Non-Fiction > Books > London, 1887 - Virginibus Puerisque, and other papers

An Apology for Idlers wj
Thence he shall command an agreeable, if
no very noble prospect ; and while others
behold the East and West, the Devil and
the Sunrise, he will be contentedly aware of
a sort of morning hour upon all sublunary
things, with an army of shadows running
speedily and in many different directions
into the great daylight of Eternity. The
shadows and the generations, the shrill
doctors and the plangent wars, go by into
ultimate silence and emptiness ; but under-
neath all this, a man may see, out of the
Belvedere windows, much green and peace-
ful landscape ; many firelit parlours ; good
people laughing, drinking, and making love
as they did before the Flood or the French
Revolution ; and the old shepherd telling
his tale under the hawthorn.
Extreme busyness^ whether at school or
college, kirk or market, is a symptom of
deficient vitality ; and a faculty for idleness
implies a catholic appetite and a strong
sense of personal identity. There is a sort
of dead-alive, hackneyed people about, who