y and skill, and it unbends like a loosened bow.

We may be enjoying our work, and we may even take glad refuge in it to
stave off depression, but we are then often adding fuel to the fire,
and tiring the very faculty of resistance, which hardly knows that it
needs resting.

The smallest change of scene, of company, of work may effect a
miraculous improvement when we are feeling low-spirited and listless.
It is not idleness as a rule that we want, but the use of other
faculties and powers and muscles.

And thus though our anxieties may be a real factor in our success, and
may give us the touch of prudence and vigilance we want, it does not do
to allow ourselves to drift into vague fears and dull depressions, and
we must fight them in a practical way. We must remember the case of
Naaman, who was vexed at being told to go and dip himself in a
mud-stained stream running violently in rocky places, when he might
have washed in Abana and Pharpar, the statelier, purer, fuller streams
of his native land. It is just the little homely torrent that we need,
and part of our cares come from being too dignified about them. It is
pleasanter to think oneself the battle-ground for high and tragical
forces of a spiritual kind, than to realise that some little homely bit
of common machinery is out of gear. But we must resist the temptation
to feel that our fears have a dark and great significance. We must
simply treat them as little sicknesses and ailments of the soul.

I therefore believe that fears are like those little fugitive gliding
things that seem to dart across the field of the eye when it is weak
and ailing, vague clusters and tangles and spidery webs, that float and
fly, and can never be fixed and truly seen; and that they are best
treated as we learn to treat common ailments, by not concerning
ourselves very much about them, by enduring and evading them and
distracting the mind, and not by facing them, because they will not be
faced; nor can they be dispelled by reason, because they are not in the
plane of reason at all, but phantoms gathered by the sick imagination,
distorted out of their proper shape, evil nightmares, the horror of
which is gone with the dawn. They are the shadows of our childishness,
and they show that we have a long journey before us; and they gain
their strength from the fact that we gather them together out of the
future like the bundle of sticks in the fable, when we shall have the
strength to snap