sive smokers a decided weakening of the will, | wards?" says the genius; "I can afford to be and a preference for talking about work to dull when I have done." But the truth still the effort of actual labor. The opinions of remains that there are stimulants and stimu medical men on this subject are so much at lants. Not the nectar of the gods themselves variance that their science only adds to our were worth the dash of a wave upon the uncertainty. One doctor tells me that the beach, and the pure cool air of the morning. most moderate smoking is unquestionably injurious, whilst others affirm that it is innocent. Speaking simply from self-observation, I find that in my own case tea and coffee are far more perilous than tobacco.

Almost all English people are habitual teadrinkers, and as the tea they drink is very strong, they may be said to use it in excess. The unpleasant symptoms which tea-poisoning produces in a patient not inured by habit, disappear in the seasoned tea-drinker, leaving only a certain exhilaration, which appears to be perfectly innocuous. If tea is a safe stimulant, it is certainly an agreeable one, and there seems to be no valid reason why brainworkers should refuse themselves that solace. I knew a worthy clergyman many years ago who from the most conscientious motives denied himself ale and wine, but found a fountain of consolation in the tea-pot. His usual allowance was sixteen cups, all of heroic strength, and the effect upon his brain seems to have been altogether favorable, for his sermons were both long and eloquent, and to this day he is preaching still, without any diminution of his powers. French people find in coffee the most efficacious remedy for the temporary torpor of the mind which results from the processes of digestion. Balzac drank great quantities of coffee whilst he wrote; and this, it is believed, brought on the terrible nervous disease that accelerated his end. The best proof that tea and coffee are favorable to intellectual expression is that all nations use one or the other as aids to conversation. In Mr. Palgrave's Travels in Arabia there is never any talk without the inevitable coffee, that fragrant Arabian berry prepared with such delicate cunning that it yields the perfect aroma.

ment of stimulants is intended to apply only to cases in which NOTE.-What is said in the above letter about the employthere is no organic disease. The harm which diseased persons do to themselves by conforming to customs which are

innocent for others is as lamentable as it is easily avoidable. Two bottles of any natural wine grown above the latitude of Lyons are a permissible daily allowance to a man whose organs are all sound; but the doctors in the wine districts unanimously forbid pure wine when there is a chronic inflammatory tendency. In these cases even the most honest Bordeaux ought to be diluted with twice its volume of water. There are many chronic diseases which tobacco irritates and accelerates. Both wine and tobacco are injurious to weak eyes.

LETTER IV.

TO A MUSCULAR CHRISTIAN.

Muscular and intellectual tendencies in two boys-Difficulty of finding time to satisfy both-Plato on the influences of music and gymnastics-Somnolence and digestion-Neglect of literature-Natural restlessness of the active temperament-Case of a Garibaldian officer-Difficulty of taking a sufficient interest in exercise-A boar hunt.

I KNOW two little boys, sons of a near neighbor, who have from childhood exhibited opposite tendencies. One of them is incessantly active, always out of doors in any weather, busy about horses, and farming, and game, heedless of his books, and studying only under positive compulsion. The other sits at home with his lessons or a story book, and only goes out because he is incited by the fraternal example. The two lads represent two distinct varieties of human life, the active and the intellectual. The elder is happiest during physical exertion; the younger is happiest when his brain is fully occupied. Left entirely to themselves, without the equalizing influence of the outside world and the ways of living which general custom has established, they would lead the most opposite The wisdom of occasionally using these va- lives. The elder would inevitably become a rious stimulants for intellectual purposes is farmer, that he might live in the country and proved by a single consideration. Each of take exercise all day long, or else he would us has a little cleverness and a great deal of seek adventure in wild travel, or in romantic sluggish stupidity. There are certain occa- warfare; but the younger would very quicksions when we absolutely need the little clev-ly be taken possession of by some engrossing erness that we possess. The orator needs it intellectual pursuit, and lead the life of a sedwhen he speaks, the poet when he versifies, entary student. The problem which these but neither cares how stupid he may become two young lives have before them is the recwhen the oration is delivered and the lyric onciliation of their tendencies. Since they set down on paper. The stimulant serves to come of cultivated parents, the intellectual bring out the talent when it is wanted, like lad has the better chance of following his own the wind in the pipes of an organ. "What bent. Both will have to take their Universiwill it matter if I am even a little duller after-ty degrees, and the younger has the advan

tality.

