You need repent none of your youthful vagaries.  They may 
have been over the score on one side, just as those of age are 
probably over the score on the other.  But they had a point; 
they not only befitted your age and expressed its attitude and 
passions, but they had a relation to what was outside of you, 
and implied criticisms on the existing state of things, which 
you need not allow to have been undeserved, because you now 
see that they were partial.  All error, not merely verbal, is 
a strong way of stating that the current truth is incomplete.  
The follies of youth have a basis in sound reason, just as 
much as the embarrassing questions put by babes and sucklings.  
Their most antisocial 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.  Shelley, chafing at the 
Church of England, discovered the cure of all evils in 
universal atheism.  Generous lads irritated at the injustices 
of society, see nothing for it but the abolishment of 
everything and Kingdom Come of anarchy.  Shelley was a young 
fool; so are these cocksparrow revolutionaries.  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.

In short, if youth is not quite right in its opinions, 
there is a strong probability that age is not much more so.  
Undying hope is co-ruler of the human bosom with infallible 
credulity.  A man finds he has been wrong at every preceding 
stage of his career, only to deduce the astonishing conclusion 
that he is at last entirely right.  Mankind, after centuries 
of failure, are still upon the eve of a thoroughly 
constitutional millennium.  Since we have explored the maze so 
long without result, it follows, for poor human reason, that 
we cannot have to explore much longer; close by must be the 
centre, with a champagne luncheon and a piece of ornamental 
water.  How if there were no centre at all, but just one alley 
after another, and the whole world a labyrinth without end or 
issue?

I overheard the other day a scrap of conversation, which 
I take the liberty to reproduce.  "What I advance is true," 
said one.  "But not the whole truth," answered the other.  
"Sir," returned the first (and it seemed to me there was a 
smack of Dr. Johnson in the speech), "Sir, there is no such 
thing as the whole truth!"  Indeed, there is nothing so 
evident in life as that there are two sides to a question.  
History is one long illustration.  The forces of nature are 
engaged, day by day, in cudgelling it into our backward 
intelligences.  We never pause for a moment's consideration 
but we admit it as an axiom.  An enthusiast sways humanity 
exactly by disregarding this great truth, and dinning it into 
our ears that this or that question has only one possible 
solution; and your enthusiast is a fine florid fellow, 
dominates things for a while and shakes the world out of a 
doze; but when once he is gone, an army of quiet and 
uninfluential people set to work to remind us of the other 
side and demolish the generous imposture.  While Calvin is 
putting everybody exactly right in his INSTITUTES, and hot-
headed Knox is thundering in the pulpit, Montaigne is already 
looking at the other side in his library in Perigord, and 
predicting that they will find as much to quarrel about in the 
Bible as they had found already in the Church.  Age may have 
one side, but assuredly Youth has the other.  There is nothing 
more certain than that both are right, except perhaps that 
both are wrong.  Let them agree to differ; for who knows but 
what agreeing to differ may not be a form of agreement rather 
than a form of difference?

I suppose it is written that any one who sets up for a 
bit of a philosopher, must contradict himself to his very 
face.  For here have I fairly talked myself into thinking that 
we have the whole thing before us at last; that there is no 
answer to the mystery, except that there are as many as you 
please; that there is no centre to the maze because, like the 
famous sphere, its centre is everywhere; and that agreeing to 
differ with every ceremony of politeness, is the only "one 
undisturbed song of pure concent" to which we are ever likely 
to lend our musical voices.



CHAPTER III - AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS


"BOSWELL: We grow weary when idle."
"JOHNSON: That is, sir, because others being busy, we 
want company; but if we were idle, there would be no growing 
weary; we should all entertain one another."


