27 APRIL 1867, Page 10

THE DIFFERENT KINDS OF REST.

THERE is no doubt, when you rush out of town even for a day or two's quiet at Easter, that you do feel a peculiar rest in the sight of the fields and the woods which you could not get,— say even by retiring into your chambers at the Temple, resolutely "sporting the oak," telling the clerk not to come again for ten days, and the laundress to complete all her preparations and be off again during your hour for dining at the quietest tavern in the neigh- bourhood, and that is, as far as we know, the completest guarantee of mere quiet accessible to men in our era. No solitude is more profound than that of a third story in a tranquil part of the Temple, when you are supposed to be out of town, and the few steps which ascend the stairs return again disconsolately, after pausing for a moment on the inhospitable landing. Indeed, a Sunday under.

such circumstances, when you are perhaps the only occupant of the block of building, and yet hear the stream of life flowing on ceaselessly within fifty yards, the sound just mellowed enough by distance to remind you constantly of your own solitude, has a pecu- liar fascination of its own which country life does not possess. But it is not the kind of rest peculiar to the country, or anything like it. It is only the perfection of insulation, accompanied by a constant low murmur to remind you of what the stream of life is which flows by you without carrying you away on its surface. There

is indeed no sort of rest in which a man more completely finds himself than this. The stimulus of the great city roar which is ever in your ears, and from which you have so recently escaped,

keeps the contrast of your own silence and solitude ever fresh, and acts on the imagination like the fierce roaring of the sea round an island in which a man has found shelter from its violence. If what you want is to remove from the whirl of sudden and abrupt social or political transitions, time to realize your true position with relation to passing events, we doubt if any rest is equal to this.

But it is the rest of retiring into yourself, of falling back on your individual character, and the resources of your own inward life and spirit,—of resuming, as it were, your own truest personality, menaced and almost crushed by the crowd of invading personali- ties with which it has been jostled. It is the rest of self-renova- tion, not of new impulse and growth. At least, what new impulse and growth there may be in such solitude comes not from the

circumstances in which you are placed, but from the absence of circumstances,—from the removal of any habitual pressure which obstructs and smothers the workings of thoughts that ask for more room and mental play, not from any sedative or stimulant-in the positive influences by which you are surrounded.

"But often in the world's most crowded streets, But often in the din of strife, There rises an unspeakable desire After the knowledge of our busied life, A thirst to spend our fire and restless force In tracking out our true original course, A longing to inquire Into the mystery of this heart that beats So wild, so deep, in us,—to know - Whence our thoughts come and where they go."

SS "And long we try in vain to speak and act, Our hidden self, and what we say and do, Is eloquent, is well,—but 'fig not trite."

And in such a state of mind the sharply insulated quiet we have described, separated by a mere spontaneous act of will from the restless world around, seems to us the best means of getting, as far as is permitted to mortals here, at the secret truth of our own- life.

But this is merely the kind of rest which we get from giving free play to the suppressed and suspended forces of our own con- scious life,—suppressed and suspended by the opposite forma and distractions of the world around us. There is, however, another sort of rest of a more positive kind which is not the lifting off of an artificial pressure from our most distinctly realized selves, —which does not so much bring us face to face with our own cha- racter as take us out of our ordinary selves, by gently stimulating into activity tastes and feelings which are for the time passive wain us, instead of merely leaving free play for the most peremptory and urgent of suppressed inward thoughts. This sort of rest, indeed, lays to sleep those peremptory and urgent thoughts.

Where this kind of rest is derived from Nature, as it is now oftener no doubt than from any other source, it is the species of rest of

which Wordsworth was the great prophet in the last generation, and which Matthew Arnold, with much more constant reference to the fret of small excitements from which it delivers us, has invoked as " Calm " in this. With Wordsworth, indeed, com- munion with Nature was much more than rest ; it was rest and life, or rather rest in life and life in rest, too. The younger poet has truly said that,— " Wordsworth's eyes avert their ken From half of human fate,"

and to him the tumult and hurry -of the mind and heart, the balancing of small doubts against smaller faiths, of little fears against less hopes, which makes up so large a portion of men's intellectual and moral life in society, and what we are pleased to call the world, was almost unknown. When he said of his ideal Lucy,—

" The floating clouds their state shall lend To her ; for her the willow bend;

Nor shall she fail to see

E'en in the motions of the storm Grace that shall mould the maiden's form By silent sympathy.

The stars of midnight shall be dear To her, and she shall lean her ear

In many a secret place, Where rivulets dance their wayward round, And beauty born of murmuring sound Shall pass into her face,"

—he said no more of the imaginary child than was actually true of his own life. These things did not soothe him back to peace, but were the life of his intellect, the substance of his imagination.

