"Who cannot on his own bed sweetly sleep,
Can on another's hardly rest."

So sings the saintly George Herbert, no new thought in these days of ours.

The effect of a residence at the Farm, I imagine, was not greater
willingness to serve in the kitchen, and so particularly assert that labor
was divine; but discontent that there was such a place as a kitchen. And,
however aimless life there seemed to be, it was an aimlessness of the
general, not of the individual life. Its beauty faded suddenly if I
remembered that it was a society for special ends, though those ends were
very noble. In the midst of busy trades and bustling commerce, it was a
congregation of calm scholars and poets, cherishing the ideal and the true
in each other's hearts, dedicate to a healthy and vigorous life. As an
association it needed a stricter system to insure success; and since it
had not the means to justify its mild life, it necessarily grew to this.
As reformers, you are now certainly more active, and may promise
yourselves heaven's reward for that. That impossibility of severance from
the world, of which you speak, I liked, though I did not like that there
should be such a protest against the world by those who were somewhat
subject to it. This was not my first feeling. When I went, it seemed as if
all hope had died from the race, as if the return to simplicity and beauty
lay through the woods and fields, and was to be a march of men whose very
habits and personal appearance should wear a sign of the coming grace. The
longer I stayed, the more surely that thought vanished. I had
unconsciously been devoted to the circumstance, while I had earnestly
denied its value. Gradually I perceived that only as a man grew deeper and
broader could he wear the coat and submit to the etiquette and obey the
laws which society demands. Now I feel that no new order is demanded, but
that the universe is plastic to the pious hand.