Non-Fiction > Uncollected essays > Volumes 33-38, 1876-1878 - Cornhill magazine > Volume 33

690 WALKING TOURS.
remain where and what you are — is not this to know both wisdom and
virtue, and to dwell with happiness ? After all, it is not they who carry
flags, but they who look upon it from a private chamber, who have the fun
of the procession. And once you are at that, you are in the vei-y humour
of all social heresy. It is no time for shuffling, or for big, empty words.
If you ask yourself what you mean by fame, riches, or learning, the
answer is far to seek; and you go back into that kingdom of light
imaginations, which seems so vain in the eyes of Philistines perspiring
after wealth, and so momentous to those who are stricken with the
disproportions of the world, and, in the face of the gigantic stai-s, cannot
stop to split diflerences between two degrees of the infinitesimally small,
such as a tobacco pipe or the Roman Empire, a million of money or a
fiddle-stick's end.
You lean from the window, your last pipe reeking whitely into the
darkness, your body full of delicious pains, jonr mind enthroned in the
seventh circle of content ; when suddenly the mood changes, the weather-
cock goes about, and you ask yourself one question more : whether, for
the interval, you have been the wisest philosopher or the most egregious
of donkeys? Human experience is not yet able to reply; but at least
you have had a fine moment, and looked down upon all the kingdoms
of the earth. And whether it was wise or foolish, to-morrow's travel
urill carry you, body and mind, into some different parish of the infinite.
E. L. S.