nate murmur of the song
which celebrates her charms. If to be near the rose makes the
nightingale tipsy with delight, what must it be to be the rose herself?
One feeling of the "wild joys of living--the leaping from rock to rock,"
is better than the "muscular-Christianity" literature which our time has
produced. I am afraid that the profession of letters interferes with the
elemental feelings of life; and I am afraid, too, that in the majority of
cases this interference is not justified by its results. The entireness
and simplicity of life is flawed by the intrusion of an inquisitive
element, and this inquisitive element never yet found anything which was
much worth the finding. Men live by the primal energies of love, faith,
imagination; and happily it is not given to every one to _live_, in the
pecuniary sense, by the artistic utilisation and sale of these. You
cannot make ideas; they must come unsought if they come at all.

"From pastoral graves extracting thoughts divine"

is a profitable occupation enough, if you stumble on the little
churchyard covered over with silence, and folded among the hills. If you
go to the churchyard with intent to procure thought, as you go into the
woods to gather anemones, you are wasting your time. Thoughts must come
naturally, like wild flowers; they cannot be forced in a hot-bed--even
although aided by the leaf-mould of your past--like exotics. And it is
the misfortune of men of letters of our day that they cannot afford to
wait for this natural flowering of thought, but are driven to the forcing
process, with the results which were to be expected.

ON THE IMPORTANCE OF A MAN TO HIMSELF

The present writer remembers to have been visited once by a strange
feeling of puzzlement; and the puzzled feeling arose out of the
following circumstance:--He was seated in a railway-carriage, five
minutes or so before starting, and had time to contemplate certain
waggons or trucks filled with cattle, drawn up on a parallel line, and
quite close to the window at which he sat. The cattle wore a
much-enduring aspect; and, as he looked into their large, patient,
melancholy eyes,--for, as before mentioned, there was no space to speak
of intervening,--the feeling of puzzlement alluded to arose in his
mind. And it consisted in an attempt to solve the existence before
him, to enter into it, to understand it, and his inability to
accomplish it, or indeed to make any way toward the acco