here came to be
established in my mind an association between the day of rest and names
which are the greatest in verse and prose. Through my life this habit
has remained with me; I have always wished to spend some part of the
Sunday quiet with books which, at most times, it is fatally easy to leave
aside, one's very knowledge and love of them serving as an excuse for
their neglect in favour of print which has the attraction of newness.
Homer and Virgil, Milton and Shakespeare; not many Sundays have gone by
without my opening one or other of these. Not many Sundays? Nay, that
is to exaggerate, as one has the habit of doing. Let me say rather that,
on many a rest-day I have found mind and opportunity for such reading.
Nowadays mind and opportunity fail me never. I may take down my Homer or
my Shakespeare when I choose, but it is still on Sunday that I feel it
most becoming to seek the privilege of their companionship. For these
great ones, crowned with immortality, do not respond to him who
approaches them as though hurried by temporal care. There befits the
garment of solemn leisure, the thought attuned to peace. I open the
volume somewhat formally; is it not sacred, if the word have any meaning
at all? And, as I read, no interruption can befall me. The note of a
linnet, the humming of a bee, these are the sounds about my sanctuary.
The page scarce rustles as it turns.

VI.

Of how many dwellings can it be said that no word of anger is ever heard
beneath its roof, and that no unkindly feeling ever exists between the
inmates? Most men's experience would seem to justify them in declaring
that, throughout the inhabited world, no such house exists. I, knowing
at all events of one, admit the possibility that there may be more; yet I
feel that it is to hazard a conjecture; I cannot point with certainty to
any other instance, nor in all my secular life (I speak as one who has
quitted the world) could I have named a single example.

It is so difficult for human beings to live together; nay, it is so
difficult for them to associate, however transitorily, and even under the
most favourable conditions, without some shadow of mutual offence.
Consider the differences of task and of habit, the conflict of
prejudices, the divergence of opinions (though that is probably the same
thing), which quickly reveal themselves between any two persons brought
into more than casual contact, and think how much self-subdual is