JUST now, when every one is bound, under pain of a decree 
in absence convicting them of LESE-respectability, to enter on 
some lucrative profession, and labour therein with something 
not far short of enthusiasm, a cry from the opposite party who 
are content when they have enough, and like to look on and 
enjoy in the meanwhile, savours a little of bravado and 
gasconade.  And yet this should not be.  Idleness so called, 
which does not consist in doing nothing, but in doing a great 
deal not recognised in the dogmatic formularies of the ruling 
class, has as good a right to state its position as industry 
itself.  It is admitted that the presence of people who refuse 
to enter in the great handicap race for sixpenny pieces, is at 
once an insult and a disenchantment for those who do.  A fine 
fellow (as we see so many) takes his determination, votes for 
the sixpences, and in the emphatic Americanism, it "goes for" 
them.  And while such an one is ploughing distressfully up the 
road, it is not hard to understand his resentment, when he 
perceives cool persons in the meadows by the wayside, lying 
with a handkerchief over their ears and a glass at their 
elbow.  Alexander is touched in a very delicate place by the 
disregard of Diogenes.  Where was the glory of having taken 
Rome for these tumultuous barbarians, who poured into the 
Senate house, and found the Fathers sitting silent and unmoved 
by their success?  It is a sore thing to have laboured along 
and scaled the arduous hilltops, and when all is done, find 
humanity indifferent to your achievement.  Hence physicists 
condemn the unphysical; financiers have only a superficial 
toleration for those who know little of stocks; literary 
persons despise the unlettered; and people of all pursuits 
combine to disparage those who have none.

But though this is one difficulty of the subject, it is 
not the greatest.  You could not be put in prison for speaking 
against industry, but you can be sent to Coventry for speaking 
like a fool.  The greatest difficulty with most subjects is to 
do them well; therefore, please to remember this is an 
apology.  It is certain that much may be judiciously argued in 
favour of diligence; only there is something to be said 
against it, and that is what, on the present occasion, I have 
to say.  To state one argument is not necessarily to be deaf 
to all others, and that a man has written a book of travels in 
Montenegro, is no reason why he should never have been to 
Richmond.

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.  It 
must have been a very foolish old gentleman who addressed 
Johnson at Oxford in these words: "Young man, ply your book 
diligently now, and acquire a stock of knowledge; for when 
years come upon you, you will find that poring upon books will 
be but an irksome task."  The old gentleman seems to have been 
unaware that many other things besides reading grow irksome, 
and not a few become impossible, by the time a man has to use 
spectacles and cannot walk without a stick.  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.

If you look back on your own education, I am sure it will 
not be the full, vivid, instructive hours of truantry that you 
regret; you would rather cancel some lack-lustre periods 
between sleep and waking in the class.  For my own part, I 
have attended a good many lectures in my time.  I still 
remember that the spinning of a top is a case of Kinetic 
Stability.  I still remember that Emphyteusis is not a 
disease, nor Stillicide a crime.  But though I would not 
willingly part with such scraps of science, I do not set the 
same store by them as by certain other odds and ends that I 
came by in the open street while I was playing truant.  This 
is not the moment to dilate on that mighty place of education, 
which was the favourite school of Dickens and of Balzac, and 
turns out yearly many inglorious masters in the Science of the 
Aspects of Life.  Suffice it to say this: if a lad does not 
learn in the streets, it is because he has no faculty of 
learning.  Nor is the truant always in the streets, for if he 
prefers, he may go out by the gardened suburbs into the 
country.  He may pitch on some tuft of lilacs over a burn, and 
smoke innumerable pipes to the tune of the water on the 
stones.  A bird will sing in the thicket.  And there he may 
fall into a vein of kindly thought, and see things in a new 
perspective.  Why, if this be not education, what is?  We may 
conceive Mr. Worldly Wiseman accosting such an one, and the 
conversation that should thereupon ensue:-

"How now, young fellow, what dost thou here?"

"Truly, sir, I take mine ease."

"Is not this the hour of the class? and should'st thou 
not be plying thy Book with diligence, to the end thou mayest 
obtain knowledge?"

"Nay, but thus also I follow after Learning, by your 
leave."

"Learning, quotha!  After what fashion, I pray thee?  Is 
it mathematics?"

"No, to be sure."

"Is it metaphysics?"

"Nor that."

"Is it some language?"

"Nay, it is no language."

"Is it a trade?"

"Nor a trade neither."

"Why, then, what is't?"

"Indeed, sir, as a time may soon come for me to go upon 
Pilgrimage, I am desirous to note what is commonly done by 
persons in my case, and where are the ugliest Sloughs and 
Thickets on the Road; as also, what manner of Staff is of the 
best service.  Moreover, I lie here, by this water, to learn 
by root-of-heart a lesson which my master teaches me to call 
Peace, or Contentment."

Hereupon Mr. Worldly Wiseman was much commoved with 
passion, and shaking his cane with a very threatful 
countenance, broke forth upon this wise: "Learning, quotha!" 
said he; "I would have all such rogues scourged by the 
Hangman!"

And so he would go his way, ruffling out his cravat with 
a crackle of starch, like a turkey when it spread its 
feathers.

