be maintained, suffice to itself without reaction, and find
continual rewards without excitement.

*****

Study and experiment, to some rare natures, is the unbroken pastime of
a life. These are enviable natures; people shut in the house by sickness
often bitterly envy them; but the commoner man cannot continue to exist
upon such altitudes: his feet itch for physical adventure; his blood
boils for physical dangers, pleasures, and triumphs; his fancy, the
looker after new things, cannot continue to look for them in books and
crucibles, but must seek them on the breathing stage of life.

*****

Life goes before us, infinite in complication; attended by the most
various and surprising meteors; appealing at once to the eye, to the
ear, to the mind--the seat of wonder, to the touch--so thrillingly
delicate, and to the belly--so imperious when starved. It combines and
employs in its manifestation the method and material, not of one art
only, but of all the arts. Music is but an arbitrary trifling with a few
of life's majestic chords; painting is but a shadow of its pageantry
of light and colour; literature does but drily indicate that wealth
of incident, of moral obligation, of virtue, vice, action, rapture and
agony, with which it teems. To 'compete with life,' whose sun we cannot
look upon, whose passions and diseases waste and slay us--to compete
with the flavour of wine, the beauty of the dawn, the scorching of fire,
the bitterness of death and separation here is, indeed, a projected
escalade of heaven; here are, indeed, labours for a Hercules in a dress
coat, armed with a pen and a dictionary to depict the passions, armed
with a tube of superior flake-white to paint the portrait of the
insufferable sun. No art is true in this sense: none can 'compete with
life': not even history, built indeed of indisputable facts, but these
facts robbed of their vivacity and sting; so that even when we read
of the sack of a city or the fall of an empire, we are surprised, and
justly commend the author's talent, if our pulse be quickened. And mark,
for a last differentia, that this quickening of the pulse is, in almost
every case, purely agreeable; that these phantom reproductions of
experience, even at their most acute, convey decided pleasure; while
experience itself, in the cockpit of life, can torture and slay.

*****

Into how many houses would not the note of the monastery bell, dividing
the day into manageable portions, br