No early stroller through the streets has failed to observe with interest this awaking of a great city from its slumbers, this re- application of itself to all its manifold tasks and toils. And if he seeks an explanation of it all, the reason at bottom undoubtedly is that in no other way than by arising and working can human beings earn their daily bread. A little further on in Clough's poem, we get a glimpse of the secret spring which drives the huge machine, as we read of the
Little child bringing breakfast to "father," that sits on the
timber There by the scaffolding; see, she waits for the can beside
him.^
2. But it is not merely in this lower sense that work must be conceived of as the universal law of human life, a sense determined by the relations in which we stand to the forces of Nature on the one hand, and the social order on the other. Work is the proof that man offers of his manhood. This is his law of relationship to the complex universe. He works. He creates a world for himself. He makes his own environment. He does not merely accept from Nature his range of opportunity. He does not merely
^ J. C. Lambert. PS. XXV.-CXIX. — 21
322 THE DAY'S WORK
find her useful for his purposes, and rest satisfied with the food he can capture from her, or the shelter that she suggests. He sets to work to bring about what he will require. He takes up what she gives him, and out of its materials he contrives, fashions, invents, improves, thinks, reasons, imagines, and toils until he has brought into existence a whole creation of things that were not there before. His life is his own in the sense that his head and hands and heart have produced it. It could not come into ex- istence but by the sweat of his brow. And as he began, so he continues. He is ever at work. He is ever bettering, correcting, enlarging. Ever a worker ! Ever a creator ! Ever a builder ! Ever labouring to win a fuller result ! Ever sowing in tears that he may reap in joy ! Ever hoping to wring a richer spoil out of the rugged soil ! Ever dreaming of a finer reward, ever foreseeing a better day ; ever spending and being spent ; ever giving himself away for a vision still denied him, of a hope still deferred ! Ever on his pilgrim way, with his eyes set on far horizons ! Ever war- ring with a stubborn earth which must be purged of thorn or thistle in order to correspond with his strong desire ! So man down all the ages, amid the awful silence of a nature that waits around him in expectation, " goeth forth to his work and to his labour."
^ It has been well said — said by a poet — that labour is at once the symbol of man's punishment and the secret of man's happiness. And it has been well said too that the gospel does not abolish labour, but gives it a new and nobler aspect. " The gospel abolishes labour much in the same way as it abolished death : it leaves the thing, but it changes its nature." ^
^ There are three things to which a man is born — labour, and sorrow, and joy. Each of these three things has its baseness and its nobleness. There is base labour, and noble labour. There is base sorrow, and noble sorrow. There is base joy, and noble joy. But you must not think to avoid the corruption of these things by doing without the things themselves. Nor can any life be right that has not all three. Labour without joy is base. Labour without sorrow is base. Sorrow without labour is base. Joy without labour is base.^
^ When Charles Lamb waF released for life from his daily drudgery of desk-work at the India Office, he felt himself the
^ A. K. H. Boyd, J^Ae Gfraver Thoughts of a CovMry Parson, ii. 148. * Ruskiu, Time and Tide, t. § 21.
PSALM CIV. 23 323
happiest of men. " I would not go back to my prison," he said to a friend, " ten years longer, for ten thousand pounds." He also wrote in the same ecstatic mood to Bernard Barton: "I have scarce steadiness of head to compose a letter," he said; "I am free ! free as air ! I will live another fifty years. Would I could sell you some of my leisure ! Positively the best thing a man can do is — nothing; and next to that, perhaps good works." Two years — two long and tedious years — passed ; and Charles Lamb's feelings had undergone an entire change. He now discovered that official, even humdrum work — "the daily round, the common task " — had been good for him, though he knew it not. Time had formerly been his friend ; it had now become his enemy. To Bernard Barton he again wrote : " I assure you, no work is worse than overwork ; the mind preys on itself — the most unwholesome of food. I have ceased to care for almost anything. . . . Never did the waters of heaven pour down upon a forlorner head. What I can do, and overdo, is to walk. I am a sanguinary murderer of time. But the oracle is silent." ^