So shall you noble be as well as rich, And as a king watch for the general good. Raised to a higher level, you shall find With large enjoyments vast constraints, vast cares. Be swayed by wider interests, be touched By wiser instincts of the experienced heart, And, since all greatness is a ponderous weight, Be capable of vaster sufferance. Your joys shall be as heaven, your griefs as hell. Rise early, O my scholars, to be rich, And make Expediency your rule of life. Then, when the utmost scale of wealth is gain’d, And other lives are to your own annex’d By the soul’s grasping power, this guide of life, This sure Expediency, shall suffer change. When appetites shall tame to prudences And Prudence purge herself to Sacred Law, When lusts shall sweeten into sympathies, And royal Justice out of Anger spring, When the expanding Self grows infinite, Then shall Expediency, the guide of life, In Virtue die, in Virtue rise again. REST. {43} DEAREST FRIEND, THE subject of your meeting of to-morrow is so suggestive that I would gladly join you all, and write an essay on it, if I had health and time. I have neither, and, perhaps, better so. My essay, I candidly avow, would tend to prove that no essay ought to be written on the subject. It has no reality. A sort of intuitive instinct led you to couple “Ghosts and Rest” together. There is, here down, and there ought to be, no Rest. Life is an _aim_; an aim which can be _approached_, not _reached_, here down. There is, therefore, no rest. Rest is immoral. It is not mine now to give a definition of the _aim_; whatever it is, there is one, there _must_ be one. Without it, Life has no sense. It is atheistical; and, moreover, an irony and a deception. I entertain all possible respect for the members of your Club; but I venture to say that any contribution on Rest which will not exhibit at the top a definition of Life will wander sadly between wild arbitrary intellectual display and commonplaces. Life is no sinecure, no “_recherche du bonheur_” to be secured, as the promulgators of the theory had it, by guillotine, or, as their less energetic followers have it, by railway shares, selfishness, or contemplation. Life is, as Schiller said, “a battle and a march;” a battle for Good against Evil, for Justice against arbitrary privileges, for Liberty against Oppression, for associated Love against Individualism; a march onwards to Self, through collective Perfecting, to the progressive realization of an Ideal, which is only dawning to our mind and soul. Shall the battle be finally won during life-time? Shall it on Earth? are we believing in a Millennium? Don’t we feel that the spiral curve through which we ascend had its beginning elsewhere, and has its end, if any, beyond this terrestrial world of ours? Where is then a possible foundation for your essays and sketches?