Now this, of Mr. Wiseman's, is the common opinion.  A 
fact is not called a fact, but a piece of gossip, if it does 
not fall into one of your scholastic categories.  An inquiry 
must be in some acknowledged direction, with a name to go by; 
or else you are not inquiring at all, only lounging; and the 
work-house is too good for you.  It is supposed that all 
knowledge is at the bottom of a well, or the far end of a 
telescope.  Sainte-Beuve, as he grew older, came to regard all 
experience as a single great book, in which to study for a few 
years ere we go hence; and it seemed all one to him whether 
you should read in Chapter xx., which is the differential 
calculus, or in Chapter xxxix., which is hearing the band play 
in the gardens.  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 be out, your truant may 
learn some really useful art: to play the fiddle, to know a 
good cigar, 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.  The shadows and the 
generations, the shrill doctors and the plangent wars, go by 
into ultimate silence and emptiness; but underneath all this, 
a man may see, out of the Belvedere windows, much green and 
peaceful landscape; many firelit parlours; good people 
laughing, drinking, and making love as they did before the 
Flood or the French Revolution; and the old shepherd telling 
his tale under the hawthorn.

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.  When they do not require to go to the office, when they 
are not hungry and have no mind to drink, the whole breathing 
world is a blank to them.  If they have to wait an hour or so 
for a train, they fall into a stupid trance with their eyes 
open.  To see them, you would suppose there was nothing to 
look at and no one to speak with; you would imagine they were 
paralysed or alienated; and yet very possibly they are hard 
workers in their own way, and have good eyesight for a flaw in 
a deed or a turn of the market.  They have been to school and 
college, but all the time they had their eye on the medal; 
they have gone about in the world and mixed with clever 
people, but all the time they were thinking of their own 
affairs.  As if a man's soul were not too small to begin with, 
they have dwarfed and narrowed theirs by a life of all work 
and no play; until here they are at forty, with a listless 
attention, a mind vacant of all material of amusement, and not 
one thought to rub against another, while they wait for the 
train.  Before he was breeched, he might have clambered on the 
boxes; when he was twenty, he would have stared at the girls; 
but now the pipe is smoked out, the snuff-box empty, and my 
gentleman sits bolt upright upon a bench, with lamentable 
eyes.  This does not appeal to me as being Success in Life.

But it is not only the person himself who suffers from 
his busy habits, but his wife and children, his friends and 
relations, and down to the very people he sits with in a 
railway carriage or an omnibus.  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.  You are no doubt very dependent 
on the care of your lawyer and stockbroker, of the guards and 
signalmen who convey you rapidly from place to place, and the 
policemen who walk the streets for your protection; but is 
there not a thought of gratitude in your heart for certain 
other benefactors who set you smiling when they fall in your 
way, or season your dinner with good company?  Colonel Newcome 
helped to lose his friend's money; Fred Bayham had an ugly 
trick of borrowing shirts; and yet they were better people to 
fall among than Mr. Barnes.  And though Falstaff was neither 
sober nor very honest, I think I could name one or two long-
faced Barabbases whom the world could better have done 
without.  Hazlitt mentions that he was more sensible of 
obligation to Northcote, who had never done him anything he 
could call a service, than to his whole circle of ostentatious 
friends; for he thought a good companion emphatically the 
greatest benefactor.  I know there are people in the world who 
cannot feel grateful unless the favour has been done them at 
the cost of pain and difficulty.  But this is a churlish 
disposition.  A man may send you six sheets of letter-paper 
covered with the most entertaining gossip, or you may pass 
half an hour pleasantly, perhaps profitably, over an article 
of his; do you think the service would be greater, if he had 
made the manuscript in his heart's blood, like a compact with 
the devil?  Do you really fancy you should be more beholden to 
your correspondent, if he had been damning you all the while 
for your importunity?  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 
to 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.  The 
other day, a ragged, barefoot boy ran down the street after a 
marble, with so jolly an air that he set every one he passed 
into a good humour; one of these persons, who had been 
delivered from more than usually black thoughts, stopped the 
little fellow and gave him some money with this remark: "You 
see what sometimes comes of looking pleased."  If he had 
looked pleased before, he had now to look both pleased and 
mystified.  For my part, I justify this encouragement of 
smiling rather than tearful children; I do not wish to pay for 
tears anywhere but upon the stage; but I am prepared to deal 
largely in the opposite commodity.  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.  Consequently, 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.  They could easier do without his services in 
the Circumlocution Office, than they can tolerate his 
fractious spirits.  He poisons life at the well-head.  It is 
better to be beggared out of hand by a scapegrace nephew, than 
daily hag-ridden by a peevish uncle.

