Imlac, the sage, describes, in “Rasselas” the placid flow of life enjoyed by a devout brotherhood, whose “time is regularly distributed; one duty succeeds another, so that they are not left open to the distraction of unguided choice, nor lost in the shades of listless inactivity. There is a certain task to be performed at an appropriated hour,” and the constraint is to them a pledge of happiness, hallowed as it is with a Divine sanction, and promissory of “an ampler ether, a diviner air” to come, in which they shall breathe more freely, and inhale more deeply, the breath of life. Freedom is not the being free to do nothing, or to do just what one likes, and when, and how, without why or wherefore. _La liberté n’est pas oisiveté_, says La Bruyère; and then he proceeds to say what liberty is: “C’est le choix de travail et de l’exercice: être libre, en un mot, n’est pas ne rien faire, c’est être seul arbitre de ce qu’on fait, ou de ce qu’on ne fait point. Quel bien en ce sens que la liberté!” But how much worthier of that note of admiration the gospel definitions, explicit or implicit, of _ce que c’est la liberté_! There is a touching suggestiveness in what Frederick Perthes says in a letter after the death of his wife. All his doings and plannings for four and twenty years past had been solely, he declares, in reference to her. “But now all this is over. I am no longer bound; I can do what I will, and next to the yearning after her, I am most oppressed in my solitude by the consciousness of freedom.” Fain would he be in those dear bonds again; to apply a passage in one of Shakspeare’s minor poems, he “In her fillet still would bide, And, true to bondage, would not break from thence.” Or as Ferdinand says of Miranda, in the “Tempest,” “All corners else o’ the earth Let liberty make use of; space enough Have I in such a prison.” In this sense may be applied in earnest what Butler writes in sport, of an independent spirit who “Disdains control, and yet can be Nowhere, but in a prison, free.”