HDT "Economy" Hypertext

(Ah! Here Thoreau lets it fly. He firmly believes in the potential of each man to be moral and divine. The Transcendentalists believed in the perfectibility of man. So, the teamster on the highway has been told by his employers and by his peers that his worth is measured by delivering goods to market on time. He does not believe in himself nor his potential to witness and participate in the divinity in the world. So, reject public opinion, societal influences, economical considerations and pursue your potential as a human in nature or suffer a life of quiet desparation.)

When we consider what, to use the words of the catechism, is the

chief end of man, and what are the true necessaries and means of

life, it appears as if men had deliberately chosen the common mode

of living because they preferred it to any other. Yet they honestly

think there is no choice left. But alert and healthy natures

remember that the sun rose clear. It is never too late to give up

our prejudices. No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can

be trusted without proof. What everybody echoes or in silence

passes by as true to-day may turn out to be falsehood to-morrow,

mere smoke of opinion, which some had trusted for a cloud that would

sprinkle fertilizing rain on their fields. What old people say you

cannot do, you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people,

and new deeds for new. Old people did not know enough once,

perchance, to fetch fresh fuel to keep the fire a-going; new people

put a little dry wood under a pot, and are whirled round the globe

with the speed of birds, in a way to kill old people, as the phrase

is. Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor

as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost. One may

almost doubt if the wisest man has learned anything of absolute

value by living. Practically, the old have no very important advice

to give the young, their own experience has been so partial, and

their lives have been such miserable failures, for private reasons,

as they must believe; and it may be that they have some faith left

which belies that experience, and they are only less young than they

were. I have lived some thirty years on this planet, and I have yet

to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from

my seniors. They have told me nothing, and probably cannot tell me

anything to the purpose. Here is life, an experiment to a great

extent untried by me; but it does not avail me that they have tried

it. If I have any experience which I think valuable, I am sure to

reflect that this my Mentors said nothing about.

(This seems adolescent in its tone even though Thoreau was 30 when he wrote it. Like Emerson, Thoreau advocates an original relation to the universe developed by new ways of living. He does not hate the elderly but beleives the experiement of life is best taken on through one's own convictions.)

One farmer says to me, "You cannot live on vegetable food

solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with"; and so he

religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with

the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his

oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering

plow along in spite of every obstacle. Some things are really

necessaries of life in some circles, the most helpless and diseased,

which in others are luxuries merely, and in others still are

entirely unknown.

The whole ground of human life seems to some to have been gone

over by their predecessors, both the heights and the valleys, and

all things to have been cared for. According to Evelyn, "the wise

Solomon prescribed ordinances for the very distances of trees; and

the Roman praetors have decided how often you may go into your

neighbor's land to gather the acorns which fall on it without

trespass, and what share belongs to that neighbor." Hippocrates has

even left directions how we should cut our nails; that is, even with

the ends of the fingers, neither shorter nor longer. Undoubtedly

the very tedium and ennui which presume to have exhausted the

variety and the joys of life are as old as Adam. But man's

capacities have never been measured; nor are we to judge of what he

can do by any precedents, so little has been tried. Whatever have

been thy failures hitherto, "be not afflicted, my child, for who

shall assign to thee what thou hast left undone?"

We might try our lives by a thousand simple tests; as, for

instance, that the same sun which ripens my beans illumines at once

a system of earths like ours. If I had remembered this it would

have prevented some mistakes. This was not the light in which I

hoed them. The stars are the apexes of what wonderful triangles!

What distant and different beings in the various mansions of the

universe are contemplating the same one at the same moment! Nature

and human life are as various as our several constitutions. Who

shall say what prospect life offers to another? Could a greater

miracle take place than for us to look through each other's eyes for

an instant? We should live in all the ages of the world in an hour;

ay, in all the worlds of the ages. History, Poetry, Mythology! -- I

know of no reading of another's experience so startling and

informing as this would be.

The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my

soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be

my good behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well?

You may say the wisest thing you can, old man -- you who have lived

seventy years, not without honor of a kind -- I hear an irresistible

voice which invites me away from all that. One generation abandons

the enterprises of another like stranded vessels.

(This is what makes reading Thoreau fun. He is so highly paradoxical and hyerbolic. He believes that success in the capitalist economy is actually failure because the opportunity cost is the loss of human potential. He detests everyday that he participated in the economy as we understand it for this participation prevented him from pursuing his spiritual, philosophical, and natural self.)

I think that we may safely trust a good deal more than we do.

We may waive just so much care of ourselves as we honestly bestow

elsewhere. Nature is as well adapted to our weakness as to our

strength. The incessant anxiety and strain of some is a well-nigh

incurable form of disease. We are made to exaggerate the importance

of what work we do; and yet how much is not done by us! or, what if

we had been taken sick? How vigilant we are! determined not to live

by faith if we can avoid it; all the day long on the alert, at night

we unwillingly say our prayers and commit ourselves to

uncertainties. So thoroughly and sincerely are we compelled to

live, reverencing our life, and denying the possibility of change.

This is the only way, we say; but there are as many ways as there

can be drawn radii from one centre. All change is a miracle to

contemplate; but it is a miracle which is taking place every

instant. Confucius said, "To know that we know what we know, and

that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge."

When one man has reduced a fact of the imagination to be a fact to

his understanding, I foresee that all men at length establish their

lives on that basis.

(When we believe in the power of the imagination to lead to another life, a better life, then we can start towards self-improvement.)

Let us consider for a moment what most of the trouble and

anxiety which I have referred to is about, and how much it is

necessary that we be troubled, or at least careful. It would be

some advantage to live a primitive and frontier life, though in the

midst of an outward civilization, if only to learn what are the

gross necessaries of life and what methods have been taken to obtain

them; or even to look over the old day-books of the merchants, to

see what it was that men most commonly bought at the stores, what

they stored, that is, what are the grossest groceries. For the

improvements of ages have had but little influence on the essential

laws of man's existence; as our skeletons, probably, are not to be

distinguished from those of our ancestors.

By the words, necessary of life, I mean whatever, of all that

man obtains by his own exertions, has been from the first, or from

long use has become, so important to human life that few, if any,

whether from savageness, or poverty, or philosophy, ever attempt to

do without it. To many creatures there is in this sense but one

necessary of life, Food. To the bison of the prairie it is a few

inches of palatable grass, with water to drink; unless he seeks the

Shelter of the forest or the mountain's shadow. None of the brute

creation requires more than Food and Shelter. The necessaries of

life for man in this climate may, accurately enough, be distributed

under the several heads of Food, Shelter, Clothing, and Fuel; for

not till we have secured these are we prepared to entertain the true

problems of life with freedom and a prospect of success. Man has

invented, not only houses, but clothes and cooked food; and possibly

from the accidental discovery of the warmth of fire, and the

consequent use of it, at first a luxury, arose the present necessity

to sit by it. We observe cats and dogs acquiring the same second

nature. By proper Shelter and Clothing we legitimately retain our

own internal heat; but with an excess of these, or of Fuel, that is,

with an external heat greater than our own internal, may not cookery

properly be said to begin? Darwin, the naturalist, says of the

inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego, that while his own party, who were

well clothed and sitting close to a fire, were far from too warm,

these naked savages, who were farther off, were observed, to his

great surprise, "to be streaming with perspiration at undergoing

such a roasting." So, we are told, the New Hollander goes naked

with impunity, while the European shivers in his clothes. Is it

impossible to combine the hardiness of these savages with the

intellectualness of the civilized man? According to Liebig, man's

body is a stove, and food the fuel which keeps up the internal

combustion in the lungs. In cold weather we eat more, in warm less.

The animal heat is the result of a slow combustion, and disease and

death take place when this is too rapid; or for want of fuel, or

from some defect in the draught, the fire goes out. Of course the

vital heat is not to be confounded with fire; but so much for

analogy. It appears, therefore, from the above list, that the

expression, animal life, is nearly synonymous with the expression,

animal heat; for while Food may be regarded as the Fuel which keeps

up the fire within us -- and Fuel serves only to prepare that Food

or to increase the warmth of our bodies by addition from without --

Shelter and Clothing also serve only to retain the heat thus

generated and absorbed.

The grand necessity, then, for our bodies, is to keep warm, to

keep the vital heat in us. What pains we accordingly take, not only

with our Food, and Clothing, and Shelter, but with our beds, which

are our night-clothes, robbing the nests and breasts of birds to

prepare this shelter within a shelter, as the mole has its bed of

grass and leaves at the end of its burrow! The poor man is wont to

complain that this is a cold world; and to cold, no less physical

than social, we refer directly a great part of our ails. The

summer, in some climates, makes possible to man a sort of Elysian

life. Fuel, except to cook his Food, is then unnecessary; the sun

is his fire, and many of the fruits are sufficiently cooked by its

rays; while Food generally is more various, and more easily

obtained, and Clothing and Shelter are wholly or half unnecessary.

At the present day, and in this country, as I find by my own

experience, a few implements, a knife, an axe, a spade, a

wheelbarrow, etc., and for the studious, lamplight, stationery, and

access to a few books, rank next to necessaries, and can all be

obtained at a trifling cost. Yet some, not wise, go to the other

side of the globe, to barbarous and unhealthy regions, and devote

themselves to trade for ten or twenty years, in order that they may

live -- that is, keep comfortably warm -- and die in New England at

last. The luxuriously rich are not simply kept comfortably warm,

but unnaturally hot; as I implied before, they are cooked, of course

a la mode.

Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of

life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the

elevation of mankind. With respect to luxuries and comforts, the

wisest have ever lived a more simple and meagre life than the poor.

The ancient philosophers, Chinese, Hindoo, Persian, and Greek, were

a class than which none has been poorer in outward riches, none so

rich in inward. We know not much about them. It is remarkable that

we know so much of them as we do. The same is true of the more

modern reformers and benefactors of their race. None can be an

impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground

of what we should call voluntary poverty. Of a life of luxury the

fruit is luxury, whether in agriculture, or commerce, or literature,

or art. There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not

philosophers. Yet it is admirable to profess because it was once

admirable to live. To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle

thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to

live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence,

magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of

life, not only theoretically, but practically. The success of great

scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not

kingly, not manly. They make shift to live merely by conformity,

practically as their fathers did, and are in no sense the

progenitors of a noble race of men. But why do men degenerate ever?

What makes families run out? What is the nature of the luxury which

enervates and destroys nations? Are we sure that there is none of

it in our own lives? The philosopher is in advance of his age even

in the outward form of his life. He is not fed, sheltered, clothed,

warmed, like his contemporaries. How can a man be a philosopher and

not maintain his vital heat by better methods than other men?

When a man is warmed by the several modes which I have

described, what does he want next? Surely not more warmth of the

same kind, as more and richer food, larger and more splendid houses,

finer and more abundant clothing, more numerous, incessant, and

hotter fires, and the like. When he has obtained those things which

are necessary to life, there is another alternative than to obtain

the superfluities; and that is, to adventure on life now, his

vacation from humbler toil having commenced. The soil, it appears,

is suited to the seed, for it has sent its radicle downward, and it

may now send its shoot upward also with confidence. Why has man

rooted himself thus firmly in the earth, but that he may rise in the

same proportion into the heavens above? -- for the nobler plants are

valued for the fruit they bear at last in the air and light, far

from the ground,

(Thoreau suggests that once basic needs are met there is an alternative to wanting better and more material goods. He suggests we imitate the trees and know the earth on which we dwell and grip it with out minds so that we may bear fruit high above the ground in inspired, almost celestial thought.)

and are not treated like the humbler esculents,

which, though they may be biennials, are cultivated only till they

have perfected their root, and often cut down at top for this

purpose, so that most would not know them in their flowering season.

