lities and verbosities;
and in the culture of these higher functions the peculiar sources of joy
connected with our simpler functions often dry up, and we grow
stone-blind and insensible to life's more elementary and general goods
and joys.

The remedy under such conditions is to descend to a more profound and
primitive level. To be imprisoned or shipwrecked or forced into the
army would permanently show the good of life to many an over-educated
pessimist. Living in the open air and on the ground, the lop-sided
beam of the balance slowly rises to the level line; and the
over-sensibilities and insensibilities even themselves out. The good
of all the artificial schemes and fevers fades and pales; and that of
seeing, smelling, tasting, sleeping, and daring and doing with one's
body, grows and grows. The savages and children of nature, to whom we
deem ourselves so much superior, certainly are alive where we are often
dead, along these lines; and, could they write as glibly as we do, they
would read us impressive lectures on our impatience for improvement and
on our blindness to the fundamental static goods of life. "Ah! my
brother," said a chieftain to his white guest, "thou wilt never know the
happiness of both thinking of nothing and doing nothing. This, next to
sleep, is the most enchanting of all things. Thus we were before our
birth, and thus we shall be after death. Thy people,... when they have
finished reaping one field, they begin to plough another; and, if the
day were not enough, I have seen them plough by moonlight. What is their
life to ours,--the life that is as naught to them? Blind that they are,
they lose it all! But we live in the present."[N]

[N] Quoted by Lotze, Microcosmus, English translation, vol. ii.
p. 240.

The intense interest that life can assume when brought down to the
non-thinking level, the level of pure sensorial perception, has been
beautifully described by a man who _can_ write,--Mr. W.H. Hudson, in his
volume, "Idle Days in Patagonia."

"I spent the greater part of one winter," says this admirable author,
"at a point on the Rio Negro, seventy or eighty miles from the sea."

... "It was my custom to go out every morning on horseback with my gun,
and, followed by one dog, to ride away from the valley; and no sooner
would I climb the terrace, and plunge into the gray, universal thicket,
than I would find myself as completely alone as if five hundred instead
of only five miles