Observers of the sick think very seriously of their liability to become wedded to their own ways, and engrossed by their own occupations. The fact is as they see it; but it would be happy for us if we had no worse mistakes to apprehend. Those of the sequestered who may re-enter the world will be pretty sure to fall in love with new ways and employments, and to feel a quite sufficient disgust with their own. And if they are never to re-enter life, is it not well for them that they can spend some energies, which would otherwise be corrosive, upon outward things? If their souls are too narrow and purblind to live beyond the bounds of their abode, the best thing for them is to get through the rest of their time as easily as they can, in the way that suits them best. If they are of a higher order, their observers may be assured of two things--that their investment of energy on the ways and occupations of their singular and trying life, is no more than a needful absorption of a power which would otherwise destroy them; and also, that there is no fear of these things becoming indispensable to them or sufficient for them. There are hours, witnessed by no observers, when they find it wise to desist from their most esteemed employments, in condescension to their own weakness, and recognise in this discipline the lesson of the day. There are hours, witnessed by no observers, when the insufficiency of such objects is felt as keenly and pressingly as by the Missionary on his way to the heathen, or the Prime Minister with the interests of nations in the balance before his eyes--or by the drowning man before whose soul life lies pictured in the instant of time which remains to him. This liability, though real, is insignificant and transient, compared with many others. There is a safeguard against it, too, in our own weakness. There is even, for some, a danger of growing absolutely idle, from a sense of the littleness of what they can do. Formerly they acted on the rule--“not a day without a line,” and now, thrown out of their habit by the absolute incapacity of some days, and disheartened by the small show made by their utmost rational diligence, they give up, and do nothing,--or nothing with regularity. This is a fearful danger. Nowhere are habits of regular employment more necessary than in such a life as ours; and, if we cannot preserve the absolute erectness of rationality,--if we must lean to the error of particularity or of indifference--I have no doubt of the former being the safer of the two;--the least injurious, and the most curable under a change of influences.