THE COST OF LIVING. 187 of probation. And it will be found that they are the weakest-minded and the hardest-hearted men that most love variety and change; for the weakest-minded are those who both wonder most at things new, and digest worst things old; and the hardest-hearted are those that least feel the endearing and binding power of custom, and hold on by no cords of affection to any shore, but drive with the waves that cast up mire and dirt. Ruskin. No man ever stood lower in my estimation for having a patch in his clothes; yet I am sure there is greater anxiety to have fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched clothes, than to have a sound conscience. I sometimes try my acquaintances by some such test as this; who could wear a patch, or two extra seams only, over the knee. Thoreau. Wilkinson quotes Diodorus as saying that the ancient Egyptians brought up a child to maturity for thirteen. shillings. It is a fact, says The Bombay Gazette, that the entire population of Hindostan do not average sixpence a year for clothing. Besides the folly, I do really think there is something fearful in asking whether a man (a soldier too) can live on two hundred pounds a year; it always sounds like insolence to the thousands of good honest men who live on twenty; like cruelty to the tens of thousands who live on less than ten. Oakfield. In India millions live at the rate of eight shillings per man a month, and are quite contented; but what a thing it is that they should be contented! If we wished to state the difference in the most striking way, we might say, discontent is the mischief in England, content in India. ль. There is in the English people a fierce resolution to make every man live according to the means he possesses. Taylor's Life of Haydon. A man with fifty, five hundred, a thousand pounds a day, given him freely, he too, you would say, is or might be a rather strong Worker! You ask him at the year's end, "Where is your three hundred thousand pounds; what have you realized to us with that? He answers in indignant surprise, "Done with it? Who are you that ask? I have eaten it, I and my flunkeys, and parasites, and slaves two-footed and fourfooted, in an ornamental manner." An answer that fills me with boding apprehension, with foreshadows of despair. Out of the loud piping whirlwind, audibly to him that has ears, the highest God is again announcing in these days; "Idleness shall not be." God has said, man cannot gainsay. Carlyle. BEAUTY AN END. Often I find myself saying, in irony is it, or earnest ? 189 Yea, what is more, be rich, O ye rich! be sublime in great houses, Clough. Like other beautiful things in this world, its end (that of a shaft) is to be beautiful; and, in proportion to its beauty, it receives permission to be otherwise useless. We do not blame emeralds and rubies because we cannot make them into heads of hammers. Ruskin. Which is most likely to be generous, a life devoted to use or to beauty? WORK. WORK. THERE is a perennial nobleness, and even sacredness in Work. Were he never so benighted, forgetful of his high calling, there is always hope in a man that actually and earnestly works; in Idleness alone there is perpetual despair. Work, never so Mammonish, mean, is in communication with Nature; the real desire to get Work done will itself lead one more and more to truth, to Nature's appointments and regulations, which are truth. Consider how, even in the meanest sorts of Labor, the whole soul of a man is composed into a kind of real harmony, the instant he sets himself to work. Doubt, Desire, Sorrow, Remorse, Indignation, Despair itself, all these like hell-dogs, lie beleaguering the soul of the poor day worker, as of every man ; but he bends himself with free valor against his task, and all these are stilled, all these shrink murmuring far off into their caves. Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness. He has a work, a Life-purpose; he has found it, and will follow it. Labor is Life; from the inmost heart of the Worker rises his god-given Force, the sacred celestial Life-essence breathed into him by Almighty God; from his inmost heart awakens him to all nobleness, to all knowledge, 'self-knowledge' and much else, so soon as Work fitly begins. And again, hast thou valued Patience, Courage, Perseverance, Openness to light; readiness to own thyself mistaken, to do better next time? All these, all virtues, in wrestling with the dim brute powers of Fact, in ordering of thy fellows in such wrestle, there and elsewhere not at all, thou wilt continually learn. Work is of a religious nature: work is of a brave nature; which it is the aim of all religion to be. All work of man is as the swimmer's: a waste ocean threatens to devour him; if he front it not bravely, it will keep its word. By incessant wise defiances of it, lusty rebuke and buffet of it, behold how loyally it supports him, bears him as its conqueror along. 'Religion,' I said, for properly speaking all true Work is Religion; and whatsoever religion is not work may go and dwell among the Brahmins, Antinomians, Spinning Dervishes, and where it will; with me it shall have no harbor. Admirable was that of the old monks, 'Laborare est orare, Work is Worship.' Older than all preached Gospels was this unpreached, inarticulate, but ineradicable, forever enduring Gospel: Work, and therein have well-being. Man, Son of Earth and of Heaven, lies there not, in the innermost heart of |