The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864, page 59 by Various Authors
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in his younger days he had called a "fiend," was in very truth an angel,--the angel of contentment and joy. Doctor Johnson stoutly maintained by both tongue and pen, that, in general, no one could be virtuous or happy who was not completely employed. Not only the bread we eat, but the true pleasures and real enjoyments of life, must be earned by the sweat of the brow. The poor old mill-horse, turned loose in the pasture on Sundays, seems sadly to miss his accustomed daily round of weary labor; the retired tallow-chandler, whose story has pointed so many morals and adorned so many tales, would have died of inertia and ennui in less than six months after his retirement from business, had not his successor kindly allowed him to help on melting-days; and methinks the very ghosts of certain busy and energetic men must fret and fume at the idle and inactive state of their shadowy and incorporal selves; nor, unless--as some hope and believe--we are to have our familiar and customary tasks and duties to perform in heaven, could their souls be happy and contented in Paradise.
But--after this rather foolish and wholly unnecessary digression--to return to Lamb. Elia, who had while a toil-worn clerk so carefully and frugally husbanded every odd moment and spare hour of time,--who, after his day's labor at India-House was over, had read so many massive old folios, and written so many pleasant pages for the pleasure and solacement of himself, and a choice and select number of men and women,--now that he had the whole long day to himself, read but little, and wrote but seldom.
And as for those long walks in the country, which he talked of so fondly in some of his letters to his friends,--those walks to Hoddesdon, to Amwell, to Windsor, and other towns and villages in the near vicinity of London, which he had enjoyed in anticipation a few years before he had the leisure actually to take them,--those long walks on "fine Isaac-Walton mornings," were found to be, it must be confessed, rather tiresome and unsatisfact