The Puritans, I have read in Southey's book, knew the
distinction. They made people observe Sunday rigorously, would not let a
nurserymaid walk out in the fields with children for recreation on that
day. But _then_ they gave the people a holiday from all sorts of work
every second Tuesday. This was giving to the two Caesars that which was
_his_ respective. Wise, beautiful, thoughtful, generous legislators!
Would Wilberforce give us our Tuesdays? No; he would turn the six days
into sevenths,--
"And those three smiling seasons of the year
Into a Russian winter."
OLD PLAY.
I am sitting opposite a person who is making strange distortions with
the gout, which is not unpleasant pleasant,--to me, at least. What is
the reason we do not sympathize with pain, short of some terrible
surgical operation? Hazlitt, who boldly says all he feels, avows that
not only he does not pity sick people, but he hates them. I obscurely
recognize his meaning. Pain is probably too selfish a consideration, too
simply a consideration of self-attention. We pity poverty, loss of
friends, etc.,--more complex things, in which the sufferer's feelings
are associated with others. This is a rough thought suggested by the
presence of gout; I want head to extricate it and plane it. What is all
this to your letter? I felt it to be a good one, but my turn, when I
write at all, is perversely to travel out of the record, so that my
letters are anything but answers.
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