bit of landscape has lured me insensibly, I awake to find the fire dying and the sky splendid with the midnight stars. The towers of Oxford have become once more a memory, but that which gives them their most enduring charm may be here as well as there; for here no less than beside the Isis one may love scholarship and pursue it, one may hold to the things of the mind against all the temptations of materialism, one may live his own life of thought.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

A WORD FOR IDLENESS.

THE study fire is sometimes so potent a solicitation to reverie that I ask myself whether it be not a subtle kind of temptation. Even when a man has cleared himself of the cant of the day, as Carlyle would put it, and delivered himself of the American illusion that every hour not devoted to "doing something" is an hour wasted, the inherited instinct is still strong enough to make a faint appeal to conscience. Those active, aggressive words, "doing" and "getting," have so long usurped the greater part of the space in our vocabulary that we use the words being and growing with a little uncertainty; most of us are not entirely at ease with them yet. One of the highest uses of literature is the aid it gives us in securing something like harmony of lifea just balance between the faculties which are developed by practical affairs and those which need. the ampler air of intellectual movement. Literature is the mute but eloquent witness forever testifying to the reality and power of ideas and ideals. Every great poem is a revelation of that invisible world of beauty in which all may claim citizenship,

but in which those alone abide who are rich in their own natures; a world in which no activity is valued by the stir it makes, and no achievement measured by the noise which accompanies it.

When I recall these things, I perceive that the study fire is helping me to be true to myself when it gently lures me on to reverie and meditation. There is a vast difference between being busy and being fruitful. Busy people are often painfully barren and uninteresting. Their activity expends itself in small mechanical ways that add nothing to the sum of human knowledge or happiness. On the other hand, people who are apparently idle, who seem to be detached from the working world, are often the most fruitful. Our standards of work and idleness are in sad need of revision-a revision which shall substitute character for mere activity, and measure worth and achievement by the depth and richness of nature disclosed. The prior of the Carmelite convent at Frankfort described Giordano Bruno as a man always "walking up and down, filled with fantastic meditations upon new things." In the judgment of the busy people of his time, Bruno, although by no means devoid of energy, was probably accounted an idler. His occupations were different from theirs, and therefore, of course, to be condemned; "so runs the world away." But time, which has corrected so many inadequate judgments, has overruled the decision of Bruno's critics; they have ceased with their works, but those

"fantastic meditations" have somehow sustained their interest, and there now stands on the Campo de' Fiori at Rome a statue of the scholar whose walking up and down attracted the attention of the Carmelite prior three centuries ago and more. In these apparently inactive hours of meditation great thoughts rise out of the silent deep over which a man broods inactive and absorbed.

Balzac was a prodigious worker. Measured by the standard he set, the real toil of most people who account themselves busy shrinks to very small dimensions. A kind of demoniac energy seized the great novelist when a new work lay clear in his mind, drove him off the boulevard, locked him in his working room, and held him there in almost solitary confinement until the novel was written, and the novelist emerged worn, exhausted, and reduced to a shadow of his former self. This anguish of toil-for work so intense and continuous is nothing less than anguish-was prolonged through years, and the fruit of it fills several shelves in our book-cases; and yet the highest work which Balzac did was not done in those solitary and painful days when the fever of composition was on him; it was done in the long, apparently idle hours which he spent on the boulevards, and at the cafés. In those hours his keen and powerful mind was receiving impressions, collecting facts, observing men, drinking in the vast movement of life which went on about him and in which every social condition,

every phase of character, every process of moral advance or decay, was revealed. These meditative

hours, in which the hands were idle that the mind might have freest range and the imagination uninterrupted play, were the creative periods; in them. great works were planned, developed, shaped. They were the real working hours of the novelist, who displayed on an immense canvas the France of his day.

One can imagine as he studies the face of Shakespeare or of Goethe, charged with the very spirit of meditation, what long and inspiring hours of thought, of deep brooding upon the mystery of the soul, lay behind the works of these masters of man and his life. Out of this profound silence, in which the soul opened itself, hushed and reverential, to the lessons of time and eternity, the great works grew as the tree and the flower spring out of the hidden places of the soil. Men of affluent nature, to whom thought brings its solemn revelations, and on the unseen horizon of whose souls the light of the imagination glows like sunrise on new and undiscovered worlds, live in this mood of meditationthe mother of all the glorious works of art and literature which inspire and sustain us. These hours in which no activity breaks the current of thought are the creative periods; hours solemn with that kinship with Deity which comes when the eye discerns the path of the divine thought, or sees with prophetic vision the image of that beauty with which