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 many 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, but 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 be 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 had 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.  Être 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 indomitable 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 be 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 René, 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.