A habit of creative work is an awful
thing."

"Come out for a turn," he went on; "never mind these rotten books; don't
get into a habit of reading--it's like endlessly listening to good talk
without ever joining in it--it makes a corpulent mind!"

We went and walked in the garden; he stopped before some giant hemlocks.
"Just look at those great things," he said, "built up as geometrically as a
cathedral, tier above tier, and yet not _quite_ regular. There must be
something very hard at work inside that, piling it all up, adding cell to
cell, carrying out a plan, and enjoying it all. Yet the beauty of it is
that it isn't perfectly regular. You see the underlying scheme, yet the
separate shoots are not quite mechanical--they lean away from each other,
that joint is a trifle shorter--there wasn't quite room at the start in
that stem, and the pressure goes on showing right up to the top, I suppose
our lives would look very nearly as geometrical to anyone who
_knew_--really knew; but how little geometrical we feel! I don't
suppose this hemlock is cursed by the power of thinking it might have done
otherwise, or envies the roses. We mustn't spend time in envying, or
repenting either--or still less in renouncing life."

"But if I want to renounce it," I said, "why shouldn't I?"

"Yes, there you have me," said Father Payne; "we know so little about
ourselves, that we don't always know whether we do better to renounce a
thing or to seize it. Make experiments, I say--don't make habits."

"But you are always drilling me into habits," I said.

He gave me a little shake with his hand. "Yes, the habit of being able to
do a thing," he said, "not the habit of being unable to do anything else!
Hang these metaphysics, if that is what they are! What I want you young men
to do is to get a firm hold upon life, and to feel that it is a finer thing
than any little presentment of it. I want you to feel and enjoy for
yourselves, and to live freely and generously. Bad things happen to all of
us, of course; but we mustn't mind that--not to be petty or quarrelsome, or
hidebound or prudish or over-particular, that's the point. To leave other
people alone, except on the rare occasions when they are not letting other
people alone; to be peaceable, and yet not to be afraid; not to be hurt and
vexed; to practise forgetting; not to want to pouch things! It's all very
well for me to talk," he said; "I made a sufficient hash of it, when I was
poor an