When the fire is made, you want to sit in front of it and grow genial in
its effulgence. I have never been upon a throne,--except in moments of a
traveler's curiosity, about as long as a South American dictator remains
on one,--but I have no idea that it compares, for pleasantness, with a
seat before a wood-fire. A whole leisure day before you, a good novel
in hand, and the backlog only just beginning to kindle, with uncounted
hours of comfort in it, has life anything more delicious? For "novel"
you can substitute "Calvin's Institutes," if you wish to be virtuous
as well as happy. Even Calvin would melt before a wood-fire. A great
snowstorm, visible on three sides of your wide-windowed room, loading
the evergreens, blown in fine powder from the great chestnut-tops, piled
up in ever accumulating masses, covering the paths, the shrubbery, the
hedges, drifting and clinging in fantastic deposits, deepening your
sense of security, and taking away the sin of idleness by making it a
necessity, this is an excellent ground to your day by the fire.
To deliberately sit down in the morning to read a novel, to enjoy
yourself, is this not, in New England (I am told they don't read much
in other parts of the country), the sin of sins? Have you any right to
read, especially novels, until you have exhausted the best part of the
day in some employment that is called practical? Have you any right to
enjoy yourself at all until the fag-end of the day, when you are
tired and incapable of enjoying yourself? I am aware that this is the
practice, if not the theory, of our society,--to postpone the delights
of social intercourse until after dark, and rather late at night, when
body and mind are both weary with the exertions of business, and when
we can give to what is the most delightful and profitable thing in life,
social and intellectual society, only the weariness of dull brains and
over-tired muscles. No wonder we take our amusements sadly, and that so
many people find dinners heavy and parties stupid. Our economy leaves no
place for amusements; we merely add them to the burden of a life already
full. The world is still a little off the track as to what is really
useful.
I confess that the morning is a very good time to read a novel, or
anything else which is good and requires a fresh mind; and I take it
that nothing is worth reading that does not require an alert mind. I
suppose it is necessary that business should be transacted; though the
amount of business that does not contribute to anybody's comfort or
improvement suggests the query whether it is not overdone. I know that
unremitting attention to business is the price of success, but I don't
know what success is. There is a man, whom we all know, who built a
house that cost a quarter of a million of dollars, and furnished it for
another like sum, who does not know anything more about architecture,
or painting, or books, or history, than he cares for the rights of those
who have not so much money as he has. I heard him once, in a foreign
gallery, say to his wife, as they stood in front of a famous picture
by Rubens: "That is the Rape of the Sardines!" What a cheerful world it
would be if everybody was as successful as that man! While I am reading
my book by the fire, and taking an active part in important transactions
that may be a good deal better than real, let me be thankful that
a great many men are profitably employed in offices and bureaus and
country stores in keeping up the gossip and endless exchange of opinions
among mankind, so much of which is made to appear to the women at home
as "business." I find that there is a sort of busy idleness among men
in this world that is not held in disrepute. When the time comes that
I have to prove my right to vote, with women, I trust that it will be
remembered in my favor that I made this admission. If it is true, as a
witty conservative once said to me, that we never shall have peace in
this country until we elect a colored woman president, I desire to be
rectus in curia early.