—­Longfellow:  Rural Life in Sweden.

7.  Extreme busyness, whether at school or college, kirk or market, is a symptom of deficient vitality; and a faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity.  There is a sort of dead-alive, hackneyed people about, who are scarcely conscious of living except in the exercise of some conventional occupation.  Bring these fellows into the country, or set them aboard ship, and you will see how they pine for their desk or their study.  They have no curiosity; they cannot give themselves over to random provocations; they do not take pleasure in the exercise of their faculties for its own sake; and unless Necessity lays about them with a stick, they will even stand still.  It is no good speaking to such folk:  they cannot be idle, their nature is not generous enough; and they pass those hours in a sort of coma, which are not dedicated to furious moiling in the gold mill.  When they do not require to go to the office, when they are not hungry and have no mind to drink, the whole breathing world is a blank to them.  If they have to wait an hour or so for a train, they fall into a stupid trance, with their eyes open.  To see them, you would suppose there was nothing to look at and no one to speak with; you would imagine they were paralyzed or alienated; and yet very possibly they are hard workers in their own way, and have good eyesight for a flaw in a deed or a turn of the market.  They have been to school and college, but all the time they had their eye on the medal; they have gone about in the world and mixed with clever people, but all the time they were thinking of their own affairs.  As if a man’s soul were not too small to begin with, they have dwarfed and narrowed theirs by a life of all work and no play; until here they are at forty, with a listless attention, a mind vacant of all material amusement, and not one thought to rub against another while they wait for the train.  Before he was breeched, he might have clambered on the boxes; when he was twenty, he would have stared at the girls; but now the pipe is smoked out, the snuffbox is empty, and my gentleman sits bolt upright on a bench, with lamentable eyes.  This does not appeal to me as being Success in Life.

—­Robert Louis Stevenson. (Copyright, by Charles Scribner’s Sons.)

B. Examine the themes which you have written.  Does each paragraph have a topic statement?  Have you introduced sentences which do not bear upon this topic statement?  Are the paragraphs real ones treating of a single topic, or are they merely groups of sentences written together without any close connection in thought?

+Theme XVIII.+—­State two or three advantages of public high schools over private boarding schools.  Use each as a topic statement and develop it into a short paragraph.

(Add to each topic statement such sentences as will prove to a pupil of your own age that the topic statement states a real advantage.  Include in each paragraph only that which bears upon the topic statement.  Consider the definition of a paragraph on page 68.  Does this definition apply to your paragraphs?)