Holidays, like all other natural and lively things, are good things; and
the abuse does not argue against the use. They serve to keep people in
mind that there is a green and glad world, as well as a world of brick
and mortar and money-getting. They remind them disinterestedly of one
another, or that they have other things to interchange besides bills and
commodities. If it were not for holidays and poetry, and such like
stumbling blocks to square-toes, there would be no getting out of the
way of care and common-places.--They keep the world fresh for
improvement. The great abuse of holidays is when they are too few. There
are offices, we understand, in the city, in which, with the exception of
Sundays, people have but one holiday or so throughout the year, which
appears to us a very melancholy hilarity. It is like a single living
thing in a solitude, which only adds to the solitariness. A clerk
issuing forth on his exclusive Good Friday must in vain attempt to be
merry, unless he is a very merry person at other times. He must be
oppressed with a sense of all the rest of the year. He cannot have time
to smile before he has to be grave again. It is a difference, a dream, a
wrench, a lay-sabbath, any thing but a holiday. There was a Greek
philosopher, who, when he was asked on his death-bed what return could
be made him for the good he had done his country, requested that all the
little boys might have a holiday on the anniversary of his birth-day.
Doubtless they had many besides, and yet he would give them another.
When we were at school, we had a holiday on every saint’s day, and this
was pretty nearly all that we, or, indeed, any one else, knew of some of
those blessed names in the calendar. When we came to know that they had
earned this pleasure for us by martyrdom and torment, we congratulated
ourselves that we had not known it sooner; and yet, upon the principle
of the Greek philosopher, perhaps a true lover of mannikin-kind would
hardly object to have his old age burnt out at the stake, if he could
secure to thousands hereafter the beatitude of a summer’s holiday.[202]
[202] Literary Pocket Book.
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