elves
to arts; we may give ourselves up to the profoundness of science. Nor is
any one of these objects incompatible with the others, nor is there
any reason why the same man should not embrace many. We may devote one
portion of the year to travelling, and another to all the abstractions
of study. I remember when I was a boy, looking forward with terror to
the ample field of human life, and saying, When I have read through all
the books that have been written, what shall I do afterwards? And there
is infinitely more sense in this, than in the ludicrous exclamations of
men who complain of the want of time, and say that life affords them no
space in which to act their imaginings.

On the contrary, when a man has got to the end of one art or course of
study, he is compelled to consider what he shall do next. And, when
we have gone through a cycle of as many acquisitions, as, from the
limitation of human faculties, are not destructive of each other, we
shall find ourselves frequently reduced to the beginning some of them
over again. Nor is this the least agreeable occupation of human leisure.
The book that I read when I was a boy, presents quite a new face to me
as I advance in the vale of years. The same words and phrases suggest to
me a new train of ideas. And it is no mean pleasure that I derive from
the singular sensation of finding the same author and the same book,
old and yet not old, presenting to me cherished and inestimable
recollections, and at the same time communicating mines of wealth, the
shaft of which was till now unexplored.

The result then of these various observations is to persuade the
candid and ingenuous man, to consider life as an important and ample
possession, to resolve that it shall be administered with as much
judgment and deliberation as a person of true philanthropy and wisdom
would administer a splendid income, and upon no occasion so much to
think upon the point of in how short a time an interesting pursuit is
to be accomplished, as by what means it shall be accomplished in a
consummate and masterly style. Let us hear no more, from those who have
to a considerable degree the command of their hours, the querulous and
pitiful complaint that they have no time to do what they ought to do and
would wish to do; but let them feel that they have a gigantic store of
minutes and hours and days and months, abundantly sufficient to enable
them to effect what it is especially worthy of a noble mind to