Few of us appreciate the number
of our everyday blessings; we look on them as trifles, and yet "trifles
make perfection, and perfection is no trifle," as Michael Angelo said. We
forget them because they are always with us; and yet for each of us, as
Mr. Pater well observes, "these simple gifts, and others equally trivial,
bread and wine, fruit and milk, might regain that poetic and, as it were,
moral significance which surely belongs to all the means of our daily
life, could we but break through the veil of our familiarity with things
by no means vulgar in themselves."
"Let not," says Isaak Walton, "the blessings we receive daily from God
make us not to value or not praise Him because they be common; let us not
forget to praise Him for the innocent mirth and pleasure we have met with
since we met together. What would a blind man give to see the pleasant
rivers and meadows and flowers and fountains; and this and many other like
blessings we enjoy daily."
Contentment, we have been told by Epicurus, consists not in great wealth,
but in few wants.
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