And what, in God's name, is all this pother about?  For 
what cause do they embitter their own and other people's 
lives?  That a man should publish three or thirty articles a 
year, that he should finish or not finish his great 
allegorical picture, are questions of little interest to the 
world.  The ranks of life are full; and although a thousand 
fall, there are always some to go into the breach.  When they 
told Joan of Arc she should be at home minding women's work, 
she answered there were plenty to spin and wash.  And so, even 
with your own rare gifts!  When nature is "so careless of the 
single life," why should we coddle ourselves into the fancy 
that our own is of exceptional importance?  Suppose 
Shakespeare had been knocked on the head some dark night in 
Sir Thomas Lucy's preserves, the world would have wagged on 
better or worse, the pitcher gone to the well, the scythe to 
the corn, and the student to his book; and no one been any the 
wiser of the loss.  There are not many works extant, if you 
look the alternative all over, which are worth the price of a 
pound of tobacco to a man of limited means.  This is a 
sobering reflection for the proudest of our earthly vanities.  
Even a tobacconist may, upon consideration, find no great 
cause for personal vainglory in the phrase; for although 
tobacco is an admirable sedative, the qualities necessary for 
retailing it are neither rare nor precious in themselves.  
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.



CHAPTER IV - ORDERED SOUTH



BY a curious irony of fate, the places to which we are 
sent when health deserts us are often singularly beautiful.  
Often, too, they are places we have visited in former years, 
or seen briefly in passing by, and kept ever afterwards in 
pious memory; and we please ourselves with the fancy that we 
shall repeat many vivid and pleasurable sensations, and take 
up again the thread of our enjoyment in the same spirit as we 
let it fall.  We shall now have an opportunity of finishing 
many pleasant excursions, interrupted of yore before our 
curiosity was fully satisfied.  It may be that we have kept in 
mind, during all these years, the recollection of some valley 
into which we have just looked down for a moment before we 
lost sight of it in the disorder of the hills; it may be that 
we have lain awake at night, and agreeably tantalised 
ourselves with the thought of corners we had never turned, or 
summits we had all but climbed: we shall now be able, as we 
tell ourselves, to complete all these unfinished pleasures, 
and pass beyond the barriers that confined our recollections.

The promise is so great, and we are all so easily led 
away when hope and memory are both in one story, that I 
daresay the sick man is not very inconsolable when he receives 
sentence of banishment, and is inclined to regard his ill-
health as not the least fortunate accident of his life.  Nor 
is he immediately undeceived.  The stir and speed of the 
journey, and the restlessness that goes to bed with him as he 
tries to sleep between two days of noisy progress, fever him, 
and stimulate his dull nerves into something of their old 
quickness and sensibility.  And so he can enjoy the faint 
autumnal splendour of the landscape, as he sees hill and 
plain, vineyard and forest, clad in one wonderful glory of 
fairy gold, which the first great winds of winter will 
transmute, as in the fable, into withered leaves.  And so too 
he can enjoy the admirable brevity and simplicity of such 
little glimpses of country and country ways as flash upon him 
through the windows of the train; little glimpses that have a 
character all their own; sights seen as a travelling swallow 
might see them from the wing, or Iris as she went abroad over 
the land on some Olympian errand.  Here and there, indeed, a 
few children huzzah and wave their hands to the express; but 
for the most part it is an interruption too brief and isolated 
to attract much notice; the sheep do not cease from browsing; 
a girl sits balanced on the projecting tiller of a canal boat, 
so precariously that it seems as if a fly or the splash of a 
leaping fish would be enough to overthrow the dainty 
equilibrium, and yet all these hundreds of tons of coal and 
wood and iron have been precipitated roaring past her very 
ear, and there is not a start, not a tremor, not a turn of the 
averted head, to indicate that she has been even conscious of 
its passage.  Herein, I think, lies the chief attraction of 
railway travel.  The speed is so easy, and the train disturbs 
so little the scenes through which it takes us, that our heart 
becomes full of the placidity and stillness of the country; 
and while the body is borne forward in the flying chain of 
carriages, the thoughts alight, as the humour moves them, at 
unfrequented stations; they make haste up the poplar alley 
that leads toward the town; they are left behind with the 
signalman as, shading his eyes with his hand, he watches the 
long train sweep away into the golden distance.

