through all the toils of life and be done with them; and then, like Alexander, sit down and rest.' The prospect of anything yet to do, appears to render the enjoyment of present repose impossible. There can be no more unhealthful state of mind. The day will never come when we shall have got through our work and well for us that it never will. Why disturb the quiet of tonight, by thinking of the toils of to-morrow? There is deep wisdom, and accurate knowledge of human nature, in the advice, given by the Soundest and Kindest of all advisers, and applicable in a hundred cases, to 'Take no thought for the morrow.' It appears to me, that in these days of hurried life, a great and valuable end is served by a class of things which all men of late have taken to abusing, to wit, the extensive class of dull, heavy, uninteresting, good, sensible, pious sermons. They afford many educated men almost their only intervals of waking leisure. You are in a cool, quiet, solemn place: the sermon is going forward: you have a general impression that you are listening to many good advices and important doctrines, and the entire result upon your mind is beneficial; and at the same time there is nothing in the least striking or startling to destroy the sense of leisure, or to painfully arouse the attention and quicken the pulse. Neither is there a syllable that can jar on the most fastidious taste. All points and corners of thought are rounded. off. The entire composition is in the highest degree gentlemanly, scholarly, correct; but you feel that it is quite impossible to attend to it. And you do not attend to it; but at the same time, you do not quite turn your attention to anything else. Now, you remember how a dying father, once upon a time, besought his prodigal son to spend an hour daily in solitary thought: and what a beneficial result followed. The dull sermon may serve an end as desirable. In church you are alone, in the sense of being isolated from all companions, or from the possibility of holding communication with anybody: and the wearisome sermon, if utterly useless otherwise, is useful in giving a man time to think, in circumstances which will generally dispose him to think seriously. There is a restful feeling, too, for which you are the better. It is a fine thing to feel that church is a place where, if even for two hours only, you are quite free from worldly business and cares. You know that all these are waiting for you outside; but at least you are free from their actual endurance here. I am persuaded, and I am happy to entertain the persuasion, that men are often much the better for being present during the preaching of sermons to which they pay very little attention. Only some such belief as this could make one think, without much sorrow, of the thousands of discourses which are preached every Sunday over Britain, and of the class of ears and memories to which they are given. You see that country congregation coming out of that ivy-covered church in that beautiful churchyard. Look at their faces, the ploughman, the dairy-maids, the drain-diggers, the stable-boys: what could they do towards taking in the gist of that well-reasoned, scholarly, elegant piece of composition which has occupied the last half-hour? Why, they could not understand a sentence of it. Yet it has done them good. The general effect is wholesome. They have got a little push, they have felt themselves floating on a gentle current, going in the right direction. Only enthusiastic young divines expect the mass of their congregation to do all they exhort them to do. You must advise a man to do a thing a hundred times, probably, before you can get him to do it once. You know that a breeze, blowing at thirty-five miles an hour, does very well if it carries a large ship along in its own direction at the rate of eight. And even so, the practice of your hearers, though truly influenced by what you say to them, lags tremendously behind the rate of your preaching. Be content, my friend, if you can maintain a movement, sure though slow, in the right way. And don't get angry with your rural flock on Sundays, if you often see on their blank faces, while you are preaching, the evidence that they are not taking in a word you say. And don't be en 1859.] Leisure not always desirable. tirely discouraged. You may be doing them good for all that. And if you do good at all, you know better than to grumble, though you may not be doing it in the fashion that you would like best. I have known men, accustomed to sit quiet, pensive, half-attentive, under the sermons of an easy-going but orthodox preacher, who felt quite indig nant when they went to a church where their attention was kept on the stretch all the time the sermon lasted, whether they would or no. They felt that this intrusive interest about the discourse, compelling them to attend, was of the nature of an assault, and of an unjustifiable infraction of the liberty of the subject. Their feeling was, 'What earthly right has that man to make us. listen to his sermon, without getting our consent? We go to church to rest: and lo! he compels us to listen!' I do not forget, musing in the shade this beautiful summer day, that there may be cases in which leisure is very much to be avoided. To some men, constant occupation is a thing that stands between them and utter wretchedness. You remember the poor man, whose story is so touchingly told by Borrow in The Romany Rye, who lost his wife, his children, all his friends, by a rapid succession of strokes; and who declared that he would have gone mad if he had not resolutely set himself to the study of the Chinese language. Only constant labour of mind could keep the misery out of his head.' And years afterwards, if he paused from toil for even a few hours, the misery returned. The poor fisherman in The Antiquary was wrong in his philo. 