ry audible to me. Nay, I will thank the Great God,
that He has said, in whatever fearful ways, and just wrath against us,
"Idleness shall be no more!" Idleness? The awakened soul of man, all
but the asphyxied soul of man, turns from it as from worse than death.
It is the life-in-death of Poet Coleridge. That fable of the Dead-Sea
Apes ceases to be a fable. The poor Worker starved to death is not the
saddest of sights. He lies there, dead on his shield; fallen down into
the bosom of his old Mother; with haggard pale face, sorrow-worn, but
stilled now into divine peace, silently appeals to the Eternal God and
all the Universe,--the most silent, the most eloquent of men.

Exceptions,--ah yes, thank Heaven, we know there are exceptions. Our
case were too hard, were there not exceptions, and partial exceptions
not a few, whom we know, and whom we do not know. Honour to the name
of Ashley,--honour to this and the other valiant Abdiel, found
faithful still; who would fain, by work and by word, admonish their
Order not to rush upon destruction! These are they who will, if not
save their Order, postpone the wreck of it;--by whom, under blessing
of the Upper Powers, 'a quiet euthanasia spread over generations,
instead of a swift torture-death concentred into years,' may be
brought about for many things. All honour and success to these. The
noble man can still strive nobly to save and serve his Order;--at
lowest, he can remember the precept of the Prophet: "Come out of her,
my people; come out of her!"

* * * * *

To sit idle aloft, like living statues, like absurd Epicurus'-gods, in
pampered isolation, in exclusion from the glorious fateful battlefield
of this God's-World: it is a poor life for a man, when all
Upholsterers and French-Cooks have done their utmost for it!--Nay
what a shallow delusion is this we have all got into, That any man
should or can keep himself apart from men, have 'no business' with
them, except a cash-account 'business'! It is the silliest tale a
distressed generation of men ever took to telling one another. Men
cannot live isolated: we _are_ all bound together, for mutual good or
else for mutual misery, as living nerves in the same body. No highest
man can disunite himself from any lowest. Consider it. Your poor
'Werter blowing out his distracted existence because Charlotte will
not have the keeping thereof:' this is no peculiar phasis; it is
simply the highest expressio