hemselves. Writing is bad. The pen
hangs idly suspended over the paper, or the sad thoughts that are alive
within write themselves down. The safest and best of all occupations
for such sufferers as are fit for it, is intercourse with young
children. An infant might beguile Satan and his peers the day after
they were couched on the lake of fire, if the love of children chanced
to linger amidst the ruins of their angelic nature. Next to this comes
honest, genuine acquaintanceship among the poor; not mere
charity-visiting, grounded on soup-tickets and blankets, but intercourse
of mind, with real mutual interest between the parties. Gardening is
excellent, because it unites bodily exertion with a sufficient
engagement of the faculties, while sweet, compassionate Nature is
ministering cure in every sprouting leaf and scented blossom, and
beckoning sleep to draw nigh, and be ready to follow up her benignant
work. Walking is good,--not stepping from shop to shop, or from
neighbour to neighbour; but stretching out far into the country, to the
freshest fields, and the highest ridges, and the quietest lanes.
However sullen the imagination may have been among its griefs at home,
here it cheers up and smiles. However listless the limbs may have been
when sustaining a too heavy heart, here they are braced, and the lagging
gait becomes buoyant again. However perverse the memory may have been
in presenting all that was agonising, and insisting only on what cannot
be retrieved, here it is first disregarded, and then it sleeps and the
sleep of the memory is the day in Paradise to the unhappy. The mere
breathing of the cool wind on the face in the commonest highway, is rest
and comfort which must be felt at such times to be believed. It is
disbelieved in the shortest intervals between its seasons of enjoyment:
and every time the sufferer has resolution to go forth to meet it, it
penetrates to the very heart in glad surprise. The fields are better
still; for there is the lark to fill up the hours with mirthful music;
or, at worst, the robin and flocks of fieldfares, to show that the
hardest day has its life and hilarity. But the calmest region is the
upland, where human life is spread out beneath the bodily eye, where the
mind roves from the peasant's nest to the spiry town, from the
school-house to the churchyard, from the diminished team in the patch of
fallow, or the fisherman's boat in the cove, to the viaduct that spans
t