o as illusions.
The nightmare illusion of middle age, the bear's hug of custom gradually
squeezing the life out of a man's soul, had not yet begun for these
happy-starr'd young Belgians. They still knew that the interest
they took in their business was a trifling affair compared to their
spontaneous, long-suffering affection for nautical sports. To know what
you prefer, instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you
you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive. Such a man may be
generous; he may be honest in something more than the commercial sense;
he may love his friends with an elective, personal sympathy, and not
accept them as an adjunct of the station to which he has been called. He
may be a man, in short, acting on his own instincts, keeping in his
own shape that God made him in; and not a mere crank in the social
engine-house, welded on principles that he does not understand, and for
purposes that he does not care for.

*****

I suppose none of us recognise the great part that is played in life by
eating and drinking. The appetite is so imperious that we can stomach
the least interesting viands, and pass off a dinner hour thankfully
enough on bread and water; just as there are men who must read
something, if it were only 'Bradshaw's Guide.' But there is a romance
about the matter, after all. Probably the table has more devotees than
love; and I am sure that food is much more generally entertaining than
scenery. Do you give in, as Walt Whitman would say, that you are any the
less immortal for that? The true materialism is to be ashamed of what
we are. To detect the flavour of an olive is no less a piece of human
perfection than to find beauty in the colours of the sunset.

*****

For the country people to see Edinburgh on her hill-tops, is one
thing; it is another for the citizen, from the thick of his affairs, to
overlook the country. It should be a genial and ameliorating influence
in life; it should prompt good thoughts and remind him of Nature's
unconcern: that he can watch from day to day, as he trots officeward,
how the spring green brightens in the wood, or the field grows black
under a moving ploughshare. I have been tempted, in this connection, to
deplore the slender faculties of the human race, with its penny-whistle
of a voice, its dull ears, and its narrow range of sight. If you could
see as people are to see in heaven, if you had eyes such as you can
fancy for a superior race,