exhaustions of one season to those of the next without some interval of change, and not suffer loss of physical vigor, intellectual force, and moral health. He who, in His wise goodness, has made us so "fearfully and wonderfully," never intended our material or spiritual structure for such constant excess. The birth-place of man was amidst trees, and herbage, and flowing waters. There are the works of God, and there, as to our early home, should we at times turn to freshen our being, and listen to the voice of Him who talked in Paradise with His children. It is not relaxation that we need. Our straining of nerve and thought, to say nothing of worse habits incident to our perverted modes of life, has already too much relaxed our faculties by recoil from the tension. What our nature demands is invigoration, a bracing of the frame, a quickening of the mind, an uplifting of the heart, an inhalation of fresh life from its original sources, that will enable us to grapple more strenuously with care, and duty, and temptation. This can not be gained in the crowded saloons of watering-places, or at the lordly country-seat, to which have been transferred the appliances of courtly gratification, or by rushing over the rapid rail, or on packed steamers, to haunts of hackneyed resorts, merely to say that we have made the fashionable tour. These give us no opportunity to think, no motive to repent and resolve anew. We are still fettered by conventionalities. The wearisome monotony of whirling excitements still sickens our aching brain. We must break away from the crowd. We must reach a spot where distance will give soberness to our view of our usual occupations, scenes where we can gather ideas, sentiments, and emotions, not from worldly dictation or even the page covered with other men's thoughts; where we can hold intercourse with our fellow-men who spend their days more simply; but, above all, where we can be alone with God among the works of His hands, and hear, answering to our own, the pulses of the Infinite Heart which fills the universe with truth and love. The student, long shut up within his library, and the servant of his race in religious or philanthropic offices, need such a change quite as much as men of business or pleasure. Books, precious as they are for enlargement of knowledge and instruction from the past, may be abused beyond their proper function. Classical, scholastic, and (in its