I do not mean to prescribe rules to strong and valiant natures,

who will mind their own affairs whether in heaven or hell, and

perchance build more magnificently and spend more lavishly than the

richest, without ever impoverishing themselves, not knowing how they

live -- if, indeed, there are any such, as has been dreamed; nor to

those who find their encouragement and inspiration in precisely the

present condition of things, and cherish it with the fondness and

enthusiasm of lovers -- and, to some extent, I reckon myself in this

number; I do not speak to those who are well employed, in whatever

circumstances, and they know whether they are well employed or not;

-- but mainly to the mass of men who are discontented, and idly

complaining of the hardness of their lot or of the times, when they

might improve them. There are some who complain most energetically

and inconsolably of any, because they are, as they say, doing their

duty. I also have in my mind that seemingly wealthy, but most

terribly impoverished class of all, who have accumulated dross, but

know not how to use it, or get rid of it, and thus have forged their

own golden or silver fetters.

If I should attempt to tell how I have desired to spend my life

in years past, it would probably surprise those of my readers who

are somewhat acquainted with its actual history; it would certainly

astonish those who know nothing about it. I will only hint at some

of the enterprises which I have cherished.

In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been

anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too;

to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future,

which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line. You will

pardon some obscurities, for there are more secrets in my trade than

in most men's, and yet not voluntarily kept, but inseparable from

its very nature. I would gladly tell all that I know about it, and

never paint "No Admittance" on my gate.

I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle dove, and am

still on their trail. Many are the travellers I have spoken

concerning them, describing their tracks and what calls they

answered to. I have met one or two who had heard the hound, and the

tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud,

and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them

themselves.

To anticipate, not the sunrise and the dawn merely, but, if

possible, Nature herself! How many mornings, summer and winter,

before yet any neighbor was stirring about his business, have I been

about mine! No doubt, many of my townsmen have met me returning

from this enterprise, farmers starting for Boston in the twilight,

or woodchoppers going to their work. It is true, I never assisted

the sun materially in his rising, but, doubt not, it was of the last

importance only to be present at it.

So many autumn, ay, and winter days, spent outside the town,

trying to hear what was in the wind, to hear and carry it express!

I well-nigh sunk all my capital in it, and lost my own breath into

the bargain, running in the face of it. If it had concerned either

of the political parties, depend upon it, it would have appeared in

the Gazette with the earliest intelligence. At other times watching

from the observatory of some cliff or tree, to telegraph any new

arrival; or waiting at evening on the hill-tops for the sky to fall,

that I might catch something, though I never caught much, and that,

manna-wise, would dissolve again in the sun.

For a long time I was reporter to a journal, of no very wide

circulation, whose editor has never yet seen fit to print the bulk

of my contributions, and, as is too common with writers, I got only

my labor for my pains. However, in this case my pains were their

own reward.

For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snow-storms and

rain-storms, and did my duty faithfully; surveyor, if not of

highways, then of forest paths and all across-lot routes, keeping

them open, and ravines bridged and passable at all seasons, where

the public heel had testified to their utility.

I have looked after the wild stock of the town, which give a

faithful herdsman a good deal of trouble by leaping fences; and I

have had an eye to the unfrequented nooks and corners of the farm;

though I did not always know whether Jonas or Solomon worked in a

particular field to-day; that was none of my business. I have

watered the red huckleberry, the sand cherry and the nettle-tree,

the red pine and the black ash, the white grape and the yellow

violet, which might have withered else in dry seasons.

In short, I went on thus for a long time (I may say it without

boasting), faithfully minding my business, till it became more and

more evident that my townsmen would not after all admit me into the

list of town officers, nor make my place a sinecure with a moderate

allowance. My accounts, which I can swear to have kept faithfully,

I have, indeed, never got audited, still less accepted, still less

paid and settled. However, I have not set my heart on that.

Not long since, a strolling Indian went to sell baskets at the

house of a well-known lawyer in my neighborhood. "Do you wish to

buy any baskets?" he asked. "No, we do not want any," was the

reply. "What!" exclaimed the Indian as he went out the gate, "do

you mean to starve us?" Having seen his industrious white neighbors

so well off -- that the lawyer had only to weave arguments, and, by

some magic, wealth and standing followed -- he had said to himself:

I will go into business; I will weave baskets; it is a thing which I

can do. Thinking that when he had made the baskets he would have

done his part, and then it would be the white man's to buy them. He

had not discovered that it was necessary for him to make it worth

the other's while to buy them, or at least make him think that it

was so, or to make something else which it would be worth his while

to buy. I too had woven a kind of basket of a delicate texture, but

I had not made it worth any one's while to buy them. Yet not the

less, in my case, did I think it worth my while to weave them, and

instead of studying how to make it worth men's while to buy my

baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling

them. The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one

kind. Why should we exaggerate any one kind at the expense of the

others?

(Thoreau is developing his perspective on the economy here. He suggests that material wealth as measured by the economy is one way of measuring a man's worth but why should it be the only way? Thoreau wants to avoid contributing to the economy of Boston and Concord. He wants to live a life free from its influence. He wants to weave baskets that cannot be bought or sold.)

Finding that my fellow-citizens were not likely to offer me any

room in the court house, or any curacy or living anywhere else, but

I must shift for myself, I turned my face more exclusively than ever

to the woods, where I was better known. I determined to go into

business at once, and not wait to acquire the usual capital, using

such slender means as I had already got. My purpose in going to

Walden Pond was not to live cheaply nor to live dearly there, but to

transact some private business with the fewest obstacles; to be

hindered from accomplishing which for want of a little common sense,

a little enterprise and business talent, appeared not so sad as

foolish.

I have always endeavored to acquire strict business habits; they

are indispensable to every man. If your trade is with the Celestial

Empire, then some small counting house on the coast, in some Salem

harbor, will be fixture enough. You will export such articles as

the country affords, purely native products, much ice and pine

timber and a little granite, always in native bottoms. These will

be good ventures. To oversee all the details yourself in person; to

be at once pilot and captain, and owner and underwriter; to buy and

sell and keep the accounts; to read every letter received, and write

or read every letter sent; to superintend the discharge of imports

night and day; to be upon many parts of the coast almost at the same

time -- often the richest freight will be discharged upon a Jersey

shore; -- to be your own telegraph, unweariedly sweeping the

horizon, speaking all passing vessels bound coastwise; to keep up a

steady despatch of commodities, for the supply of such a distant and

exorbitant market; to keep yourself informed of the state of the

markets, prospects of war and peace everywhere, and anticipate the

tendencies of trade and civilization -- taking advantage of the

results of all exploring expeditions, using new passages and all

improvements in navigation; -- charts to be studied, the position of

reefs and new lights and buoys to be ascertained, and ever, and

ever, the logarithmic tables to be corrected, for by the error of

some calculator the vessel often splits upon a rock that should have

reached a friendly pier -- there is the untold fate of La Prouse;

-- universal science to be kept pace with, studying the lives of all

great discoverers and navigators, great adventurers and merchants,

from Hanno and the Phoenicians down to our day; in fine, account of

stock to be taken from time to time, to know how you stand. It is a

labor to task the faculties of a man -- such problems of profit and

loss, of interest, of tare and tret, and gauging of all kinds in it,

as demand a universal knowledge.

I have thought that Walden Pond would be a good place for

business, not solely on account of the railroad and the ice trade;

it offers advantages which it may not be good policy to divulge; it

is a good port and a good foundation. No Neva marshes to be filled;

though you must everywhere build on piles of your own driving. It

is said that a flood-tide, with a westerly wind, and ice in the

Neva, would sweep St. Petersburg from the face of the earth.

As this business was to be entered into without the usual

capital, it may not be easy to conjecture where those means, that

will still be indispensable to every such undertaking, were to be

obtained. As for Clothing, to come at once to the practical part of

the question, perhaps we are led oftener by the love of novelty and

a regard for the opinions of men, in procuring it, than by a true

utility. Let him who has work to do recollect that the object of

clothing is, first, to retain the vital heat, and secondly, in this

state of society, to cover nakedness, and he may judge how much of

any necessary or important work may be accomplished without adding

to his wardrobe. Kings and queens who wear a suit but once, though

made by some tailor or dressmaker to their majesties, cannot know

the comfort of wearing a suit that fits. They are no better than

wooden horses to hang the clean clothes on. Every day our garments

become more assimilated to ourselves, receiving the impress of the

wearer's character, until we hesitate to lay them aside without such

delay and medical appliances and some such solemnity even as our

bodies. No man ever stood the lower in my estimation for having a

patch in his clothes; yet I am sure that there is greater anxiety,

commonly, to have fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched

clothes, than to have a sound conscience. But even if the rent is

not mended, perhaps the worst vice betrayed is improvidence. I

sometimes try my acquaintances by such tests as this -- Who could

wear a patch, or two extra seams only, over the knee? Most behave

as if they believed that their prospects for life would be ruined if

they should do it. It would be easier for them to hobble to town

with a broken leg than with a broken pantaloon. Often if an

accident happens to a gentleman's legs, they can be mended; but if a

similar accident happens to the legs of his pantaloons, there is no

help for it; for he considers, not what is truly respectable, but

what is respected. We know but few men, a great many coats and

breeches. Dress a scarecrow in your last shift, you standing

shiftless by, who would not soonest salute the scarecrow? Passing a

cornfield the other day, close by a hat and coat on a stake, I

recognized the owner of the farm. He was only a little more

weather-beaten than when I saw him last. I have heard of a dog that

barked at every stranger who approached his master's premises with

clothes on, but was easily quieted by a naked thief. It is an

interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if

they were divested of their clothes. Could you, in such a case,

tell surely of any company of civilized men which belonged to the

most respected class? When Madam Pfeiffer, in her adventurous

travels round the world, from east to west, had got so near home as

Asiatic Russia, she says that she felt the necessity of wearing

other than a travelling dress, when she went to meet the

authorities, for she "was now in a civilized country, where ...

people are judged of by their clothes." Even in our democratic New

England towns the accidental possession of wealth, and its

manifestation in dress and equipage alone, obtain for the possessor

almost universal respect. But they yield such respect, numerous as

they are, are so far heathen, and need to have a missionary sent to

them. Beside, clothes introduced sewing, a kind of work which you

may call endless; a woman's dress, at least, is never done.

A man who has at length found something to do will not need to

get a new suit to do it in; for him the old will do, that has lain

dusty in the garret for an indeterminate period. Old shoes will

serve a hero longer than they have served his valet -- if a hero

ever has a valet -- bare feet are older than shoes, and he can make

them do. Only they who go to soires and legislative balls must

have new coats, coats to change as often as the man changes in them.

But if my jacket and trousers, my hat and shoes, are fit to worship

God in, they will do; will they not? Who ever saw his old clothes

-- his old coat, actually worn out, resolved into its primitive

elements, so that it was not a deed of charity to bestow it on some

poor boy, by him perchance to be bestowed on some poorer still, or

shall we say richer, who could do with less? I say, beware of all

enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of

clothes. If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made

to fit? If you have any enterprise before you, try it in your old

clothes. All men want, not something to do with, but something to

do, or rather something to be. Perhaps we should never procure a

new suit, however ragged or dirty the old, until we have so

conducted, so enterprised or sailed in some way, that we feel like

new men in the old, and that to retain it would be like keeping new

wine in old bottles. Our moulting season, like that of the fowls,

must be a crisis in our lives. The loon retires to solitary ponds

to spend it. Thus also the snake casts its slough, and the

caterpillar its wormy coat, by an internal industry and expansion;

for clothes are but our outmost cuticle and mortal coil. Otherwise

we shall be found sailing under false colors, and be inevitably

cashiered at last by our own opinion, as well as that of mankind.

