le of looking,
that you will acquire the warm and palpitating facts of life. While
others are filling their memory with a lumber of words, one-half of
which they will forget before the week be out, your truant may learn
some really useful art: to play the fiddle, to know a good cigar, or to
speak with ease and opportunity to all varieties of men. Many who have
"plied their book diligently," and know all about some one branch or
another of accepted lore, come out of the study with an ancient and
owl-like demeanour, and prove dry, stockish, and dyspeptic in all the
better and brighter parts of life. Many make a large fortune, who remain
under-bred and pathetically stupid to the last. And meantime there goes
the idler, who began life along with them--by your leave, a different
picture. He has had time to take care of his health and his spirits; he
has been a great deal in the open air, which is the most salutary of all
things for both body and mind; and if he has never read the great Book
in very recondite places, he has dipped into it and skimmed it over to
excellent purpose. Might not the student afford some Hebrew roots, and
the business man-some of his half-crowns, for a share of the idler's
knowledge of life at large, and Art of Living? Nay, and the idler has
another and more important quality than these. I mean his wisdom. He who
has much looked on at the childish satisfaction of other people in their
hobbles, will regard his own with only a very ironical indulgence. He
will not be heard among the dogmatists. He will have a great and cool
allowance for all sorts of people and opinions. If he finds no
out-of-the-way truths, he will identify himself with no very burning
falsehood. His way takes him along a by-road, not much frequented, but
very even and pleasant, which is called Commonplace Lane, and leads to
the Belvedere of Common-sense. Thence he shall command an agreeable, if
no very noble prospect; and while others behold the East and West, the
Devil and the Sunrise, he will be contentedly aware of a sort of morning
hour upon all sublunary things, with an army of shadows running speedily
and in many different directions into the great daylight of Eternity.
The shadows and the generations, the shrill doctors and the plangent
wars, go by into ultimate silence and emptiness; but underneath all
this, a man may see, out of the Belvedere windows, much green and
peaceful landscape; many fire-lit parlours; good people laugh