Is there any reason for this inordinate ambition to “get on”?  Louis Stevenson was happier, as a small boy with a bull’s-eye lantern at his belt, than any king upon his throne.  The secret of enjoyment is to learn to look about us, to value what our destiny has given us, to transform it into magic by some contributory gift of poetry or humor, to consider with contentment the lilies of the field.  The zest of life is in the living of it; and “to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.”

How often, in the roaring and tumultuary tide of life, we meet a man who sighs, “If only I could have a single day in which there was nothing that I had to do, nothing even that I had to think of, how happy I should be!” and yet this self-same man, if set down at a railway junction, will at once bestir himself to seek something to think of, something to do, and will spurn the gift of leisure.  The incessant hurry of our current life has tragically lured us to forget the art of loitering.  We are no longer able—­like Wordsworth, on his “old gray stone”—­to sit upon a trunk at some railway junction of our lives and listen reverently to the “mighty sum of things forever speaking.”

One of the loveliest women I have ever known—­the late Alison Cunningham—­told me a little anecdote of the author of The Lantern-Bearers which, so far as I know, has never yet been published.  When little Louis was about five years old, he did something naughty, and Cummy stood him up in a corner and told him he would have to stay there for ten minutes.  Then she left the room.  At the end of the allotted period, she returned and said, “Time’s up, Master Lou:  you may come out now.”  But the little boy stood motionless in his penitential corner.  “That’s enough:  time’s up,” repeated Cummy.  And then the child mystically raised his hand, and with a strange light in his eyes, “Hush...,” he said, “I’m telling myself a story....”

And, in the Christian Morals of Sir Thomas Browne, we may read the following passage:—­“He who must needs have company, must needs have sometimes bad company.  Be able to be alone.  Lose not the advantage of solitude, and the society of thyself; nor be only content, but delight to be alone and single with Omnipresency.  He who is thus prepared, the day is not uneasy nor the night black unto him.  Darkness may bound his eyes, not his imagination.  In his bed he may lie, like Pompey and his sons, in all quarters of the earth; may speculate the universe, and enjoy the whole world in the hermitage of himself.”

Wordsworth sitting quiescent and receptive in a lakeside landscape, little Louis standing in a corner, Sir Thomas Browne enjoying the whole world in the hermitage of himself:—­what a rebuke is offered by these images to those who fret and fume away the leisure that is granted them at all the waiting places of their lives!...  These disgruntled travelers nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita miss their privilege