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 THE RECLUSE. 301 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 302 ACTION AND CONTEMPLATION. wants, and heavier woes of our corporeal nature, as its humiliations, which afflict the sensitive recluse. On his principles, and with his habits of feeling, he can be far happier amidst sufferings and necessities, than when solicited and disturbed by trivial cares, or ignoble occupations. For the former impel and aid him to abstract himself more and more from the body;- the latter, against all his tastes, implicate him in its meanness. To hide himself from the world, is not, it is true, to escape from the humiliations of the body; nevertheless it is to be exempt from all but those of his own. It is to be free from the grossness, the frivolity, and the petulant selfishness of common life; to converse with perfection and infinitude. But there remains a difficulty, an insuperable difficulty in the way of the Recluse. This very Christianity, whence he has derived the various elements of his solitary bliss this very book, which opens to him an inexhaustible treasure of ineffable meditation, itself peremptorily refused to give its sanction to his purpose of seclusion; it follows him to his cell with the most imperative commands; and requires him, instead of thus seeking to please himself, to return into the very heart of every social relation, and to encumber himself with every office of common life. Isaac Taylor. "Serve God by action," it is said; but then I find all courses of action so clogged and blocked up with meanness, and worldliness, and Mammon, that the service of God is ACTION AND CONTEMPLATION. 303 well nigh choked out of them. Well, then patience is recommended. "Wait," it is said, "and cast bread upon the waters; and sow, not desiring yourself to reap and believe that these active courses shall be by degrees purified, and God will be continually drawing more and more good out of the evil which now offends you; do not expect to see perfection, but be content to take the good with the bad." Well, this is a hard saying, though I suppose there is much truth in it; the only thing I complain of in it is, that this said contentment is so tempting; it is so easy to be content to take the good with the bad; and then it is so easy to go a step further, and be content with the bad. Why should I expose myself to this temptation? Why should I not seek for the good where I can get it, without the bad, in the ideal world? Why should I be battling and painfully discriminating between good and evil; finding, with much disgust, a grain of truth for a bushel of falsehood, if, by giving myself up to the pure words of great men, I may be growing continually to a higher standard of unmixed truth?" "Because," said Margaret, "God does not will that you should have peace in the world." "I doubt that only I think that we, with our slavish fears, shrink from peace as from every other good thing: none of us take as freely as God gives. We fidget and bustle, and plunge into painful turmoil, and then babble about peace not being our lot on earth, when in truth we have never looked for it. The question for me is, "May I give myself up to peace," that is |