pears to him, "and then
imagining new." He hovers on the brink of the deepest philosophy,
enquiring how came I here, and to what end. He becomes a castle-builder,
constructing imaginary colleges and states, and searching out the
businesses in which they are to be employed, and the schemes by which
they are to be regulated. He thinks what he would do, if he possessed
uncontrolable strength, if he could fly, if he could make himself
invisible. In this train of mind he cons his first lessons of liberty
and independence. He learns self-reverence, and says to himself, I also
am an artist, and a maker. He ruffles himself under the yoke, and feels
that he suffers foul tyranny when he is driven, and when brute force is
exercised upon him, to compel him to a certain course, or to chastise
his faults, imputed or real.

Such are the benefits of leisure to the schoolboy: and they are not less
to man when arrived at years of discretion. It is good for us to have
some regular and stated occupation. Man may be practically too free;
this is frequently the case with those who have been nurtured in the lap
of opulence and luxury. We were sent into the world under the condition,
"In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread." And those who, by the
artificial institutions of society, are discharged from this necessity,
are placed in a critical and perilous situation. They are bound, if
they would consult their own well-being, to contrive for themselves a
factitious necessity, that may stand them in the place of that necessity
which is imposed without appeal on the vast majority of their brethren.

But, if it is desirable that every man should have some regular and
stated occupation, so it is certainly not less desirable, that every man
should have his seasons of relaxation and leisure.

Unhappy is the wretch, whose condition it is to be perpetually bound to
the oar, and who is condemned to labour in one certain mode, during all
the hours that are not claimed by sleep, or as long as the muscles of
his frame, or the fibres of his fingers will enable him to persevere.
"Apollo himself," says the poet, "does not always bend the bow." There
should be a season, when the mind is free as air, when not only we
should follow without restraint any train of thinking or action, within
the bounds of sobriety, and that is not attended with injury to others,
that our own minds may suggest to us, but should sacrifice at the shrine
of intellectual liberty