In fact, reflection, meditation, though its pleasures have been chanted by poets and sages for thousands of years, is probably that form of intellectual activity which is least admired and least desired of any. It is not the same as “studying out a subject,” or exerting the creative faculty, as an inventor when he is devising a machine; but the leisurely calling up from our memory of its various contents. They may be from reading or from conversation or from our experience of life. We may present these to ourselves as the pictures of a gallery or as the scenes of a drama or as a series of connected events; and we may endeavor to discern what relations they bore to each other, or speculate on what would have been the results had they occurred differently, or not at all. We may renew half-forgotten pleasures, or smile at useless pains, or recall long since vanished woes. Lessons for our guidance or knowledge of ourselves may unexpectedly come to us as the results of such self-communing; or we may cast our eyes to the future, and enjoy in prolonged anticipation those pleasures which may never come, or, if they come, can last but a moment. This is the nature of that reflection which, if we learn it and cultivate it, will enable us to pass many a pleasant hour, when otherwise we should be cut off from all sources of amusement, as in some dreary waiting for a train or enforced and lonely vigil. As solitude is thus relieved by exercise of our minds, society by the same may have many an added charm. What a fund of rational enjoyment is offered by reading circles, debating societies, literary coteries, and associations for the purpose of studying Shakespeare or Browning or Ibsen, or whatever other literary star may be in the ascendant! There are some pretentious persons who profess to be above such gatherings. They can well be dispensed with in them. The tendency to be guarded against in order to make such schemes prosperous is that of improving the mind. This should be entirely incidental and secondary. When one joins a dining club, he expects a dinner which he likes, not a special diet prescribed by his medical adviser; and so it should be with literary clubs. Let the improvement take care of itself. It will do so.