It falls ;-the frail thread of their being is riven; Mais qu'il me soit permis de ne le savoir pas, is the wish of some in regard even of escaped peril. Scott vividly illustrates in "Rokeby" the position of unconscious and therefore unconcerned borderers on the grave; it is where Bertram creeps on hands and knees through the spreading birch and hazels, and takes aim at Redmond, and twice Matilda comes between the carabine and Redmond's breast, "just ere the spring his finger pressed;" and the interruption of Guy Denzil's approach makes the ruffian retire, rê infectâ: "They whom dark Bertram, in his wrath, Their thoughts to one sad subject lent, While on the very verge of fate; Heedless and unconcerned remained, When Heaven the murderer's arm restrained; As ships drift darkling down the tide, Nor see the shelves o'er which they glide." NO LEISURE. ST. MARK vi. 31. HAT must have been a busy time with the apostles, TH careful and troubled about many things, cumbered with much serving, worn with many anxieties, and kept in unrest by continual demands on their services, when the Divine Master— knowing their frame and remembering that they were dust— bade them come by themselves "apart into a desert place, and rest a while; for there were many coming and going, and they had no leisure so much as to eat." Our own age has been rightly described as one of stimulus and high pressure: we live as it were our lives out fast; effect is everything; results produced at once; something to show, and something that may tell. "The folio of patient years is replaced by the pamphlet that stirs men's curiosity to-day, and to-morrow is forgotten." Or as an eminent reviewer puts it-writing to the same effect as the eminent divine just quotedwithout grudging to contemporary productions the applause which they receive, or the interest which they excite, thoughtful minds cannot see them with complacency obscuring by their brilliance, or perhaps their "glare," the more temperate and wholesome light of the elder classics of our land. "At no moment in the intellectual progress of England has repose ever been more needful, if the literature of the present century be to take its place among its great antecessors." For want of repose our prose is declared on the same authority to be growing turgid, our verse empty or inflated; and as a good cooling regimen is required to correct these exorbitances, nothing would rejoice our censor more than to be assured, on the credit of sound publishers' statistics, that the number of new books was diminishing, while that of re-editions of old books was on the increase. Dr. Arnold, we are told, once preached a sermon to the boys at Rugby against taking in the monthly numbers of "Nicholas Nickleby," by way of protest against systematic and uninterrupted excitement. "Society keeps up as much excitement as it can. It wants its new number of something to appear incessantly. There is no rest or repose, and one subject of thought succeeds another faster than wave succeeds wave." A rather ironical apology for dull sermons sets up at least this plea in their behalf: that so easy is it for a man who lives in such a society never to be alone with himself, that a compulsory half-hour of quietude at a wakeful time of the day, in a place which recalls to him the most solemn thoughts, is no slight advantage. La Bruyère, two centuries ago, complained of French society in his day, that there was no getting any one to abide quietly at home, and there in patience possess his soul, and make sure to himself that he had one. All was hurry and flurry. Not to be excitedly busy was to be idle. But that the philosopher denied. A wise man turns his leisure to account. He is not idle who devotes his leisure to tranquil meditation, and con verse and reading. Rather is this a species of work-at any rate a means for working with fresh energy and better effect when the working hour comes round again. There is such a thing as what Wordsworth wisely calls a wise passiveness. Chateaubriand, again, more than a century afterwards, complained-not indeed of Frenchmen alone, but of all men—that all was done helter-skelter and in haste, post-haste; that amid this din and distraction of coming and going there was no leisure so much as to eat; or that if men did set about a meal, there was no such thing as sitting down to it, but it was eaten by them with their loins girded, their shoes on their feet, and their staff in their hand-eaten in haste, as was the Jewish passover. The most eminent political economist of our day owns himself to be "not charmed" with the ideal of life held out by those who think that the normal state of human beings is that of struggling to get on; that the trampling, crushing, elbowing, and treading on one another's heels, which form the existing type of social life, are the most desirable lot of human kind, or anything but the disagreeable symptoms of one of the phases of industrial progress. The town, complains one of the most thoughtful