We don garment after garment, as if we grew like exogenous

plants by addition without. Our outside and often thin and fanciful

clothes are our epidermis, or false skin, which partakes not of our

life, and may be stripped off here and there without fatal injury;

our thicker garments, constantly worn, are our cellular integument,

or cortex; but our shirts are our liber, or true bark, which cannot

be removed without girdling and so destroying the man. I believe

that all races at some seasons wear something equivalent to the

shirt. It is desirable that a man be clad so simply that he can lay

his hands on himself in the dark, and that he live in all respects

so compactly and preparedly that, if an enemy take the town, he can,

like the old philosopher, walk out the gate empty-handed without

anxiety. While one thick garment is, for most purposes, as good as

three thin ones, and cheap clothing can be obtained at prices really

to suit customers; while a thick coat can be bought for five

dollars, which will last as many years, thick pantaloons for two

dollars, cowhide boots for a dollar and a half a pair, a summer hat

for a quarter of a dollar, and a winter cap for sixty-two and a half

cents, or a better be made at home at a nominal cost, where is he so

poor that, clad in such a suit, of his own earning, there will not

be found wise men to do him reverence?

When I ask for a garment of a particular form, my tailoress

tells me gravely, "They do not make them so now," not emphasizing

the "They" at all, as if she quoted an authority as impersonal as

the Fates, and I find it difficult to get made what I want, simply

because she cannot believe that I mean what I say, that I am so

rash. When I hear this oracular sentence, I am for a moment

absorbed in thought, emphasizing to myself each word separately that

I may come at the meaning of it, that I may find out by what degree

of consanguinity They are related to me, and what authority they

may have in an affair which affects me so nearly; and, finally, I am

inclined to answer her with equal mystery, and without any more

emphasis of the "they" -- "It is true, they did not make them so

recently, but they do now." Of what use this measuring of me if she

does not measure my character, but only the breadth of my shoulders,

as it were a peg to bang the coat on? We worship not the Graces,

nor the Parcae, but Fashion. She spins and weaves and cuts with

full authority. The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveller's cap,

and all the monkeys in America do the same. I sometimes despair of

getting anything quite simple and honest done in this world by the

help of men. They would have to be passed through a powerful press

first, to squeeze their old notions out of them, so that they would

not soon get upon their legs again; and then there would be some one

in the company with a maggot in his head, hatched from an egg

deposited there nobody knows when, for not even fire kills these

things, and you would have lost your labor. Nevertheless, we will

not forget that some Egyptian wheat was handed down to us by a

mummy.

On the whole, I think that it cannot be maintained that dressing

has in this or any country risen to the dignity of an art. At

present men make shift to wear what they can get. Like shipwrecked

sailors, they put on what they can find on the beach, and at a

little distance, whether of space or time, laugh at each other's

masquerade. Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but

follows religiously the new. We are amused at beholding the costume

of Henry VIII, or Queen Elizabeth, as much as if it was that of the

King and Queen of the Cannibal Islands. All costume off a man is

pitiful or grotesque. It is only the serious eye peering from and

the sincere life passed within it which restrain laughter and

consecrate the costume of any people. Let Harlequin be taken with a

fit of the colic and his trappings will have to serve that mood too.

When the soldier is hit by a cannonball, rags are as becoming as

purple.

The childish and savage taste of men and women for new patterns

keeps how many shaking and squinting through kaleidoscopes that they

may discover the particular figure which this generation requires

today. The manufacturers have learned that this taste is merely

whimsical. Of two patterns which differ only by a few threads more

or less of a particular color, the one will be sold readily, the

other lie on the shelf, though it frequently happens that after the

lapse of a season the latter becomes the most fashionable.

Comparatively, tattooing is not the hideous custom which it is

called. It is not barbarous merely because the printing is

skin-deep and unalterable.

I cannot believe that our factory system is the best mode by

which men may get clothing. The condition of the operatives is

becoming every day more like that of the English; and it cannot be

wondered at, since, as far as I have heard or observed, the

principal object is, not that mankind may be well and honestly clad,

but, unquestionably, that corporations may be enriched. In the long

run men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, though they should

fail immediately, they had better aim at something high.

As for a Shelter, I will not deny that this is now a necessary

of life, though there are instances of men having done without it

for long periods in colder countries than this. Samuel Laing says

that "the Laplander in his skin dress, and in a skin bag which he

puts over his head and shoulders, will sleep night after night on

the snow ... in a degree of cold which would extinguish the life of

one exposed to it in any woollen clothing." He had seen them asleep

thus. Yet he adds, "They are not hardier than other people." But,

probably, man did not live long on the earth without discovering the

convenience which there is in a house, the domestic comforts, which

phrase may have originally signified the satisfactions of the house

more than of the family; though these must be extremely partial and

occasional in those climates where the house is associated in our

thoughts with winter or the rainy season chiefly, and two thirds of

the year, except for a parasol, is unnecessary. In our climate, in

the summer, it was formerly almost solely a covering at night. In

the Indian gazettes a wigwam was the symbol of a day's march, and a

row of them cut or painted on the bark of a tree signified that so

many times they had camped. Man was not made so large limbed and

robust but that he must seek to narrow his world and wall in a space

such as fitted him. He was at first bare and out of doors; but

though this was pleasant enough in serene and warm weather, by

daylight, the rainy season and the winter, to say nothing of the

torrid sun, would perhaps have nipped his race in the bud if he had

not made haste to clothe himself with the shelter of a house. Adam

and Eve, according to the fable, wore the bower before other

clothes. Man wanted a home, a place of warmth, or comfort, first of

warmth, then the warmth of the affections.

We may imagine a time when, in the infancy of the human race,

some enterprising mortal crept into a hollow in a rock for shelter.

Every child begins the world again, to some extent, and loves to

stay outdoors, even in wet and cold. It plays house, as well as

horse, having an instinct for it. Who does not remember the

interest with which, when young, he looked at shelving rocks, or any

approach to a cave? It was the natural yearning of that portion,

any portion of our most primitive ancestor which still survived in

us. From the cave we have advanced to roofs of palm leaves, of bark

and boughs, of linen woven and stretched, of grass and straw, of

boards and shingles, of stones and tiles. At last, we know not what

it is to live in the open air, and our lives are domestic in more

senses than we think. From the hearth the field is a great

distance. It would be well, perhaps, if we were to spend more of

our days and nights without any obstruction between us and the

celestial bodies, if the poet did not speak so much from under a

roof, or the saint dwell there so long. Birds do not sing in caves,

nor do doves cherish their innocence in dovecots.

However, if one designs to construct a dwelling-house, it

behooves him to exercise a little Yankee shrewdness, lest after all

he find himself in a workhouse, a labyrinth without a clue, a

museum, an almshouse, a prison, or a splendid mausoleum instead.

Consider first how slight a shelter is absolutely necessary. I have

seen Penobscot Indians, in this town, living in tents of thin cotton

cloth, while the snow was nearly a foot deep around them, and I

thought that they would be glad to have it deeper to keep out the

wind. Formerly, when how to get my living honestly, with freedom

left for my proper pursuits, was a question which vexed me even more

than it does now, for unfortunately I am become somewhat callous, I

used to see a large box by the railroad, six feet long by three

wide, in which the laborers locked up their tools at night; and it

suggested to me that every man who was hard pushed might get such a

one for a dollar, and, having bored a few auger holes in it, to

admit the air at least, get into it when it rained and at night, and

hook down the lid, and so have freedom in his love, and in his soul

be free. This did not appear the worst, nor by any means a

despicable alternative. You could sit up as late as you pleased,

and, whenever you got up, go abroad without any landlord or

house-lord dogging you for rent. Many a man is harassed to death to

pay the rent of a larger and more luxurious box who would not have

frozen to death in such a box as this. I am far from jesting.

Economy is a subject which admits of being treated with levity, but

it cannot so be disposed of. A comfortable house for a rude and

hardy race, that lived mostly out of doors, was once made here

almost entirely of such materials as Nature furnished ready to their

hands. Gookin, who was superintendent of the Indians subject to the

Massachusetts Colony, writing in 1674, says, "The best of their

houses are covered very neatly, tight and warm, with barks of trees,

slipped from their bodies at those seasons when the sap is up, and

made into great flakes, with pressure of weighty timber, when they

are green.... The meaner sort are covered with mats which they make

of a kind of bulrush, and are also indifferently tight and warm, but

not so good as the former.... Some I have seen, sixty or a hundred

feet long and thirty feet broad.... I have often lodged in their

wigwams, and found them as warm as the best English houses." He

adds that they were commonly carpeted and lined within with

well-wrought embroidered mats, and were furnished with various

utensils. The Indians had advanced so far as to regulate the effect

of the wind by a mat suspended over the hole in the roof and moved

by a string. Such a lodge was in the first instance constructed in

a day or two at most, and taken down and put up in a few hours; and

every family owned one, or its apartment in one.

In the savage state every family owns a shelter as good as the

best, and sufficient for its coarser and simpler wants; but I think

that I speak within bounds when I say that, though the birds of the

air have their nests, and the foxes their holes, and the savages

their wigwams, in modern civilized society not more than one half

the families own a shelter. In the large towns and cities, where

civilization especially prevails, the number of those who own a

shelter is a very small fraction of the whole. The rest pay an

annual tax for this outside garment of all, become indispensable

summer and winter, which would buy a village of Indian wigwams, but

now helps to keep them poor as long as they live. I do not mean to

insist here on the disadvantage of hiring compared with owning, but

it is evident that the savage owns his shelter because it costs so

little, while the civilized man hires his commonly because he cannot

afford to own it; nor can he, in the long run, any better afford to

hire. But, answers one, by merely paying this tax, the poor

civilized man secures an abode which is a palace compared with the

savage's. An annual rent of from twenty-five to a hundred dollars

(these are the country rates) entitles him to the benefit of the

improvements of centuries, spacious apartments, clean paint and

paper, Rumford fire-place, back plastering, Venetian blinds, copper

pump, spring lock, a commodious cellar, and many other things. But

how happens it that he who is said to enjoy these things is so

commonly a poor civilized man, while the savage, who has them not,

is rich as a savage?

If it is asserted that civilization is a real

advance in the condition of man -- and I think that it is, though

only the wise improve their advantages -- it must be shown that it

has produced better dwellings without making them more costly; and

the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is

required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.

An

average house in this neighborhood costs perhaps eight hundred

dollars, and to lay up this sum will take from ten to fifteen years

of the laborer's life, even if he is not encumbered with a family --

estimating the pecuniary value of every man's labor at one dollar a

day, for if some receive more, others receive less; -- so that he

must have spent more than half his life commonly before his wigwam

will be earned. If we suppose him to pay a rent instead, this is

but a doubtful choice of evils. Would the savage have been wise to

exchange his wigwam for a palace on these terms?

It may be guessed that I reduce almost the whole advantage of

holding this superfluous property as a fund in store against the

future, so far as the individual is concerned, mainly to the

defraying of funeral expenses. But perhaps a man is not required to

bury himself. Nevertheless this points to an important distinction

between the civilized man and the savage; and, no doubt, they have

designs on us for our benefit, in making the life of a civilized

people an institution, in which the life of the individual is to a

great extent absorbed, in order to preserve and perfect that of the

race. But I wish to show at what a sacrifice this advantage is at

present obtained, and to suggest that we may possibly so live as to

secure all the advantage without suffering any of the disadvantage.

What mean ye by saying that the poor ye have always with you, or

that the fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth

are set on edge?

"As I live, saith the Lord God, ye shall not have occasion any

more to use this proverb in Israel.

"Behold all souls are mine; as the soul of the father, so also

the soul of the son is mine: the soul that sinneth, it shall die."

