Coverdale's Sick-Chamber

As for me, I lay abed; and if I said my prayers, it was backward,
cursing my day as bitterly as patient Job himself. The truth was, the
hot-house warmth of a town residence, and the luxurious life in which I
indulged myself, had taken much of the pith out of my physical system;
and the wintry blast of the preceding day, together with the general
chill of our airy old farmhouse, had got fairly into my heart and the
marrow of my bones. In this predicament, I seriously wished--selfish
as it may appear--that the reformation of society had been postponed
about half a century, or, at all events, to such a date as should have
put my intermeddling with it entirely out of the question.

What, in the name of common-sense, had I to do with any better society
than I had always lived in? It had satisfied me well enough. My
pleasant bachelor-parlor, sunny and shadowy, curtained and carpeted,
with the bedchamber adjoining; my centre-table, strewn with books and
periodicals; my writing-desk with a half-finished poem, in a stanza of
my own contrivance; my morning lounge at the reading-room or picture
gallery; my noontide walk along the cheery pavement, with the
suggestive succession of human faces, and the brisk throb of human life
in which I shared; my dinner at the Albion, where I had a hundred
dishes at command, and could banquet as delicately as the wizard
Michael Scott when the Devil fed him from the king of France's kitchen;
my evening at the billiard club, the concert, the theatre, or at
somebody's party, if I pleased,--what could be better than all this?