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being impatient to arrive at some town, only perhaps to be equally restless when arrived there. Not that he was insensible to the pleasure of driving fast-stirring the blood as it does, and giving a sense of power; but he complained that everything was getting a little too hasty and business-like, "as though we were to be eternally getting on, and never realizing anything but fidget and money-the means instead of the end." A distinction is duly recognised between haste and hurryhurry adding to rapidity the element of painful confusion; but in the case of ordinary people, as Dr. Boyd observes, haste generally implies hurry, and very strenuously he dilates on "what a horrible thing" it must be to go through life in a hurry. The self-styled country parson made a name ("letters four do make that name") by his "Recreations." And he has since then maintained its popularity by a series of "Leisure Hours." In his essay concerning Hurry and Leisure he avows his utter contempt for the idler-the loafer, as Yankees term him-who never does anything, whose idle hands are always in his idle pockets, and who is always sauntering to and fro. Leisure, we are reminded, is the intermission of labour-the blink of idleness in the life of a hard-working man; and it is only in the case of such a man that leisure is allowed to be dignified, commendable, or enjoyable. "But to him it is all these, and more. Let us not be ever driving on. The machinery, physical and mental, will not stand it." Only in leisure, it is further contended, will the human mind yield many of its best products. Calm views, sound thoughts, healthful feelings, do not originate in a hurry or a fever.

It was in wistful remembrance of the silence in heaven for the space of half an hour, as recorded by the Seer of Patmos, that Mrs. Browning penned a sonnet which expressed a prayer, suggestive in its earnestness and of wide application,

"Vouchsafe us such a half-hour's hush alone,

In compensation for our stormy years!"

Never to be forgotten amid the tranquillising sweets of leisure hours, with healing on their wings, is the serene solemnity of that silent half-hour.

Professor Longfellow, in one of his earliest works, proclaimed to his countrymen as the great want of the national character, that of the "dignity of repose." "We seem," he said, "to live in the midst of a battle-there is such a din, such a hurrying to and fro. In the streets of a crowded city it is difficult to walk slowly. You feel the rushing of the crowd, and rush with it onward. In the press of our life, it is difficult to be calm. In this stress of wind and tide, all professions seem to drag their anchors, and are swept out into the main." The following stanza is so thoroughly conceived in the spirit and expressed in the style of the same author-the author of the "Psalm of Life"-that few readers might have hesitated to attribute it to him, were it not known to be from one of the "Palm Leaves" of Lord Houghton, who, a quarter of a century ago, as Richard Monckton Milnes, after contrasting the din, and stir, and turmoil of the West with the reposeful air of the East, counselled the poet of the West to wander eastward now and then:

"There the calm of life comparing

With his Europe's busy fate,

Let him gladly homeward faring,

Learn to labour and to wait."

It is perhaps the most gifted of American writers of fiction to whom we owe the avowal, that were he to adopt a pet idea, as so many people do, and fondle it in his embraces to the exclusion of all others, it would be that the great want which mankind labours under at this present period is-sleep. The world, he urges, should recline its vast head on the first convenient pillow, and take a prolonged nap. It has gone distracted, on his showing, through a morbid activity, and while preternaturally wide awake, is nevertheless tormented by visions that seem real to it now, but would assume their true aspect and character were all things once set right by an interval of sound repose. This he declares to be the only method of getting rid of old delusions and of avoiding new ones of restoring to us the simple perception of what is right, and the single-hearted desire to achieve it, both of which have

long been lost in consequence of this weary activity of brain and torpor or passion of the heart that now afflict the universe. "Stimulants, the only mode of treatment hitherto attempted, cannot quell the disease; they do but heighten the delirium." Sleep, therefore, is the panacea he prescribes for the physical and metaphysical regeneration of our race, so that it may in due time awake, as an infant out of dewy slumber.

To the like effect protests an able essayist of our day against tendencies to overrate the endless facilities of speedy locomotion now enjoyed, as if they were a boon without a drawback; and he professes not to regard as particularly attractive or elevating the sight of mankind scouring and bustling endlessly hither and thither over the face of the earth, like eager, energetic ants, with little bits of straw or other rubbish packed on their heads. Ought we not rather, it is asked, to look on tranquillity, and equilibrium, and regularity, as the normal condition of things? and in the thousand encomiums which are poured forth upon steam and speed, do we often take into account the waste and havoc which they make in "plain living"-how they practically shorten the days of a man?