When I consider my neighbors, the farmers of Concord, who are at

least as well off as the other classes, I find that for the most

part they have been toiling twenty, thirty, or forty years, that

they may become the real owners of their farms, which commonly they

have inherited with encumbrances, or else bought with hired money --

and we may regard one third of that toil as the cost of their houses

-- but commonly they have not paid for them yet. It is true, the

encumbrances sometimes outweigh the value of the farm, so that the

farm itself becomes one great encumbrance, and still a man is found

to inherit it, being well acquainted with it, as he says. On

applying to the assessors, I am surprised to learn that they cannot

at once name a dozen in the town who own their farms free and clear.

If you would know the history of these homesteads, inquire at the

bank where they are mortgaged. The man who has actually paid for

his farm with labor on it is so rare that every neighbor can point

to him. I doubt if there are three such men in Concord. What has

been said of the merchants, that a very large majority, even

ninety-seven in a hundred, are sure to fail, is equally true of the

farmers. With regard to the merchants, however, one of them says

pertinently that a great part of their failures are not genuine

pecuniary failures, but merely failures to fulfil their engagements,

because it is inconvenient; that is, it is the moral character that

breaks down. But this puts an infinitely worse face on the matter,

and suggests, beside, that probably not even the other three succeed

in saving their souls, but are perchance bankrupt in a worse sense

than they who fail honestly. Bankruptcy and repudiation are the

springboards from which much of our civilization vaults and turns

its somersets, but the savage stands on the unelastic plank of

famine. Yet the Middlesex Cattle Show goes off here with eclat

annually, as if all the joints of the agricultural machine were

suent.

The farmer is endeavoring to solve the problem of a livelihood

by a formula more complicated than the problem itself. To get his

shoestrings he speculates in herds of cattle. With consummate skill

he has set his trap with a hair spring to catch comfort and

independence, and then, as he turned away, got his own leg into it.

This is the reason he is poor; and for a similar reason we are all

poor in respect to a thousand savage comforts, though surrounded by

luxuries. As Chapman sings,

"The false society of men --

-- for earthly greatness

All heavenly comforts rarefies to air."

And when the farmer has got his house, he may not be the richer

but the poorer for it, and it be the house that has got him. As I

understand it, that was a valid objection urged by Momus against the

house which Minerva made, that she "had not made it movable, by

which means a bad neighborhood might be avoided"; and it may still

be urged, for our houses are such unwieldy property that we are

often imprisoned rather than housed in them; and the bad

neighborhood to be avoided is our own scurvy selves. I know one or

two families, at least, in this town, who, for nearly a generation,

have been wishing to sell their houses in the outskirts and move

into the village, but have not been able to accomplish it, and only

death will set them free.

Granted that the majority are able at last either to own or hire

the modern house with all its improvements. While civilization has

been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who

are to inhabit them. It has created palaces, but it was not so easy

to create noblemen and kings. And if the civilized man's pursuits

are no worthier than the savage's, if he is employed the greater

part of his life in obtaining gross necessaries and comforts merely,

why should he have a better dwelling than the former?

But how do the poor minority fare? Perhaps it will be found

that just in proportion as some have been placed in outward

circumstances above the savage, others have been degraded below him.

The luxury of one class is counterbalanced by the indigence of

another. On the one side is the palace, on the other are the

almshouse and "silent poor." The myriads who built the pyramids to

be the tombs of the Pharaohs were fed on garlic, and it may be were

not decently buried themselves. The mason who finishes the cornice

of the palace returns at night perchance to a hut not so good as a

wigwam. It is a mistake to suppose that, in a country where the

usual evidences of civilization exist, the condition of a very large

body of the inhabitants may not be as degraded as that of savages.

I refer to the degraded poor, not now to the degraded rich. To know

this I should not need to look farther than to the shanties which

everywhere border our railroads, that last improvement in

civilization; where I see in my daily walks human beings living in

sties, and all winter with an open door, for the sake of light,

without any visible, often imaginable, wood-pile, and the forms of

both old and young are permanently contracted by the long habit of

shrinking from cold and misery, and the development of all their

limbs and faculties is checked. It certainly is fair to look at

that class by whose labor the works which distinguish this

generation are accomplished. Such too, to a greater or less extent,

is the condition of the operatives of every denomination in England,

which is the great workhouse of the world. Or I could refer you to

Ireland, which is marked as one of the white or enlightened spots on

the map. Contrast the physical condition of the Irish with that of

the North American Indian, or the South Sea Islander, or any other

savage race before it was degraded by contact with the civilized

man. Yet I have no doubt that that people's rulers are as wise as

the average of civilized rulers. Their condition only proves what

squalidness may consist with civilization. I hardly need refer now

to the laborers in our Southern States who produce the staple

exports of this country, and are themselves a staple production of

the South. But to confine myself to those who are said to be in

moderate circumstances.

Most men appear never to have considered what a house is, and

are actually though needlessly poor all their lives because they

think that they must have such a one as their neighbors have. As if

one were to wear any sort of coat which the tailor might cut out for

him, or, gradually leaving off palm-leaf hat or cap of woodchuck

skin, complain of hard times because he could not afford to buy him

a crown! It is possible to invent a house still more convenient and

luxurious than we have, which yet all would admit that man could not

afford to pay for. Shall we always study to obtain more of these

things, and not sometimes to be content with less? Shall the

respectable citizen thus gravely teach, by precept and example, the

necessity of the young man's providing a certain number of

superfluous glow-shoes, and umbrellas, and empty guest chambers for

empty guests, before he dies? Why should not our furniture be as

simple as the Arab's or the Indian's? When I think of the

benefactors of the race, whom we have apotheosized as messengers

from heaven, bearers of divine gifts to man, I do not see in my mind

any retinue at their heels, any carload of fashionable furniture.

Or what if I were to allow -- would it not be a singular allowance?

-- that our furniture should be more complex than the Arab's, in

proportion as we are morally and intellectually his superiors! At

present our houses are cluttered and defiled with it, and a good

housewife would sweep out the greater part into the dust hole, and

not leave her morning's work undone. Morning work! By the blushes

of Aurora and the music of Memnon, what should be man's morning work

in this world? I had three pieces of limestone on my desk, but I

was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily, when

the furniture of my mind was all undusted still, and threw them out

the window in disgust. How, then, could I have a furnished house?

I would rather sit in the open air, for no dust gathers on the

grass, unless where man has broken ground.

It is the luxurious and dissipated who set the fashions which

the herd so diligently follow. The traveller who stops at the best

houses, so called, soon discovers this, for the publicans presume

him to be a Sardanapalus, and if he resigned himself to their tender

mercies he would soon be completely emasculated. I think that in

the railroad car we are inclined to spend more on luxury than on

safety and convenience, and it threatens without attaining these to

become no better than a modern drawing-room, with its divans, and

ottomans, and sun-shades, and a hundred other oriental things, which

we are taking west with us, invented for the ladies of the harem and

the effeminate natives of the Celestial Empire, which Jonathan

should be ashamed to know the names of. I would rather sit on a

pumpkin and have it all to myself than be crowded on a velvet

cushion. I would rather ride on earth in an ox cart, with a free

circulation, than go to heaven in the fancy car of an excursion

train and breathe a malaria all the way.

The very simplicity and nakedness of man's life in the primitive

ages imply this advantage, at least, that they left him still but a

sojourner in nature. When he was refreshed with food and sleep, he

contemplated his journey again. He dwelt, as it were, in a tent in

this world, and was either threading the valleys, or crossing the

plains, or climbing the mountain-tops. But lo! men have become the

tools of their tools. The man who independently plucked the fruits

when he was hungry is become a farmer; and he who stood under a tree

for shelter, a housekeeper. We now no longer camp as for a night,

but have settled down on earth and forgotten heaven. We have

adopted Christianity merely as an improved method of agri-culture.

We have built for this world a family mansion, and for the next a

family tomb. The best works of art are the expression of man's

struggle to free himself from this condition, but the effect of our

art is merely to make this low state comfortable and that higher

state to be forgotten.

(Thoreau praises the savage existence close to the land and laments our disassociation from it.

How man can release from this disconect from nature is the subject of this book.)

There is actually no place in this village

for a work of fine art, if any had come down to us, to stand, for

our lives, our houses and streets, furnish no proper pedestal for

it. There is not a nail to hang a picture on, nor a shelf to

receive the bust of a hero or a saint. When I consider how our

houses are built and paid for, or not paid for, and their internal

economy managed and sustained, I wonder that the floor does not give

way under the visitor while he is admiring the gewgaws upon the

mantelpiece, and let him through into the cellar, to some solid and

honest though earthy foundation. I cannot but perceive that this

so-called rich and refined life is a thing jumped at, and I do not

get on in the enjoyment of the fine arts which adorn it, my

attention being wholly occupied with the jump; for I remember that

the greatest genuine leap, due to human muscles alone, on record, is

that of certain wandering Arabs, who are said to have cleared

twenty-five feet on level ground. Without factitious support, man

is sure to come to earth again beyond that distance. The first

question which I am tempted to put to the proprietor of such great

impropriety is, Who bolsters you? Are you one of the ninety-seven

who fail, or the three who succeed? Answer me these questions, and

then perhaps I may look at your bawbles and find them ornamental.

The cart before the horse is neither beautiful nor useful. Before

we can adorn our houses with beautiful objects the walls must be

stripped, and our lives must be stripped, and beautiful housekeeping

and beautiful living be laid for a foundation: now, a taste for the

beautiful is most cultivated out of doors, where there is no house

and no housekeeper.

Old Johnson, in his "Wonder-Working Providence," speaking of the

first settlers of this town, with whom he was contemporary, tells us

that "they burrow themselves in the earth for their first shelter

under some hillside, and, casting the soil aloft upon timber, they

make a smoky fire against the earth, at the highest side." They did

not "provide them houses," says he, "till the earth, by the Lord's

blessing, brought forth bread to feed them," and the first year's

crop was so light that "they were forced to cut their bread very

thin for a long season." The secretary of the Province of New

Netherland, writing in Dutch, in 1650, for the information of those

who wished to take up land there, states more particularly that

"those in New Netherland, and especially in New England, who have no

means to build farmhouses at first according to their wishes, dig a

square pit in the ground, cellar fashion, six or seven feet deep, as

long and as broad as they think proper, case the earth inside with

wood all round the wall, and line the wood with the bark of trees or

something else to prevent the caving in of the earth; floor this

cellar with plank, and wainscot it overhead for a ceiling, raise a

roof of spars clear up, and cover the spars with bark or green sods,

so that they can live dry and warm in these houses with their entire

families for two, three, and four years, it being understood that

partitions are run through those cellars which are adapted to the

size of the family. The wealthy and principal men in New England,

in the beginning of the colonies, commenced their first

dwelling-houses in this fashion for two reasons: firstly, in order

not to waste time in building, and not to want food the next season;

secondly, in order not to discourage poor laboring people whom they

brought over in numbers from Fatherland. In the course of three or

four years, when the country became adapted to agriculture, they

built themselves handsome houses, spending on them several

thousands."

In this course which our ancestors took there was a show of

prudence at least, as if their principle were to satisfy the more

pressing wants first. But are the more pressing wants satisfied

now? When I think of acquiring for myself one of our luxurious

dwellings, I am deterred, for, so to speak, the country is not yet

adapted to human culture, and we are still forced to cut our

spiritual bread far thinner than our forefathers did their wheaten.

Not that all architectural ornament is to be neglected even in the

rudest periods; but let our houses first be lined with beauty, where

they come in contact with our lives, like the tenement of the

shellfish, and not overlaid with it. But, alas! I have been inside

one or two of them, and know what they are lined with.

Though we are not so degenerate but that we might possibly live

in a cave or a wigwam or wear skins today, it certainly is better to

accept the advantages, though so dearly bought, which the invention

and industry of mankind offer. In such a neighborhood as this,

boards and shingles, lime and bricks, are cheaper and more easily

obtained than suitable caves, or whole logs, or bark in sufficient

quantities, or even well-tempered clay or flat stones. I speak

understandingly on this subject, for I have made myself acquainted

with it both theoretically and practically. With a little more wit

we might use these materials so as to become richer than the richest

now are, and make our civilization a blessing. The civilized man is

a more experienced and wiser savage. But to make haste to my own

experiment.