161 sophy, when Mr. Oldbuck found From the lone shieling on the misty island, Fair these broad meads, these hoary woods are grand,— And you felt that much leisure will not suit there. Therefore, you stout backwoodsman, go at the huge forest-tree; rain upon it the blows of your axe, as long as you can stand; watch the fragments as they fly; and jump briskly out of the way as the reeling giant falls :-for all this brisk exertion will stand between you and remembrances that would unman you. There is nothing very philosophical in the plan, to dance sad thoughts away,' which I remember as the chorus of some Canadian song. I doubt whether that peculiar specific will do much good. But you may work sad thoughts away: you may crowd morbid feelings out of your mind by stout daylight toils; and remember that sad remembrances, too long indulged, tend strongly to the maudlin. Even Werter was little better than a fool; and a contemptible fool was Mr. Augustus Moddle. How many of man's best works take for granted that the majority of cultivated persons, capable of enjoy ing them, shall have leisure in which to do so. The architect, the artist, the landscape-gardener, the poet, spend their pains in producing that which can never touch the hurried man. I really feel that I act unkindly by the man who did that elaborate picking-out in the painting of a railway carriage, if I rush upon the platform at the last moment, pitch in my luggage, sit down and take to the Times, without ever having noticed whether the colour of the carriage is brown or blue. There seems a dumb pleading eloquence about even the accurate diagonal arrangement of the little woollen tufts in the morocco cushions, and the interlaced network above one's head, where umbrellas go, as though they said, We are made thus neatly to be looked at, but we cannot make you look at us unless you choose; and half the people who come into the carriage are so hurried that they never notice us.' And when I have seen a fine church-spire, rich in graceful ornament, rising up by the side of a city street, where hurried crowds are always passing by, not one in a thousand ever casting a glance at the beautiful object, I have thought, Now surely you are not doing what your designer intended! When he spent so much of time, and thought, and pains in planning and executing all those beauties of detail, surely he intended them to be looked at; and not merely looked at in their general effect, but followed and traced into their lesser graces. But he wrongly fancied that men would have time for that; he forgot that, except on the solitary artistic visitor, all he has done would be lost, through the nineteenth century's want of leisure. And you, architect of Melrose, when you designed that exquisite tracery, and decorated so perfectly that flying buttress, were you content to do so for the pleasure of knowing you did your work thoroughly and well; or did you count on its producing on the minds of men in after ages an impression which a prevailing hurry has prevented from being produced, save perhaps in one case in a thousand? And you, old monk, who spent half your life in writing and illuminating that magnificent Missal; was your work its own reward in the pleasure its execution gave you; or did you actually fancy that mortal man would have time or patienceleisure, in short-to examine in detail all that you have done, and that interested you so much, and kept you eagerly engaged for so many hours together, in days the world has left four hundred years behind? I declare it touches me to look at that laborious appeal to men with countless hours to spare: men, in short, hardly now to be found in Britain. No doubt, all this is the old story: for how great a part of the higher and finer human work is done in the hope that it will produce an effect which it never will produce, and attract the interest of those who will never notice it! Still, the ancient missal-writer pleased himself with the thought of the admiration of skilled observers in days to come; and so the fancy served its purpose. Thus, at intervals through that bright summer day, did the writer muse at leisure in the shade; and note down the thoughts (such as they are) which you have here at length in this essay. The sun was still warm and cheerful when he quitted the lawn; but somehow, looking back upon that day, the colours of the scene are paler than the fact, and the sunbeams feel comparatively chill. For memory cannot bring back things freshly as they lived, but only their faded images. Faces in the distant past look wan; voices sound thin and distant; the landscape round is uncertain and shadowy. Do you not feel somehow, when you look back on ages forty centuries ago, as if people then spoke in whispers and lived in twilight? A. K. H. B. 1859.7 163 A BUNCH OF SONG-FLOWERS. I. BLAAVIN. WONDERFUL mountain of Blaavin, Your bulk in its sultriest bronze. O sweet is the spring wind, Blaavin, For before the bell of the snowdrop, It was with the strangest start That I felt, at the little querulous cry The new pulse awake in my heart. A pulse that will live and beat, Blaavin, Till, standing around my bed, While the chirrup of birds is heard out in the dawn, The watchers whisper, ' He's dead.' O, another heart is mine, Blaavin, Sin' this time seven year, For Life is brighter by a charm, The mist-wreaths perish with heat, The wet rock slide with a trickling gleam While toward the crimson islands Where the sea-birds flutter and skirl, A cormorant flaps o'er a sleek ocean floor II. THE WELL. The well gleams by a mountain road, That, thread-like, far away doth run Is crowned by spire and castle rock; A rough uneven waste of grey, The city blossoms into lights; Now here, now there, a sudden spark High stands the lonely mountain ground The foolish people never seek All-seeing as the eye of God, Haunting the peasant on the down, Though from the closely-curtained dawn |