Moreover, there is still before the invalid the shock of 
wonder and delight with which he will learn that he has passed 
the indefinable line that separates South from North.  And 
this is an uncertain moment; for sometimes the consciousness 
is forced upon him early, on the occasion of some slight 
association, a colour, a flower, or a scent; and sometimes not 
until, one fine morning, he wakes up with the southern 
sunshine peeping through the PERSIENNES, and the southern 
patois confusedly audible below the windows.  Whether it come 
early or late, however, this pleasure will not end with the 
anticipation, as do so many others of the same family.  It 
will leave him wider awake than it found him, and give a new 
significance to all he may see for many days to come.  There 
is something in the mere name of the South that carries 
enthusiasm along with it.  At the sound of the word, he pricks 
up his ears; he becomes as anxious to seek out beauties and to 
get by heart the permanent lines and character of the 
landscape, as if he had been told that it was all his own - an 
estate out of which he had been kept unjustly, and which he 
was now to receive in free and full possession.  Even those 
who have never been there before feel as if they had been; and 
everybody goes comparing, and seeking for the familiar, and 
finding it with such ecstasies of recognition, that one would 
think they were coming home after a weary absence, instead of 
travelling hourly farther abroad.

It is only after he is fairly arrived and settled down in 
his chosen corner, that the invalid begins to understand the 
change that has befallen him.  Everything about him is as he 
had remembered, or as he had anticipated.  Here, at his feet, 
under his eyes, are the olive gardens and the blue sea.  
Nothing can change the eternal magnificence of form of the 
naked Alps behind Mentone; nothing, not even the crude curves 
of the railway, can utterly deform the suavity of contour of 
one bay after another along the whole reach of the Riviera.  
And of all this, he has only a cold head knowledge that is 
divorced from enjoyment.  He recognises with his intelligence 
that this thing and that thing is beautiful, while in his 
heart of hearts he has to confess that it is not beautiful for 
him.  It is in vain that he spurs his discouraged spirit; in 
vain that he chooses out points of view, and stands there, 
looking with all his eyes, and waiting for some return of the 
pleasure that he remembers in other days, as the sick folk may 
have awaited the coming of the angel at the pool of Bethesda.  
He is like an enthusiast leading about with him a stolid, 
indifferent tourist.  There is some one by who is out of 
sympathy with the scene, and is not moved up to the measure of 
the occasion; and that some one is himself.  The world is 
disenchanted for him.  He seems to himself to touch things 
with muffled hands, and to see them through a veil.  His life 
becomes a palsied fumbling after notes that are silent when he 
has found and struck them.  He cannot recognise that this 
phlegmatic and unimpressionable body with which he now goes 
burthened, is the same that he knew heretofore so quick and 
delicate and alive.

He is tempted to lay the blame on the very softness and 
amenity of the climate, and to fancy that in the rigours of 
the winter at home, these dead emotions would revive and 
flourish.  A longing for the brightness and silence of fallen 
snow seizes him at such times.  He is homesick for the hale 
rough weather; for the tracery of the frost upon his window-
panes at morning, the reluctant descent of the first flakes, 
and the white roofs relieved against the sombre sky.  And yet 
the stuff of which these yearnings are made, is of the 
flimsiest: if but the thermometer fall a little below its 
ordinary Mediterranean level, or a wind come down from the 
snow-clad Alps behind, the spirit of his fancies changes upon 
the instant, and many a doleful vignette of the grim wintry 
streets at home returns to him, and begins to haunt his 
memory.  The hopeless, huddled attitude of tramps in doorways; 
the flinching gait of barefoot children on the icy pavement; 
the sheen of the rainy streets towards afternoon; the 
meagreanatomy of the poor defined by the clinging of wet 
garments; the high canorous note of the North-easter on days 
when the very houses seem to stiffen with cold: these, and 
such as these, crowd back upon him, and mockingly substitute 
themselves for the fanciful winter scenes with which he had 
pleased himself a while before.  He cannot be glad enough that 
he is where he is.  If only the others could be there also; if 
only those tramps could lie down for a little in the sunshine, 
and those children warm their feet, this once, upon a kindlier 
earth; if only there were no cold anywhere, and no nakedness, 
and no hunger; if only it were as well with all men as it is 
with him!