Near the end of March, 1845, I borrowed an axe and went down to

the woods by Walden Pond, nearest to where I intended to build my

house, and began to cut down some tall, arrowy white pines, still in

their youth, for timber. It is difficult to begin without

borrowing, but perhaps it is the most generous course thus to permit

your fellow-men to have an interest in your enterprise. The owner

of the axe, as he released his hold on it, said that it was the

apple of his eye; but I returned it sharper than I received it. It

was a pleasant hillside where I worked, covered with pine woods,

through which I looked out on the pond, and a small open field in

the woods where pines and hickories were springing up. The ice in

the pond was not yet dissolved, though there were some open spaces,

and it was all dark-colored and saturated with water. There were

some slight flurries of snow during the days that I worked there;

but for the most part when I came out on to the railroad, on my way

home, its yellow sand heap stretched away gleaming in the hazy

atmosphere, and the rails shone in the spring sun, and I heard the

lark and pewee and other birds already come to commence another year

with us. They were pleasant spring days, in which the winter of

man's discontent was thawing as well as the earth, and the life that

had lain torpid began to stretch itself. One day, when my axe had

come off and I had cut a green hickory for a wedge, driving it with

a stone, and had placed the whole to soak in a pond-hole in order to

swell the wood, I saw a striped snake run into the water, and he lay

on the bottom, apparently without inconvenience, as long as I stayed

there, or more than a quarter of an hour; perhaps because he had not

yet fairly come out of the torpid state. It appeared to me that for

a like reason men remain in their present low and primitive

condition; but if they should feel the influence of the spring of

springs arousing them, they would of necessity rise to a higher and

more ethereal life. I had previously seen the snakes in frosty

mornings in my path with portions of their bodies still numb and

inflexible, waiting for the sun to thaw them. On the 1st of April

it rained and melted the ice, and in the early part of the day,

which was very foggy, I heard a stray goose groping about over the

pond and cackling as if lost, or like the spirit of the fog.

(Thoreau believed that in 1845 we were at the fag end of an awful cycle, but there is the optimism her that all men can improve their lives.)

So I went on for some days cutting and hewing timber, and also

studs and rafters, all with my narrow axe, not having many

communicable or scholar-like thoughts, singing to myself, --

Men say they know many things;

But lo! they have taken wings --

The arts and sciences,

And a thousand appliances;

The wind that blows

Is all that any body knows.

I hewed the main timbers six inches square, most of the studs on

two sides only, and the rafters and floor timbers on one side,

leaving the rest of the bark on, so that they were just as straight

and much stronger than sawed ones. Each stick was carefully

mortised or tenoned by its stump, for I had borrowed other tools by

this time. My days in the woods were not very long ones; yet I

usually carried my dinner of bread and butter, and read the

newspaper in which it was wrapped, at noon, sitting amid the green

pine boughs which I had cut off, and to my bread was imparted some

of their fragrance, for my hands were covered with a thick coat of

pitch. Before I had done I was more the friend than the foe of the

pine tree, though I had cut down some of them, having become better

acquainted with it. Sometimes a rambler in the wood was attracted

by the sound of my axe, and we chatted pleasantly over the chips

which I had made.

By the middle of April, for I made no haste in my work, but

rather made the most of it, my house was framed and ready for the

raising. I had already bought the shanty of James Collins, an

Irishman who worked on the Fitchburg Railroad, for boards. James

Collins' shanty was considered an uncommonly fine one. When I

called to see it he was not at home. I walked about the outside, at

first unobserved from within, the window was so deep and high. It

was of small dimensions, with a peaked cottage roof, and not much

else to be seen, the dirt being raised five feet all around as if it

were a compost heap. The roof was the soundest part, though a good

deal warped and made brittle by the sun. Doorsill there was none,

but a perennial passage for the hens under the door board. Mrs. C.

came to the door and asked me to view it from the inside. The hens

were driven in by my approach. It was dark, and had a dirt floor

for the most part, dank, clammy, and aguish, only here a board and

there a board which would not bear removal. She lighted a lamp to

show me the inside of the roof and the walls, and also that the

board floor extended under the bed, warning me not to step into the

cellar, a sort of dust hole two feet deep. In her own words, they

were "good boards overhead, good boards all around, and a good

window" -- of two whole squares originally, only the cat had passed

out that way lately. There was a stove, a bed, and a place to sit,

an infant in the house where it was born, a silk parasol,

gilt-framed looking-glass, and a patent new coffee-mill nailed to an

oak sapling, all told. The bargain was soon concluded, for James

had in the meanwhile returned. I to pay four dollars and

twenty-five cents tonight, he to vacate at five tomorrow morning,

selling to nobody else meanwhile: I to take possession at six. It

were well, he said, to be there early, and anticipate certain

indistinct but wholly unjust claims on the score of ground rent and

fuel. This he assured me was the only encumbrance. At six I passed

him and his family on the road. One large bundle held their all --

bed, coffee-mill, looking-glass, hens -- all but the cat; she took

to the woods and became a wild cat, and, as I learned afterward,

trod in a trap set for woodchucks, and so became a dead cat at last.

I took down this dwelling the same morning, drawing the nails,

and removed it to the pond-side by small cartloads, spreading the

boards on the grass there to bleach and warp back again in the sun.

One early thrush gave me a note or two as I drove along the woodland

path. I was informed treacherously by a young Patrick that neighbor

Seeley, an Irishman, in the intervals of the carting, transferred

the still tolerable, straight, and drivable nails, staples, and

spikes to his pocket, and then stood when I came back to pass the

time of day, and look freshly up, unconcerned, with spring thoughts,

at the devastation; there being a dearth of work, as he said. He

was there to represent spectatordom, and help make this seemingly

insignificant event one with the removal of the gods of Troy.

I dug my cellar in the side of a hill sloping to the south,

where a woodchuck had formerly dug his burrow, down through sumach

and blackberry roots, and the lowest stain of vegetation, six feet

square by seven deep, to a fine sand where potatoes would not freeze

in any winter. The sides were left shelving, and not stoned; but

the sun having never shone on them, the sand still keeps its place.

It was but two hours' work. I took particular pleasure in this

breaking of ground, for in almost all latitudes men dig into the

earth for an equable temperature. Under the most splendid house in

the city is still to be found the cellar where they store their

roots as of old, and long after the superstructure has disappeared

posterity remark its dent in the earth. The house is still but a

sort of porch at the entrance of a burrow.

At length, in the beginning of May, with the help of some of my

acquaintances, rather to improve so good an occasion for

neighborliness than from any necessity, I set up the frame of my

house. No man was ever more honored in the character of his raisers

than I. They are destined, I trust, to assist at the raising of

loftier structures one day. I began to occupy my house on the 4th

of July, as soon as it was boarded and roofed, for the boards were

carefully feather-edged and lapped, so that it was perfectly

impervious to rain, but before boarding I laid the foundation of a

chimney at one end, bringing two cartloads of stones up the hill

from the pond in my arms. I built the chimney after my hoeing in

the fall, before a fire became necessary for warmth, doing my

cooking in the meanwhile out of doors on the ground, early in the

morning: which mode I still think is in some respects more

convenient and agreeable than the usual one. When it stormed before

my bread was baked, I fixed a few boards over the fire, and sat

under them to watch my loaf, and passed some pleasant hours in that

way. In those days, when my hands were much employed, I read but

little, but the least scraps of paper which lay on the ground, my

holder, or tablecloth, afforded me as much entertainment, in fact

answered the same purpose as the Iliad.

It would be worth the while to build still more deliberately

than I did, considering, for instance, what foundation a door, a

window, a cellar, a garret, have in the nature of man, and perchance

never raising any superstructure until we found a better reason for

it than our temporal necessities even. There is some of the same

fitness in a man's building his own house that there is in a bird's

building its own nest. Who knows but if men constructed their

dwellings with their own hands, and provided food for themselves and

families simply and honestly enough, the poetic faculty would be

universally developed, as birds universally sing when they are so

engaged? But alas! we do like cowbirds and cuckoos, which lay their

eggs in nests which other birds have built, and cheer no traveller

with their chattering and unmusical notes. Shall we forever resign

the pleasure of construction to the carpenter? What does

architecture amount to in the experience of the mass of men? I

never in all my walks came across a man engaged in so simple and

natural an occupation as building his house. We belong to the

community. It is not the tailor alone who is the ninth part of a

man; it is as much the preacher, and the merchant, and the farmer.

Where is this division of labor to end? and what object does it

finally serve? No doubt another may also think for me; but it is

not therefore desirable that he should do so to the exclusion of my

thinking for myself.

(Ah! Here is Thoreau's main point. He fears that men will not know how to sustain themselves. They won't be able to build, track animals, survive in nature, and will become soft. His great fear is that men will become so specialized that their thinking will be done by others. Emersonian self-reliance and following personal; convictions and dreams are hallmarks of Thoreau's argument.)

True, there are architects so called in this country, and I have

heard of one at least possessed with the idea of making

architectural ornaments have a core of truth, a necessity, and hence

a beauty, as if it were a revelation to him. All very well perhaps

from his point of view, but only a little better than the common

dilettantism. A sentimental reformer in architecture, he began at

the cornice, not at the foundation. It was only how to put a core

of truth within the ornaments, that every sugarplum, in fact, might

have an almond or caraway seed in it -- though I hold that almonds

are most wholesome without the sugar -- and not how the inhabitant,

the indweller, might build truly within and without, and let the

ornaments take care of themselves. What reasonable man ever

supposed that ornaments were something outward and in the skin

merely -- that the tortoise got his spotted shell, or the shell-fish

its mother-o'-pearl tints, by such a contract as the inhabitants of

Broadway their Trinity Church? But a man has no more to do with the

style of architecture of his house than a tortoise with that of its

shell: nor need the soldier be so idle as to try to paint the

precise color of his virtue on his standard. The enemy will find it

out. He may turn pale when the trial comes. This man seemed to me

to lean over the cornice, and timidly whisper his half truth to the

rude occupants who really knew it better than he. What of

architectural beauty I now see, I know has gradually grown from

within outward, out of the necessities and character of the

indweller, who is the only builder -- out of some unconscious

truthfulness, and nobleness, without ever a thought for the

appearance and whatever additional beauty of this kind is destined

to be produced will be preceded by a like unconscious beauty of

life. The most interesting dwellings in this country, as the

painter knows, are the most unpretending, humble log huts and

cottages of the poor commonly; it is the life of the inhabitants

whose shells they are, and not any peculiarity in their surfaces

merely, which makes them picturesque; and equally interesting will

be the citizen's suburban box, when his life shall be as simple and

as agreeable to the imagination, and there is as little straining

after effect in the style of his dwelling. A great proportion of

architectural ornaments are literally hollow, and a September gale

would strip them off, like borrowed plumes, without injury to the

substantials. They can do without architecture who have no olives

nor wines in the cellar. What if an equal ado were made about the

ornaments of style in literature, and the architects of our bibles

spent as much time about their cornices as the architects of our

churches do? So are made the belles-lettres and the beaux-arts and

their professors. Much it concerns a man, forsooth, how a few

sticks are slanted over him or under him, and what colors are daubed

upon his box. It would signify somewhat, if, in any earnest sense,

he slanted them and daubed it; but the spirit having departed out of

the tenant, it is of a piece with constructing his own coffin -- the

architecture of the grave -- and "carpenter" is but another name for

"coffin-maker." One man says, in his despair or indifference to

life, take up a handful of the earth at your feet, and paint your

house that color. Is he thinking of his last and narrow house?

