Topic
Mark Twain gives the opening frame: good friends, good books, a sleepy conscience. Browning finds that gain is gain however small; Keats says health is his expected heaven. Addison lists three grand essentials for happiness: something to do, something to love, something to hope for. The collection is deliberately modest in its satisfactions — these writers do not demand much, but they are precise about what they require. Plato on old age as release from passion; Lincoln on never being satisfied with anyone blockheaded enough to have him. The quieter pieces suggest that satisfaction arrives unexpectedly in the middle of ordinary life and is usually recognized only in retrospect, which makes it easier to miss the first time.