the same time, he fell into a similar error of judgment. The blackbird, that pipes in the warm leaves before my window, is a witness against the preacher and admiral. He tired of the lime-bough, and is finishing his song on an apple-branch, that swings him further into the sun. He wanted a change. Then what is whiling away time? When Watt sat in the chimney-corner, observing the water force up the cover of the saucepan, he aroused the anger of his relations; but he was discovering the steamengine. Sir Walter Scott, walking one day by the banks of the Yarrow, found Mungo Park, the traveller, earnestly employed in casting stones into the stream, and watching the bubbles that followed their descent. "Park, what is it that engages your attention?" asked Sir Walter. "I was thinking how often I had thus tried to sound the rivers in Africa, by calculating the time that elapsed before the bubbles rose to the surface." Then," said Scott, "I know that you think of returning to Africa." "I do, indeed," was the reply; "but it is yet a secret." Such is the idleness of genius. But people for the last eighteen hundred years have been finding fault with it. The uncle of Pliny reproved him for walking; he declared it to be time lost.

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How much truer was the confession of Warburton to his friend Hurd: "It would have been the greatest pleasure to have dropped upon you at Newark. I could have led you through delicious walks, and picked off for your amusement in our rambles a thousand notions which I hung upon every thorn as I passed, thirty years ago." They whom the world calls idle are doing the most. In villages and bye-lanes, open eyes are always learning. "Let a reflective man, when he stands in a garden, or meadow, or forest, or on the margin of a pool, consider what there is within the circle, although invisible to him." In that circumference lies a whole library of knowledge, waiting only to be read-everlasting types, which Nature, in her great printing-press, never breaks up. And surely he is happy who is thus taught; for no man can afford to be really unemployed. The tree, it has been said, may lose its verdure; the sun need not count its rays; because the sap will strike out new foliage, and another night refills the treasury of day. But the thinking

faculty does not suffer waste.

The most saving

and thrifty use of it will only make it sufficient for our absolute necessities.

Pascal remarks, that if a man examine his thoughts, he finds them to be occupied with what

is, or is to be. The past and present are paths to the future. Ainsi, nous ne vivons jamais; mais nous espérons de vivre. A thought embodying the famous line of Pope

Man never is, but always to be blest.

This disposition is admirable when its aim is improvement; when we look to coming days with a hope of growing better in them. The remembrance of the succession of one thing to another, i. e. of what went before, what followed, and what accompanied, is called an experiment. Many experiments make up experience; which is nothing else but a remembrance of what antecedents were followed by what consequents. The definition belongs to Hobbes. Now the experiments of life, which we call our experience, are only valuable as they enable us to shape what we have to do, by success or failure in what we have done. Unproductive husbandry teaches us to look about for a wiser system of cultivation. There must be more weeding, sowing, and watching in our fields. When the husbandman goes out to sow, we hear the shrill cry of the village boys scaring the birds from the furrows. The good seed of the mind is to be guarded from vain thoughts descending with fiercer hunger. Nor will our best instruction be drawn from books.

If he who wishes to be pathetic and eloquent is to look in his heart and write; in like manner, the scholar of time, completing his education for eternity, will read some of his noblest lessons in the same volume, invisible to other eyes, ever open and lighted up to his own. And even among the fields and woodlands, he will still be at school.

MAY 3rd:

Oft on the dappled turf at ease,

I sit and play with similes,

Loose types of things through all degrees.

This is Wordsworth's plan and mine. I have been thinking of a new series of parallels more entertaining and profitable than Hurd's-Genius, Life, and Shadows. Did you ever spend a summer hour in making notes of shadows, with a view to their history? Then you would be astonished to find how the spreading, lengthening, and vanishing of a shadow, represent the growth, fulness, and decline of genius or life. In a green, overbowered lane, where birds shake dew and blossoms from the hedgerows, and spots of sun chequer the wayside grass, look for your own shadow. At what hour is it behind? Whenever the sun shines in your face, your shadow is

at your back. And has it ever been otherwise with poet, painter, or man of noble thought and magnificent enterprise? with Milton or Columbus? Long and wearisome is their road to glory; steep and entangled the path towards the rising orb of their reputation. They behold not the shadow they cast; it stretches after them -cheering others, not themselves.

Retrace your steps down the glimmering lane. Let it be evening. What a change! Warm streaks of light gild the edges of bird-homes, and sleep in the dim hollows of mossy oaks. Where is your shadow now? Twenty feet before you, as if it were rushing up the garden, to sit down in the parlour, before you can turn the corner. It is a race between you and your shadow; but you will never overtake it while you travel from the sun. Can you make no simile out of this? When the day of intellectual life sets, and the pilgrim of poetry, eloquence, or art, walks away from the glory of the morning, where is his shadow? Thrown forward into the untrodden paths of the future. It lengthens at every step, and, at last, springs into the rich orchards of a remoter and sunnier climate. You have the history of the mind's shadow in the Shakspere of the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.