66 “I—I— it's nothing father's- I mean I bought it." Without a word Kyle loosed her wrist and rose up. Without a word he turned from her; only when he had gone ten steps he came back, and said, very hoarse and low, Faith Morgan, you have told me a lie, an' you know it. I can't say if it was for the first time, but I can say it shall be the last. I wondered"- and his voice sank deeper still" that you should shrink when I took you in my arms a while ago. I wonder now you dared let me do it, wi' that man's face lying between my heart an' yours. Go to him now, an you will; I want no wife on whom I can't depend in word an' deed." He was gone the next moment; and Faith, sobbing bitterly with grief and anger, went home to find Philip Denbigh at the garden gate waiting for her. He had been courting her for the last two months; and she had coquetted with him. Flirting is not an amusement confined to the upper ten. I have heard of a young Patagonian squaw who was as finished an adept at it as any Belgravian beauty; and Faith, an only child and the prettiest girl in Amlwch, had been wonderfully fond of trying her fascinations on the "weaker" sex, till the arrival of a new first mate for her father's favorite vessel, the vessel he had commanded himself until he was admitted to a partnership in the firm of Denbigh & Co., his employers. Kyle Griffiths, big as a giant, true as the light of day, and masterful as he said himself, had "cut out "all the rest in no time, and won Faith for his own undivided property.' She never even cared to look at any one else when he was by; and, I believe, loved him as entirely as was in her nature, with most worshipful affection; but when Kyle was away at sea, and young Mr. Denbigh came to Amlwch Mr. Denbigh, who was what she called a gentleman: some one who wore fine clothes, and had white hands, and a curly moustache - and when this hero testified an immediate and violent admiration for herself, how could she help being pleased? how could she help going back to the old habits? She did not help either. Mr. Denbigh made love; and she smiled and flirted, all unconscious in her flattered vanity of what the neighbors were saying, until, just three days before Kyle's return, the suitor brought matters to a crisis by a declaration. They had had a tiff about a photo. of Faith, which Denbigh had stolen and put in his locket; and he had brought her a fine gold locket with one of himself in it, and begged her to accept it and take the donor into the bargain. Followed a wakening for silly little Faith, and the confession, "But I am engaged!" Followed anger (from the gentleman) and tears (from the lady). Followed fresh solicitations, more ardent from the rebuff, and fresh "noes," more feeble from remorse and shame. Followed tremendous scenes of masculine woe and anguish, and feminine contrition and soothing. Finally Denbigh left the house, determined to try again on his return from America; and Faith remained with the locket, which she had at last consented to keep and wear, as some small salve to the giver's wounded affections. She loved Kyle far, far better than his rival; but Philip Denbigh was so handsome and sweet-spoken, it would be downright cruel to refuse him such a trifle as hanging the trinket round her neck for a day or two; and no one need ever know. Nevertheless some one did know now; and the sweetspoken gentleman got a savage snubbing on this aforementioned evening. "Kyle will hear I refused him, and come back. He'll never leave me so. He must ask my pardon first," thought the weeping beauty, that night. He did not ask pardon, however, nor come back. The Olinda sailed three days later, and Faith's two lovers sailed in it. Kyle had a beautiful black retriever, which he had been used to leave behind to "take care of his lassie love while he was gone." He took it with him this time; and Faith nearly wept her lovely eyes out, that she had been too proud to own her folly and seek a reconciliation before he went. Patience! it would be only six weeks, or at the most eight, and then he would be back, and she would be good so good and meek. He must forgive her then. Eight weeks had passed - eight weeks all but two days - when the sun went down in stormy grandeur, one cold evening, on the Irish Sea. It had been blowing great guns all day, and for many days and nights before; and the waves had wrestled terribly with a crazy barque which, with creaking timbers and leaking pores, with strained and naked masts bending beneath the gale, till at every lurch they seemed like to bury themselves in the foam-crested waves tumbling mountain-high around them, had striven like a living thing to weather the cruel storm. Where was she now? The huge breakers, crested still with foam, turbid and purple-stained, dashed themselves, moaning and roaring, against the gray and iron-bound cliffs of the Welsh coast, flinging up great fragments of timber, torn and twisted scraps of sail-cloth, and battered, shapeless things, too awful in their piteous mutilation for any human name, against the pitiless rocks, only to suck them back again into the black and boiling gulf below. Above, great storm-rent clouds, black too, but fringed with fire, were gathering thickly over the threatening vault; and low on the horizon the sun, like a blood-red hand, pointed from between them to something black and broken, over which the sea was breaking in unresisted