1859.] Concerning Hurry and Leisure. for the system to take any firm root on this uncongenial soil-Episcopacy does not spread. Of course where Episcopacy was rampant, Jacobite traditions flourished vigorously. The Chevalier landed in the '15 at Peterhead, and the whole 'fencible men' of the town, including Mistress Walker, Janet Dickie, Widow Brown, and Widow Bodie,' formed themselves into a civic guard. Not a few, moreover, of the beautiful and stirring ballads, in which the unhappy chivalry of a doomed house found its most pathetic expression, were composed in Buchan, written many of them by men of lowly origin and humble life, who yet through days of labour, And nights devoid of ease, 145 John Skinner was one of the most tuneful of these rustic poets, and his life, if rightly read, is an idyll in itself-true, simple, and patriarchal. He was a brave and honest gentleman, genial and easy tempered as a singer should be, yet with a quiet firmness of character and conviction that would have nerved him to die, had it been required of him, for what he deemed to be the church of God. To our perspiring politicians we commend the burden of his cheerful and tolerant philosophy: What signifies't for folks to chide For what was done before them; To drop their Whig-mig-morum; SHIRLEY. CONCERNING HURRY AND LEISURE. OH what a blessing it is to have time to breathe, and think, and look around one! I mean, of course, that all this is a blessing to the man who has been overdriven :) who has been living for many days in a breathless hurry, pushing and driving on, trying to get through his work, yet never seeing the end of it, not knowing to what task he ought to turn first, so many are pressing upon him altogether. Some folk, I am informed, like to live in a fever of excitement, and in a ceaseless crowd of occupations: but such folk form the minority of the race. Most human beings will agree in the assertion that it is a horrible feeling to be in a hurry. It wastes the tissues of the body; it fevers the fine mechanism of the brain; it renders it impossible for one to enjoy the scenes of nature. Trees, fields, sunsets, rivers, breezes, and the like, must all be enjoyed at leisure, if enjoyed at all. There is not the slightest use in a man's paying a hurried visit to the country. He may as well go there blindfold, as go in a hurry. He will never see the country. He will have a perception, no doubt, of hedgerows and grass, of green lanes and silent cottages, perhaps of great hills and rocks, of various items which go towards making the country; but the country itself he will never see. That feverish atmosphere which he carries with him will distort and transform even individual objects; but it will utterly exclude the view of the whole. A circling London fog could not do so more completely. For quiet is the great characteristic and the great charm of country scenes; and you cannot see or feel quiet when you are not quiet yourself. A man flying though this peaceful valley in an express-train at the rate of fifty miles an hour, might just as reasonably fancy that to us, its inhabitants, the trees and hedges seem always dancing, rushing, and circling about, as they seem to him in looking from the window of the flying carriage; as imagine that, when he comes for a day or two's visit, he sees these landscapes as they are in themselves, and as they look to their ordinary inhabitants. The quick pulse of London keeps with him: he cannot, for a long time, feel sensibly an influence so little startling, as faintly flavoured, as that of our simple country life. We have all beheld some country scenes, pleasing but not very striking, while driving hastily to catch a train for which we feared we should be too late; and afterwards, when we came to know them well, how different they looked! I have been in a hurry. I have been tremendously busy. I have got through an amazing amount of work in the last few weeks, as I ascertain by looking over the recent pages of my diary. You can never be sure whether you have been working hard or not, except by consulting your diary. Sometimes you have an oppressed and worn-out feeling of having been overdriven, of having done a vast deal during many days past; when lo! you turn to the uncompromising record, you test the accuracy of your feeling by that unerring and unimpeach able standard; and you find that, after all, you have accomplished very little. The discovery is mortifying, but it does you good; and besides other results, it enables you to see how very idle and useless people, who keep no diary, may easily bring themselves to believe that they are among the hardestwrought of mortals. They know they feel weary; they know they have been in a bustle and worry; they think they have been in it much longer than is the fact. For it is curious how readily we believe that any strongly-felt state of mind or outward condition-strongly-felt at the present moment-has been lasting for a very long time. You have been in very low spirits: you fancy now that you have been so for a great portion of your life, or at any rate for weeks past: you turn to your diary,-why, eight and forty hours ago you were as merry as a cricket