For it is not altogether ill with the invalid, after all.  
If it is only rarely that anything penetrates vividly into his 
numbed spirit, yet, when anything does, it brings with it a 
joy that is all the more poignant for its very rarity.  There 
is something pathetic in these occasional returns of a glad 
activity of heart.  In his lowest hours he will be stirred and 
awakened by many such; and they will spring perhaps from very 
trivial sources; as a friend once said to me, the "spirit of 
delight" comes often on small wings.  For the pleasure that we 
take in beautiful nature is essentially capricious.  It comes 
sometimes when we least look for it; and sometimes, when we 
expect it most certainly, it leaves us to gape joylessly for 
days together, in the very home-land of the beautiful.  We may 
have passed a place a thousand times and one; and on the 
thousand and second it will be transfigured, and stand forth 
in a certain splendour of reality from the dull circle of 
surroundings; so that we see it "with a child's first 
pleasure," as Wordsworth saw the daffodils by the lake side.  
And if this falls out capriciously with the healthy, how much 
more so with the invalid.  Some day he will find his first 
violet, and be lost in pleasant wonder, by what alchemy the 
cold earth of the clods, and the vapid air and rain, can be 
transmuted into colour so rich and odour so touchingly sweet.  
Or perhaps he may see a group of washerwomen relieved, on a 
spit of shingle, against the blue sea, or a meeting of flower-
gatherers in the tempered daylight of an olive-garden; and 
something significant or monumental in the grouping, something 
in the harmony of faint colour that is always characteristic 
of the dress of these southern women, will come borne to him 
unexpectedly, and awake in him that satisfaction with which we 
tell ourselves that we are the richer by one more beautiful 
experience.  Or it may be something even slighter: as when the 
opulence of the sunshine, which somehow gets lost and fails to 
produce its effect on the large scale, is suddenly revealed to 
him by the chance isolation - as he changes the position of 
his sunshade - of a yard or two of roadway with its stones and 
weeds.  And then, there is no end to the infinite variety of 
the olive-yards themselves.  Even the colour is indeterminate 
and continually shifting: now you would say it was green, now 
gray, now blue; now tree stands above tree, like "cloud on 
cloud," massed into filmy indistinctness; and now, at the 
wind's will, the whole sea of foliage is shaken and broken up 
with little momentary silverings and shadows.  But every one 
sees the world in his own way.  To some the glad moment may 
have arrived on other provocations; and their recollection may 
be most vivid of the stately gait of women carrying burthens 
on their heads; of tropical effects, with canes and naked rock 
and sunlight; of the relief of cypresses; of the troubled, 
busy-looking groups of sea-pines, that seem always as if they 
were being wielded and swept together by a whirlwind; of the 
air coming, laden with virginal perfumes, over the myrtles and 
the scented underwood; of the empurpled hills standing up, 
solemn and sharp, out of the green-gold air of the east at 
evening.

There go many elements, without doubt, to the making of 
one such moment of intense perception; and it is on the happy 
agreement of these many elements, on the harmonious vibration 
of many nerves, that the whole delight of the moment must 
depend.  Who can forget how, when he has chanced upon some 
attitude of complete restfulness, after long uneasy rolling to 
and fro on grass or heather, the whole fashion of the 
landscape has been changed for him, as though the sun had just 
broken forth, or a great artist had only then completed, by 
some cunning touch, the composition of the picture?  And not 
only a change of posture - a snatch of perfume, the sudden 
singing of a bird, the freshness of some pulse of air from an 
invisible sea, the light shadow of a travelling cloud, the 
merest nothing that sends a little shiver along the most 
infinitesimal nerve of a man's body - not one of the least of 
these but has a hand somehow in the general effect, and brings 
some refinement of its own into the character of the pleasure 
we feel.