Toss up a copper for it as well. What an abundance of leisure be

must have! Why do you take up a handful of dirt? Better paint your

house your own complexion; let it turn pale or blush for you. An

enterprise to improve the style of cottage architecture! When you

have got my ornaments ready, I will wear them.

Before winter I built a chimney, and shingled the sides of my

house, which were already impervious to rain, with imperfect and

sappy shingles made of the first slice of the log, whose edges I was

obliged to straighten with a plane.

I have thus a tight shingled and plastered house, ten feet wide

by fifteen long, and eight-feet posts, with a garret and a closet, a

large window on each side, two trap doors, one door at the end, and

a brick fireplace opposite. The exact cost of my house, paying the

usual price for such materials as I used, but not counting the work,

all of which was done by myself, was as follows; and I give the

details because very few are able to tell exactly what their houses

cost, and fewer still, if any, the separate cost of the various

materials which compose them:--

Boards .......................... $ 8.03+, mostly shanty boards.

Refuse shingles for roof sides ... 4.00

Laths ............................ 1.25

Two second-hand windows

with glass .................... 2.43

One thousand old brick ........... 4.00

Two casks of lime ................ 2.40 That was high.

Hair ............................. 0.31 More than I needed.

Mantle-tree iron ................. 0.15

Nails ............................ 3.90

Hinges and screws ................ 0.14

Latch ............................ 0.10

Chalk ............................ 0.01

Transportation ................... 1.40 I carried a good part

------- on my back.

In all ...................... $28.12+

These are all the materials, excepting the timber, stones, and

sand, which I claimed by squatter's right. I have also a small

woodshed adjoining, made chiefly of the stuff which was left after

building the house.

I intend to build me a house which will surpass any on the main

street in Concord in grandeur and luxury, as soon as it pleases me

as much and will cost me no more than my present one.

I thus found that the student who wishes for a shelter can

obtain one for a lifetime at an expense not greater than the rent

which he now pays annually. If I seem to boast more than is

becoming, my excuse is that I brag for humanity rather than for

myself; and my shortcomings and inconsistencies do not affect the

truth of my statement. Notwithstanding much cant and hypocrisy --

chaff which I find it difficult to separate from my wheat, but for

which I am as sorry as any man -- I will breathe freely and stretch

myself in this respect, it is such a relief to both the moral and

physical system; and I am resolved that I will not through humility

become the devil's attorney. I will endeavor to speak a good word

for the truth. At Cambridge College the mere rent of a student's

room, which is only a little larger than my own, is thirty dollars

each year, though the corporation had the advantage of building

thirty-two side by side and under one roof, and the occupant suffers

the inconvenience of many and noisy neighbors, and perhaps a

residence in the fourth story. I cannot but think that if we had

more true wisdom in these respects, not only less education would be

needed, because, forsooth, more would already have been acquired,

but the pecuniary expense of getting an education would in a great

measure vanish. Those conveniences which the student requires at

Cambridge or elsewhere cost him or somebody else ten times as great

a sacrifice of life as they would with proper management on both

sides. Those things for which the most money is demanded are never

the things which the student most wants. Tuition, for instance, is

an important item in the term bill, while for the far more valuable

education which he gets by associating with the most cultivated of

his contemporaries no charge is made. The mode of founding a

college is, commonly, to get up a subscription of dollars and cents,

and then, following blindly the principles of a division of labor to

its extreme -- a principle which should never be followed but with

circumspection -- to call in a contractor who makes this a subject

of speculation, and he employs Irishmen or other operatives actually

to lay the foundations, while the students that are to be are said

to be fitting themselves for it; and for these oversights successive

generations have to pay. I think that it would be better than this,

for the students, or those who desire to be benefited by it, even to

lay the foundation themselves. The student who secures his coveted

leisure and retirement by systematically shirking any labor

necessary to man obtains but an ignoble and unprofitable leisure,

defrauding himself of the experience which alone can make leisure

fruitful. "But," says one, "you do not mean that the students

should go to work with their hands instead of their heads?" I do

not mean that exactly, but I mean something which he might think a

good deal like that; I mean that they should not play life, or study

it merely, while the community supports them at this expensive game,

but earnestly live it from beginning to end. How could youths

better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of

living? Methinks this would exercise their minds as much as

mathematics. If I wished a boy to know something about the arts and

sciences, for instance, I would not pursue the common course, which

is merely to send him into the neighborhood of some professor, where

anything is professed and practised but the art of life; -- to

survey the world through a telescope or a microscope, and never with

his natural eye; to study chemistry, and not learn how his bread is

made, or mechanics, and not learn how it is earned; to discover new

satellites to Neptune, and not detect the motes in his eyes, or to

what vagabond he is a satellite himself; or to be devoured by the

monsters that swarm all around him, while contemplating the monsters

in a drop of vinegar. Which would have advanced the most at the end

of a month -- the boy who had made his own jackknife from the ore

which he had dug and smelted, reading as much as would be necessary

for this -- or the boy who had attended the lectures on metallurgy

at the Institute in the meanwhile, and had received a Rodgers'

penknife from his father? Which would be most likely to cut his

fingers?... To my astonishment I was informed on leaving college

that I had studied navigation! -- why, if I had taken one turn down

the harbor I should have known more about it. Even the poor student

studies and is taught only political economy, while that economy of

living which is synonymous with philosophy is not even sincerely

professed in our colleges. The consequence is, that while he is

reading Adam Smith, Ricardo, and Say, he runs his father in debt

irretrievably.

As with our colleges, so with a hundred "modern improvements";

there is an illusion about them; there is not always a positive

advance. The devil goes on exacting compound interest to the last

for his early share and numerous succeeding investments in them.

Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our

attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an

unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive

at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste

to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and

Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. Either is

in such a predicament as the man who was earnest to be introduced to

a distinguished deaf woman, but when he was presented, and one end

of her ear trumpet was put into his hand, had nothing to say. As if

the main object were to talk fast and not to talk sensibly. We are

eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some

weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first news that will leak

through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the

Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough. After all, the man whose

horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most important

messages; he is not an evangelist, nor does he come round eating

locusts and wild honey. I doubt if Flying Childers ever carried a

peck of corn to mill.

One says to me, "I wonder that you do not lay up money; you love

to travel; you might take the cars and go to Fitchburg today and see

the country." But I am wiser than that. I have learned that the

swiftest traveller is he that goes afoot. I say to my friend,

Suppose we try who will get there first. The distance is thirty

miles; the fare ninety cents. That is almost a day's wages. I

remember when wages were sixty cents a day for laborers on this very

road. Well, I start now on foot, and get there before night; I have

travelled at that rate by the week together. You will in the

meanwhile have earned your fare, and arrive there some time

tomorrow, or possibly this evening, if you are lucky enough to get a

job in season. Instead of going to Fitchburg, you will be working

here the greater part of the day. And so, if the railroad reached

round the world, I think that I should keep ahead of you; and as for

seeing the country and getting experience of that kind, I should

have to cut your acquaintance altogether.

Such is the universal law, which no man can ever outwit, and

with regard to the railroad even we may say it is as broad as it is

long. To make a railroad round the world available to all mankind

is equivalent to grading the whole surface of the planet. Men have

an indistinct notion that if they keep up this activity of joint

stocks and spades long enough all will at length ride somewhere, in

next to no time, and for nothing; but though a crowd rushes to the

depot, and the conductor shouts "All aboard!" when the smoke is

blown away and the vapor condensed, it will be perceived that a few

are riding, but the rest are run over -- and it will be called, and

will be, "A melancholy accident." No doubt they can ride at last

who shall have earned their fare, that is, if they survive so long,

but they will probably have lost their elasticity and desire to

travel by that time. This spending of the best part of one's life

earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the

least valuable part of it reminds me of the Englishman who went to

India to make a fortune first, in order that he might return to

England and live the life of a poet. He should have gone up garret

at once. "What!" exclaim a million Irishmen starting up from all

the shanties in the land, "is not this railroad which we have built

a good thing?" Yes, I answer, comparatively good, that is, you

might have done worse; but I wish, as you are brothers of mine, that

you could have spent your time better than digging in this dirt.

Before I finished my house, wishing to earn ten or twelve

dollars by some honest and agreeable method, in order to meet my

unusual expenses, I planted about two acres and a half of light and

sandy soil near it chiefly with beans, but also a small part with

potatoes, corn, peas, and turnips. The whole lot contains eleven

acres, mostly growing up to pines and hickories, and was sold the

preceding season for eight dollars and eight cents an acre. One

farmer said that it was "good for nothing but to raise cheeping

squirrels on." I put no manure whatever on this land, not being the

owner, but merely a squatter, and not expecting to cultivate so much

again, and I did not quite hoe it all once. I got out several cords

of stumps in plowing, which supplied me with fuel for a long time,

and left small circles of virgin mould, easily distinguishable

through the summer by the greater luxuriance of the beans there.

The dead and for the most part unmerchantable wood behind my house,

and the driftwood from the pond, have supplied the remainder of my

fuel. I was obliged to hire a team and a man for the plowing,

though I held the plow myself. My farm outgoes for the first season

were, for implements, seed, work, etc., $14.72+. The seed corn was

given me. This never costs anything to speak of, unless you plant

more than enough. I got twelve bushels of beans, and eighteen

bushels of potatoes, beside some peas and sweet corn. The yellow

corn and turnips were too late to come to anything. My whole income

from the farm was

$ 23.44

Deducting the outgoes ............ 14.72+

-------

There are left .................. $ 8.71+

beside produce consumed and on hand at the time this estimate was

made of the value of $4.50 -- the amount on hand much more than

balancing a little grass which I did not raise. All things

considered, that is, considering the importance of a man's soul and

of today, notwithstanding the short time occupied by my experiment,

nay, partly even because of its transient character, I believe that

that was doing better than any farmer in Concord did that year.

The next year I did better still, for I spaded up all the land

which I required, about a third of an acre, and I learned from the

experience of both years, not being in the least awed by many

celebrated works on husbandry, Arthur Young among the rest, that if

one would live simply and eat only the crop which he raised, and

raise no more than he ate, and not exchange it for an insufficient

quantity of more luxurious and expensive things, he would need to

cultivate only a few rods of ground, and that it would be cheaper to

spade up that than to use oxen to plow it, and to select a fresh

spot from time to time than to manure the old, and he could do all

his necessary farm work as it were with his left hand at odd hours

in the summer; and thus he would not be tied to an ox, or horse, or

cow, or pig, as at present. I desire to speak impartially on this

point, and as one not interested in the success or failure of the

present economical and social arrangements. I was more independent

than any farmer in Concord, for I was not anchored to a house or

farm, but could follow the bent of my genius, which is a very

crooked one, every moment. Beside being better off than they

already, if my house had been burned or my crops had failed, I

should have been nearly as well off as before.

I am wont to think that men are not so much the keepers of herds

as herds are the keepers of men, the former are so much the freer.

