out. And pleasantly under the silver moon, and under
the silent, solemn stars, ring the steel shoes of the skaters on the
frozen sea, and voices, and the sound of bells.

--Longfellow: _Rural Life in Sweden_.

7. Extreme _busyness_, whether at school or college, kirk or market, is a
symptom of deficient vitality; and a faculty for idleness implies a
catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity. There is a sort
of dead-alive, hackneyed people about, who are scarcely conscious of
living except in the exercise of some conventional occupation. Bring these
fellows into the country, or set them aboard ship, and you will see how
they pine for their desk or their study. They have no curiosity; they
cannot give themselves over to random provocations; they do not take
pleasure in the exercise of their faculties for its own sake; and unless
Necessity lays about them with a stick, they will even stand still. It is
no good speaking to such folk: they _cannot_ be idle, their nature is not
generous enough; and they pass those hours in a sort of coma, which are
not dedicated to furious moiling in the gold mill. When they do not
require to go to the office, when they are not hungry and have no mind to
drink, the whole breathing world is a blank to them. If they have to wait
an hour or so for a train, they fall into a stupid trance, with their eyes
open. To see them, you would suppose there was nothing to look at and no
one to speak with; you would imagine they were paralyzed or alienated; and
yet very possibly they are hard workers in their own way, and have good
eyesight for a flaw in a deed or a turn of the market. They have been to
school and college, but all the time they had their eye on the medal; they
have gone about in the world and mixed with clever people, but all the
time they were thinking of their own affairs. As if a man's soul were not
too small to begin with, they have dwarfed and narrowed theirs by a life
of all work and no play; until here they are at forty, with a listless
attention, a mind vacant of all material amusement, and not one thought to
rub against another while they wait for the train. Before he was breeched,
he might have clambered on the boxes; when he was twenty, he would have
stared at the girls; but now the pipe is smoked out, the snuffbox is
empty, and my gentleman sits bolt upright on a bench, with lamentable
eyes. This does not appeal to me as being Success in Life.

--Robert Louis St