And if the external conditions are thus varied and 
subtle, even more so are those within our own bodies.  No man 
can find out the world, says Solomon, from beginning to end, 
because the world is in his heart; and so it is impossible for 
any of us to understand, from beginning to end, that agreement 
of harmonious circumstances that creates in us the highest 
pleasure of admiration, precisely because some of these 
circumstances are hidden from us for ever in the constitution 
of our own bodies.  After we have reckoned up all that we can 
see or hear or feel, there still remains to be taken into 
account some sensibility more delicate than usual in the 
nerves affected, or some exquisite refinement in the 
architecture of the brain, which is indeed to the sense of the 
beautiful as the eye or the ear to the sense of hearing or 
sight.  We admire splendid views and great pictures; and yet 
what is truly admirable is rather the mind within us, that 
gathers together these scattered details for its delight, and 
makes out of certain colours, certain distributions of 
graduated light and darkness, that intelligible whole which 
alone we call a picture or a view.  Hazlitt, relating in one 
of his essays how he went on foot from one great man's house 
to another's in search of works of art, begins suddenly to 
triumph over these noble and wealthy owners, because he was 
more capable of enjoying their costly possessions than they 
were; because they had paid the money and he had received the 
pleasure.  And the occasion is a fair one for self-
complacency.  While the one man was working to be able to buy 
the picture, the other was working to be able to enjoy the 
picture.  An inherited aptitude will have been diligently 
improved in either case; only the one man has made for himself 
a fortune, and the other has made for himself a living spirit.  
It is a fair occasion for self-complacency, I repeat, when the 
event shows a man to have chosen the better part, and laid out 
his life more wisely, in the long run, than those who have 
credit for most wisdom.  And yet even this is not a good 
unmixed; and like all other possessions, although in a less 
degree, the possession of a brain that has been thus improved 
and cultivated, and made into the prime organ of a man's 
enjoyment, brings with it certain inevitable cares and 
disappointments.  The happiness of such an one comes to depend 
greatly upon those fine shades of sensation that heighten and 
harmonise the coarser elements of beauty.  And thus a degree 
of nervous prostration, that to other men would be hardly 
disagreeable, is enough to overthrow for him the whole fabric 
of his life, to take, except at rare moments, the edge off his 
pleasures, and to meet him wherever he goes with failure, and 
the sense of want, and disenchantment of the world and life.

It is not in such numbness of spirit only that the life 
of the invalid resembles a premature old age.  Those 
excursions that he had promised himself to finish, prove too 
long or too arduous for his feeble body; and the barrier-hills 
are as impassable as ever.  Many a white town that sits far 
out on the promontory, many a comely fold of wood on the 
mountain side, beckons and allures his imagination day after 
day, and is yet as inaccessible to his feet as the clefts and 
gorges of the clouds.  The sense of distance grows upon him 
wonderfully; and after some feverish efforts and the fretful 
uneasiness of the first few days, he falls contentedly in with 
the restrictions of his weakness.  His narrow round becomes 
pleasant and familiar to him as the cell to a contented 
prisoner.  Just as he has fallen already out of the mid race 
of active life, he now falls out of the little eddy that 
circulates in the shallow waters of the sanatorium.  He sees 
the country people come and go about their everyday affairs, 
the foreigners stream out in goodly pleasure parties; the stir 
of man's activity is all about him, as he suns himself inertly 
in some sheltered corner; and he looks on with a patriarchal 
impersonality of interest, such as a man may feel when he 
pictures to himself the fortunes of his remote descendants, or 
the robust old age of the oak he has planted over-night.

In this falling aside, in this quietude and desertion of 
other men, there is no inharmonious prelude to the last 
quietude and desertion of the grave; in this dulness of the 
senses there is a gentle preparation for the final 
insensibility of death.  And to him the idea of mortality 
comes in a shape less violent and harsh than is its wont, less 
as an abrupt catastrophe than as a thing of infinitesimal 
gradation, and the last step on a long decline of way.  As we 
turn to and fro in bed, and every moment the movements grow 
feebler and smaller and the attitude more restful and easy, 
until sleep overtakes us at a stride and we move no more, so 
desire after desire leaves him; day by day his strength 
decreases, and the circle of his activity grows ever narrower; 
and he feels, if he is to be thus tenderly weaned from the 
passion of life, thus gradually inducted into the slumber of 
death, that when at last the end comes, it will come quietly 
and fitly.  If anything is to reconcile poor spirits to the 
coming of the last enemy, surely it should be such a mild 
approach as this; not to hale us forth with violence, but to 
persuade us from a place we have no further pleasure in.  It 
is not so much, indeed, death that approaches as life that 
withdraws and withers up from round about him.  He has 
outlived his own usefulness, and almost his own enjoyment; and 
if there is to be no recovery; if never again will he be young 
and strong and passionate, if the actual present shall be to 
him always like a thing read in a book or remembered out of 
the far-away past; if, in fact, this be veritably nightfall, 
he will not wish greatly for the continuance of a twilight 
that only strains and disappoints the eyes, but steadfastly 
await the perfect darkness.  He will pray for Medea: when she 
comes, let her either rejuvenate or slay.

