I wonder if it ever occurred to him to reflect, in the tedious hours of too tranquil age, how much of what is best in the world had been simply _missed_ by him; how he had missed all the variety and interest of travel, the charm of intellectual society, the influences of genius, and even the physical excitements of healthy out-door amusements. When I think what a magnificent world it is that we inhabit, how much natural beauty there is in it, how much admirable human work in literature and the fine arts, how many living men and women there are in each generation whose acquaintance a wise man would travel far to seek, and value infinitely when he had found it, I cannot avoid the conclusion that my friend might have lived as he did in a planet far less richly endowed than ours, and that after a long life he went out of the world without having really known it. I have said that the intelligent Bohemian is generally a man of small or moderate means, whose object is to enjoy the _best_ advantages (not the most visible) of riches. In his view these advantages are leisure, travel, reading, and conversation. His estimate is different from that of the Philistine, who sets his heart on the lower advantages of riches, sacrificing leisure, travel, reading, and conversation, in order to have a larger house and more servants. But how, without riches, is the Bohemian to secure the advantages that he desires, for they also belong to riches? There lies the difficulty, and the Bohemian's way of overcoming it constitutes the romance of his existence. In absolute destitution the intelligent Bohemian life is not possible. A little money is necessary for it, and the art and craft of Bohemianism is to get for that small amount of money such an amount of leisure, reading, travel, and good conversation as may suffice to make life interesting. The way in which an old-fashioned Bohemian usually set about it was this: he treated material comfort and outward appearances as matters of no consequence, accepting them when they came in his way, but enduring the privation of them gayly. He learned the art of living on a little. "Je suis pauvre, très pauvre, et vis pourtant fort bien C'est parce que je vis comme les gens de rien."[26] He spent the little that he had, first for what was really necessary, and next for what really gave him pleasure, but he spent hardly anything in deference to the usages of society. In this way he got what he wanted. His books were second-hand and ill bound, but he _had_ books and read them; his clothes were shabby, yet still they kept him warm; he travelled in all sorts of cheap ways and frequently on foot; he lived a good deal in some unfashionable quarters in a capital city, and saw much of art, nature, and humanity.