morning in re-reading favourite bits from all
my favourite poets.

I think I may trace most of this
discursiveness to idleness. I grieve to have to
make the confession, but that apprentice,
Thomas Idle, whom I have read of in this
journal, is a fellow completely after my own
heart. I love to do nothing, specially when I
know I ought to be doing a great many things.
What can be more delightful, when I know
work is waiting for me that must be done,
than to lie flat on my back on the grass with
the hot summer air fanning me into
luxurious repose, while I dream such golden dreams,
that they become hazy with their own
gorgeousness? Or, what is more luxurious than
to sit lazily before the fire with a book near
me, which, as Doctor Folliot says in Crotchet
Castle, "you may open if you please, and
need not open unless you please," and, giving
myself up to the thoughts that are gently
wandering through my mind—thoughts that
die away almost before they have made me
aware of their existence. What dreams the
idler dreams! He is the true mental vagabond;
who can turn his rags and tatters into
kingly robes, and can build palaces of the
veriest hovels. He is the lotus eater of life,
ever singing:

Surely, surely, slumber is more sweet than toil—the shore
Than labour in the deep mid-ocean, wind, and wave, and oar;
O! rest ye, brother mariners, we will not wander more.

I resume my subject: the history of an
article, and the article in question this paper.
I seat myself to reflect, and, to assist reflection,
I take down the large German pipe that I
bought at Frankfort; but, almost before I
have lighted it, my wretched mind starts off
at a tangent to Fatherland. Visions of the
Rhine come stealing over me, and I recal a
glorious sunset which I saw from the top of
the Drachenfels, that bathed all the plains
around Bonn and the town itself in a golden
haze, that toned down every sharp angle,
and gave a softness and an immaterial look
to the whole landscape, lifting me away from
every day life and sending me wandering
through kingdoms of air, peopled with spirits
divine in form and radiant in beauty. No
sooner have I come down with a bump from
this vision than, by an easy process, I slip
away to Weimar, and, as a natural sequence,
come face to face with the mighty Goëthe.
As a matter of course the sight of him
calls to my remembrance his correspondence
with Schiller, and conversations with
Eckermann. The latter is an especially
delightful book. For the life of me I cannot
help taking a peep at it. Happening to open
it upon the passage where Goëthe gives his
opinion of old fashioned furniture, my mind
emits a feeble spark, and suggests for a
subject that, as we have had histories of pins and
walking-sticks, we might furbish up an
interesting paper on the history of a chair.
Forthwith with a start and a plunge, my mind
impetuously rushes into an old castle to find
a chair worthy of its attention; but, at
that point, I fall foul of the buttress on the
seat, and that brings to my recollection a
picture I once saw at Cologne by one of the
masters of the old Cologne school. The
subject is Hades, and the lost human beings are
represented as the strangest monsters out of
creation; one with a boar's head and eagle's
body, another with the legs of an ostrich, the
body of a scorpion, and the head of a turkey-cock.
The principal figure is a fish—a plaice,
but unlike every plaice in creation; it is open
down the front, with neat rows of buttons
and button-holes to do itself up when it feels
cold.

Thus I sat, one day last week, the victim of
my wretched habit. I felt it was useless to
endeavour that day to settle the question,
and I began to doze and dream upon my
misfortunes; and here let me remark, that I
have never met with a satisfactory treatise
on the psychology of dreams. I would gladly
undertake the treatment, but my discursiveness
totally unfits me for grasping so fleeting a
subject. I feel certain that my labours would
result in airy nothings. A dream, however,
suggested to me a subject for this periodical.
I dreamed of an old old story that I had half
worked out, years ago: one of those fragments
that lie dormant in my brain, growing
mouldy with neglect, and gradually losing
all the force and vitality that gave them
their charms when they first dawned on
it. I drew it forth, and a wretched,
tattered, dusty fragment it was; like an
piece of old finery that had lain by for
years, being suddenly brought out, and all
its faded colours and moth-eaten silk
displayed. Although the idea was a mere
dry skeleton, I conquered my troublesome
mind sufficiently to force it to dwell upon
the story; not merely during the time I was
dressing, but even up to the fourth page
of my writing; but I was doomed to
disappointment, for just as I had penned one
of the neatest turned sentences in the world,
down the street came the organ man playing,
to waltz time, the air Dame e mobile. Now,
my story happening to be a modern domestic
one, it was utterly impossible for me to
continue writing it to the accompaniment of a
tune from an opera, the story of which is
in every way opposed to the quiet current
of my novelette, and I found my mind
gradually slipping into a mediæval train of
thought in every way incompatible with
Todd, the hero of my tale, and Laura Myddleton,
the heroine, who loved and lived in Hyde
Park Gardens.

What was to be done? I was determined
to write the article; but my wretched mind
stubbornly refused to yield to my resolve. It
was a battle royal between Will and Habit;