And how plainly the smooth, cheerful face of the savage testified to the healthfulness, in a physical sense; of a life devoid of worry!  If you would see the reverse of the medal, look at the anxious faces, the knit brows, and the bald heads, of the twenty or thirty greatest merchants whom you will see on the Exchange of Glasgow or of Manchester.  Or you may find more touching proof of the ageing effect of worry, in the careworn face of the man of thirty with a growing family and an uncertain income; or the thin figure and bloodless cheek which testify to the dull weight ever resting on the heart of the poor widow who goes out washing, and leaves her little children in her poor garret under the care of one of eight years old.  But still, the cottages of Humboldt’s ’unwrinkled people’ were, we have little doubt, much infested with vermin, and possessed a pestilential atmosphere; and the people’s freedom from care did but testify to their ignorance, and to their lack of moral sensibility.  We must take worry, it is to be feared, along with civilization.  As you go down in the scale of civilization, you throw off worry by throwing off the things to which it can adhere.  And in these days, in which no man would seriously think of preferring the savage life, with its dirt, its stupidity, its listlessness, its cruelty, the good we may derive from that life, or any life approximating to it, is mainly that of a sort of moral alterative and tonic.  The thing itself would not suit us, and would do us no good; but we may be the better for musing upon it.  It is like a refreshing shower-bath, it is like breathing a cool breeze after the atmosphere of a hot-house, to dwell for a little, with half-closed eyes, upon pictures which show us all the good of the unworried life, and which say nothing of all the evil.  We know the thing is vain:  we know it is but an idle fancy; but still it is pleasant and refreshful to think of such a life as Byron has sketched as the life of Daniel Boone.  Not in misanthropy, but from the strong preference of a forest life, did the Kentucky backwoodsman keep many scores of miles ahead of the current of European population setting onwards to the West.  We shall feel much indebted to any reader who will tell us where to find anything more delightful than the following stanzas, to read after an essay on modern worry:—­

    He was not all alone:  around him grew
        A sylvan tribe of children of the chase;
    Whose young, unwakened world was ever new,
        Nor sin, nor sorrow, yet had left a trace
    On her unwrinkled brow; nor could you view
        A frown on Nature’s or on human face: 
    The free-born forest found and kept them free,
    And fresh as is a torrent or a tree.

    And tall, and strong, and swift of foot were they,
        Beyond the dwarfing city’s pale abortions: 
    Because their thoughts had never been the prey
        Of care or gain:  the green woods were their portions. 
    No sinking spirits told them they grew grey,
        No fashion made them apes of her distortions;
    Simple they were, not savage, and their rifles,
    Though very true, were yet not used for trifles.