from morning till night, though he may have grieved that he could not be watching the train of his thoughts during that time, yet the few hasty lines which at evening record his day’s experience will be more musical and true than his freest but idle fancy could have furnished.  Surely the writer is to address a world of laborers, and such therefore must be his own discipline.  He will not idly dance at his work who has wood to cut and cord before nightfall in the short days of winter; but every stroke will be husbanded, and ring soberly through the wood; and so will the strokes of that scholar’s pen, which at evening record the story of the day, ring soberly, yet cheerily, on the ear of the reader, long after the echoes of his axe have died away.  The scholar may be sure that he writes the tougher truth for the calluses on his palms.  They give firmness to the sentence.  Indeed, the mind never makes a great and successful effort, without a corresponding energy of the body.  We are often struck by the force and precision of style to which hard-working men, unpractised in writing, easily attain when required to make the effort.  As if plainness, and vigor, and sincerity, the ornaments of style, were better learned on the farm and in the workshop, than in the schools.  The sentences written by such rude hands are nervous and tough, like hardened thongs, the sinews of the deer, or the roots of the pine.  As for the graces of expression, a great thought is never found in a mean dress; but though it proceed from the lips of the Woloffs, the nine Muses and the three Graces will have conspired to clothe it in fit phrase.  Its education has always been liberal, and its implied wit can endow a college.  The world, which the Greeks called Beauty, has been made such by being gradually divested of every ornament which was not fitted to endure.  The Sibyl, “speaking with inspired mouth, smileless, inornate, and unperfumed, pierces through centuries by the power of the god.”  The scholar might frequently emulate the propriety and emphasis of the farmer’s call to his team, and confess that if that were written it would surpass his labored sentences.  Whose are the truly labored sentences?  From the weak and flimsy periods of the politician and literary man, we are glad to turn even to the description of work, the simple record of the month’s labor in the farmer’s almanac, to restore our tone and spirits.  A sentence should read as if its author, had he held a plough instead of a pen, could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end.  The scholar requires hard and serious labor to give an impetus to his thought.  He will learn to grasp the pen firmly so, and wield it gracefully and effectively, as an axe or a sword.  When we consider the weak and nerveless periods of some literary men, who perchance in feet and inches come up to the standard of their race, and are not deficient in girth also, we are amazed at the immense sacrifice of thews and sinews.  What! these proportions,—­these bones,—­and this their work!  Hands which could have felled an ox have hewed this fragile matter which would not have tasked a lady’s fingers!  Can this be a stalwart man’s work, who has a marrow in his back and a tendon Achilles in his heel?  They who set up the blocks of Stonehenge did somewhat, if they only laid out their strength for once, and stretched themselves.