Show the secret half tho secret of life we are persuaded is to know when we are grown old and it is the half most hardly learned it is more hardly learned moreover in the matter of exercise than in tho matter of diet there is no advice so commonly given to the ailing man of middle age a the advice to take more exercise and there is perhaps none which leads him into so many pitfalls this is particularly the case with the brain workers the man who labors his brain must spare his body he can burn tho candle at both ends and the attempt to do so will almost inevitably result in his lighting it in the middle to boot the waste to tissue will lie so great that he will be tempted to repair it by the use of a too generous diet most men who use their brains much soon learn for themselves that the sense of physical exaltation the glow of exuberant health which comes from a body strung to its full powers by continuous and severe exercise is not favorable to study the exercise such men need is the exercise that rests not that which tires they need to wash their brains with the fresh air of heaven to bring into gentle play the muscles that have been lying idle while the head worked nor is it only to this class of laboring humanity that the advice to take exercise needs J reservations the time of violent delights soon passes and the efforts to protract it beyond its natural span is as danger i ous as it is ridiculous some men through lature or the accident of fortune will of course bo able to keep touch of it longer than others but when once the touch has been lost the struggle to regain it can add but sorrow to the labor of this our doctor makes a cardinal point but pertinent as his warning may be to the old for whom indeed he has primarily compounded his elixir vita it is yet more pertinent to men of middle age and probably it is mere cessare ces sary it is in the latter period that most of the mischief is done the old are commonly resigned to their lot but few men will consent without a struggle to own that they are no longer young all things are not good to all men and oil things are not always good to the same man this was a point much insisted an by the wise minds of old bacon especially ally commends the advice of celsus whom he somewhat sarcastically observes must have been a wise man as well as a good physician that one of the great precepts of health and lasting is that a man do vary and interchange contraries con traries the man who confines his studies within one unchanging groove with find his intellectual condition so light and nimble so free of play so capable of giving and receiving as he who varies them according to his mood for tho mind needs rest and recreation not less then the body it is not well to keep either always at high pressure one fixed unswerving system of diet with out regard to needs and seasons or oven to fancy is not wise one man has not always the same stomach what is grateful and nourishing at one time may be found insipid and even unwholesome at another within the lines marked by experience it is well that the jove of change which is ria to all men should be given full play A too servile adherence to a system which has been found once beneficial in certain conditions may diminish or even destroy its value when those conditions return the great secret of existence after all is to be tho master and not the slave of both mind and body and that is best done by giving both fre rein within certain limits which as the old sages were universally agreed each man must discover for li itself Im self happy are the words of addison and happily quoted A continual acx bioty for life vitiates all the relishes of it and casts a gloom over the whole face of nature as it is impossible that we should take a delight in anything that we are every moment afraid of losing one of the best methods of avoiding that pitiful anxiety is to learn within what limits we may safely indulge our desire for change and indulge them Mac magazine |