Now, the advantages of drill are evident
and very generally recognized, but the advantages of intellectual
_flanerie_ are not so generally recognized. For the work of the
intellect to be clear and healthy, a great deal of free play of the mind
is absolutely necessary. Harness is good for an hour or two at a time,
but the finest intellects have never _lived_ in harness. In reading any
book that has much vitality you are sure to meet with many allusions and
illustrations which the author hit upon, not when he was in harness, but
out at grass. Harness trains us to the systematic performance of our
work, and increases our practical strength by regulated exercise, but it
does not supply everything that is necessary to the perfect development
of the mind. The truth is, that we need both the discipline of harness
and the abundant nourishment of the free pasture. Yet may not our
freedom be the profitless, choiceless, freedom of a grain of
desert-sand, carried hither and thither by the wind, gaining nothing and
improving nothing, so that it does not signify where it was carried
yesterday or where it may fall to-morrow, but rather the liberty of the
wild bee, whose coming and going are ordered by no master, nor fixed by
any premeditated regulation, yet which misses no opportunity of
increase, and comes home laden in the twilight. Who knows where he has
wandered; who can tell over what banks and streams the hum of his wings
has sounded? Is anything in nature freer than he is; can anything
account better for a rational use of freedom? Would he do his work
better if tiny harness were ingeniously contrived for him? Where then
would be the golden honey, and where the waxen cells?

LETTER VIII.

TO A FRIEND (HIGHLY CULTIVATED) WHO CONGRATULATED HIMSELF ON HAVING
ENTIRELY ABANDONED THE HABIT OF READING NEWSPAPERS.

Advantages in economy of time--Much of what we read in newspapers is
useless to our culture--The too great importance which they attach to
novelty--Distortion by party spirit--An instance of false
presentation--Gains to serenity by abstinence from
newspapers--Newspapers keep up our daily interest in each other--The
French peasantry--The newspaper-reading Americans--An instance of
total abstinence from newspapers--Auguste Comte--A suggestion of
Emerson's--The work of newspaper correspondents--War
correspondents--Mr. Stanley--M. Erdan, of the _Temps_.

Your abstinence from newspaper reading is not anew e