fury - the stem of a vessel with the broken bowsprit and foremast just visible amongst the foam and spray. Greatly as the wind had lessened, that sail looking red now before the angry sun was all the captain of the pilot-cutter cared to show even now to its tender mercies. It had been a work of danger to get near the wreck at all, hanging as she did in a nest of rocks; and there was a look of relief on more than one hardy, sunburnt face, when the order was given to tack and 'bout ship again. Suddenly the captain caught up his spy-glass, which was lying beside him, and after a hasty glance through it, roared to the men to "hold all hard." "There's summat living arter all," he said, pointing to a ridge of low outlying rocks, where some object was plainly discernible even by the naked eye. "There! just above the line o' high water. Can't none o' ye see? "A man down on all-fours!" cried one of the crew. "Look, he's moved a bit higher. Poor fellow! he must be a rare plucked un surely to ha' kep' life in him so long." "Lower the boat," said the captain sharply. Now, my lads, ready all. Jim" (to an old pilot), "give us a coil o' that line. We mayn't be able to get over-near him; an' I say, one o' you lubbers, chuck a bottle o' rum inter the stern-sheets- quick! They are brave, kindly men, those Welsh pilots; I have owed my life to them, and know; but I am afraid they thought their courage and kindness wasted when they found the object of it was only a dog! They hauled him into the boat none the less, almost too much spent, poor fellow, to second their efforts; and then, while he was trying very feebly to lick the hands that had saved him, his beautiful eyes full of all a dog's gratitude, they saw he had a tin flask tied to his collar. The captain opened it. "To Miss Faith Morgan, Amlwch," he said, reading something within; and then, not being a person of refined delicacy, he took the paper out, and opened and read that. This was what it said: "Boat just left with the crew and Philip Denbigh. No room for me; but no wish for it. Remember that. I give mine on board, with willing heart, to him you gave it to ashore. God bless you, sweetheart. Forgive my rude words as I forgive your falsehood. There's a Saviour more merciful than we are, an' to Him I pray to care for you, an' make you happy, as I would ha' tried to, had He been willed to let me.' They gave that paper, with the dog —a beautiful black retriever to Faith Morgan. It was all that ever came to port of the ill-fated Pride of the West, the ramshackle old barque, which had been hastily patched up, and thought good enough to last one voyage more. Boat and crew were never heard of again. They must have perished with their fine young owner in the vain attempt to reach land, that stormy night; and there was no tongue left to tell of those bitter eight weeks when the "sweet spoken" gentleman strove, by every vulgar boast and innuendo, to torture the man whom he considered his successful rival - the man who was no gentleman, but who had the grand old knightly feelings that would have made him bear anything rather than, by word or retort, drag the name of the woman he loved into an unseemly dispute - the man whose unswerving discipline and tireless energy had alone preserved them even so long-the man who, when the ship had struck, and the cowardly scoundrel who owned it was clinging in frantic, helpless terror to his knees, when the men were shouting for the captain to join them and cast off, lifted in the miserable wretch first with his own strong arms; and then, seeing there was no room for more, cut the rope that held the boat to the sinking ship, and stayed alone - to die! And Faith? Faith is living still. I met her yesterday coming up the high street at Amlwch, with her married daughter, each holding a hand of a wee, toddling, browneyed thing between them. A bright, bonny old woman she is too, with as comely a face as if the eyes had never been washed in salt tears, the brow never wrinkled under a cloud of care. "I must be goin' home to my old man," she said, stopping at the corner. "Kiss grannie, sweetums," and then turned just at the churchyard-wall where stands a rough stone cross," To the memory of the captain and crew of the Pride of the West." Kyle's prayer has been granted-perhaps better by his death than if he had lived to carry it out. As Faith "THE wisdom of many, and the wit of one," was Earl Russell's definition of a proverb at one of Samuel Rogers's famous breakfasts, as chronicled by Sir James Macintosh; and although many people have tried their hands at the same definition, I don't know that any one has succeeded better. No sentence can ever pass into a genuine proverb which does not consist of the wisdom of the many; and it generally requires the wit of some "one to condense or precipitate this floating wisdom into the brilliant drops which some proverbs are, or to sublime the rising incense into something which shall breathe, as some proverbs do, a still higher fragrance. Perhaps the three best characteristics are in the alliterative sentence which declares that a proverb, in order to live, must have "shortness, sense, and salt." Shortness is, above all, essential, for proverbs in this respect resemble the gold pieces of a coinage- small, convenient (very convenient), and easily carried, yet representing a considerable value; without sense, of course, they would be