tage there. Still there are powerful influ- | It is sleep, and weariness, and the great neces ences in favor of the elder. His activity will be sary business of digestion, that drown your encouraged by the admiration of his compan- intellectual energies. The work of repairing ions, and by the example of the country gen- so great a destruction of muscle is nature's tlemen who are his neighbors. He can ride, chief concern. Since you became the mighty and row, and swim; he is beginning to shoot; hunter that you are, the wear and tear have at twenty he will be a sportsman. When been enormous, and the necessary rapidity of once he has taken his degree, I wonder what reconstruction has absorbed your rich viwill be the advances in his intellectual culture. Fraternal and social influences will preserve I will not question the wisdom of your the younger from absolute physical inaction; choice, if there has been any deliberate but there are not any influences powerful choice, though perhaps the life of action that enough to keep the elder safe from intellect- you lead may have grown rather out of cirual rust. cumstances determining habit than from any If you, who are a distinguished sportsman conscious resolution. Health is so much and athlete, would kindly inform us with more necessary to happiness than culture, perfect frankness of the line which your stud- that few who could choose between them ies have followed since you quitted Eton, we would sacrifice it for learning, unless they should be the wiser for your experience. were impelled by irresistible instincts. And Have gymnastic exercises hardened you, as beyond the great delight of health and Plato said they did, when pursued excess-strength there is a restlessness in men born to ively? and do you need the musical studies be active which must have its outlet in activwhich he both valued and dreaded as the most powerful of softening influences? If you have energy enough to lead both lives, pray how do you find the time?

when I asked him whether it was affection to his famous chief, or faith in a political creed, or some more personal motive that had led him to this scorn of prudence, he answered that, after honest self-examination, he believed the most powerful motive to be the passion for an active life. The active temperament likes physical action for its own sake, and not as a means of health. Activity renews itself and claims larger and larger satisfaction, till at last the habit of it absorbs the whole energy of the man.

ity. I knew a brave Italian who had followed Garibaldi in all his romantic enterprises, who had suffered from privation and from wounds, who had not only faced death As to Plato's musical influence, you invite in the wildest adventures, but, what is even it, and yet you treacherously elude its pow-more terrible to the active temperament, had er. After being out all day in the pursuit risked health from frequent exposure; and of sylvan pleasures (if shooting on treeless wastes can be called a sylvan pleasure), you come home at nightfall ravenous. Then you do ample justice to your dinner, and having satisfied your faim de chasseur, you go into the drawing-room, and ask your wife to play and sing to you. If Plato could witness that pretty scene, he would approve your obedience to his counsels. He would behold an athletic Englishman stretching his mighty limbs on a couch of soft repose, and letting his soul grow tender as his ears drank ravishing harmonies. If, however, the ancient sage, delighted with so sweet a picture of strength refined by song, were to dwell upon the sight as I have done, he would perceive too soon that, although your body was present indeed, your soul had become deaf in sleep's oblivion. So it happens to you night after night, and the music reaches you no more than the songs of choristers reach the dead in the graves below.

And the elevating influences of literature? You have books, of course, in abundance. There is a library, amongst other luxuries of your home. But the literature your intellect feeds upon is in the columns of the Field, your newspaper. Yet this neglect of the means of culture is not due to any natural feebleness of the mind. Your brain, by its nature, is as vigorous as your vigorous body.

Although such a life as yours would be incompatible with the work I have to do, it would be an unmixed benefit to me to take a greater interest in exercise. If you could but communicate that interest, how willingly would I become your pupil! The fatal law of the studious temperament is, that in exercise itself it must find some intellectual charm, so that we quit our books in the library only to go and read the infinite book of nature. We cannot go out in the country without incessantly thinking about either botany, or geology, or landscape painting, and it is difficult for us to find a refuge from the importunate habit of investigation. Sport is the only refuge, but the difficulty is to care about it sufficiently to avoid ennui. When you have not the natural instinct, how are you to supply its place by any make-believe excitement?

