Page:The Campaner thal, and other writings.djvu/251

, and wrote down what I was there—thinking. I was well aware, that when I to-day, on the twenty-fifth of May retired from this Salernic spinning-school, where one is taught to spin out the thread of life, in fairer wise, and without wetting it by foreign mixtures,—I was well aware, I say, that I should carry off with me far more elementary principles of the Science of Happiness than the whole Chamberlain piquet ever muster all their days. I noted down my first impression, in the following Rules of Life for myself and the press.

"Little joys refresh us constantly like house-bread, and never bring disgust; and great ones, like sugar-bread, briefly, and then bring it.—Trifles we should let, not plague us only, but also gratify us; we should seize not their poison-bags only, but their honey-bags also; and if flies often buzz about our room, we should, like Domitian, amuse ourselves with flies, or, like a certain still living Elector, feed them.—For civic life and its micrologies, for which the Parson has a natural taste, we must acquire an artificial one; must learn to love without esteeming it; learn, far as it ranks beneath human life, to enjoy it like another twig of this human life, as poetically as we do the pictures of it in romances. The loftiest mortal loves and seeks the same sort of things with the meanest; only from higher grounds and by higher paths. Be every minute, Man, a full life to thee!—Despise anxiety and wishing, the Future and the Past!—If the Second-pointer can be no road-pointer into an Eden for thy soul, the Month-pointer