during the pleasant drive with Smith, or the cheerful evening that you spent with Snarling. I can well imagine that when some heavy misfortune befals a man, he soon begins to feel as if it had befallen him a long, long time ago: he can hardly remember days which were not darkened by it it seems to have been the condition of his being almost since his birth. And so, if you have been toiling very hard for three days your pen in your hand almost from morning to night perhaps-rely upon it that at the end of those days, save for the uncompromising diary that keeps you right, you would have in your mind a general impression that you had been labouring desperately for a very long period for many days, for several weeks, for a month or two. After heavy rain has fallen for four or five days, all persons who do not keep diaries invariably think that it has rained for a fortnight. If keen frost lasts in winter for a fortnight, all persons without diaries have a vague belief that there has been frost for a month or six weeks. You resolve to read Alison's valuable History of the French Revolu tion (I take for granted you are a young person): you go at it every evening for a week. At the end of that period you have a vague, uneasy impression, that you have been soaked in a sea of platitudes, or weighed down by an incubus of words, for about a hundred years. There is indeed one signal exception to the law of mind which has been noticed the law, to wit, that if your present state is one that is strongly felt, you naturally fancy that it has lasted much longer than it has actually done. Month by month you receive with gratitude a certain periodical whose name it is unnecessary further to particularize. You sit down to read it, having first cut its leaves. You fall into an ecstasy of interest in what you read. And when you return to a state of perception of the outward world, you fancy you have been reading for about ten minutes. You consult your watch: you have been reading for three hours! Need that monthly maga zine's name be mentioned? : Every human being, then, who is desirous of knowing for certain whether he is doing much work or little, ought to preserve a record of what he does. And such a record, I believe, will in most cases serve to humble him who keeps it, and to spur on to more and harder work. It will seldom flatter vanity, or encourage a tendency to rest on the oars, as though enough had been done. You must have laboured very hard and very constantly indeed, if it looks much in black and white. And how much work may be expressed by a very few words in the diary! Think of Elihu Burrit's forged fourteen hours, then Hebrew Bible three hours.' 1859.] About Keeping a Diary. Think of Sir Walter's short memorial of his eight pages before breakfast, and what large and closelywritten pages they were! And how much stretch of such minds as they have got-how many quick and laborious processes of the mental machinery-are briefly embalmed in the diaries of humbler and smaller men, in such entries as 'after breakfast, walk in garden with children for ten minutes; then Article on 10 pp.; working hard from 10 till 1 p.m.; then left off with bad headache, and very weary? And don't fancy, reader, that the ten pages thus accomplished are ten pages of the magazine: they are ten pages of manuscript, probably making about three of print. The truth is, you can't represent work by any record of it. As yet, there is no way known of photographing the mind's exertion, and thus preserving an accurate memorial of it. You might as well expect to find in such a general phrase as a stormy sea the delineation of the countless shapes and transformations of the waves throughout several hours in several miles of ocean, as think to see in Sir Walter Scott's eight pages before breakfast an adequate representation of the hard, varied, wearing-out work that went to turn them off. And so it is, that the diary which records the work of a very hard-wrought man, may very likely appear to careless, unsympathizing readers, to express not such a very laborous life after all. Who has not felt this, in reading the biography of that amiable, able, indefatigable, and over wrought man, Dr. Kitto? He worked himself to death by labour at his desk: but only the reader who has learned by personal experience to feel for him, is likely to see how he did it. But besides such reasons as these, there are strong arguments why every man should keep a diary. I cannot imagine how many reflective men do not. How narrow and small a thing their actual life must be! They live merely in the present; and the present is only a shifting point, a constantly progressing mathematical line, which parts the future from the past. If a man keeps no diary, the path crumbles away behind him as his feet leave 147 it; and days gone by are little more than a blank, broken by a few distorted shadows. His life is all confined within the limits of to-day. Who does not know how imperfect a thing memory is? It not merely forgets; it misleads. Things in memory do not merely fade away, preserving as they fade their own lineaments so long as they can be seen: they change their aspect, they change their