Men and oxen exchange work; but if we consider necessary work only,

the oxen will be seen to have greatly the advantage, their farm is

so much the larger. Man does some of his part of the exchange work

in his six weeks of haying, and it is no boy's play. Certainly no

nation that lived simply in all respects, that is, no nation of

philosophers, would commit so great a blunder as to use the labor of

animals. True, there never was and is not likely soon to be a

nation of philosophers, nor am I certain it is desirable that there

should be. However, I should never have broken a horse or bull and

taken him to board for any work he might do for me, for fear I

should become a horseman or a herdsman merely; and if society seems

to be the gainer by so doing, are we certain that what is one man's

gain is not another's loss, and that the stable-boy has equal cause

with his master to be satisfied? Granted that some public works

would not have been constructed without this aid, and let man share

the glory of such with the ox and horse; does it follow that he

could not have accomplished works yet more worthy of himself in that

case? When men begin to do, not merely unnecessary or artistic, but

luxurious and idle work, with their assistance, it is inevitable

that a few do all the exchange work with the oxen, or, in other

words, become the slaves of the strongest. Man thus not only works

for the animal within him, but, for a symbol of this, he works for

the animal without him. Though we have many substantial houses of

brick or stone, the prosperity of the farmer is still measured by

the degree to which the barn overshadows the house. This town is

said to have the largest houses for oxen, cows, and horses

hereabouts, and it is not behindhand in its public buildings; but

there are very few halls for free worship or free speech in this

county. It should not be by their architecture, but why not even by

their power of abstract thought, that nations should seek to

commemorate themselves? How much more admirable the Bhagvat-Geeta

than all the ruins of the East! Towers and temples are the luxury

of princes. A simple and independent mind does not toil at the

bidding of any prince. Genius is not a retainer to any emperor, nor

is its material silver, or gold, or marble, except to a trifling

extent. To what end, pray, is so much stone hammered? In Arcadia,

when I was there, I did not see any hammering stone. Nations are

possessed with an insane ambition to perpetuate the memory of

themselves by the amount of hammered stone they leave. What if

equal pains were taken to smooth and polish their manners? One

piece of good sense would be more memorable than a monument as high

as the moon. I love better to see stones in place. The grandeur of

Thebes was a vulgar grandeur. More sensible is a rod of stone wall

that bounds an honest man's field than a hundred-gated Thebes that

has wandered farther from the true end of life. The religion and

civilization which are barbaric and heathenish build splendid

temples; but what you might call Christianity does not. Most of the

stone a nation hammers goes toward its tomb only. It buries itself

alive. As for the Pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them

so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough

to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby,

whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the

Nile, and then given his body to the dogs. I might possibly invent

some excuse for them and him, but I have no time for it. As for the

religion and love of art of the builders, it is much the same all

the world over, whether the building be an Egyptian temple or the

United States Bank. It costs more than it comes to. The mainspring

is vanity, assisted by the love of garlic and bread and butter. Mr.

Balcom, a promising young architect, designs it on the back of his

Vitruvius, with hard pencil and ruler, and the job is let out to

Dobson & Sons, stonecutters. When the thirty centuries begin to

look down on it, mankind begin to look up at it. As for your high

towers and monuments, there was a crazy fellow once in this town who

undertook to dig through to China, and he got so far that, as he

said, he heard the Chinese pots and kettles rattle; but I think that

I shall not go out of my way to admire the hole which he made. Many

are concerned about the monuments of the West and the East -- to

know who built them. For my part, I should like to know who in

those days did not build them -- who were above such trifling. But

to proceed with my statistics.

By surveying, carpentry, and day-labor of various other kinds in

the village in the meanwhile, for I have as many trades as fingers,

I had earned $13.34. The expense of food for eight months, namely,

from July 4th to March 1st, the time when these estimates were made,

though I lived there more than two years -- not counting potatoes, a

little green corn, and some peas, which I had raised, nor

considering the value of what was on hand at the last date -- was

Rice .................... $ 1.73 1/2

Molasses ................. 1.73 Cheapest form of the

saccharine.

Rye meal ................. 1.04 3/4

Indian meal .............. 0.99 3/4 Cheaper than rye.

Pork ..................... 0.22

All experiments which failed:

Flour .................... 0.88 Costs more than Indian meal,

both money and trouble.

Sugar .................... 0.80

Lard ..................... 0.65

Apples ................... 0.25

Dried apple .............. 0.22

Sweet potatoes ........... 0.10

One pumpkin .............. 0.06

One watermelon ........... 0.02

Salt ..................... 0.03

Yes, I did eat $8.74, all told; but I should not thus unblushingly

publish my guilt, if I did not know that most of my readers were

equally guilty with myself, and that their deeds would look no

better in print. The next year I sometimes caught a mess of fish

for my dinner, and once I went so far as to slaughter a woodchuck

which ravaged my bean-field -- effect his transmigration, as a

Tartar would say -- and devour him, partly for experiment's sake;

but though it afforded me a momentary enjoyment, notwithstanding a

musky flavor, I saw that the longest use would not make that a good

practice, however it might seem to have your woodchucks ready

dressed by the village butcher.

Clothing and some incidental expenses within the same dates,

though little can be inferred from this item, amounted to

$ 8.40-3/4

Oil and some household utensils ........ 2.00

So that all the pecuniary outgoes, excepting for washing and

mending, which for the most part were done out of the house, and

their bills have not yet been received -- and these are all and more

than all the ways by which money necessarily goes out in this part

of the world -- were

House ................................. $ 28.12+

Farm one year ........................... 14.72+

Food eight months ....................... 8.74

Clothing, etc., eight months ............ 8.40-3/4

Oil, etc., eight months ................. 2.00

-----------

In all ............................ $ 61.99-3/4

I address myself now to those of my readers who have a living to

get. And to meet this I have for farm produce sold

$ 23.44

Earned by day-labor .................... 13.34

-------

In all ............................ $ 36.78

which subtracted from the sum of the outgoes leaves a balance of

$25.21 3/4 on the one side -- this being very nearly the means with

which I started, and the measure of expenses to be incurred -- and

on the other, beside the leisure and independence and health thus

secured, a comfortable house for me as long as I choose to occupy

it.

These statistics, however accidental and therefore uninstructive

they may appear, as they have a certain completeness, have a certain

value also. Nothing was given me of which I have not rendered some

account. It appears from the above estimate, that my food alone

cost me in money about twenty-seven cents a week. It was, for

nearly two years after this, rye and Indian meal without yeast,

potatoes, rice, a very little salt pork, molasses, and salt; and my

drink, water. It was fit that I should live on rice, mainly, who

love so well the philosophy of India. To meet the objections of

some inveterate cavillers, I may as well state, that if I dined out

occasionally, as I always had done, and I trust shall have

opportunities to do again, it was frequently to the detriment of my

domestic arrangements. But the dining out, being, as I have stated,

a constant element, does not in the least affect a comparative

statement like this.

I learned from my two years' experience that it would cost

incredibly little trouble to obtain one's necessary food, even in

this latitude; that a man may use as simple a diet as the animals,

and yet retain health and strength. I have made a satisfactory

dinner, satisfactory on several accounts, simply off a dish of

purslane (Portulaca oleracea) which I gathered in my cornfield,

boiled and salted. I give the Latin on account of the savoriness of

the trivial name. And pray what more can a reasonable man desire,

in peaceful times, in ordinary noons, than a sufficient number of

ears of green sweet corn boiled, with the addition of salt? Even

the little variety which I used was a yielding to the demands of

appetite, and not of health. Yet men have come to such a pass that

they frequently starve, not for want of necessaries, but for want of

luxuries; and I know a good woman who thinks that her son lost his

life because he took to drinking water only.

The reader will perceive that I am treating the subject rather

from an economic than a dietetic point of view, and he will not

venture to put my abstemiousness to the test unless he has a

well-stocked larder.

Bread I at first made of pure Indian meal and salt, genuine

hoe-cakes, which I baked before my fire out of doors on a shingle or

the end of a stick of timber sawed off in building my house; but it

was wont to get smoked and to have a piny flavor, I tried flour

also; but have at last found a mixture of rye and Indian meal most

convenient and agreeable. In cold weather it was no little

amusement to bake several small loaves of this in succession,

tending and turning them as carefully as an Egyptian his hatching

eggs. They were a real cereal fruit which I ripened, and they had

to my senses a fragrance like that of other noble fruits, which I

kept in as long as possible by wrapping them in cloths. I made a

study of the ancient and indispensable art of bread-making,

consulting such authorities as offered, going back to the primitive

days and first invention of the unleavened kind, when from the

wildness of nuts and meats men first reached the mildness and

refinement of this diet, and travelling gradually down in my studies

through that accidental souring of the dough which, it is supposed,

taught the leavening process, and through the various fermentations

thereafter, till I came to "good, sweet, wholesome bread," the staff

of life. Leaven, which some deem the soul of bread, the spiritus

which fills its cellular tissue, which is religiously preserved like

the vestal fire -- some precious bottleful, I suppose, first brought

over in the Mayflower, did the business for America, and its

influence is still rising, swelling, spreading, in cerealian billows

over the land -- this seed I regularly and faithfully procured from

the village, till at length one morning I forgot the rules, and

scalded my yeast; by which accident I discovered that even this was

not indispensable -- for my discoveries were not by the synthetic

but analytic process -- and I have gladly omitted it since, though

most housewives earnestly assured me that safe and wholesome bread

without yeast might not be, and elderly people prophesied a speedy

decay of the vital forces. Yet I find it not to be an essential

ingredient, and after going without it for a year am still in the

land of the living; and I am glad to escape the trivialness of

carrying a bottleful in my pocket, which would sometimes pop and

discharge its contents to my discomfiture. It is simpler and more

respectable to omit it. Man is an animal who more than any other

can adapt himself to all climates and circumstances. Neither did I

put any sal-soda, or other acid or alkali, into my bread. It would

seem that I made it according to the recipe which Marcus Porcius

Cato gave about two centuries before Christ. "Panem depsticium sic

facito. Manus mortariumque bene lavato. Farinam in mortarium

indito, aquae paulatim addito, subigitoque pulchre. Ubi bene

subegeris, defingito, coquitoque sub testu." Which I take to mean,

-- "Make kneaded bread thus. Wash your hands and trough well. Put

the meal into the trough, add water gradually, and knead it

thoroughly. When you have kneaded it well, mould it, and bake it

under a cover," that is, in a baking kettle. Not a word about

leaven. But I did not always use this staff of life. At one time,

owing to the emptiness of my purse, I saw none of it for more than a

month.

Every New Englander might easily raise all his own breadstuffs

in this land of rye and Indian corn, and not depend on distant and

fluctuating markets for them. Yet so far are we from simplicity and

independence that, in Concord, fresh and sweet meal is rarely sold

in the shops, and hominy and corn in a still coarser form are hardly

used by any. For the most part the farmer gives to his cattle and

hogs the grain of his own producing, and buys flour, which is at

least no more wholesome, at a greater cost, at the store. I saw

that I could easily raise my bushel or two of rye and Indian corn,

for the former will grow on the poorest land, and the latter does

not require the best, and grind them in a hand-mill, and so do

without rice and pork; and if I must have some concentrated sweet, I

found by experiment that I could make a very good molasses either of

pumpkins or beets, and I knew that I needed only to set out a few

maples to obtain it more easily still, and while these were growing

I could use various substitutes beside those which I have named.

"For," as the Forefathers sang,--

"we can make liquor to sweeten our lips

Of pumpkins and parsnips and walnut-tree chips."

Finally, as for salt, that grossest of groceries, to obtain this

might be a fit occasion for a visit to the seashore, or, if I did

without it altogether, I should probably drink the less water. I do

not learn that the Indians ever troubled themselves to go after it.

Thus I could avoid all trade and barter, so far as my food was

concerned, and having a shelter already, it would only remain to get

clothing and fuel. The pantaloons which I now wear were woven in a

farmer's family -- thank Heaven there is so much virtue still in

man; for I think the fall from the farmer to the operative as great

and memorable as that from the man to the farmer; -- and in a new

country, fuel is an encumbrance. As for a habitat, if I were not

permitted still to squat, I might purchase one acre at the same

price for which the land I cultivated was sold -- namely, eight

dollars and eight cents. But as it was, I considered that I

enhanced the value of the land by squatting on it.

There is a certain class of unbelievers who sometimes ask me

such questions as, if I think that I can live on vegetable food

alone; and to strike at the root of the matter at once -- for the

root is faith -- I am accustomed to answer such, that I can live on

board nails. If they cannot understand that, they cannot understand

much that I have to say. For my part, I am glad to bear of

experiments of this kind being tried; as that a young man tried for

a fortnight to live on hard, raw corn on the ear, using his teeth

for all mortar. The squirrel tribe tried the same and succeeded.

