y gun down and begin to botanize. Last week a
friendly neighbor invited me to a boar-hunt. The boar was supposed to
be in the middle of a great impenetrable plantation, and all I did
during the whole morning was to sit in my saddle awaiting the exit of
the beast, cantering from one point of the wood's circumference to
another, as the cry of the dogs guided me. Was it pleasure? A true
hunter would have found interest enough in expectation, but I felt like
a man on a railway-platform who is waiting for a train that is late.

LETTER V.

TO A STUDENT WHO NEGLECTED BODILY EXERCISE.

Difficulty of conciliating the animal and the intellectual
lives--Bodily activity sometimes preserved by an effort of the
will--Necessity of faith in exercise--Incompatibility between physical
and intellectual living disappears in large spaces of time--Franklin's
theory about concentration in exercise--Time an essential
factor--Health of a rural postman--Pedestrian habits of
Wordsworth--Pedestrian and equestrian habits of Sir Walter
Scott--Goethe's wild delight in physical exercise--Alexander Humboldt
combated early delicacy by exercise--Intellectual utilities of
physical action.

"We have done those things which we ought not to have done; we have left
undone those things which we ought to have done, and there is no health
in us."

How applicable, my dear brother, are these words which the Church, in
her wisdom, has seen to be adapted to all sinners--how applicable, I
say, are they to students most especially! They have quite a personal
applicability to you and me. We have read all day long, and written till
three o'clock in the morning; we have taken no exercise for weeks, and
there is no health in us. The doctor scrutinizes our wearied eyes, and
knows that our brains are weary. Little do we need his warnings, for
does not Nature herself remind us of our disobedience, and tell us in
language not to be misinterpreted, to amend the error of our ways? Our
digestion is sluggish and imperfect; we are as nervous as delicate
ladies, and there is no health in us.

How easy it is to follow one of the two lives--the animal or the
intellectual! how difficult to conciliate the two! In every one of us
there exists an animal which might have been as vigorous as wolves and
foxes, if it had been left to develop itself in freedom. But besides the
animal, there existed also a mind, and the mental activity restrained
the bodily activi