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(3) The last and most notable mark of recreation is the use of the imagination. Recreation comes from within and not from without the man. It depends on that a man is and not upon what a man has. A child grows tired of his toys, a man wearies of his possessions, but there is no being tired of the imagination which leaps ahead and every day reveals something new. Sleary was wrong when he said, “People must be amused”. He should have said, “People must amuse themselves”. Their recreation must, that is, come from the use of their own faculties of heart and mind. “The cultivation of the inner life,” it was truly said in a discussion on the hard lot of the middle classes, “is the only cure for the commercial tyrannies and class prejudices of that class.” The Japanese are the best holiday takers I have ever met; they have in themselves a taste for beauty, and they go to the country to enjoy the use of that taste. A man who because he is interested in mankind sets himself on his holiday to observe and study the habits of man; or, because he cares for Nature, looks deeper into her secrets by the way of plants or rocks or stars; or, because he is familiar with history, seeks in buildings and places illustrations of the past; a holiday maker who in such ways uses his inner powers will come home refreshed. His pleasure has come from within; he, on the other hand, who has lounged about a pier, moved from place to place, travelled from sight to sight, looking always for pleasure from outside himself, will come home bored.

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