worthless; nor is some sharp relish of Attic salt less necessary to preserve them from decay, and to make them, like ginger, "hot i' the mouth." Martial's most happy epigram upon epigrams is no less applicable to proverbs: "Three things must epigrams, like bees, have all: Their sting, their honey, and their body small;" with which we may compare an English metrical description of proverbs by James Howell, itself a translation of a Latin proverb very well known, which, if not so smart and stinging as Martial's, is hardly less full of truth: "The people's voice the voice of God we call; And what are proverbs but the people's voice? Coined first and current made by common choice, Then sure they must have weight and truth withall.” They are especially and above all "the people's voice: " the outspeak of the common heart of humanity, very often of several nations, of some shrewd truth which frequently it is well and wholesome to keep ever before one's eyes. And in confirmation of this truth we find the Petronius of the eighteenth century, Lord Chesterfield, warning his son that "no man of fashion ever uses a proverb." They were common and unclean, and quite unfit for the mouths of the finer porcelain of the human race; just as he cautions the same youth against "fiddling," or any musical accomplishment of a like nature, as fit only for the slavish portion of mankind; and begs him, if he requires any such "linked sweetness long drawn out," to pay some one to fiddle in his long though noble ears. Curiously enough my lord's great rival, who blew in his noble ears that "far-reaching blast of doom," as Carlyle calls the dedication of the Dictionary, does not seem to have been much fonder of proverbs than my lord. Possibly they were too short and condensed for the lover of that sesquipedalian oratory. Those long words and rolling, ponderous periods had no room to disport themselves within the limits of sentences whose brevity was the soul of their wit; and Dr. Johnson in a proverb would have been like an elephant in a nutshell. "Wesley," said the great doctor to his familiar, "is a well-informed man, but he is always in a hurry. Now, sir, I love to fold my legs and have my talk out." He had, as we know, a particular objection to persons running away in the midst of his preachments; and one of the reasons which he gave for his love for journeying in a postchaise was, that his victim could not escape him, but must e'en sit and bear it. Buttonholing would have been entirely beneath his dignity; but a post-chaise formed a most convenient arena for the display of his particular talent, and one which he doubtless improved to the fullest extent. It always appears to me that Shakespeare had an espe cial dislike to those good people who, in his own words, "patch grief with proverbs," who seek to heal the wounds which flesh is heir to by the application of some trite axiom. His justice "with beard of formal cut, Full of wise saws and modern instances," for the benefit of his friends and culprits, all the while that he is himself physically full of "good capon," sustained by creature comforts, and seeking to nourish others on such a windy diet never seems to have been a favorite with him; and the disconsolate Leonato, in "Much Ado," who cries out against those who patch grief with proverbs, "Can counsel, and speak comfort to that grief Charm ache with air, and agony with words," is echoed by the Laureate when his heart was still bleeding for the loss of his friend : "One writes that other friends remain ; That death is common to the race, And common is the commonplace; And vacant chaff well meant for grain." quo In the second line of which stanza we have a proverb common, alas, to every people and nation and tongue. The Hebrew" All flesh is grass," and Horace's mournful" pulsat pede," will recur to all; while the picturesque Arabic," Death is a black camel which kneels at every door" (kneels to take up the coffin-load, that is), is perchance less known. This last axiom may serve to show the curious, couleur locale which some proverbs possess, more especially those of Eastern origin. "He that takes the raven for a guide shall light upon carrion" brings before us the desert wastes of the East, with the sinking sun and the dying camel Mahomet's dreadful saying, "There are no fans in hell," may remind us of the finger dipped in water so earnestly desired by the rich man "tormented in this flame,” and is an instance of the terrible truth with which, to their honor be it spoken, proverbs deal with the most appalling subjects. Perhaps there is scarcely a more alarming warn ing against delay than in our own "The road to hell is paved with good intentions," or Macbeth's paraphrase, L "To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, The Chinese love of gardens, and their pawky, canny, Scotch contentment and caution peep out in one of the Celestials' axioms: "In a field of melons tie not thy shoe; under a plum-tree adjust not thy cap," where the scene pictured is that of a land flowing with milk and honey, luscious fruits, and industrious cultivation of them to the highest perfection. Some, as those of Russia, contain that strange intermingling of the most solemn names with homeliest themes which is one of the characteristics of the land claiming the prefix of Holy Russia, a very large proportion of her proverbs not scrupling to introduce into their substance