Never give, to either passion or self interest, but a small part of what is you. For even in material servitude there is a way to keep free one’s inner self, the self of reason and of feeling. So never do you try to justify, by your absorption in labour, in conflict, the enslaving of your soul.

  1. find in a comer of my memory a story which shall symbolize my meaning... There was a patriarch king, in some far- off Orient where the flock of happy stories has its eyrie; he reigned in a kingdom of that happy candour one finds in Eastern tale; he was called, in man’s tradition, the king that was hospitable; immense was his charity. Within its bosom all human misadventure came to end. To it came he who needed bread and he who wanted balsam for a wounded heart. His own reflected, like a sensitive chord, the rhythm of others. His palace was the house of the people. All was liberty and life within that august portal, which never knew a guard; shepherds piped their dances as they waited, old men gossiped while the evening fell, and changing companies of girls replaced the garlands and urns of flowers, flowers which were the only taxes. Merchants of Ophir, traders from Damascus, kept passing through the open gates, competing in showing of rich wares, silks, jewels, perfumes. Before the king’s very throne reposed the wearied pilgrim; songbirds attended on his table to pick up crumbs, and at the dawn came little children to tell the king the day had come; as well to souls without fortune as to creatures without soul went out his almsgiving. Nature herself seemed attracted by his largess—the winds, the birds, the very plants, seemed, as in the myth of Orpheus or the legend of Assisi, to seek man’s companionship in that oasis of peace. Flowers bloomed unhindered and unplucked in the very paving-stones, twining plants sought the king’s own chamber through the open windows; the tired winds laid freely all their scents and

spices o’er his castle; the very spume of the sea sought to besprinkle its feet; and the freedom of Paradise, a mighty sharing of trust, kept up about its walls continual holy day....

But within—far within, isolated from the noisy castle by covered passageways, hidden from the vulgar eye like the lost chapel of Uhland in the heart of the forest, at the end of unknown pathways, there was a hall of mystery, a home where no one ventured to set foot save only the king himself, where even his hospitality seemed changed to an ascetic egoism. Not an echo of that external gaiety, not a note of all that nature-concert, not a word from the lips of men e’er ventured past the thickness of those porphyrine sills to move an air within that forbidden hold. A religious silence brooded on the chastity of its sleeping air; the light itself gleamed pale through painted glass, measured into tint, to fall like a cup of snow in a warm nest, in heavenly calm. Sometimes, when the night was clear and still, opening apart as a shell of pearl, one might see a vision of the serene shadow. The perfume that prevailed was that of nenuphar, pure essence suggestive but of serenity and thought. Grave caryatides alone guarded the marble doors, in tranquil pose, the faces sculptured into profiles grave in introspection. And the old king would assure his people that though no one of them might accompany him there, his hospitality prevailed there just as generous, as great, in that mysterious retreat as ever; only that his guests there bidden were invisible, impalpable. There he dreamed, there he freed himself of the actual, this legendary king; there he turned his vision inward, smoothed and refined his thought in meditation like the pebbles all polished by the wave; there he bound to the noble forehead the youthful wings of Psyche.... And then, at last, when Death came to remind him that he himself had been but a guest in that palace, the impenetrable house was locked and mute forever; forever sunken into infinite repose. No one e’er profaned it, no one e’er dared to set irreverent foot within, where the old king had willed to be alone with his dreams, in the solitude of that Thule of his soul.

To this story I liken your inmost kingdom. Open with healthy generosity to all the currents of the world, there exists at the same time, like the secret chamber of that king, an inner forum hidden from all, closed to the common guests, ruled by serene reason alone. Only when you enter within this inviolable sanctuary may you call yourselves free men. They are not free who give up their self-dominion to inordinate affection or selfish interest, forgetting Montaigne’s wise precept that our souls may indeed be lent, but never surrendered. To think, to dream, to admire—these are the ministrants that haunt my cell. The ancients ranked them under the word otium, well-employed leisure, which they deemed the highest use of a being truly rational; liberty of thought emancipated of all ignoble chains. Such leisure meant that use of time which they opposed to mere economic activity as the expression of a higher life. Their conception of the dignity of life was linked closely to this lofty conception of leisure; the classical attitude finds its correction and its complement in our modem belief in the dignity of labour; and both employments of one’s spirit shall make up a rhythm of individual life whose necessary maintenance needs no insistence on my part. The school of the Stoics which illumined the sunset of antiquity as if with an anticipation of the dawn of Christianity, has left to us a simple but touching image of the salvation of one’s inner liberty even in the midst of serfdom in that figure of Cleanto.

Compelled to use his brawny arms in sinking the stones of a fountain or moving a mill wheel, he yet found time to devote the breathing spells of his hard labour to tracing with roughened hand the maxims of Zeno upon the stones. All rational education, all perfect cultivation, of our natures, will take as a starting-point this possibility of rousing in every one of us the double activity which Cleanto’s story symbolizes.