There is no position in the world more weari- difficult to conciliate the two! In every one some than that of a man inwardly indifferent of us there exists an animal which might to the amusement in which he is trying to have been as vigorous as wolves and foxes, if take part. You can watch for game with an it had been left to develop itself in freedom. invincible patience, for you have the natural But besides the animal, there existed also a instinct, but after the first ten minutes on the mind, and the mental activity restrained the skirts of the wood I lay my gun down and be- bodily activity, till at last there is a serious gin to botanize. Last week a friendly neigh- danger of putting an end to it altogether. bor invited me to a boar-hunt. The boar was I know two men, about fifty-five years old supposed to be in the middle of a great im- both of them, and both of them admirably acpenetrable plantation, and all I did during tive. They tell me that their bodily activity the whole morning was to sit in my saddle has been preserved by an effort of the will; awaiting the exit of the beast, cantering from that if they had not resolutely kept up the one point of the wood's circumference to an-habit of using legs and arms in daily work or other, as the cry of the dogs guided me. Was amusement their limbs would have stiffened it pleasure? A true hunter would have found interest enough in expectation, but I felt like a man on a railway-platform who is waiting for a train that is late.

LETTER V.

into uselessness, and their constitutions would have been unable to bear the call of any sudden emergency. One of them has four resi dences in different parts of the same county, and yet he will not keep a carriage, but is a pedestrian terrible to his friends; the other is at the head of a great business, and gives an example of physical activity to his workpeople. Both have an absolute faith in habit

TO A STUDENT WHO NEGLECTED BODILY EXER-ual exercise; and both affirm that if the habit

CISE.

Difficulty of conciliating the animal and the intellectual lives -Bodily activity sometimes preserved by an effort of the will-Necessity of faith in exercise-Incompatibility between physical and intellectual living disappears in large spaces of time-Franklin's theory about concentration in exercise-Time an essential factor-Health of a rural and equestrian habits of Sir Walter Scott-Goethe's wild delight in physical exercise-Alexander Humboldt combated early delicacy by exercise-Intellectual utilities of

postman-Pedestrian habits of Wordsworth-Pedestrian

physical action.

"WE have done those things which we ought not to have done; we have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and there is no health in us."

were

once broken they could never afterwards resume it.

We need this faith in exercise-this firm conviction of its necessity-the sort of conviction that makes a man go out in all weathers, and leave the most urgent intellectual labor for the mere discipline and hardening of the body. Few students possess this faith in its purity. It is hard to believe that we shall get any good from exercise proportionate to the sacrifice of time.

The incompatibility between the physical and the intellectual lives is often very marked if you look at small spaces of time only; but if you consider broader spaces, such as a How applicable, my dear brother, are these lifetime, then the incompatibility is not so words which the Church, in her wisdom, has marked, and gives place to a manifest conciliseen to be adapted to all sinners-how appli-ation. The brain is clearer in vigorous health cable, I say, are they to students most especially! They have quite a personal applicability to you and me. We have read all day long, and written till three o'clock in the morning; we have taken no exercise for weeks, and there is no health in us. The doctor scrutinizes our wearied eyes, and knows that our brains are weary. Little do we need his warnings, for does not Nature herself remind us of our disobedience, and tell us in language not to be misinterpreted, to amend the error of our ways? Our digestion is Franklin's theory about concentrating his sluggish and imperfect; we are as nervous as exercise for the economy of time was founded delicate ladies, and there is no health in upon a mistake. Violent exertion for minutes

than it can be in the gloom and misery of sickness; and although health may last for a while without renewal from exercise, so that if you are working under pressure for a month the time given to exercise is so much deducted from the result, it is not so for the life's performance. Health sustained for many years is so useful to the realization of all considerable intellectual undertakings, that the sacrifice to the bodily well-being is the best of all possible investments.