the Highest of all names. A strange pendant to such a use, or perhaps abuse, of the most solemn words is the commercial morality, or immorality, which is apparent in some of them. One, indeed, "Without cheating, no trading," declares itself upon this head with the most charming directness and plainness of speech. King Solomon had before warned us that there might possibly be some little arts practised in dealing, such as It is naught, it is naught, saith the buyer; but when he is gone he boasteth" (subawli, of the good birgain he has made); but the Muscovite moralist is much more direct, and speaks much less delicately. That interesting animal the pig makes a considerable figure, as we might have expected, in Russian proverbs; sometimes in the character of a friend, sometimes as an enemy or avenger to be feared. "Ask a pig to dinner, and he will put his feet on the table," is somewhat analogous to our own axioms which declare the hopelessness of trying to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, or of expecting anything of a pig but the vocal effort natural to his race. But in his other character we hardly know him: "If God does not forsake us, the pigs will not take us;" wherein the pig appears as a kind of avenging bogie, or as the Commendatore in "Don Juan." Another Muscovite axiom reminds us of Topsy's "Specs I growed :" "Fools are not planted or sowed, they grow of themselves; which may perhaps account for Mr. Carlyle's mostly fools" in his description of mankind generally. 39 66 The characteristics of each particular nation peep out in their proverbs. The subtle policy and revenge of the Italians, the pride of the Castilian hidalgo, are displayed in such axioms as the Italian "Revenge of a hundred years old has still its sucking teeth; or the stately, leisurely Spanish," When thou seest thine house in flames, approach and warm thyself at it." Every reader of " Don Quixote" will be ready to indorse Lord Chesterfield's remark that proverbs are only for the vulgar; for whilst honest Sanchio has a proverb for every emergency, and scarcely speaks except in those axioms, the stately Don never once, I think, uses them, and more than once expresses his impatience at his squire's addiction to the practice. What nation, again, but the French, could have given birth to the cynical, heartless "Maxims" of Rochefoucauld -displaying as they do so dreadful a knowledge of the worst side of human nature, and expressing it with such pitiless precision and that crystal clearness which is so eminently French? "In the adversity of our best friends there is something which does not displease us," for instance. How vile is the sentiment, and yet how many poor human hearts, if they confess the very truth, will perforce admit the fact, as frankly as Edmund Burke does in his famous essay "On the Sublime and Beautiful!" What a dreadful antithesis is it to the apostolic description of Christian brotherhood, "If one member suffer, all the members suffer with it"! But the Duke, though sometimes bad enough in stripping off the tinsel and disguise from seeming virtuous actions, and showing them in all their hideousness, is nothing compared to some of the confessions of faith which have followed his. Such are the satanic definitions of happiness as consisting in "a bad heart and a good stomach," and the apotheosis of that famous condiment of which it was said, "with this sauce one could eat his father." I don't think the hog-trough theory of happiness could be carried much further than in those two detestable axioms, or could be expressed with more atrocious plainness. Two celebrated sayings bave reference both to France and Russia; the one, Napoleon's famous description of the Muscovite, itself a genuine proverb, which so well describes the veneered civilization of the gallicized St. Petersburger overlying the natural barbarian," Scratch the Russian, and you will find the Tartar," but which. in the whirligig of time, the great invader found so full of solemn truth, when, in his Moscow expedition, he scratched the Russian and found so terrible a Tartar during his retreat; the other having reference to the self-same expedition, but issuing from the mouth of Talleyrand, when he prognosticated of the same retreat to Savary that it was "the beginning of the end "the first serious symptom of decay in that mighty power which had then well-nigh run its course, and was soon to expiate its errors on the rock of St. Helena. MR. BLANCHARD JERROLD will write a personal and biographical sketch of the late Shirley Brooks, with the aid of materials in the possession of the family, for the May number of the Gentleman's Magazine. A THOUGHTFUL Parisian vegetarian has applied to the government to let out to him the moat of the fortifications round the capital for the purpose of planting it with fruit and vegetables in case of a second siege. MR. HALLIWELL has found a drawing of the original Globe theatre in Southwark, where Shakespeare acted, and which was built in 1599. The only engraving heretofore known is that of the rebuilt theatre of 1613. MR. TOM TAYLOR has been selected as the editor of Punch. Readers of Punch are to be congratulated that a previous report, placing the editorship in the hands of the author of "Happy Thoughts," was without foundation. THE following telegraphic review of Victor Hugo's new novel was, according to the Rappel, forwarded to the