EXCELSIOR.

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ONWARD AND UPWARD.

"If I might speak as a monitor, my whole exhortation might be comprised in a single word, and that one word would be, ASPIRE."— Sir James Stephen's Lecture to the Young Men's Christian Association.

NICHOLAS HORN was the son of a rich man and the nephew of a famous scholar. It was believed that 'Clæss himself was clever; but he had such an aversion to labour, that the only efforts he ever made were to get up late in the day, and undress in the evening. He left his money to a cousin, who joyfully closed his eyes, and who, in terms of his will, erected his monument. It was one of his instructions that his epitaph should record all his eminent actions; accordingly, with more than usual fidelity, it simply announced that there was a day when Nicholas died. His age was fifty-nine; but, deducting the time he spent in bed, the calculation was that he had lived no more than nineteen years.

Mr. Horn was what Lord Bacon calls a "glaring instance." Since the Fall, indolence has been a besetting sin of our species; and, left to ourselves, most of us would repeat the life of the lazy German. In civilised countries, however, it is seldom that men get leave to indulge the do-nothing propensity. Like the agitator in a paper-vat, or rather like the floor of heated iron on which the waggish

doctor made his patients dance away their imaginary diseases, hunger keeps our millions on the move; and the few who are so rich that they might "eat" without "working," are roused to exertion by the desire of distinction, or some nobler motive. And it is only in lands where this disease of humanity is left to itself, or, as physicians would say, where it is treated on the expectant system, that we see how little tendency there is in laziness to work its own cure. In balmy isles, like the Marquesas, it is to be feared that even the Anglo-Saxon might grow lethargic; and were he sleeping night after night under a bread-fruit tree, and waking up every morning to find a dainty breakfast dropped from the branches, there would be a danger lest the countryman of Arkwright and Addison should subside into a sluggard, and become the ancestor of a horde of savages.

This aversion to labour is a part of our fallen heritage, and it is a chief triumph of man's great enemy. If not as culpable as our estrangement from God and from one another, indolence is quite as constitutional and hardly less fatal. It is the sleepy venom which paralyses man's faculties and hinders him from all attempts to better his condition. It is the stupefaction which makes a being little lower than the angels content with the level of the beasts, and which reconciles to sottish ignorance and mere sentient enjoyment a race to which heaven stands open, and which its Creator originally formed with tastes and affections resembling His

own.

Has the reader ever realised his own amazing capacities? His turn of mind may not be poetical, or metaphysical, or observant; but still, however latent, he has a turn for something and let that turn or taste be only quickened,let it be so stimulated as to burst through the remissness and sluggishness inherent in us all, and for anything he knows our young reader may yet be a Milton, a Leibnitz, a

THE STARTLED DAY-DREAMER.

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Linnæus. His piety may be very crude, or it may not have yet commenced; but he has a soul capable of becoming as devout, and holy, and benevolent, as Daniel or John and let him only catch the celestial fire,-let him only receive. right views of God's character and the right affection towards him, and although he may not prove the facsimile and exact repetition of a Buxton, a Chalmers, or an Arnold, he will be what is incomparably better, he will be a new epistle of Jesus Christ. In precise proportion as his peculiar powers are consecrated, he will be an original in goodness, a fresh contribution to the world's welfare, and, all the rather for being closely scriptural, a distinct and unborrowed specimen of that glorious thing, regenerate humanity.

One day a well-educated youth wrote these words :— "Nineteen years! certainly a fourth part of my life; perhaps how great a part! and yet I have been of no service to society. The clown who scares crows for twopence a-day is a more useful man; he preserves the bread which I eat in idleness." The truth began to strike him. He was lounging life away, and was in danger of dying an inglorious cumber-ground. Some say that he had little genius. If so, it all the better proves what well-directed industry may do. Robert Southey started from his torpor. He began to redeem the time. He read; he wrote; he enriched his mind. Volume after volume he filled with abridgements and extracts; and he composed and re-composed essays of his own. And not to speak of the continual feast supplied by his wealthy and well-furnished mind; to say nothing of the fond pride with which he sat enthroned in the midst of a noble library, the purchase of his unwearying pen; without dwelling on the life-long delight involved in the progress of his elaborate histories, or the splendid revelries which his fancy enjoyed in its ultra-Oriental