a man on a railway-platform who is waiting for a train that is late. LETTER V. TO A STUDENT WHO NEGLECTED BODILY EXERCISE. Difficulty of conciliating the animal and the intellectual lives--Bodily activity sometimes preserved by an effort of the will--Necessity of faith in exercise--Incompatibility between physical and intellectual living disappears in large spaces of time--Franklin's theory about concentration in exercise--Time an essential factor--Health of a rural postman--Pedestrian habits of Wordsworth--Pedestrian and equestrian habits of Sir Walter Scott--Goethe's wild delight in physical exercise--Alexander Humboldt combated early delicacy by exercise--Intellectual utilities of physical action. "We have done those things which we ought not to have done; we have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and there is no health in us." How applicable, my dear brother, are these words which the Church, in her wisdom, has seen to be adapted to all sinners--how applicable, I say, are they to students most especially! They have quite a personal applicability to you and me. We have read all day long, and written till three o'clock in the morning; we have taken no exercise for weeks, and there is no health in us. The doctor scrutinizes our wearied eyes, and knows that our brains are weary. Little do we need his warnings, for does not Nature herself remind us of our disobedience, and tell us in language not to be misinterpreted, to amend the error of our ways? Our digestion is sluggish and imperfect; we are as nervous as delicate ladies, and there is no health in us. How easy it is to follow one of the two lives--the animal or the intellectual! how difficult to conciliate the two! In every one of us there exists an animal which might have been as vigorous as wolves and foxes, if it had been left to develop itself in freedom. But besides the animal, there existed also a mind, and the mental activity restrained the bodily activity, till at last there is a serious danger of putting an end to it altogether. I know two men, about fifty-five years old both of them, and both of them admirably active. They tell me that their bodily activity has been preserved by an effort of the will; that if they had not resolutely kept up the habit of using legs and arms in daily work or amusement their limbs would have stiffened into uselessness, and their constitutions would have been unable to bear the call of any sudden emergency. One of them has four residences in different parts of the same county, and yet he will not keep a carriage, but is a pedestrian terrible to his friends; the other is at the head of a great business, and gives an example of physical activity to his workpeople. Both have an absolute faith in habitual exercise; and both affirm that if the habit were once broken they could never afterwards resume it.