is not equivalent to moderate exercise for hours. The desire to concentrate good of various kinds into the smallest possible space is

Here

one of the commonest of human wishes, but was delicate in his youth, but the longing for it is not encouraged by the broader economy great enterprises made him dread the hinof nature. In the exercise of the mind every drances of physical insufficiency, so he accusteacher is well aware that time is an essential tomed his body to exercise and fatigue, and factor. It is necessary to live with a study prepared himself for those wonderful explorfor hundreds or thousands of hours before ations which opened his great career. the mind can assimilate as much of the sub-are intellectual lives which were forwarded in ject as it may need; and so it is necessary to their special aims by habits of physical exerlive in exercise during a thousand hours of cise; and, in an earlier age, have we not also every year to make sure of the physical bene- the example of the greatest intellect of a great fits. Even the fresh air itself requires time epoch, the astonishing Leonardo da Vinci, to renovate our blood. The fresh air cannot who took such a delight in horsemanship that be concentrated; and to breathe the prodig- although, as Vasari tells us, poverty visited ious quantities of it which are needed for per- him often, he never could sell his horses or fect energy, we must be out in it frequently dismiss his grooms? and long.

The physical and intellectual lives are not The inhabitants of great cities have recourse incompatible. I may go farther, and affirm to gymnastics as a substitute for the sports of that the physical activity of men eminent in the country. These exercises have one ad-literature has added abundance to their matevantage-they can be directed scientifically rial and energy to their style; that the activso as to strengthen the limbs that need devel-ity of scientific men has led them to innumeropment; but no city gymnasium can offer the able discoveries; and that even the more invigorating breezes of the mountain. We sensitive and contemplative study of the fine require not only exercise but exposure-daily exposure to the health-giving inclemencies of the weather. The postman who brings my letters walks eight thousand miles a year, and enjoys the most perfect regularity of health. There are operatives in factories who go through quite as much bodily exertion, but they have not his fine condition. He is as merry as a lark, and announces himself every morning like a bearer of joyful tidings. What the postman does from necessity an old gentleman did as regularly, though more moderately, for the preservation of his health and faculties. He went out every day; and as he never consulted the weather, so he never had to consult the physicians.

Nothing in the habits of Wordsworth-that model of excellent habits-can be better as an example to men of letters than his love of pedestrian excursions. Wherever he happened to be, he explored the whole neighborhood on foot, looking into every nook and cranny of it; and not merely the immediate neighborhood, but extended tracts of country; and in this way he met with much of his best material. Scott was both a pedestrian and an equestrian traveller, having often, as he tells us, walked thirty miles or ridden a hundred in those rich and beautiful districts which afterwards proved to him such a mine of literary wealth.

arts has been carried to a higher perfection by artists who painted action in which they had had their part, or natural beauty, which they had travelled far to see. Even philosophy itself owes much to mere physical courage and endurance. How much that is noblest in ancient thinking may be due to the hardy health of Socrates!

LETTER VI.

TO AN AUTHOR IN MORTAL DISEASE.

Considering death as a certainty-The wisdom learned from suffering-Employment of happier intervals-The teaching of the diseased not to be rejected-Their double experience-Ignorance of Nature's spoiled children-Benefit of disinterested thought-Reasons for pursuing intellectual labors to the last-Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire.

WHEN Alexandre Bixio lay on his death-bed, his friend Labrousse visited him, and exclaimed on entering the room, "How well you are looking to-day!" To this, Bixio, who was clearly aware of his condition, answered in these words:-"Voyons, mon pauvre Labrousse; tu viens voir un homme qui n'a plus qu'un quart d'heure à vivre, et tu veux lui faire croire qu'il a bonne mine; allons, une poignée de main, cela vaut mieux pour un homme que tous ces petits mensonges-là.'

