lest I should lose one line or look in the intelligent report which I should hear the next morning!  The punctuating of time at that early period—­every thing that gives it an articulate voice—­seems of the utmost consequence; for we do not know what scenes in the ideal world may run out of them:  a world of interest may hang upon every instant, and we can hardly sustain the weight of future years which are contained in embryo in the most minute and inconsiderable passing events.  How often have I put off writing a letter till it was too late!  How often had to run after the postman with it—­now missing, now recovering, the sound of his bell—­breathless, angry with myself—­then hearing the welcome sound come full round a corner—­and seeing the scarlet costume which set all my fears and self-reproaches at rest!  I do not recollect having ever repented giving a letter to the postman, or wishing to retrieve it after he had once deposited it in his bag.  What I have once set my hand to, I take the consequences of, and have been always pretty much of the same humour in this respect.  I am not like the person who, having sent off a letter to his mistress, who resided a hundred and twenty miles in the country, and disapproving, on second thoughts, of some expressions contained in it, took a post-chaise and four to follow and intercept it the next morning.  At other times, I have sat and watched the decaying embers in a little back painting-room (just as the wintry day declined,) and brooded over the half-finished copy of a Rembrandt, or a landscape by Vangoyen, placing it where it might catch a dim gleam of light from the fire; while the Letter-Bell was the only sound that drew my thoughts to the world without, and reminded me that I had a task to perform in it.  As to that landscape, methinks I see it now—­

  “The slow canal, the yellow-blossom’d vale,
  The willow-tufted bank, the gliding sail.”

There was a windmill, too, with a poor low clay-built cottage beside it:—­how delighted I was when I had made the tremulous, undulating reflection in the water, and saw the dull canvass become a lucid mirror of the commonest features of nature!  Certainly, painting gives one a strong interest in nature and humanity (it is not the dandy-school of morals or sentiment)—­

  “While with an eye made quiet by the power
  Of harmony and the deep power of joy,
  We see into the life of things.”

Perhaps there is no part of a painter’s life (if we must tell “the secrets of the prison-house”) in which he has more enjoyment of himself and his art, than that in which after his work is over, and with furtive sidelong glances at what he has done, he is employed in washing his brushes and cleaning his pallet for the day.  Afterwards, when he gets a servant in livery to do this for him, he may have other and more ostensible sources of satisfaction—­greater splendour, wealth, or fame; but he will not be so