forbidden to scrutinise life, to wonder what it is all about, to study its problems, to apprehend its beauty and significance.  We admire a man who goes on making money long after he has made far more than he needs; we think a life honourably spent in editing Greek books.  Socrates in one of Plato’s dialogues quotes the opinion of a philosopher to the effect that when a man has made enough to live upon, he should begin to practise virtue.  “I think he should begin even earlier,” says the interlocutor; and I am wholly in agreement with him.  Travel is one of the expedients to which busy men resort, in order that they may forget their existence.  I do not venture to think this exactly culpable, but I feel sure that it is a pity that people do not do less and think more.  If a man asks what good comes from thinking, I can only retort by asking what good comes from the multiplication of unnecessary activity.  I am quite as much at a loss as any one else to say what is the object of life, but I do not feel any doubt that we are not sent into the world to be in a fuss.  Like the lobster in The Water-Babies, I cry, “Let me alone; I want to think!” because I believe that that occupation is at least as profitable as many others.

And then, too, without travelling more than a few miles from my door, I can see things fully as enchanting as I can see by ranging Europe.  I went to-day along a well-known road; just where the descent begins to fall into a quiet valley, there stands a windmill—­not one of the ugly black circular towers that one sometimes sees, but one of the old crazy boarded sort, standing on a kind of stalk; out of the little loopholes of the mill the flour had dusted itself prettily over the weather-boarding.  From a mysterious hatch half-way up leaned the miller, drawing up a sack of grain with a little pulley.  There is nothing so enchanting as to see a man leaning out of a dark doorway high up in the air.  He drew the sack in, he closed the panel.  The sails whirled, flapping and creaking; and I loved to think of him in the dusty gloom, with the gear grumbling among the rafters, tipping the golden grain into its funnel, while the rattling hopper below poured out its soft stream of flour.  Beyond the mill, the ground sank to a valley; the roofs clustered round a great church tower, the belfry windows blinking solemnly.  Hard by the ancient Hall peeped out from its avenue of elms.  That was a picture as sweet as anything I have ever seen abroad, as perfect a piece of art as could be framed, and more perfect than anything that could be painted, because it was a piece out of the old kindly, quiet life of the world.  One ought to learn, as the years flow on, to love such scenes as that, and not to need to have the blood and the brain stirred by romantic prospects, peaked hills, well-furnished galleries, magnificent buildings:  mutare animum, that is the secret, to grow more hopeful, more alive to delicate beauties, more tender, less exacting.  Nothing, it is true, can give us peace;