Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 49.djvu/428

410 ones. The new writers give us the last refinements and developments of thought, the latest paradoxes, and all that is up to date in style and expression; the old ones are better interpreters of primal Nature, and of what is broad and fundamental in humanity. In these pauses of life we should try to take to heart the lesson that Wordsworth teaches in his celebrated sonnet:

 The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;

and which a later poet echoes when he exclaims:

 The will to neither strive nor cry. The power to feel with others give; Calm, calm me more, nor let me die Before I have begun to live!

The Roman satirist Persius gives this pithy advice: "Dwell with yourself, and find out how little you really require." In our holidays it would be well, instead of pampering ourselves, to try to reduce life to its simplest, or at least to comparatively simple, elements. Thus can we best renew and rejuvenate our spirits, and bring ourselves to feel how little the joy of life depends upon the luxuries and artificialities of advanced civilization. These are old ideas and have been much better expressed by many writers of note; but we are all apt to forget the good counsels we receive, and a timely reminder can do no harm. Particularly in a civilization so restless as ours and so avid of novelty, is a period of rest far from the hurry and turmoil of the city a matter of necessity. Otherwise what do we tend to become?—mere creatures of the moment, rushing from task to task or from amusement to amusement, hurriedly scanning the headlines of our papers or the illustrations of our magazines, constantly absorbed in the actualities and trivialities of life, and constantly tending toward a soulless materialism in thought and sentiment. If our civilization, however, is to count for anything serious in the great chain of human history, we must get more soul into it—we must strive to rise above the routine and mere mechanics of existence. We must find out and take the truth home to our hearts, that life is something more than meat, that the body is of more dignity than its raiment, and that the soul of man is destined for other and higher uses than simply to reflect the shows of the passing moment. Let us in our holidays, if we are so fortunate as to have any, try to baptize ourselves anew in the fresh fountains of natural beauty which almost every countryside affords, let us attune ourselves to the harmonies of Nature, let us get sight of our own souls, "our true deep-buried selves, being one with which," as one whom we all know has finely said, "we are one with the whole world."

is not one of those philosophers who think it a duty to hold severely and loftily aloof from practical and everyday questions. He is keenly interested in the daily life of the people in the widest sense of the word; and we may attribute to that fact the zeal he has recently displayed in connection with the proposition to make a radical change in the system of weights and measures now and for many generations established in England. Since we last referred to this subject Mr. Spencer has addressed two further communications to the London Times in relation thereto. The second of these we quote entire, as being a brief yet comprehensive statement, from the writer's standpoint, of the whole question.