leave fortresses untaken in our rear.

You complain of want of time--you, with your boundless leisure!

It is true that the most absolute master of his own hours still needs
thrift if he would turn them to account, and that too many _never_ learn
this thrift, whilst others learn it late. Will you permit me to offer
briefly a few observations on time-thrift which have been suggested to
me by my own experience and by the experience of intellectual friends?

It may be accepted for certain, to begin with, that men who like
yourself seriously care for culture, and make it, next to moral duty,
the principal object of their lives, are but little exposed to waste
time in downright frivolity of any kind. You may be perfectly idle at
your own times, and perfectly frivolous even, whenever you have a mind
to be frivolous, but then you will be clearly aware how the time is
passing, and you will throw it away knowingly, as the most careful of
money-economists will throw away a few sovereigns in a confessedly
foolish amusement, merely for the relief of a break in the habit of his
life. To a man of your tastes and temper there is no danger of wasting
too much time so long as the waste is intentional; but you are exposed
to time-losses of a much more insidious character.

It is in our pursuits themselves that we throw away our most valuable
time. Few intellectual men have the art of economizing the hours of
study. The very necessity, which every one acknowledges, of giving vast
portions of life to attain proficiency in anything makes us prodigal
where we ought to be parsimonious, and careless where we have need of
unceasing vigilance. The best time-savers are the love of soundness in
all we learn or do, and a cheerful acceptance of inevitable limitations.
There is a certain point of proficiency at which an acquisition begins
to be of use, and unless we have the time and resolution necessary to
reach that point, our labor is as completely thrown away as that of a
mechanic who began to make an engine but never finished it. Each of us
has acquisitions which remain permanently unavailable from their
unsoundness, a language or two that we can neither speak nor write, a
science of which the elements have not been mastered, an art which we
cannot practice with satisfaction either to others or to ourselves. Now
the time spent on these unsound accomplishments has been in great
measure wasted, not quite absolutely wasted, since the mere labor