my
"well-earned" leisure. Fool that I am! As if enjoyment were a thing to
be taken up and laid down at will, like a walking-stick. As if one could
let the golden moment pass and hope to find it again awaiting our
convenience. Why can we not be like Pippa with her one precious day? But
if she had been born in New England do you suppose her day would have
been what it was? Would she have sprung up at daybreak with heart and
mind all alight for pleasure? Certainly not. She would have spent the
golden morning in cleaning the kitchen, and the golden afternoon in
clearing up the attic, and would have gone out for a little walk after
the supper dishes were washed, only because she thought she "ought" to
take a little exercise in the open air.

Duty and work are all very well, but we have bound ourselves up in them
so completely that we have almost lost the art of spontaneous
enjoyment. We can feel comfortable or uncomfortable, annoyed or
gratified, but we cannot feel simple, buoyant, instinctive enjoyment in
anything. We take our very pleasures under the name of duties-- "We
ought to take a walk," "We ought not to miss that concert," "We ought to
read" a certain book, "We ought" to go and see this friend, or invite
that one to see us. Those things that should be our spontaneous
pleasures we have clothed and masked until they no longer know
themselves. A pleasure must present itself under the guise of a duty
before we feel that we can wholly give ourselves over to it.

Ah, let us stop all that! Let us take our pleasures without apology. Let
us give up this fashion of shoving them away into the left-over corners
of our lives, covering their gleaming raiment with sad-colored robes,
and visiting them with half-averted faces. Let us consort with them
openly, gayly!

The Jonathan Papers

I

A Placid Runaway

Jonathan and I differ about a great many things; how otherwise are we to
avoid the sloughs of bigoted self-satisfaction? But upon one point we
agree: we are both convinced that on a beautiful morning in April or May
or June there is just one thing that any right-minded person really
wants to do. That is to turn a deaf ear to duty and a blind eye to all
other pleasures, and--find a trout brook. We are, indeed, able to
understand that duty may be too much for him--may be quite indifferent
to his deaf ear and shout in the other, or may even seize him by the
shoulders and hold him firmly in his place. He may no