HALF HOURS. 16 1 



what he meant, with or without a German grammar. Never tell 

 me that a man knows his own aims, that he has any one predomi- 

 nating interest in view, who can spend more than fifteen minutes 

 contriving what he is to do flext !^I have known several very good 

 natured well-meaning persons who invariably happened to do 

 precisely what they did not intend to do; and, upon comparing notes 

 with them (from some passages in my own life of a like enigmatical 

 character), I became satisfied that they owed their mistakes, firstly, 

 to not knowing their own aims, and, secondly, to employing too long 

 time in endeavouring to find them out; whereby resolution became 

 drowsy, and they stumbled the wrong way. The author of the 

 "Sorrows of Werter,'' provides, too, for this dilemma, by advising 

 that we should always do the work first that lies nearest at hand, 

 which of course would put an end to the debate about precedency. 

 The neglect of this rule is indeed a fertile source of confusion in the 

 winding up of accounts ; and I think it will be found that a great 

 deal of unnecessary fatigue may be traced to this neglect, besides 

 the squandering of innumerable half hours inasmuch as a straight- 

 forward path conducts sooner to your journey's end than a zig-zag 

 one. The German philosopher doubtless gave his advice in both 

 instances from experience, and wrote feelingly. He would not have 

 been in early life the advocate of suicide, and his hero weary of all 

 things under the sun, especially as he was himself a passionate 

 admirer of physical nature, if he had then been in possession of these 

 valuable rules ! With transcendent powers of intellect, and a tolerable 

 gift of moral sensibility, he ranged the "mystery of the universe" 

 (as Madame de Stael has it), during seventy years sentimentalist, 

 deist, atheist, dramatist, demonologist, theologist, every sort of ist, 

 before he fixed upon the work nearest at hand the knowledge of 

 himself and it was not till he found himself approaching the brink, 

 towards the solution of his own share in "the mystery, 1 ' that he began 

 seriously to examine what might be his own peculiar and individual 

 concern in the responsibilities of time, and to settle his aims with 

 reference to something to come beyond it. To be sure, Lord Byron 

 and Goethe were both tremendous idlers of half hours, and utterly 

 ignorant of their own aims, long after their minority ! But it is 

 beyond my grasp and purpose to analyse their gigantic eccentricities 

 as well might I pretend to acquaintance with the comet's path. 

 Prudently retreating from "criticisms and comparisons," be it my 

 humbler aim to draw wisdom from their experience, and to adopt 

 forthwith the lesson afforded me by the latter. Years, not half 

 hours, have I spent in considering what I should. do next, without 

 having either the genius or the variety of knowledge of those 

 illustrious men to puzzle my choice. My own aims I am pretty sure 

 about, though "persevering" in them I have found to be a difficulty; 

 but I have always been haunted with an uneasy notion that idleness 

 is a vice. Cotton Mather says it is "the most violent of all our 

 passions/' I am determined that it shall no longer lay hands on my 

 half hours ; and as I may not have many remaining, and can never 

 et back the thousand and one I have expended in ruminating upon 

 ints for tragedies, skeletons of fashionable life, novels, segments of 



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