Consolation for Laggards

— As a lover of quietness and leisure, — not as a lazy man, though the vulgar sometimes miss the distinction, — I have recently come to feel a new sense of personal obligation to the Moon. It is not for her beauty ; that I have always admired. Had I been gifted with “ the vision and the faculty divine,” her face, I am sure, would have inspired some of my most rapturous singing. As it is, I am forced to content myself with silent worship, or to borrow the words of others. For years I have been in the habit of repeating those exquisite lines from “the great ode,” —

and not infrequently I have seemed to experience the very feelings of the poet himself. No, it is not the beauty of Cynthia that has just dawned upon my soul. Neither is it her usefulness to the mariner, inestimable as that is, and greatly as I myself have profited by it. These are familiar considerations ; and, as Emerson says, “ only our newest knowledge works as a source of inspiration and thought.” What I have lately discovered (the erudite school-boy is welcome to laugh at my anonymous confession) is the fact of the moon’s restraining influence upon the earth’s diurnal revolution.

It appears that formerly this globe of ours went spinning about its axis at a frightful rate, turning completely round once in every three or four hours! Think of the state of mind in which its dizzy inhabitants must have been kept; having to do a day’s work and get a night’s rest all within that ridiculously short space ! It was inevitable that they should live in one continual hurry, even while trying to sleep ; and equally inevitable that we, their descendants, should inherit an over-active and fidgety temper. This effect has been so pronounced and so universal, indeed, that at last, instead of bewailing our excessive industriousness, we have actually come to pride ourselves upon it. First at school, and afterwards in business, a man must be forever shortening his days with incessant fagging, else —like the Japanese official who shrinks from the “ happy dispatch”—he can no longer hold up his head as a respectable citizen. On this point the world is substantially agreed ; the dissenters, for the most, part, being only a few poets and other lightly esteemed Bohemians. But as " the stars in their courses fought against Sisera,” so does the Moon (she should have temples built in her honor) fight against the modern Philistine. By means of a most ingenious brake — by means of the tides, that is to say — she has been from the first unceasingly slackening the earth’s speed, until in place of a day of four hours we rejoice in one of six times that length. Better yet (and this is my comfort), the good work still goes on ; and ultimately — not in my time, but in somebody’s time — the day’s duration will be, not twenty-four hours, nor even two hundred and forty hours, but fourteen hundred !

Then will dawn the golden age. Then there will be time enough. For I make sure that long before that blessed consummation the labor reformers will have carried their point ; and instead of a man’s having to drudge eight or ten hours daily, as is the lot of so many of us at present, a stint of half that length will be accounted ample for the meanest workman ; leaving a remnant of at least thirteen hundred and ninety-five hours for mental cultivation, and especially for recreative idleness. What long evenings ! And how the Browning Clubs will flourish ! The Ring and the Book will then stand in the class of short poems; finding a place, we may presume, in the thousand-and-first volume of some Golden Treasury of Songs and Lyrics. At the opera-house, the tetralogy of Wagner, if such a musical trifle shall still keep its place upon the stage, will seem but a mere bagatelle; doing duty as an overture, perhaps, or, more likely, as an entr’acte. Nor will any attendant upon the opera or at the club ever be afflicted with sleepiness ; a nap of four hundred hours, more or less, on the night previous, will have put all mischances of that kind quite out of the question.

Actors will no longer be compelled to cut the plays of Shakespeare ; nor will magazine editors find it necessary to curtail the manuscripts of even their most long-winded contributors. In imagination I peep into the sanctum of that all-too-remote epoch, and I seem to see, hanging above the sacred desk, this most inspiring motto : " Prolixity is the soul of wit.”

In short, under such altered temporal conditions, not only human proverbs, but all the daily current of human life, will be curiously modified. Pupils at the Latin School will no longer say, Tempus fugit. Breakfast may be expected to consume ten hours, at the least and dinner not less than twenty-five ; and dyspepsia, as a matter of course, will long ago have become a disease unheard of. All in all, the picture is inviting, though, as perhaps must be true of every picture, it is not quite without shadows. Think, for example, of a prisoner sentenced to a day of solitary confinement on bread and water, or the people of an entire commonwealth hidden to observe a day of fasting! Consider, also, the probable length of sermons!

That day of fourteen hundred hours, inevitable as is its coming, is, unhappily, far distant. But the very tardiness of its approach is, in one aspect, highly encouraging to the idle temperament. If some bustling Yankee had taken a contract, to reduce the velocity of the earth’s rotation, he would have set about it, as the Yankee expression is, " hammer and tongs.” But the Moon (who, by the bye, is probably not “ pale from weariness ”) takes up the work in another spirit. “ Be not in haste, O son of Adam,” I fancy her saying; “ blessed are they that know how to be idle.” She is not to be flurried with any thought of the magnitude of her undertaking. Twice a day she applies her brake, and in the time appointed she will complete her task. How long that time is likely to prove, the reader, if he have a slate large enough, may calculate for himself ; the requisite datum is furnished by the approximate fact that the work progresses at the rate of about one sixty-sixth of a second in every twenty-five hundred years. For my own part, I have never deemed it worthwhile to figure the sum. Enough that as long as I live things must remain substantially as they are. And yet, as I began by saying, I take no little satisfaction in the Moon’s labor. It will avail for others, it not for me; and meanwhile, unfinished though it is,

I am resolved to turn it to some practical account. Till now, when upbraided for my indolence, either by my own perverted conscience or by my neighbors, I have been wont to quote the sage of Grasmere: —

But I have observed that those who ride the hobby of hard work are seldom much impressed by a stanza or two of poetry. Henceforth, then, I shall refer them not to the poet, but to the astronomer ; the man of science, who deals in figures, to be sure, but not in figures of speech. I shall remind my censors that the Divine Providence itself has discovered that the world was started at too fast a pace, and, having discovered it, has been engaged ever since in the process of slowing up. I shall assure them that I have taken to heart the fair Moon’s example, and am determined never more to be in haste; to act hereafter as if I were already a dweller in the promised land, the land of “ an astronomic leisure.”