place, they turn to something quite different from the fact. In the picture of the past, which memory unaided by any written record sets before us, the perspective is entirely wrong. How capriciously some events seem quite recent, which the diary shows are really far away; and how unaccountably many things look far away, which in truth are not left many weeks behind us! A man might almost as well not have lived at all as entirely forget that he has lived, and entirely forget what he did on those departed days. But I think that almost every person would feel a great interest in looking back, day by day, upon what he did and thought upon that day twelvemonths, that day three or five years. The trouble of writing the diary is very small. A few lines, a few words, written at the time, suffice, when you look at them, to bring all (what Yankees call) the surroundings of that season before you. Many little things come up again, which you know quite well you never would have thought of again but for your glance at those words, and still which you feel you would be sorry to have forgotten. There must be a richness about the life of a person who keeps a diary, unknown to other men. And a million more little links and ties must bind him to the members of his family circle, and to all among whom he lives. Life, to him looking back, is not a bare line, stringing together his personal identity; it is surrounded, intertwined, entangled, with thousands and thousands of slight incidents, which give it beauty, kindliness, reality. Some folk's life is like an oak walkingstick, straight and varnished; useful, but hard and bare. Other men's life (and such may yours and mine, kindly reader, ever be), is like that oak when it was not a stick but a branch, and waved, leaf-enveloped, and with lots of little twigs growing out of it, upon the summer tree. And yet more precious than the power of the diary to call up again a host of little circumstances and facts, is its power to bring back the indescribable but keenly-felt atmosphere of those departed days. The old time comes over you. It is not merely a collection, an aggregate of facts, that comes back; it is something far more excellent than that: it is the soul of days long ago; it is the dear Auld lang syne itself! The perfume of hawthorn-hedges faded is there; the breath of breezes that fanned our grey hair when it made sunny curls, often smoothed down by hands that are gone; the sunshine on the grass where these old fingers made daisy-chains; and snatches of music, compared with which anything you hear at the Opera is extremely poor. Therefore keep your diary, my friend. Begin at ten years old, if you have not yet attained that age. It will be a curious link between the altered seasons of your life; there will be something very touching about even the changes which will pass upon your handwriting. You will look back at it occasionally, and shed several tears of which you have not the least reason to be ashamed. No doubt when you look back, you will find many very silly things in it; well, you did not think them silly at the time; and possibly you may be humbler, wiser, and more sympathetic, for the fact that your diary will convince you (if you are a sensible person now), that probably you yourself, a few years or a great many years since, were the greatest fool you ever knew. Possibly at some future time you may look back with similar feelings on your present self: so you will see that it is very fit that meanwhile you should avoid self-confidence and cultivate humility; that you should not be bumptious in any way; and that you should bear, with great patience and kindliness, the follies of the young. Therefore, my reader, write up your diary daily. You may do so at either of two times: 1st. After breakfast, whenever you sit down to your work, and before you begin your work; 2nd. After you have done your indoors work, which ought not to be later than two p.m., and before you go out to your external duties. Some good men, as Dr. Arnold, have in addition to this brought up their history to the present period before retiring for the night. This is a good plan; it preserves the record of the day as it appears to us in two different moods: the record is therefore more likely to be a true one, uncoloured by any temporary mental state. Write down briefly what you have been doing. Never mind that the events are very little. Of course they must be; but you remember what Pope said of little things. State what work you did. Record the progress of matters in the garden. Mention where you took your walk, or ride, or drive. State anything particular concerning the horses, cows, dogs, and pigs. Preserve some memorial of the progress of the children. Relate the occasions on which you made a kite or a water-wheel for any of them; also the stories you told them, and the hymns you heard them repeat. You may preserve some mention of their more remarkable and old-fashioned sayings. Forsitan et olim hæc meminisse juvabit: all these things may bring back more plainly a little life when it has ceased; and set before you a rosy little face and a curly little head when they have mouldered into clay. Or