DLENESS is harder to distinguish than the philosopher's stone. Stupidity you can put your finger on; and so with , day-dreaming, or lassitude. But idleness may link itself with any, all, or none of these. It is the will-o'-the-wisp among human characteristics. You avoid it, being hoodwinked as to its presence in your vicinage; you bear with it in others, when your is veritably on something very different. Small wonder if you wax so wise and so finical that you shall swear, sooner or later, in the phrase of a certain friend of ours, that "there never was no sich" a thing!  
What astronomy is to astrology, or chemistry to the alchemy of old times, that is idleness, so called, the most useful and spectacle in the world, to idleness criminal. Idleness, simon-pure, from which all manner of good springs like seed from a fallow soil, is sure to be misnamed and misconstrued, even when it is stuck, like a bill-post, in the public eye. A thinking person, the schoolmaster will allow you, is barely to be called idle; but for that exaggeration of thought, the almost tidal stand-still between activities, which belongs to Dunce on the back bench, he has no more respect than can fit in the of his rod. Dunce, nevertheless, may grow up to be called Oliver Goldsmith, or Arthur, Duke of Wellington. Tommy, who stops on his way to market, to sit on a stone wall and plan a nest-robbing, indulgent passers-by shall consider busy, though misguided; but young Galileo or Columbus, planning nothing , drifting into the mental and stillness whence astonishing ideas arise, are sure to be set up as a couple of intolerable wool-gatherers. A boy may before the fire, looking through the kettle steam at "one far-off divine event," and be com-163-plimented on his value to society, or ironically offered a penny for the contents of his ridiculous head.
 
Thoreau put his own case, in the illustration of the man who roves all day through a pine-forest, rejoicing in its height and shade and , and is far and wide as a lazy good-for-nought, as opposed to the sober and citizen who betakes himself, in hand, to the giants down. Every township has its business men, but Mr. Henry Thoreau was, without exception, the best American idleness-man on record. He floated about in his dory, the breathing reflection of Nature in its wealth of deta............