s
life! I thought he might as well have stayed at home; but you never can
tell wherein a man's life consists, nor in what he sets his pleasure:
one to drink, another to marry, a third to write scurrilous articles and
be repeatedly caned in public, and now this fourth, perhaps, to be an
apothecary in Brazil. As for his old father, he could conceive no reason
for the lad's behaviour. 'I had always bread for him,' he said; 'he ran
away to annoy me. He loved to annoy me. He had no gratitude.' But at
heart he was swelling with pride over his travelled offspring, and he
produced a letter out of his pocket, where, as he said, it was rotting,
a mere lump of paper rags, and waved it gloriously in the air. 'This
comes from America,' he cried, 'six thousand leagues away!' And the
wine-shop audience looked upon it with a certain thrill.

*****

The fame of other lands had reached them; the name of the eternal
city rang in their ears; they were not colonists, but pilgrims; they
travelled towards wine and gold and sunshine, but their hearts were set
on something higher. That divine unrest, that old stinging trouble of
humanity that makes all high achievements and all miserable failures,
the same that spread wings with Icarus, the same that sent Columbus into
the desolate Atlantic, inspired and supported these barbarians on their
perilous march.

*****

There is more adventure in the life of the working man who descends as a
common soldier into the battle of life, than in that of the millionaire
who sits apart in an office, like Von Moltke, and only directs the
manoeuvres by telegraph. Give me to hear about the career of him who
is in the thick of the business; to whom one change of market means an
empty belly, and another a copious and savoury meal. This is not the
philosophical, but the human side of economics; it interests like a
story; and the life of all who are thus situated partakes in a small way
of the charm of Robinson Crusoe; for every step is critical, and human
life is presented to you naked and verging to its lowest terms.

*****

An aspiration is a joy for ever, a possession as solid as a landed
estate, a fortune which we can never exhaust and which gives us year by
year a revenue of pleasurable activity. To have many of these is to be
spiritually rich.

*****

To be wholly devoted to some intellectual exercise is to have succeeded
in life; and perhaps only in law and the higher mathematics may this
devotion