if you go, as you would rather have it, before them, why, when one of your boys is Archbishop of Canterbury and the other Lord Chancellor, they may turn over the faded leaves, and be the better for reading those early records, and not impossibly think some kindly thoughts of their Governor who is far away. Record when the first snowdrop came, and the earliest primrose. Of course you will mention the books you read, and those (if any) which you write. Preserve some memorial, in short, of everything that interests you and yours; and look back each day, after you have written the few lines of your little chronicle, to see what you were about that day the preceding year. No one who in this simple spirit keeps a diary, can possibly be a bad, unfeeling, or cruel man. No scapegrace or blackguard could keep a diary such as that which has been described. I am 1859.] Locking up the Skeleton. not forgetting that various black guards, and extremely dirty ones, have kept diaries, but they have been diaries to match their own character. Even in reading Byron's diary, you can see that he was not so much a very bad fellow, as a very silly fellow, who thought it a grand thing to be esteemed very bad. When, by the way, will the day come when young men will cease to regard it as the perfection of youthful humanity to be a reckless, swaggering fellow, who never knows how much money he has or spends, who darkly hints that he has done many wicked things which he never did, who makes it a boast that he never reads anything, and thus who affects to be even a more ignorant numskull than he actually is? When will young men cease to be ashamed of doing right, and to boast of doing wrong (which they never did)? Thank God,' said poor Milksop to me the other day, although I have done a great many bad things, I never did, &c. &c. &c.' The silly fellow fancied that I should think a vast deal of one who had gone through so much, and sown such a large crop of wild oats. I looked at him with much pity. Ah! thought I to myself, there are fellows who actually do the things you absurdly pretend to have done; but if you had been one of those I should not have shaken hands with you five minutes since. With great difficulty did I refrain from patting his empty head, and saying, Oh, poor Milksop, you are a tremendous fool.' It is indeed to be admitted that by keeping a diary you are providing what is quite sure in days to come to be an occasional cause of sadness. Probably it will never conduce to cheerfulness to look back over those leaves. Well, you will be much the better for being sad occasionally. There are other things in this life than to put things in a ludicrous light, and laugh at them. That, too, is excellent in its time and place: but even Douglas Jerrold sickened of the forced fun of Punch, and thought this world had better ends than jesting. Don't let your diary fall behind: write it up day by day: or you will shrink from going back to it and continuing it, as Sir Walter Scott tells us he did. You will feel a double un 149 happiness in thinking you are neg lecting something you ought to do, and in knowing that to repair your omission demands an exertion attended with especial pain and sorrow. Avoid at all events that discomfort of diary-keeping, by scrupulous regularity: there are others which you cannot avoid, if you keep a diary at all, and occasionally look back upon it. It must tend to make thoughtful people sad, to be reminded of things concerning which we feel that we cannot think of them; that they have gone wrong, and cannot now be set right; that the evil is irremediable, and must just remain, and fret and worry whenever thought of; and life go on under that condition. It is like making up one's mind to live on under some incurable disease, not to be alleviated, not to be remedied, only if possible to be forgotten. Ordinary people have all some of these things: tangles in their life and affairs that cannot be unravelled and must be left alone: sorrowful things which they think cannot be helped. I think it highly inexpedient to give way to such a feeling; it ought to be resisted as far as it possibly can. The very worst thing that you can do with a skeleton is to lock the closet door upon it, and try to think no more of it. No: open the door: let in air and light: bring the skeleton out, and sort it manfully up: perhaps it may prove to be only the skeleton of a cat, or even no skeleton at all. There is many a house, and many a family, in which there is a skeleton, which is made the distressing nightmare it is, mainly by trying to ignore it. There is some fretting disagreement, some painful estrangement, made a thousand times worse by ill-judged endeavours to go on just as if it were not there. If you wish to get rid of it, you must recognise its existence, and treat it with frankness, and seek manfully to set it right. It is wonderful how few evils are remediless, if you fairly face them, and honestly try to remove them. Therefore, I say it earnestly, don't lock your skeleton-chamber door. If the skeleton be there, I defy you to forget that it is. And even if it could bring you present quiet, it is no healthful draught, the water |