urnish
my skull to fill it; but you expect something, and shall have a notelet.
Is Sunday, not divinely speaking, but humanly and holiday-sically, a
blessing? Without its institution, would our rugged taskmasters have
given us a leisure day so often, think you, as once in a month? or, if
it had not been instituted, might they not have given us every sixth
day? Solve me this problem. If we are to go three times a-day to church,
why has Sunday slipped into the notion of a _holi_day? A HOLY-day, I
grant it. The Puritans, I have read in Southey's book, knew the
distinction. They made people observe Sunday rigorously, would not let a
nurserymaid walk out in the fields with children for recreation on that
day. But _then_ they gave the people a holiday from all sorts of work
every second Tuesday. This was giving to the two Caesars that which was
_his_ respective. Wise, beautiful, thoughtful, generous legislators!
Would Wilberforce give us our Tuesdays? No; he would turn the six days
into sevenths,--

"And those three smiling seasons of the year
Into a Russian winter."
OLD PLAY.

I am sitting opposite a person who is making strange distortions with
the gout, which is not unpleasant pleasant,--to me, at least. What is
the reason we do not sympathize with pain, short of some terrible
surgical operation? Hazlitt, who boldly says all he feels, avows that
not only he does not pity sick people, but he hates them. I obscurely
recognize his meaning. Pain is probably too selfish a consideration, too
simply a consideration of self-attention. We pity poverty, loss of
friends, etc.,--more complex things, in which the sufferer's feelings
are associated with others. This is a rough thought suggested by the
presence of gout; I want head to extricate it and plane it. What is all
this to your letter? I felt it to be a good one, but my turn, when I
write at all, is perversely to travel out of the record, so that my
letters are anything but answers. So you still want a motto? You must
not take my ironical one, because your book, I take it, is too serious
for it. Bickerstaff might have used it for _his_ lucubrations. What do
you think of (for a title) Religio Tremuli? or Tremebundi? There is
Religio Medici and Laici. But perhaps the volume is not quite Quakerish
enough, or exclusively so, for it. Your own "Vigils" is perhaps the
best. While I have space, let me congratulate with you the return of
spring,--what a summery spring too! All th