itself felt; and now, even in the opening of youthful manhood, he found himself closely questioning life, asking eternal reasons for what he should do in time.

Oakfield.

The idea of a man's life cannot be reduced to a mere tangibility, which is what is generally meant when people clamor for "something practical;" it is not that which you can take in hand any morning, take a day's work at, and have done with; still less is it any thing fanciful or unreal. It is most real; it is what you must work at always; work at nothing without working at it. Ib.

I came out here six months ago, with a vague hope of finding some great work going on, to which all willing helpers would be welcome. The Bathos from these notions to the intense insignificance of an unposted Ensign, would have been wholly ludicrous, if not partly painful. Ib.

I came out to this country with vague general notions of a great work of civilization and reform, calling for laborers, and so on; but I find this notion fade entirely away before the stupid realities of daily life. Ib.

We start with fervor in other lines beside this Indian work; and in all we shall find, not that our fervor is wasted, God forbid, but that it must vent itself in silent, painful, perhaps apparently unfruitful work, not in

VOL. II.

20

298

ADVICE TO A YOUNG AUTHOR.

the grand triumphal march we had pictured to ourselves. Oakfield.

I am free from that ambition, which received its hateful name from the existence of a bad motive, but not from

that which springs from the feeling and consciousness of a vocation to action and power; this no one can censure. Niebuhr.

Whatever is the object of our constant attention will naturally be the chief object of our interest. Even the feelings of speculative men become speculative. They care about the notions of things, and their abstractions, and their relations, far more than about the realities. Thus an author's blood will turn to ink. Words enter into him and take possession of him; and nothing can obtain admission except through the passport of words. Inverting the legitimate process, he regards things as the symbols of words, instead of words as the symbols of things. Guesses at Truth.

With no other privilege than that of sympathy and sincere good wishes, I would address an affectionate exhortation to the youthful literati, grounded on my own experience. It will be but short; for the beginning, middle, and end, converge to one charge, - Never pursue literature as a trade. With the exception of one extraordinary man, I have never known any one, least of all an individual of genius, healthy or happy without a

ADVICE TO A MAN IN ACTIVE LIFE.

299

profession; i. e. some regular employment which does not depend on the will of the moment, and which can be carried on so far mechanically, that an average quantum only of health, spirits, and intellectual exertion are requisite to its faithful discharge. Three hours of leisure unalloyed by any alien anxiety, and looked forward to with delight, as a change and recreation, will suffice to realize in literature a larger product of what is truly genial, than weeks of compulsion. While the scholar obtains by his talents a competence in some known trade or profession, he may devote his genius to objects of his tranquil and unbiassed choice. S. T. Coleridge.

Meantime let the chosen employments of the years of hope be the relaxations of the time present. Thus you will preserve your inward trains of thought, your faculties and your feelings contempered to a life of ease, and capable of enjoying leisure. And while you thus render future affluence more and more desirable, you will at the same time prevent all undue impatience, and disarm the temptation of poisoning the allotted interval by anxieties, and anxious schemes and efforts to get rich in haste. Ib.

Above all things we must preserve our truthfulness in science so pure, that we must eschew absolutely every false appearance, that we must not write the very smallest thing as certain, of which we are not fully convinced, — that when we have to express a conjecture, we

must strenuously endeavor to exhibit the precise degree

300 THE STUDENT AND THE MAN OF COMMON SENSE.

of probability we attach to it. If we do not ourselves indicate our errors where possible, even such as it is unlikely that any one will ever discover, — if, when we lay down our pen, we cannot say in the sight of God, upon strict examination, I have not knowingly written any thing that is not true, and have never deceived, either regarding myself or others; I have not exhibited my most inveterate opponent in any light which I could not justify upon my death-bed; if we cannot do this, then study and literature render us unrighteous and sinful.

Niebuhr.

A hardy out-of-doors life is eminently desirable, not only for securing the general health, but specifically for keeping alive that fresh and natural good sense which a merely studious and abstracted course always impairs, or totally dissipates. The most powerful understandings become more or less enfeebled and perverted by a few years' seclusion in a closet, with a stove temperature and lamp-light. There is needed more than a little rough, farmer-like daily occupation abroad, to keep the student clear of the pedant; and assuredly it is not an hour's pacing up and down a college walk that suffices for this purpose. One would fain, in conducting a thoroughly intellectual education, counteract the debilitating effects of studious habits, so as should preclude the mortifying comparison. commonly made between the accomplished scholar and the man of business, in whatever does not involve mere erudition. One would gladly spare a young man the

pungent shame which many have felt - conscious as they may have been of high attainments, and yet compelled to feel that, in the broad and open world, no one has thought their opinions worth listening to a moment, in relation to the weighty interests of common life. And in such instances, what is felt to be wanting is not so much the requisite information on the point in question, as a want of that intuition which seizes a notion in the concrete that is to say, in its practical form; instead of groping about for it in the region of the abstract, where it has broken itself off from the actual concernments of mankind.

Isaac Taylor.

There are circumstances of a humiliating kind in the actual condition of man, which tend greatly to enhance the pleasures of the solitary life, or to corroborate the purpose of the recluse in his separation from the world. By the very constitution of human nature a contrariety exists between the principles of the higher and the lower lifethe intellectual and the animal, which though it may be gracefully concealed by elegance of manners, and the artificial modes of civilized life, is never absolutely reconciled, and presses always as an annoyance, and a burden upon the high-wrought sensibilities of serious, meditative minds. The susceptibility of such minds and their want of active energy, expose them painfully to this uneasiness. Nor can they avail themselves of the aid which in the gay and busy world, is supplied by levity and joyousness, and the velocity of affairs. It is not so much the pains, and