than to die daily in the sickroom.  By all means
+begin your folio; even if the doctor does not give you a
+year, even if he hesitates about a month, make one brave
+push and see what can be accomplished in a week.  It is not
+only in finished undertakings that we ought to honour
+useful labour.  A spirit goes out of the man who means
+execution, which outlives the most untimely ending.  All
+who have meant good work with their whole hearts, have done
+good work, although they may die before they have the time
+to sign it.  Every heart that has beat strong and
+cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it in the
+world, and bettered the tradition of mankind.
+
+*
+
+Now the man who has his heart on his sleeve, and a good
+whirling weathercock of a brain, who reckons his life as a
+thing to be dashingly used and cheerfully hazarded, makes a
+very different acquaintance of the world, keeps all his
+pulses going true and fast, and gathers impetus as he runs,
+until, if he be running towards anything better than
+wildfire, he may shoot up and become a constellation in the
+end.
+
+*
+
+When the time comes that he should go, there need be few
+illusions left about himself.  Here lies one who meant
+well, tried a little, failed much:-surely that may be his
+epitaph, of which he need not be ashamed, nor will he
+complain at the summons which calls a defeated soldier from
+the field; defeated, ay, if he were Paul or Marcus
+Aurelius!--but if there is still one inch of fight in his
+old spirit, undishonoured.  The faith which sustained him
+in his lifelong blindness and lifelong disappointment will
+scarce even be required in this last formality of laying
+down his arms.  Give him a march with his old bones;
+there, out of the glorious sun-coloured earth, out
+of the day and the dust and the ecstasy-there goes
+another Faithful Failure.
+
+*
+
+We are apt to make so much of the tragedy of the tragedyof
+death, and think so little of the enduring tragedy of some
+men's lives, that we see more to lament for in a life cut
+off in the midst of usefulness and love, than in one that
+miserably survives all love and usefulness, and goes about
+the world the phantom of itself, without hope, or joy, or
+any consolation.
+
+*
+
+'You are a strange physician,' said Will, looking
+steadfastly upon his guest.
+'I am a natural law,' he replied, 'and people call
+me Death.'
+'Why did you not tell me so at first?' cried Will.
+'I have been waiting for you these many years.
+Give me your hand, and welcome.'
+
+*
+
+Under the wide and starry sky
+Dig the grave and let me lie.
+Glad did I live, and gladly die,
+And I laid me down with a will.
+
+This be the verse you grave for me:
+Here he lies where he longed to be;
+Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
+And the hunter home from the hill.
+
+*
+
+But the girls picked up their skirts, as if they were sure
+they had good ankles, and followed until their breath was
+out.  The last to weary were the three graces and a couple
+of companions; and just as they, too, had had enough, the
+foremost of the three leaped upon a tree-stump and kissed
+her hand to the canoeists.  Not Diana herself, although
+this was more of a Venus, after all, could have done a
+graceful thing more gracefully.  'Come back again!' she
+cried; and all the others echoed her; and the hills about
+Origny repeated the words, 'Come back.' But the river had
+us round an angle in a twinkling, and we were alone with
+the green trees and running water.
+
+Come back?  There is no coming back, young ladies, on the
+impetuous stream of life.
+
+      'The merchant bows unto the seaman's star,
+      The plowman from the sun his season takes.'
+
+And we must all set our pocket watches by the clock of
+fate.  There is a headlong, forthright tide, that bears
+away man with his fancies like straw, and runs fast in time
+and space.  It is full of curves like this, your winding
+river of the Oise; and lingers and returns in pleasant
+pastorals; and yet, rightly thought upon, never returns at
+all.  For though it should revisit the same acre of meadow
+in the same hour, it will have made an ample sweep between-
+whiles; many little streams will have fallen in; many
+exhalations risen toward the sun; and even although it were
+the same acre, it will not be the same river Oise.  And
+thus, oh graces of Origny, although the wandering fortune
+of my life should carry me back again to where you await
+death's whistle by the river, that will not be the old I
+who walks the streets; and those wives and mothers, say,
+will those be you?
+
+*
+
+          THE CELESTIAL SURGEON
+
+        If I have faltered more or less
+        In my great task of happiness;
+        If I have moved among my race
+        And shown no glorious morning face;
+        If beams from happy human eyes
+        Have moved me not; if morning skies,
+        Books, and my food, and summer rain
+        Knocked on my sullen heart in vain
+        Lord, Thy most pointed pleasure take
+        And stab my spirit broad awake;
+        Or, Lord, if too obdurate I,
+        Choose Thou, before that spirit die,
+        A piercing pain, a killing sin,
+        And to my dead heart run them in!
+
+*
+
+Purge out of every heart the lurking grudge.  Give us grace
+and strength to forbear and to persevere.  Offenders, give
+us the grace to accept and to forgive offenders.  Forgetful
+ourselves, help us to bear cheerfully the forgetfulness of
+others.  Give us courage and gaiety and the quiet mind.
+Spare us to our friends, soften us to our enemies.  Bless
+us, if it may be, in all our innocent endeavours.  If it
+may not, give us the strength to encounter that which is to
+come, that we be brave in peril, constant in tribulation,
+temperate in wrath, and in all changes of fortune, and down
+to the gates of death, loyal and loving one to another.
+
+*
+
+PRAYER AT MORNING
+
+The day returns and brings us the petty round of irritating
+concerns and duties.  Help us to play the man, help us to
+perform then with laughter and kind faces, let cheerfulness
+abound with industry.  Give us to go blithely on our
+business all this day, bring us to our resting beds weary
+and content and undishonoured, and grant us in the end the
+gift of sleep.
+
+*
+
+PRAYER AT EVENING
+
+Our guard is relieved, the service of the day is over, and
+the hour come to rest.  We resign into Thy hands our
+sleeping bodies, our cold hearths and open doors.  Give us
+to awake with smiles, give us to labour smiling.  As the
+sun returns in the east, so let our patience be renewed
+with dawn; as the sun lightens the world, so let our
+loving-kindness make bright this house of our habitations.
+
+*
+
+Blind us to the offences of our beloved, cleanse them from
+our memories, take them out of our mouths for ever.  Let
+all here before Thee carry and measure with the false
+balances of love, and be in their own eyes and in all
+conjunctures the most guilty.  Help us at the same time
+with the grace of courage, that we be none of us cast down
+when we sit lamenting amid the ruins of our happiness or
+our integrity; touch us with fire from the altar, that we
+may be up and doing to rebuild our city.
+
+*
+
+We beseech Thee, Lord, to behold us with favour, folk of
+many families and nations gathered together in the peace of
+this roof, weak men and women subsisting under the covert
+of Thy patience.  Be patient still; suffer us yet a while
+longer;-with our broken purposes of good, with our idle
+endeavours against evil, suffer us a while longer to
+endure, and (if it may be) help us to do better.  Bless to
+us our extraordinary mercies; if the day come when these
+must be taken, brace us to play the man under affliction.
+Be with our friends, be with ourselves.  Go with each of us
+to rest; if any awake, temper to them the dark hours of
+watching; and when the day returns, return to us, our sun
+and comforter, and call us up with morning faces and with
+morning hearts-eager to labour--eager to he happy, if
+happiness shall be our portion--and if the day be marked
+for sorrow, strong to endure it.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of The Project Gutenberg Etext The Pocket R.L.S., by R.L. Stevenson
+
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