LITMIR.BIZ

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      Will never my winds go sleep in the West?

      Will never my wheels, which whirl the sun

      And satellites, have rest?

      NEMOPHILY

      An earnest plea was once entered in Maga's pages for the bodies of saints. Yet it is to be hoped that others not included in that respectable class may have physical needs also, and it is to be feared that they may not be above the necessity of a little of the same invigorating tonic. For there are not a few on this continent of ours, whom the Avvocata del Diavolo would certainly expect to enter a nolo contendere, who stand in much need of a healthy animalism. That these sinners would be benefited by what Mr. Kingsley's critics call "muscular Christianity" cannot be denied. For they are not sinners beyond all hope of amendment, by any means; and their offences being rather against the laws and light of Nature than against any of the commands of the Decalogue, it is earnestly desired that they be brought within the pale of promise, even if they never reach the sacred fane of canonization.

      Indeed, at the outset, let there be a protest entered on behalf of the sinner against this unnecessary pity of the saint. It is a part of that false halo with which enthusiastic admiration (reckless of gilding and ruinously prodigal of ochre) delights to endue the favored heads of the beati. The saint himself countenances the folly, and meekly inclines his head (sideways) to the rays. It is a part of the capital of the calling to look interesting. The revered and reverend Charles Honeyman, in the hands of that acute manager, Mr. Sherrick, was bidden to sit in his pew at evening service and cough. A qualified consumption and a moderate bronchitis are no bad substitutes for eloquence, learning, and that indiscreet piety which is so careless of feminine favor as to bring into the pulpit a robust person and to the dinner-table a healthy appetite.

      But the saint, if he have a reasonable sense of his pastoral duty, gets, malgré lui, a very fair share of that open-air medicine which is supposed to be the great lack of his profession. For if he be a clergyman in a rural parish of tolerable extent and with no great superfluity of wealth, he will not want for either air or exercise. The George Herbert so situated finds by no means his whole round of duty in the study. Old Mrs. Smith, sick and bedridden, lives a couple of miles from the parsonage; but the thoughtless creature actually expects a weekly visit and half-hour's reading of certain old familiar English literature, and will remind her pastor of it, if the expected day pass without his coming. Jones and his wife, who live in just the other direction, are wantonly apt, upon the insufficient plea of a long walk, to be missed from their wonted pew on a stormy Sunday, and must be looked up. Little Mary Gray has not been to Sunday-school. Cause suspected,—insufficient shoes. Bessy Bell, up the cross-road, quite over beyond Beman's Farms, is likewise delinquent, from the opposite want of a bonnet. Wilson, the cross-grained vestryman, has an idea, which never fails by Saturday night to break out into a positive rush of conviction, that the minister is neglecting his studies and "going to Rome," if he doesn't in the course of the week go to Wilson and carry him the Church papers and take a look at the Wilson prize-pigs. So good Mr. Herbert never fails, in due attestation of his "abhorrence of the Bishop of Rome and his detestable enormities," to foot it over the rocky hill and down across the rickety little bridge and past the poor-house farm, (where he stops on a little private business of his own, that perhaps makes a few old hearts and certainly one old coat-pocket the lighter,) and so on, a good piece, through the woods, to where Vestryman Wilson is bending over the hoe or swinging the axe, and thinking the while what an easy life the parson has of it.

      Then Mr. Herbert gets the occasional tonic of a brisk walk over the hard-beaten snow, of a moonlight winter's night. A walk-only think of it!—over the crisp, crunching snow, to the distant outlying hamlet of Paton's Corner, where a few are gathered in the little school-house to hear him preach, and to give him the happy relief of a five-mile tramp home again.

      It is really doubtful if dumb-bells, a gymnasium, and a pickerel-back racing-wherry would meet precisely the case of Mr. Herbert, however desirable for city saints who have plenty of spare sixpences for the omnibuses.

      But the miserable sinner,—"where," as the shepherd exclaimed, to Mr. Weller's indignation, "is the miserable sinner?" Keeping school, keeping books, making books, standing behind counters when busy and on street-corners when disengaged, doing anything or everything but taking care of his precious body, and thereby giving his precious soul the chance of being in very bad company, and following the fate of poor Tray, and of the well-meaning stork in Dr. Aesop's fable. What shall he, or rather, what can he, do with his leisure? For leisure more or less almost every young man has,—and it is of young men, and especially of the very young men, that we are benevolently writing. If he dwell in an inland town, the boat-club is hopeless,—and boat-clubs, though capital things for the young gentlemen of Harvard and Yale and Trinity, have also their drawbacks. One cannot always be ready to move in complete unison with a dozen fellow-mortals. Pendennis is never ready when the club are desirous to row; Newcome is perpetually anxious to tempt the wave when the wave tempts nobody else. The gymnasium gets to be a wearisome round of very mill-horse-like work, after the varieties of possible dislocation of all one's bones have been exhausted. Climbing ropes and poles with nothing but cobwebs at the top, and leaping horses with only tan at the bottom, grow monotonous after six months' steady dissipation thereat. Base-ball clubs do not always find desirable commons, and the municipal fathers of the towns have a prejudice against them in the streets. What shall youth, conscious of muscle and eager for fresh air, do? Even the gloves are not fancy-free, but are very apt to bring with them the slang of the ring and the beastly associations of professional pugilism. Youth looks up to its teachers; but if its teachers in the manly art be the Game-Chicken, the Pet, the Slasher, youth, in learning to respect the brute strength of such men, will hardly learn to respect itself.

      But—and here lies the purport of this article—there is hardly a town or village of New England which has not within a quarter of a mile of its suburbs a patch of woodland or a strip of sandy beach. What is to hinder the sinner, if he repent him of the foul air and cramped posture of which he has been the victim, from a little pedestrianism? Do American men and boys ever walk? Drive, it is known they do; they can always get time for that.

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