like an old tale.

Or perhaps you are left to your own company for the night, and surly
weather imprisons you by the fire. You may remember how Burns, numbering
past pleasures, dwells upon the hours when he has been "happy thinking."
It is a phrase that may well perplex a poor modern, girt about on every
side by clocks and chimes, and haunted, even at night, by flaming
dial-plates. For we are all so busy, and have so many far-off projects
to realise, and castles in the fire to turn into solid habitable
mansions on a gravel soil, that we can find no time for pleasure trips
into the Land of Thought and among the Hills of Vanity. Changed times,
indeed, when we must sit all night, beside the fire, with folded hands;
and a changed world for most of us, when we find we can pass the hours
without discontent, and be happy thinking. We are in such haste to be
doing, to be writing, to be gathering gear, to make our voice audible a
moment in the derisive silence of eternity, that we forget that one
thing, of which these are but the parts--namely, to live. We fall in
love, we drink hard, we run to and fro upon the earth like frightened
sheep. And now you are to ask yourself if, when all is done, you would
not have been better to sit by the fire at home, and be happy thinking.
To sit still and contemplate,--to remember the faces of women without
desire, to be pleased by the great deeds of men without envy, to be
everything and everywhere in sympathy, and yet content to remain where
and what you are--is not this to know both wisdom and virtue, and to
dwell with happiness? After all, it is not they who carry flags, but
they who look upon it from a private chamber, who have the fun of the
procession. And once you are at that, you are in the very humour of all
social heresy. It is no time for shuffling, or for big, empty words. If
you ask yourself what you mean by fame, riches, or learning, the answer
is far to seek; and you go back into that kingdom of light imaginations,
which seem so vain in the eyes of Philistines perspiring after wealth,
and so momentous to those who are stricken with the disproportions of
the world, and, in the face of the gigantic stars, cannot stop to split
differences between two degrees of the infinitesimally small, such as a
tobacco-pipe or the Roman Empire, a million of money or a fiddlestick's
end.

You lean from the window, your last pipe reeking whitely into the
darkness, your body full of delicious pai