The haste and hurry of modern English civilization, it has been elsewhere observed, ever increasing and carrying us more impetuously forward, tend to deaden all capacity for simpler enjoyments, and all sense of the worth of a tranquil life on which the eyes of all the world are not fixed. And whenever, as a reflective discourser remarks, people set their heads to constant work, we may be perfectly certain that they are losing more than they gain, and are sinking in the scale at once of meditative and social beings. The accomplished author of an essay on Leisure—the cultivation of which as an art is thought to be in danger of dying out amongst us--says of that activity which never relaxes sufficiently to allow time for a calm and more or less passive contemplation of life as a whole, that it is "apt to degenerate into mere hand-to-mouth fussiness or drudgery, and can be justified only by necessity." The very repose of leisure is accordingly pronounced a by no means purely selfish enjoyment-it being one of the most

communicable, nay, contagious, of pleasures; for there are people, we are reminded, whose company is as restful as sleep, in whose presence hurry seems like a bad dream when it is past, and whom one leaves with a sense of refreshment and renewed energy such as is produced by a good night's rest. And this writer contends that to afford such refreshment to others may often be turning time to better account than to crowd it with self-chosen business. Not that the fact is not duly insisted upon that too little work is as fatal as too much to that lightness and alacrity of spirit which are needed for the conversion of spare time into hours of leisure worthy to be so called. Some natures, indeed, and they are of a high order, sometimes of the highest, find one leisure hour at a time as much as they can away with, and anon

"The hour of rest is gone,

And urgent voices round them cry,
'Ho, lingerer, hasten on !'

"And has the soul, then, only gained,
From this brief time of ease,

A moment's rest, when overstrained,
One hurried glimpse of peace?"

Nay something better and more abiding than that.

But to conclude. The notion, as expounded by an essayist on "Short Cuts," that if a thing is to be done at all, "then 'twere well it were done quickly," admirable as it may be on the Exchange, is justly said to rub the delicacy and bloom off life when it is made the ruling maxim in all other relations and positions: a life with leisure hours in it for watching and examining all that we pass being a much more enviable and rational lot than a swift rushing from one goal to another, from one sort of fame or power or opulence to another and more remote. When the ambitious hero in Sir Henry Taylor's dramatic poem declares in the storm and stress of his career,

"We have not time to mourn,"

"The worse for us!" is his good counsellor's rejoinder :

"He that lacks time to mourn lacks time to mend.

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For life's worst ills, to have no time to feel them.
Where sorrow's held intrusive and turn'd out,
There wisdom will not enter, nor true power,
Nor aught that dignifies humanity.
Yet such the barrenness of busy life!
From shelf to shelf Ambition clambers up
To reach the naked'st pinnacle of all,
While Magnanimity, absolved from toil,
Reposes self-included at the base."

A PROPHYLACTIC KNIFE TO THE THROAT.

PROVERBS xxiii. 2.

K

ING Solomon's discreet counsel to him that feasts with royalty, to put a knife to his throat, if he be a man given to appetite, may be advantageously enlarged in its application. to diners-out, or for the matter of that, to diners at home, all and sundry. Sitting to eat with a ruler, the guest is admonished to consider diligently what is before him; and at the same time to be not desirous of the great man's dainties, for they are deceitful meat. Any and every man given to appetite will do well to chew the cud of this bitter fancy; and the prophylactic application of a knife to the throat, forbidding rash ingress and intemperate speed of swallow, is wholesome for all estates and degrees of men among us, and might beneficially be a standing order for all times.

Adam Smith, in his "Theory of the Moral Sentiments," calls it "indecent" to express any strong degree of those passions which arise from a certain situation or disposition of the body; because the company, not being in the same disposition, cannot be expected to sympathize with them; and he mentions violent hunger as being, though upon many occasions not only natural, but unavoidable, yet "always indecent; and to eat voraciously is universally regarded as a piece of ill manners.” There is, however, he allows, some degree of sympathy, even with hunger, and we may add, even on the part of a ruler at whose table sits the man given to appetite. Lewis the Fourteenth,

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