sh indolence, and other
counterfeits, from that genuine weariness which makes the sleep of a
laboring man sweet. Weariness is the best friend of labor, just as the
toothache is the best friend of sound teeth. Weariness is an angel. When
the proper end of your day has come, she hovers over your desk, and, if
you are careless of the time, she breathes a misty breath upon your
eyelids, and loads your pen with an invisible weight; the shadow of her
gray wings dims your page, and her throbbing hand upon your forehead
admonishes you of her presence. Let her visits be few and far between,
and it is well; but you will never regret that you entertained her even
unawares. You may avoid, but never resist her. She comes from Heaven to
save life.

But comes there never into your study a little imp of darkness,--of
intellectual darkness, we mean,--whose efforts to imitate the gentle
interference of fatigue are as grotesque as they are vexatious, and who
does not succeed in deceiving, however readily one may sometimes fall in
with his humor? The heavy pen, the dull page, the wandering thoughts,
sometimes interrupt the most successful currents of labor, in those
morning hours, and in the fresh days after vacations, when we cannot
find the excuse of weariness. There is an indisposition to continuous
labor, which is utterly different from fatigue.

John Foster declared: "I have no power of getting fast forward in any
literary task; it costs me far more labor than any other mortal who has
been in the habit so long. I have the most extreme and invariable
repugnance to all literary labors of any kind, and almost all mental
labor. When I have anything of the kind to do, I linger hours and hours
before I can resolutely set about it, and days and weeks if it is some
task more than ordinary."

Dr. Humphrey recommends that the unwilling thoughts be frightened to
their task by the same means which Lord Jeffrey used to drive out a
headache. He says, in his letters to his son: "When you sit down to
write, you sometimes will, no doubt, find it difficult to collect your
scattered thoughts at the moment, and fix them upon the subject. If, in
these cases, you take up a newspaper, or whatever other light reading
may happen to be at hand, with the hope of luring the truants back, you
will be disappointed. Nothing but stern and decided measures will
answer. I would advise you to resort at once to geometry or conic
sections, or some other equally inexor