that neither your trouble, nor any likeness of it, is absorbing other people. But this is not the whole reason: the truth is, the life and impulses of other men are catching: you cannot explain exactly how it is that they take you out of yourself.

MILVERTON. No man is so confidential as when he is addressing the whole world. You find, therefore, more comfort for sorrow in books than in social intercourse. I mean more direct comfort; for I agree with what Ellesmere says about society.

ELLESMERE. In comparing men and books, one must always remember this important distinction-that one can put the books down at any time. As Macaulay says, 'Plato is never sullen. Cervantes is never petulant. Demosthenes never comes unseasonably. Dante never stays too long.'

MILVERTON. Besides, one can manage to agree so well, intellectually, with a book; and intellectual differences are the source of half the quarrels in the world.

ELLESMERE. Judicious shelving!

MILVERTON. Judicious skipping will nearly do. Now when one's friend, or one's self, is crotchety, dogmatic, or disputatious, one cannot turn over to another day.

ELLESMERE. Don't go, Dunsford. Here is a passage in the essay I meant to have said something about why should we expect the inner life to be one course of unbroken self-improvement,' &c.-You recollect? Well, it puts me in mind of a conversation between a complacent poplar and a grim old oak, which I overheard the other day. The poplar said, that it grew up quite straight, heavenwards, that all its branches pointed the same way, and always had done so. Turning to the oak, which it had been talking at before for some time, the poplar went on to remark, that it did not wish to say anything unfriendly to a brother of the forest, but those warped and twisted branches seemed to show strange struggles. The tall thing concluded its oration by saying, that it grew up very fast, and that when it had done growing, it did not suffer itself to be made into huge floating engines of destruction. But different trees had different tastes. There was then a sound from the old oak, like an 'ah,' or a 'whew,' or, perhaps, it was only the wind amongst its resisting branches : and the gaunt creature said that it had had ugly winds from without and cross-grained impulses from within; that it knew it had thrown out awkwardly a branch here and a branch there, which would never come quite right again it

feared; that men worked it up, sometimes for good and sometimes for evil-but that at any rate it had not lived for nothing. The poplar began again immediately, for this kind of tree can talk for ever, but I patted the old oak approvingly and went on.

MILVERTON. Well, your trees divide their discourse somewhat Ellesmerically: they do not talk with the simplicity La Fontaine's would: but there is a good deal in them. They are not altogether sappy.

ELLESMERE. I really thought of this fable of mine the other day as I was passing the poplar at the end of the valley, and I determined to give it you on the first occasion.

DUNSFORD. I hope, Ellesmere, you do not intend to put sarcastic notions into the sap of our trees hereabouts. There's enough of sarcasm in you to season a whole forest.

ELLESMERE. Dunsford is afraid of what the trees may say to the country gentlemen, and whether they will be able to answer them. I will be careful not to make the trees too clever.

MILVERTON. Let us go and try if we can hear any more forest talk. The winds, shaped into voices by the leaves, say many things to us at all

CHAPTER IV.

IN the course of our walk Milverton promised to read the following essay on Recreation the next day. I have no note of anything that was said before the reading.

RECREATION.

HIS subject has not had the thought it

THIS

merits. It seems trivial. It concerns some hours in the daily life of each of us; but it is not connected with any subject of human grandeur, and we are rather ashamed. of it. Schiller has some wise, but hard, words that relate to it. He perceives the preeminence of the Greeks who could do many things. He finds that modern men are units of great nations; but not great units themselves. And there is some room for this reasoning of his.

Our modern system of division of labour divides wits also. The more necessity there

is, therefore, for finding in recreation something to expand men's intelligence. There are intellectual pursuits almost as much divided as pin-making: and many a man goes through some intellectual process, for the greater part of his working hours, which corresponds with the making of a pin's head. Must there not be some danger of a general contraction of mind from this convergence of attention upon something very small, for so considerable a portion of a man's life?

What answer can civilization give to this? It can say that greater results are worked out by the modern system: that though each man is doing less himself than he might have done in former days, he sees greater and better things accomplished: and that his thoughts, not bound down by his petty · occupation, travel over the work of the human family. There is a great deal, doubtless, in this argument; but man is not altogether an intellectual recipient. He is a constructive animal also. It is not the knowledge that you can pour into him that will satisfy him, or enable him to work out his nature. He must see things for himself; he must have bodily work and intellectual work different from his bread-getting work; or he runs