and influential of latter-day divines,—the town, with its fever and its excitements, and its collision of mind with mind, has spread over the country, and there is no country, scarcely home. "To men who traverse England in a few hours, and spend only a portion of the year in one place, home is becoming a vocable of past ages." He echoes Wordsworth's lament that "Plain living and high thinking are no more;" and in another place he declares our want to be the vision of a calmer and simpler beauty, to tranquillise us in the midst of artificial tastes, and the draught of a purer spring to cool the flame of our excited life. It is many years ago since the most genial of essayists avowed his preference for "coaching it," and could have been well content to live upon the road, in those roomy antiques, instead of getting on at the present rate, and being impatient to arrive at some town, only perhaps to be equally restless when arrived there. Not that he was insensible to the pleasure of driving fast-stirring the blood as it does, and giving a sense of power; but he complained that everything was getting a little too hasty and business-like, "as though we were to be eternally getting on, and never realizing anything but fidget and money-the means instead of the end." A distinction is duly recognised between haste and hurryhurry adding to rapidity the element of painful confusion; but in the case of ordinary people, as Dr. Boyd observes, haste generally implies hurry, and very strenuously he dilates on "what a horrible thing" it must be to go through life in a hurry. The self-styled country parson made a name (“letters four do make that name") by his "Recreations." And he has since then maintained its popularity by a series of "Leisure Hours." In his essay concerning Hurry and Leisure he avows his utter contempt for the idler-the loafer, as Yankees term him-who never does anything, whose idle hands are always in his idle pockets, and who is always sauntering to and fro. Leisure, we are reminded, is the intermission of labour-the blink of idleness in the life of a hard-working man; and it is only in the case of such a man that leisure is allowed to be dignified, commendable, or enjoyable. "But to him it is all these, and more. Let us not be ever driving on. The machinery, physical and mental, will not stand it." Only in leisure, it is further contended, will the human mind yield. many of its best products. Calm views, sound thoughts, healthful feelings, do not originate in a hurry or a fever. It was in wistful remembrance of the silence in heaven for the space of half an hour, as recorded by the Seer of Patmos, that Mrs. Browning penned a sonnet which expressed a prayer, suggestive in its earnestness and of wide application, "Vouchsafe us such a half-hour's hush alone, In compensation for our stormy years!" Never to be forgotten amid the tranquillising sweets of leisure hours, with healing on their wings, is the serene solemnity of that silent half-hour, Professor Longfellow, in one of his earliest works, proclaimed to his countrymen as the great want of the national character, that of the "dignity of repose." "We seem," he said, "to live in the midst of a battle-there is such a din, such a hurrying to and fro. In the streets of a crowded city it is difficult to walk slowly. You feel the rushing of the crowd, and rush with it onward. In the press of our life, it is difficult to be calm. In this stress of wind and tide, all professions seem to drag their anchors, and are swept out into the main." The following stanza is so thoroughly conceived in the spirit and expressed in the style of the same author-the author of the Psalm of Life"-that few readers might have hesitated to attribute it to him, were it not known to be from one of the "Palm Leaves" of Lord Houghton, who, a quarter of a century ago, as Richard Monckton Milnes, after contrasting the din, and stir, and turmoil of the West with the reposeful air of the East, counselled the poet of the West to wander eastward now and then : "There the calm of life comparing With his Europe's busy fate, It is perhaps the most gifted of American writers of fiction to whom we owe the avowal, that were he to adopt a pet idea, as so many people do, and fondle it in his embraces to the exclusion of all others, it would be that the great want which mankind labours under at this present period is-sleep. The world, he urges, should recline its vast head on the first convenient pillow, and take a prolonged nap. It has gone distracted, on his showing, through a morbid activity, and while preternaturally wide awake, is nevertheless tormented by visions that seem real to it now, but would assume their true aspect and character were all things once set right by an interval of sound repose. This he declares to be the only method of getting rid of old delusions and of avoiding new ones of restoring to us the simple perception of what is right, and the single-hearted desire to achieve it, both of which have |