The Quest of the Simple Life

met by the remark: 'Oh, there would be nothing to do there!' No doubt if a holiday is devoted to lounging, it is much more difficult to lounge at a solitary farm than at some crowded se

ions, and an industrious endeavour to explore all scenes of interest within a reasonable compass. Now that I had come to live in the c

bs with a fair proficiency; I dug nearly an acre of land at the back of my house with my own spade; made paths, and planted fruit trees; all the turf for my lawn I laid myself, with a few hours' assistance

himself. The paper which I had hung with my own labour gave me a pleasure which a much finer paper hung by paid labour could not have given me. The lawn which I had laid with my own hands seemed more intimately mine than if I had paid some one else to make it. The more I reflect upon the matter the more am I convinced that one of the great curses of civilisation is the division of labour which makes us dependent upon other people to a degree which destroys individual efficiency. Thrown back upon himself as a dweller in a wilderness, any man of ordinary capacity soon develops efficiency for kinds of work which he would never have attempted in a city, simply because a city te

f the Sea Ranger, remarks to the incompetent landsman Herrick, whom he has engaged as first mate on the Farralone, 'There ain't nothing to sailoring when you come to look it in the face,' and I am inclined to think that the observation is true of other things besides navigation. There is nothing in ordinary gardening, carpentering, or work about a house that any intelligent man cannot learn in a month by giving his mind to it. Intelligence, industry, and a deft hand will take any man of capacity through any of the ordinary employments of life with moderate credit, or at least without disgrace. When once the right handling of tools is learned, the rest is merely a matter of intelligence. At all events, I

ment, so vivid was the sense of some ingenious jugglery in the whole business, that I did not know whether I had been cheated or was a cheat, in living by a kind of labour that cost me so little. How different was my feeling now! At the end of an hour's spade-work, I saw something actually done, of which I was the indisputable author. When I laid down the saw and plane and hammer, and stretched my aching back, I saw something growing into shape, which I myself had created. There was no jugglery about this; there was immediate intimate relation between cause and effect. And thence I found a kind of joy in my work, which was new and exquisite to me. I stood upon my own feet, self-possessed, self-respecting, efficient for my own needs, and conscious of a definit

ike developing some single part of the human organism, such as a finger-tip, to high sensitiveness, by drawing away the sensitiveness from all the rest. To do this reduces life to barrenness; it makes it meagre in energy and pleasure; it makes work a disease. But in such a life as I now lived, it was not a finger-tip that worked but the whole man. The cabbage I cut for dinner was fashioned from my own substance, f

ese mistakes, but before a year had passed I found myself raising all my own garden produce, well supplied with eggs and poultry for my own table, and able to earn a little by the sale of my superfluous stock. Some articles, such as coal, were excessively dear; but then, as a set-off, I could have all the wood I required for next to nothing, and we burned more wood than

everywhere transparent; the woods were plumed with snow, and over all shone the sun of June, and the keen air tingled in the veins like wine. Beside the road the drifts ran high, hollowed by the wind into a hundred curves and cavities, and in each the reflected light made a tapestry of delicate violet and rose. Those who imagine that snow is only white-dead, cold white-have never seen the pure new-fallen snow, when the stricture of the frost begins to bind it; such snow has every colour of the rainbow in it, and where it is beaten fine it is like a dust of diamonds. Under a hard grey sky snow appears dead white; but under such a sun as this it glowed and sparkled with all the glories of an ice cave. And then came the sunset, a sunset to be dreamed of. Skiddaw was a pyramid of rosy flame; great saffron seas of light lay o

urs, just before sunset, when the mountains glowed with richest colour; when through the rift of thinning clouds some vast peak named like a torch, and the mist blew out like purple banners, and the watercourses sparkled like ropes of brilliants hung on the scarred rocks, an

and to be absorbed by it. He discusses the actors and their doings as though they were real personages. Effie Deans and Varley, Ophelia and Don Quixote, were for us creatures whom we knew. It was the same with later writers. Byron's poetry once more appealed to me by its revolutionary note, Shelley was interpreted afresh to me by these mountains which he would have loved. One incident I recollect which may serve to illustrate this new hold which imaginative literature took upon me. I opened one evening Great Expectations, and began to read it aloud. The next morning, at five o'clock, my two boys were contending for the book. For a month Pip sat beside our hearth, and Joe Gargery winked at us, and 'that ass' Pumblechook mouthed his solemn platitudes. We were continually rem

r, who set papers for a certain Theological College, telling me that one year he put this question: 'Give some account of the life of Mary, the mother of our Lord.' This was a question which obviously required some power of synthesis, some exercise of thought and skill in narrative. One bright youth, after a feeble sentence or two in which the name of Mary was at least included, went on to say, 'At this point it may not be out of place to give a list of the kings of Israel.' Here was something he did know, and it was something not worth knowing. I found that my boys had been educated on much the same principle. They could do a simple problem of mathematics after a fashion; that is, they could recite it; but it had never once been suggested to them as an exercise of reason. It was the same with history; they could recite dates and facts, but they had no perception of principles. It may be imagined that I had to go to school again myself before I could attempt to instruct them. I had to take down again my long disused Virgil and Cicero, and work

lights, and wonder that memory should be persistent over mere physical sensations. But I am not sure that these physical sensations are not recollected with more acuteness than mental ones, and there is no just reason why they should be despised. I have forgotten a good many aesthetic pleasures which at the time gave me keen delight-some phrase in oratory, some movement in concerted music, and such like-but I never forget the sensation of wind blowing over my bare flesh as I coasted down a long mountain road on a broiling day in August, nor the poignant thrill of that rushing water in my morning bathes. And mixed with it all is the aromatic scent of the pines beside the stream, the freshness of the meadows, and the song of falling water. Sometimes, when the river was in summer flood, there was just that spice of danger in

high midsummer

usk carnations

have gold-dust

ith his homely

s in frag

own the alle

asmine-muff

er the dreamin

on, and the whi

hantoms, barely conscious of ourselves. We had now recovered proprietorship in our own lives. Work, that had been a curse, was a blessing. Life, that had gone on maimed feet, was now virile in every part. This mere fulness of health was in itself ample compensation for the loss of a hundred artificial pleasures which we had once thought necess