lly tamed to the doom of a working creature, he may yet
discover, in the lively sympathy with play that bathes his inward
feeling, that his soul is playing now,--enjoying, without the motions,
all it could do in them; manifold more than it could if he were down
upon the floor himself, in the unconscious activity and lively frolic of
childhood. Saddened he may be to note how time and work have changed his
spirit and dried away the playful springs of animal life in his being;
yet he will find, or ought, a joy playing internally over the face of
his working nature, which is fuller and richer as it is more tranquil;
which is to the other as fulfillment to prophecy, and is in fact the
prophecy of a better and far more glorious fulfillment still.

Having struck in this manner the great world-problem of WORK AND PLAY,
his thoughts kindle under the theme, and he pursues it. The living races
are seen at a glance to be offering in their history everywhere a
faithful type of his own. They show him what he himself is doing and
preparing--all that he finds in the manifold experience of his own
higher life. They have, all, their gambols; all, their sober cares and
labors. The lambs are sporting on the green knoll; the anxious dams are
bleating to recall them to their side. The citizen beaver is building
his house by a laborious carpentry; the squirrel is lifting his sail to
the wind on the swinging top of the tree. In the music of the morning,
he hears the birds playing with their voices, and when the day is up,
sees them sailing round in circles on the upper air, as skaters on a
lake, folding their wings, dropping and rebounding, as if to see what
sport they can make of the solemn laws that hold the upper and lower
worlds together. And yet these play-children of the air he sees again
descending to be carriers and drudges; fluttering and screaming
anxiously about their nest, and confessing by that sign that not even
wings can bear them clear of the stern doom of work. Or, passing to some
quiet shade, meditating still on this careworn life, playing still
internally with ideal fancies and desires unrealized, there returns upon
him there, in the manifold and spontaneous mimicry of nature, a living
show of all that is transpiring in his own bosom; in every flower some
bee humming over his laborious chemistry and loading his body with the
fruits of his toil; in the slant sunbeam, populous nations of motes
quivering with animated joy, and c