author by the Italian poet Boito: "Milan, the 22d, 1.55 P. M. To Victor Hugo: I am at the 192d page of the third volume. Glory! - Borro." late Duke of Brunswick is to be sold by public auction on THE jewelry bequeathed to the city of Geneva by the April 22. The catalogue comprises 326 items; among other curiosities are a sapphire statuette, and a Chinese idol in rubies from the Summer Palace at Peking. "DOES your arm pain you?" asked a witty Aberdeen lady of a gentleman, who, at a party, had thrown his arm across the back of her chair, so that it touched her shoulder. "No, madam, it doesn't pain me; but why do you ask?" "Oh, I noticed that it was dislocated, sir; that's all." The arm was removed. A FURTHER instalment of Prosper Mérimée's correspondence is about to be published, and will undoubtedly be welcome to all who cultivate the almost obsolete art of letter-writing. The late Academician was nearly as untiring a correspondent as M. Thiers or Barthélemy St. Hilaire. The promised letters are addressed to a literary colleague, and exhibit rather more plainly than the epistles to the "Inconnue " the hard, cynical, and somewhat coarse side of the writer's character. It is no longer the courtly satirist playing an academical St. Preux to a very modern and materialistic Julie; but a frank sceptic recounting without reserve or equivocation his impressions of men and things. The correspondence opens in 1849, and in the very first lines it is evident that Mérimée had already adopted the passive rôle of the philosophic spectator which neither Sénat nor Academy could afterwards make him abandon. "We are at Paris nearly as reactionary as you Bordelais. The loungers have ceased to care for the Republic; but, believe me, they will do nothing to overthrow it. If it falls by itself, or is pushed from behind, they will make no effort to pick it up, but be rather pleased to be led by a government they can laugh at." A little further on, a love story that seriously influenced Mérimée's life is mixed up with learned dissertations on the formation of languages and dialects: "I had a hot discussion the other day with M. Cousin at the Academy. I upheld that many French words have two origins, or, to speak more correctly, that there are words of different meaning, Latin or German, that have passed into French with a similar pronunciation and orthography. I cited tourbe, 'canaille,' from turba, and tourbe, 'peat,' from the German turve; sûr from 'securus,' and sur from 'säur,' etc." Mérimée never missed an opportunity of ridiculing poets and poetry: "Je me défie toujours des poètes. La rime leur fait dire tant de choses malgré eux." Marriage, death, political questions, all are treated by the "parfait sceptique" with a laughing Voltairian bitterness that no French writer has been able to imitate, though perhaps a score have essayed. This is the way he announces an illness which almost proved mortal: "J'ai failli crever en Provence, il y a deux mois, d'un coup de soleil attrapé dans l'exercice de mes fonctions". Mérimée was Inspector of Historical Monuments. In the latter years of his life the author of "Colomba" became more and more frank and confirmed in his epicureanism. He devotes many of his last letters to the discussion of different qualities of wines. He preferred Château La Rose, and filled page after page with praises of his favorite vin. AFTER HEINE. I'VE written couplets to my lady's eyes, I've lavished dozens of poetic fancies. I've sung her little cheek, in verse apart, Her little mouth, what rhymes I've made upon it! And if my lady had a little heart, Why, I would celebrate it in a sonnet. And Love has led thee to the stranger land, So now thy fuller life is in the West, V. LOVE-FLOWERS. OH! who was watching when Love came by, The wreath of flowers his head went round Shall fears and jealous hatreds flame again? But hearts that change not, love that cannot cease, EVERY SATURDAY: A JOURNAL OF CHOICE Reading, Published WEEKLY BY H. O. HOUGHTON AND COMPANY, 219 WASHINGTON STREET, BOSTON: NEW YORK: HURD AND HOUGHTON; Single Numbers, 10 cts.: Monthly Par's, 50 cts.; Yearly Subscription, $5.00. N. B. THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY and EVERY SATURDAY sent to one address for $8.00. NEED ONE HURRY? ALTHOUGH the sun rises and sets daily with some show of regularity, and the seasons succeed each other in the same order with which they began, each showing some anticipation of the one that is to come, as well as reminiscence of the one that has just departed, there is nevertheless a feeling that lurks very generally in the human mind that the world is coming to an end. It has lurked there, certainly in all historic time, and the fables which prehistoric times have told had this moral; it has blazed out now and then into a fire of burning expectation and dread; and in every generation there are men and whole classes of society to whom the coming end is the stimulus to action, or the paralyzer of honest work. Now there is no great, comprehensive, or penetrating impulse moving men and generations, which has not its miniature presentment in the petty ways of life; and the strong hope which made the horizon luminous to the Apostle, and caught up his daily life into the sweep of heroic action, is parodied in the flicker of some phantom future which makes ordinary mortals discontented with the present, and turns their daily work into