Goethe took a wild delight in all sorts of physical exercise-swimming in the Ilm by moonlight, skating with the merry I will vex you with none of these wellWe little Weimar court on the Schwansee, riding meant but wearisome little falsehoods. about the country on horseback, and becom- both of us know your state; we both know ing at times quite outrageous in the rich exu- that your malady, though it may be alleviaberance of his energy. Alexander Humboldt ted, can never be cured; and that the fatal

happiest privileges of the high intellectual life that it can elevate us—at least in the intervals of relief from complete prostration or acute pain-to regions of disinterested thought, where all personal anxieties are forgotten. To feel that he is still ablo, even in days of physical weakness and decline, to add something to the world's inheritance of knowledge, or to bequeath to it some new and noble

termination of it, though delayed by all the gulf of death,-you who, with perfect self-posartifices of science, will certainly arrive at session and heroie cheerfulness, are counting last. The cheerful courage which enables you the last miles of the voyage,-find leisure to to look this certainty in the face has also ena-study and think as the boat glides onwards bled you to extract from years of suffering silently to the inevitable end. It is one of the that profoundest wisdom which (as one of the wisest of living Englishmen has told us) can be learned from suffering alone. The admirable elasticity of your intellectual and moral nature has enabled you, in the intervals of physical uneasiness or pain, to cast aside every morbid thought, to enter quite fully and heartily into the healthy life of others, and to enjoy the magnificent spectacle of the universe with contented submission to its laws-thought in the pearl of complete expression, those beneficent yet relentless laws which to you bring debility and death. You have continued to write notwithstanding the progress of your malady; and yet, since it has so pitilessly held you, there is no other change in the spirit of your compositions than the deepening of a graver beauty, the addition of a sweeter seriousness. Not one sentence that you have written betrays either the injustice of the invalid, or his irritability. Your mind is not clouded by any mist from the fever marshes, but its sympathies are far more active than they were. Your pain has taught you a tender pity for all the pain that is outside of you, and a patient gentleness which was wanting to your nature in its days of barbarian health.

is a profound satisfaction to the active mind that is lodged in a perishing body. Many diseases fortunately permit this activity to the last; and I do not hesitate to affirm, that the work done in the time of physical decline has in not a few instances been the most perfect and the most permanently valuable. It is not accurately true that the mind and the body invariably fail together. Physicians who know how pervalent chronic diseases are, and how many eminent men are physically inconvenienced by them, know also that minds of great spiritual energy possess the wonderful faculty of indefinitely improving themselves whilst the body steadily deteriorates. Nor is there anything irrational in this persistent improvement of the mind, Surely it would be a lamentable error if even to the extremest limit of material decay; mankind were to carry out the recommenda- for the mind of every intellectual human tion of certain ruthless philosophers, and re- being is part and parcel of the great permaject the help and teaching of the diseased. nent mind of humanity; and even if its inWithout undervaluing the robust perform-fluence soon ceases to be traceable—if the ance of healthy natures, and without encour-spoken words are forgotten-if the written aging literature that is morbid, that is fev-volume is not reprinted or even quoted, it ered, impatient, and perverse, we may still has not worked in vain. The intellectual prize the noble teaching which is the testa- light of Europe in this century is not only ment of sufferers to the world. The diseased due to great luminaries whom every one can have a peculiar and mysterious experience; name, but to millions of thoughtful persons, they have known the sensations of health, and now utterly forgotten, who in their time then, in addition to this knowledge, they have loved the light, and guarded it, and increased gained another knowledge which enables them it, and carried it into many lands, and beto think more accurately even of health itself. queathed it as a sacred trust. He who laA life without suffering would be like a pict-bors only for his personal pleasure may well ure without shade. The pets of Nature, who be discouraged by the shortness and uncerdo not know what suffering is, and cannot tainty of life, and cease from his selfish toil realize it, have always a certain rawness, on the first approaches of disease; but wholike foolish landsmen who laugh at the ter-ever has fully realized the grand continuity rors of the ocean, because they have neither of intellectual tradition, and taken his own experience enough to know what those place in it between the future and the past, terrors are, nor brains enough to imagine will work till he can work no more, and then them. gaze hopefully on the world's great future, You who are borne along, slowly but irresist-like Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, when his blind ibly, to that Niagara which plunges into the eyes beheld the future of zoology.