Roycroft's Elbert Hubbard Recommended Habits

               Miriam Hubbard Roelofs recalls habits her father, Elbert Hubbard, espoused.  The first of three being the Work Habit (see previous blog).  The next is the Study Habit.

          "On the Study Habit.  What a silly thought that study, the habit of study, stops when schooling stops.  What folly to throw away, or let sloth away, intellectual curiosity.  To keep one's mind active, to grow in judgment, to expand the capacity for sympathy, to make new friends, enemies or enemies for that matter that one meets in the history and literature.  All these should come from the study habit, and new skills.  I was thinking of the story of Hayden who, when the doctor told him he was going to die, said "Why, I can't possibly die, I've only begun to learn the French horn." 

          And the third habit to cultivate was the Health habit.

          The Health Habit, a most valuable possession.  The habit of daily exercise, regular sleep, proper food, and an even temper makes for general comfort for, and as the saying is, self and family.

          All these sound obvious and even trite but living with these habits as the programming of your daily life is neither trite nor common place. Father had the peculiarity, not only of preaching but practicing.  No one could have taken better or more unobtrusive good care of his health than he did.  He was never sick. When one considers the amount of nervous energy that he had, one hundred pounds of pressure per square inch as he used to say. How easy it would have been to have made a wreck of himself if he had not had good sense, intelligence, and self discipline.  Work gave a solid foundation to his character, the habit of study gave an ever flowing spring of interest and mental stimulation, add the habit of health and there are three habits to cherish. 

          Thus ends Hubbard's lesson for the day as remembered by Miriam Hubbard Roelofs, only child of Elbert and Alice Moore Hubbard.