And yet the ties that still attach him to the world are 
many and kindly.  The sight of children has a significance for 
him such as it may have for the aged also, but not for others.  
If he has been used to feel humanely, and to look upon life 
somewhat more widely than from the narrow loophole of personal 
pleasure and advancement, it is strange how small a portion of 
his thoughts will be changed or embittered by this proximity 
of death.  He knows that already, in English counties, the 
sower follows the ploughman up the face of the field, and the 
rooks follow the sower; and he knows also that he may not live 
to go home again and see the corn spring and ripen, and be cut 
down at last, and brought home with gladness.  And yet the 
future of this harvest, the continuance of drought or the 
coming of rain unseasonably, touch him as sensibly as ever.  
For he has long been used to wait with interest the issue of 
events in which his own concern was nothing; and to be joyful 
in a plenty, and sorrowful for a famine, that did not increase 
or diminish, by one half loaf, the equable sufficiency of his 
own supply.  Thus there remain unaltered all the disinterested 
hopes for mankind and a better future which have been the 
solace and inspiration of his life.  These he has set beyond 
the reach of any fate that only menaces himself; and it makes 
small difference whether he die five thousand years, or five 
thousand and fifty years, before the good epoch for which he 
faithfully labours.  He has not deceived himself; he has known 
from the beginning that he followed the pillar of fire and 
cloud, only to perish himself in the wilderness, and that it 
was reserved for others to enter joyfully into possession of 
the land.  And so, as everything grows grayer and quieter 
about him, and slopes towards extinction, these unfaded 
visions accompany his sad decline, and follow him, with 
friendly voices and hopeful words, into the very vestibule of 
death.  The desire of love or of fame scarcely moved him, in 
his days of health, more strongly than these generous 
aspirations move him now; and so life is carried forward 
beyond life, and a vista kept open for the eyes of hope, even 
when his hands grope already on the face of the impassable.

Lastly, he is bound tenderly to life by the thought of 
his friends; or shall we not say rather, that by their thought 
for him, by their unchangeable solicitude and love, he remains 
woven into the very stuff of life, beyond the power of bodily 
dissolution to undo?  In a thousand ways will he survive and 
be perpetuated.  Much of Etienne de la Boetie survived during 
all the years in which Montaigne continued to converse with 
him on the pages of the ever-delightful essays.  Much of what 
was truly Goethe was dead already when he revisited places 
that knew him no more, and found no better consolation than 
the promise of his own verses, that soon he too would be at 
rest.  Indeed, when we think of what it is that we most seek 
and cherish, and find most pride and pleasure in calling ours, 
it will sometimes seem to us as if our friends, at our 
decease, would suffer loss more truly than ourselves.  As a 
monarch who should care more for the outlying colonies he 
knows on the map or through the report of his vicegerents, 
than for the trunk of his empire under his eyes at home, are 
we not more concerned about the shadowy life that we have in 
the hearts of others, and that portion in their thoughts and 
fancies which, in a certain far-away sense, belongs to us, 
than about the real knot of our identity - that central 
metropolis of self, of which alone we are immediately aware - 
or the diligent service of arteries and veins and 
infinitesimal activity of ganglia, which we know (as we know a 
proposition in Euclid) to be the source and substance of the 
whole?  At the death of every one whom we love, some fair and 
honourable portion of our existence falls away, and we are 
dislodged from one of these dear provinces; and they are not, 
perhaps, the most fortunate who survive a long series of such 
impoverishments, till their life and influence narrow 
gradually into the meagre limit of their own spirits, and 
death, when he comes at last, can destroy them at one blow.


NOTE. - To this essay I must in honesty append a word or 
two of qualification; for this is one of the points on which a 
slightly greater age teaches us a slightly different wisdom:

A youth delights in generalities, and keeps loose from 
particular obligations; he jogs on the footpath way, himself 
pursuing butterflies, but courteously lending his applause to 
the advance of the human species and the coming of the kingdom 
of justice and love.  As he grows older, he begins to think 
more narrowly of man's action in the general, and perhaps more 
arrogantly of his own in the particular.  He has not that same 
unspeakable trust in what he would have done had he been 
spared, seeing finally that that would have been little; but 
he has a far higher notion of the blank that he will make by 
dying.  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.