However mean your life is,meet it and live it ;do not shun it and call it hard names.It is not so bad as you are.It looks poorest when you are richest.The fault-finder will find faults in paradise.Love your life,poor as it is.You may perhaps have some pleasant,thrilling,glorious hourss,even in a poor-house.The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the alms-house as brightly as from the rich man's abode;the snow melts before its door as early in the spring.I do not see but a quiet mind may live as contentedly there,and have as cheering thoughts,as in a palace.The town's poor seem to me often to live the most independent lives of any.May be they are simply great enough to receive without misgiving.Most think that they are above being supported by the town;but it often happens that they are not above supporting themselves by dishonest means.which should be more disreputable.Cultivate poverty like a garden herb,like sage.Do not trouble yourself much to get new things,whether clothes or friends,Turn the old,return to them.Things do not change;we change.Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts
That must be the story of innumerable couples,and the pattern of lifeof life it offers has a homely grace.It reminds you of a placid rivulet,meandering smoohtly through green pastures and shaded by pleasant trees,till at last it falls into the vasty sea;but the sea is so calm,so silent,so infifferent,that you are troubled suddently by a vague uneasiness.Perhaps it is only by a kink in my nature,strong in me even in those days,that i felt in such an existence,the share of the great majority,something amiss.I recognized its social value.I saw its ordered happiness,but a fever in my blood asked for a wilder course.There seemed to me something alarming in such easy delights.In my heart was desire to live more dangerously.I was not unprepared for jagged rocks and treacherous,shoals it I could only have change-change and the exicitement of unforeseen.