They were not, as we said just now, rest from life, but rest in life. But when ordinary men look for rest, it is for

restoration after a tumult, not for the daily companionship of familiar delights which have grown with their growth and strengthened with their strength. We look to the grass, the sun- shine, and the flowers, to awaken in us something which is usually dormant, to charm to sleep something which is usually restless. We want to bury the compound householders for a season ; to forget the frauds, the injustices, the uncleanlinesses, and even the difficult uprightness, the tasked virtue, the commanding volition which rides and rules the hurricane of human affairs, altogether. And no doubt for most men nothing effects this more completely than the life of Nature. She offers us the contrast of a large free life that is not our life, that is entirely free from our cares, that

stirs with involuntary movements, that shows us growth and fresh- ness attained not only without taking thought for the morrow, but

without taking thought even for to-day. Without perception of there would be no rest in Nature. Imitation grass, and woods, and hills, however perfect the imitation, would give none of that gentle impulse to the involuntary side of our physical and mental life, to the pulses of the blood and the forces of brooding reverie, which we look for in Nature. It is the stir of a great fresh life outside us, the clouds racing in the upper air, the leaves brightening in the rain, the flowers opening to the sun, the black- bird hopping across the grass, (for even though it be actually

'engaged, which we never realize, in a "conflict for existence" with the worm, and be at that very moment crowding a few of that species out of existence, it gives no sign of choice or feverish

doubt, but destroys with the gracious unconsciousness of divine instinct), it is these which stimulate the involuntary life within us, and make us sensible that we, too, have something stirring in us beneath the weary circle of ordered thoughts and anxious cares. It is the discovery which this great free-growing world gives us of a similar world, too much forgotten, and permitted far too little free play, within us, that produces so profound a sense of rest ; or if not the discovery,—for many feel the rest of the country who never make the discovery, of this mute spontaneous life in them- selves,—still the stir of those new feelings which precede the dis- covery, the dim anticipation, which the presence of Nature stimu- lates, that

"Ours may be the breathing balm And ours the silence and the calm Of mute insensate things."

Yet there is a rest, no doubt, deeper than either the rest of com- -pieta self-isolation, which restores you to the true central point of

your conscious life, or the rest which lulls the fever of conscious- ness into slumber, by awakening the blind spontaneous nature, those " vital feelings of delight," which are half physical and half dreamy reverie,—we mean, the rest of sympathy. Mr. Arnold has sketched this deeper rest with his usual transparent felicity of out- line in its purely sentimental aspect :—

" Only—but this is rare—

When a beloved hand is laid in oars, When jaded with the rush and glare Of the interminable hours,

Our eyes can in another's eyes read clear,—

When our world-deafened ear Is by the tones of a loved voice caressed,— A bolt is shot back somewhere in the breast, And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again: The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain And what we mean we say, and what we would we know ; A man becomes aware of his life's flow And hears its winding murmur, and he sees The meadows where it glides, the sun, the breeze.

And there arrives a lull in the hot race Wherein be doth for ever chase That flying and delusive shadow, Rest.

An air of coolness plays upon his face, And an unwonted calm pervades his breast.

And then he thinks he knows The Hills where his life rose, And the Sea where it goes."

It takes, however, a rare sentimental sympathy, or rather a rare sympathy of sentiment, for we speak in no disrespectful sense, to achieve that state of mind, and it is not every one who has that, even now and then, at command. It is a rest for the few, not for the many. Bat the rest of the same kind which can be gained by giving up the struggle against God, and acquiescing in His pur- poses, small or great, for you, is accessible to all, and is perhaps the highest and most perfect form of human repose, —that "rest in the Lord" which inspired the highest strain of one of the greatest of prophetic poets, and was taken up by one of the greatest of religious musicians in a melody that still pours, even through dull ears, the very essence of ethereal peace. If Mr. Arnold had not claimed this new flood of light as to "the whence" and "the whither" for the more sentimental mood, we should have said that there is no complete sense of rest, no absolute tracing up of the fountains to

"The Hills where our life rose, And the Sea where it goes,"

short of this last surrender of all individual care. In such sym- pathy as he describes there is still a doubt behind the calm, a fear beneath the rest,—only the plank of a weak lifeboat between the buoyancy of life and a dreary waste of waters. But in the last and deepest kind of rest, "those hills where your life rose, and the sea where it goes," even if, like Wordsworth's sea and mountains, they have still two voices," have, like those two "mighty voices," but one message,—a divine promise of the highest freedom.