ing peace of mind and healthful
activity of body! We speak of hardships, but the true hardship is to be
a dull fool, and permitted to mismanage life in our own dull and foolish
manner.

*****

But struggle as you please, a man has to work in this world. He must be
an honest man or a thief, Loudon.

*****

Industry is, in itself and when properly chosen, delightful and
profitable to the worker; and when your toil has been a pleasure, you
have not earned money merely, but money, health, delight, and moral
profit, all in one.

*****

'The cost of a thing,' says he, 'is the amount OF WHAT I WILL CALL
LIFE which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the
long-run.' I have been accustomed to put it to myself, perhaps more
clearly, that the price we have to pay for money is paid in liberty.
Between these two ways of it, at least, the reader will probably not
fail to find a third definition of his own; and it follows, on one or
other, that a man may pay too dearly for his livelihood, by giving, in
Thoreau's terms, his whole life for it, or, in mine, bartering for it
the whole of his available liberty, and becoming a slave till death.
There are two questions to be considered--the quality of what we buy,
and the price we have to pay for it. Do you want a thousand a year, a
two thousand a year, or a ten thousand a year livelihood? and can you
afford the one you want? It is a matter of taste; it is not in the least
degree a question of duty, though commonly supposed so. But there is no
authority for that view anywhere. It is nowhere in the Bible. It is true
that we might do a vast amount of good if we were wealthy, but it is
also highly improbable; not many do; and the art of growing rich is not
only quite distinct from that of doing good, but the practice of the one
does not at all train a man for practising the other.

*****

We may escape uncongenial toil, only to devote ourselves to that which
is congenial. It is only to transact some higher business that even
Apollo dare play the truant from Admetus. We must all work for the sake
of work; we must all work, as Thoreau says again, in any 'absorbing
pursuit--it does not much matter what, so it be honest'; but the most
profitable work is that which combines into one continued effort the
largest proportion of the powers and desires of a man's nature; that
into which he will plunge with ardour, and from which he will desist
with reluctance; in which he wil