an unseemly push and incontinent hurry. Something is coming, be it Saturday, or pay-day, or the annual balance-sheet, or the visit of a relation, or a journey, a marriage, a birthday, an anniversary, the end of the world in which we are dwelling for the time is at hand; then is to begin something new; some changed circumstances, a fresh day, a new week, a new account, different society, a new start in life, a settlement, a beginning after the end. It is impossible for one to sit down to think at all of what enters into the motive of his life, without seeing how very large a share new beginnings have in it; how constantly he looks to the end with reference to the beginning that is to come after. The point at issue is not how to eradicate hope, small or great, from one's life, but how to get rid of this perpetual hurry and drive, this galloping to the end of a journey, only to mount a fresh steed and gallop on the next stage: the clatter of the horses' hoofs becoming an accompaniment to all one's thoughts. There is certainly something ignominious in the confession which people are constantly making that they have no time to do this or that needful thing, and that they shall breathe more freely if they can once clear their desk, or finish this job, or wipe out this obligation. One comes to feel that Time has been borrowed from, and that one's notes are perpetually maturing, while one makes a vain effort to cancel them by giving fresh notes. We turn round in a helpless sort of fashion, and berate the age we live in, with its whizzing locomotives, and its clicking telegraphs, as if the punctuality of railroad trains and the instantaneouness of dispatches were not the very friends and servants of honest leisure. It would be idle to lay down a set of rules by which one might hope to exorcise this evil demon of haste and unrest, but one would take much pains if he could hope to persuade the unhappy man of hurry that the fault was all his own, and lay in the very spirit with which he set about his work; that, in short, hurry was an evil spirit, to be exorcised by whatever power is mighty enough to control it. It is among men of business that it shows itself most clearly, while it is most offensive when displayed in the life of men of thought. Business and hurry, so far from being necessary partners, are opposed to each other by the most violent contrast. It may safely be said that the most successful men of business are the least hurried, for hurry is an open transgression of the law of order, and order is the foundation-stone of a business house. And there we touch the secret of a leisurely life, one which has free play, without this incessant push from behind. He who orders his life, and refuses to be carried along by the nearest current; who holds his purposes as sacred and does not lightly allow himself to be turned from them; who has the will to refuse work, in spite of that most intolerable complaint, the suspicion of being a shirk it is he who can hope bravely to live a life of leisure. Is it not pitiable to see one, who, through his very anxiety to do everything which circumstance seems to lay on his broad back, comes to be the very thrall of circumstance, and starts at every shadow which seems to whisper that he is not faithful! He wears his life away to a fretful existence, in the vain attempt to leave nothing undone, when it would have been nobler to leave much undone which he has done ill. He disappoints his masters by the excess of his endeavor, yet none is so disappointed as himself, for the solace of having tried to do what one has not done is a mockery. It is doing which brings comfort. Along with the spirit of order which leads one to arrange his work so that it shall not be always at his heels, and the courage which makes him refuse to do what he cannot do well, though he be suspected of shirking, that most hateful thing to his soul, — there is also the element, which indeed is but the spirit of order and of courage combined, of resolute reserve of leisure. Forster, in his account of Dickens, has touched upon the fundamental weakness of that sad life, the absence of any "city of the mind" to which he could flee for refuge from the incessant pressure of the actual and real upon him. It is, we hold, a necessity for every man of business to have and guard jealously some period of each day which shall be consecrated to leisure, - the leisure of books, or of gentle society, or of nature, or of worship. The last is essential; the others are grateful aids. a chance to set his watch by the when he issues forth, into whatever thicket of men or af fairs he may plunge, he will at any rate be himself and not the slave of necessity. There is no need of hurry, for hurry is at variance with freedom; and the need that men have is of freedom. So it comes to pass that in a hurrying age, the man of leisure is the man of hope, and the end of the world to him is the opening of fairer prospect for that which even now lies in his grasp. NOTES. In this shelter he has heavenly bodies, and We depart a little from the usage of this journal in the present number, and give an article, "In the Laboratory with Agassiz," not from an English magazine, but contributed to our pages from the note-book of one of Agassiz's former pupils. It is so good an illustration of one cardinal point in that great teacher's method, that we wished to preserve it in print. |