When the body is freed from strain and weariness is the time to leap
 and dance and sing and wrestle.

 When the mind is free from prejudice and weariness is the time for its
 original activity to begin; new thoughts spring up unbidden and the
 creative imagination lives and grows.

(In the sphere of will, many great sages have said that an analogous sequence holds good.  When the whole emotional and moral nature has thrown itself in a particular direction, and then an unwinding has taken place, the moment of completed renunciation has been said to be the dawn of some great new spiritual light.)

Who does not know the peaceful activity of a Sunday evening, the fruitful quiet of a long railway journey or sea-voyage at the end of a holiday?  Two friends walk slowly home together after an exciting expedition or debate; two girls give each other their confidence while brushing their hair after a dance.

Why is this so?  Nowadays people are very ready to answer the question by refusing the fact.  It is waste of time not to be doing something strenuously.  Rest is almost as strenuous as everything else; it is to be thorough while it is the duty on hand and is to fit exactly on to the work time, without overlapping but without interspace.

In this way too often the imagination, the really individual part of the mind, is starved and atrophied.  Especially in childhood there ought to be a space left between useful work and ordered play for the individually invented games, the pursuits that are not for any definite end, for dreams and lived-out tales, when the child may make what he likes, do what he likes, and in imagination be what he likes.  If we scrupulously respected this growing-time we should soon have a race of sturdier mettle altogether.  Just now this particular want is probably most nearly supplied among elementary school children than among those who have more “educational advantages”; they “go out to play” in the streets for hours every day, and one cannot help thinking that it is the vitality thus evolved that keeps most of them healthy and happy in spite of many hardships.

In later life, if we really want to make something of our lives, we shall do well to insist an keeping such a margin of free time to ourselves.  It need not be long.  Five minutes, if one really sails away in the ship of imagination, will take us to fairyland and back again.  But the five minutes (or the day in the country, or the week of quiet, or whatever we take or can get) must really and truly be free; we must have the courage to seek for what we really want, and we shall have the inestimable reward of finding what we really are.

 E.M.  COBHAM.

 HOW MUCH SHOULD WE EAT?[6]

 [6] See July number.