The human race is interested in these experiments, though a few old

women who are incapacitated for them, or who own their thirds in

mills, may be alarmed.

My furniture, part of which I made myself -- and the rest cost

me nothing of which I have not rendered an account -- consisted of a

bed, a table, a desk, three chairs, a looking-glass three inches in

diameter, a pair of tongs and andirons, a kettle, a skillet, and a

frying-pan, a dipper, a wash-bowl, two knives and forks, three

plates, one cup, one spoon, a jug for oil, a jug for molasses, and a

japanned lamp. None is so poor that he need sit on a pumpkin. That

is shiftlessness. There is a plenty of such chairs as I like best

in the village garrets to be had for taking them away. Furniture!

Thank God, I can sit and I can stand without the aid of a furniture

warehouse. What man but a philosopher would not be ashamed to see

his furniture packed in a cart and going up country exposed to the

light of heaven and the eyes of men, a beggarly account of empty

boxes? That is Spaulding's furniture. I could never tell from

inspecting such a load whether it belonged to a so-called rich man

or a poor one; the owner always seemed poverty-stricken. Indeed,

the more you have of such things the poorer you are. Each load

looks as if it contained the contents of a dozen shanties; and if

one shanty is poor, this is a dozen times as poor. Pray, for what

do we move ever but to get rid of our furniture, our exuvioe: at

last to go from this world to another newly furnished, and leave

this to be burned? It is the same as if all these traps were

buckled to a man's belt, and he could not move over the rough

country where our lines are cast without dragging them -- dragging

his trap. He was a lucky fox that left his tail in the trap. The

muskrat will gnaw his third leg off to be free. No wonder man has

lost his elasticity. How often he is at a dead set! "Sir, if I may

be so bold, what do you mean by a dead set?" If you are a seer,

whenever you meet a man you will see all that he owns, ay, and much

that he pretends to disown, behind him, even to his kitchen

furniture and all the trumpery which he saves and will not burn, and

he will appear to be harnessed to it and making what headway he can.

I think that the man is at a dead set who has got through a

knot-hole or gateway where his sledge load of furniture cannot

follow him. I cannot but feel compassion when I hear some trig,

compact-looking man, seemingly free, all girded and ready, speak of

his "furniture," as whether it is insured or not. "But what shall I

do with my furniture?" -- My gay butterfly is entangled in a

spider's web then. Even those who seem for a long while not to have

any, if you inquire more narrowly you will find have some stored in

somebody's barn. I look upon England today as an old gentleman who

is travelling with a great deal of baggage, trumpery which has

accumulated from long housekeeping, which he has not the courage to

burn; great trunk, little trunk, bandbox, and bundle. Throw away

the first three at least. It would surpass the powers of a well man

nowadays to take up his bed and walk, and I should certainly advise

a sick one to lay down his bed and run. When I have met an

immigrant tottering under a bundle which contained his all --

looking like an enormous wen which had grown out of the nape of his

neck -- I have pitied him, not because that was his all, but because

he had all that to carry. If I have got to drag my trap, I will

take care that it be a light one and do not nip me in a vital part.

But perchance it would be wisest never to put one's paw into it.

I would observe, by the way, that it costs me nothing for

curtains, for I have no gazers to shut out but the sun and moon, and

I am willing that they should look in. The moon will not sour milk

nor taint meat of mine, nor will the sun injure my furniture or fade

my carpet; and if he is sometimes too warm a friend, I find it still

better economy to retreat behind some curtain which nature has

provided, than to add a single item to the details of housekeeping.

A lady once offered me a mat, but as I had no room to spare within

the house, nor time to spare within or without to shake it, I

declined it, preferring to wipe my feet on the sod before my door.

It is best to avoid the beginnings of evil.

Not long since I was present at the auction of a deacon's

effects, for his life had not been ineffectual:--

"The evil that men do lives after them."

As usual, a great proportion was trumpery which had begun to

accumulate in his father's day. Among the rest was a dried

tapeworm. And now, after lying half a century in his garret and

other dust holes, these things were not burned; instead of a

bonfire, or purifying destruction of them, there was an auction, or

increasing of them. The neighbors eagerly collected to view them,

bought them all, and carefully transported them to their garrets and

dust holes, to lie there till their estates are settled, when they

will start again. When a man dies he kicks the dust.

The customs of some savage nations might, perchance, be

profitably imitated by us, for they at least go through the

semblance of casting their slough annually; they have the idea of

the thing, whether they have the reality or not. Would it not be

well if we were to celebrate such a "busk," or "feast of first

fruits," as Bartram describes to have been the custom of the

Mucclasse Indians? "When a town celebrates the busk," says he,

"having previously provided themselves with new clothes, new pots,

pans, and other household utensils and furniture, they collect all

their worn out clothes and other despicable things, sweep and

cleanse their houses, squares, and the whole town of their filth,

which with all the remaining grain and other old provisions they

cast together into one common heap, and consume it with fire. After

having taken medicine, and fasted for three days, all the fire in

the town is extinguished. During this fast they abstain from the

gratification of every appetite and passion whatever. A general

amnesty is proclaimed; all malefactors may return to their town."

"On the fourth morning, the high priest, by rubbing dry wood

together, produces new fire in the public square, from whence every

habitation in the town is supplied with the new and pure flame."

They then feast on the new corn and fruits, and dance and sing

for three days, "and the four following days they receive visits and

rejoice with their friends from neighboring towns who have in like

manner purified and prepared themselves."

The Mexicans also practised a similar purification at the end of

every fifty-two years, in the belief that it was time for the world

to come to an end.

I have scarcely heard of a truer sacrament, that is, as the

dictionary defines it, "outward and visible sign of an inward and

spiritual grace," than this, and I have no doubt that they were

originally inspired directly from Heaven to do thus, though they

have no Biblical record of the revelation.

For more than five years I maintained myself thus solely by the

labor of my hands, and I found that, by working about six weeks in a

year, I could meet all the expenses of living. The whole of my

winters, as well as most of my summers, I had free and clear for

study. I have thoroughly tried school-keeping, and found that my

expenses were in proportion, or rather out of proportion, to my

income, for I was obliged to dress and train, not to say think and

believe, accordingly, and I lost my time into the bargain. As I did

not teach for the good of my fellow-men, but simply for a

livelihood, this was a failure. I have tried trade but I found that

it would take ten years to get under way in that, and that then I

should probably be on my way to the devil. I was actually afraid

that I might by that time be doing what is called a good business.

When formerly I was looking about to see what I could do for a

living, some sad experience in conforming to the wishes of friends

being fresh in my mind to tax my ingenuity, I thought often and

seriously of picking huckleberries; that surely I could do, and its

small profits might suffice -- for my greatest skill has been to

want but little -- so little capital it required, so little

distraction from my wonted moods, I foolishly thought. While my

acquaintances went unhesitatingly into trade or the professions, I

contemplated this occupation as most like theirs; ranging the hills

all summer to pick the berries which came in my way, and thereafter

carelessly dispose of them; so, to keep the flocks of Admetus. I

also dreamed that I might gather the wild herbs, or carry evergreens

to such villagers as loved to be reminded of the woods, even to the

city, by hay-cart loads. But I have since learned that trade curses

everything it handles; and though you trade in messages from heaven,

the whole curse of trade attaches to the business.

As I preferred some things to others, and especially valued my

freedom, as I could fare hard and yet succeed well, I did not wish

to spend my time in earning rich carpets or other fine furniture, or

delicate cookery, or a house in the Grecian or the Gothic style just

yet. If there are any to whom it is no interruption to acquire

these things, and who know how to use them when acquired, I

relinquish to them the pursuit. Some are "industrious," and appear

to love labor for its own sake, or perhaps because it keeps them out

of worse mischief; to such I have at present nothing to say. Those

who would not know what to do with more leisure than they now enjoy,

I might advise to work twice as hard as they do -- work till they

pay for themselves, and get their free papers. For myself I found

that the occupation of a day-laborer was the most independent of

any, especially as it required only thirty or forty days in a year

to support one. The laborer's day ends with the going down of the

sun, and he is then free to devote himself to his chosen pursuit,

independent of his labor; but his employer, who speculates from

month to month, has no respite from one end of the year to the

other.

In short, I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to

maintain one's self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime,

if we will live simply and wisely; as the pursuits of the simpler

nations are still the sports of the more artificial. It is not

necessary that a man should earn his living by the sweat of his

brow, unless he sweats easier than I do.

One young man of my acquaintance, who has inherited some acres,

told me that he thought he should live as I did, if he had the

means. I would not have any one adopt my mode of living on any

account; for, beside that before he has fairly learned it I may have

found out another for myself, I desire that there may be as many

different persons in the world as possible; but I would have each

one be very careful to find out and pursue his own way, and not his

father's or his mother's or his neighbor's instead. The youth may

build or plant or sail, only let him not be hindered from doing that

which he tells me he would like to do. It is by a mathematical

point only that we are wise, as the sailor or the fugitive slave

keeps the polestar in his eye; but that is sufficient guidance for

all our life. We may not arrive at our port within a calculable

period, but we would preserve the true course.

Undoubtedly, in this case, what is true for one is truer still

for a thousand, as a large house is not proportionally more

expensive than a small one, since one roof may cover, one cellar

underlie, and one wall separate several apartments. But for my

part, I preferred the solitary dwelling. Moreover, it will commonly

be cheaper to build the whole yourself than to convince another of

the advantage of the common wall; and when you have done this, the

common partition, to be much cheaper, must be a thin one, and that

other may prove a bad neighbor, and also not keep his side in

repair. The only co-operation which is commonly possible is

exceedingly partial and superficial; and what little true

co-operation there is, is as if it were not, being a harmony

inaudible to men. If a man has faith, he will co-operate with equal

faith everywhere; if he has not faith, he will continue to live like

the rest of the world, whatever company he is joined to. To

co-operate in the highest as well as the lowest sense, means to get

our living together. I heard it proposed lately that two young men

should travel together over the world, the one without money,

earning his means as he went, before the mast and behind the plow,

the other carrying a bill of exchange in his pocket. It was easy to

see that they could not long be companions or co-operate, since one

would not operate at all. They would part at the first interesting

crisis in their adventures. Above all, as I have implied, the man

who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must

wait till that other is ready, and it may be a long time before they

get off.

But all this is very selfish, I have heard some of my townsmen

say. I confess that I have hitherto indulged very little in

philanthropic enterprises. I have made some sacrifices to a sense

of duty, and among others have sacrificed this pleasure also. There

are those who have used all their arts to persuade me to undertake

the support of some poor family in the town; and if I had nothing to

do -- for the devil finds employment for the idle -- I might try my

hand at some such pastime as that. However, when I have thought to

indulge myself in this respect, and lay their Heaven under an

obligation by maintaining certain poor persons in all respects as

comfortably as I maintain myself, and have even ventured so far as

to make them the offer, they have one and all unhesitatingly

preferred to remain poor. While my townsmen and women are devoted

in so many ways to the good of their fellows, I trust that one at

least may be spared to other and less humane pursuits. You must

have a genius for charity as well as for anything else. As for

Doing-good, that is one of the professions which are full.

Moreover, I have tried it fairly, and, strange as it may seem, am

satisfied that it does not agree with my constitution. Probably I

should not consciously and deliberately forsake my particular

calling to do the good which society demands of me, to save the

universe from annihilation; and I believe that a like but infinitely

greater steadfastness elsewhere is all that now preserves it. But I

would not stand between any man and his genius; and to him who does

this work, which I decline, with his whole heart and soul and life,

I would say, Persevere, even if the world call it doing evil, as it

is most likely they will.

I am far from supposing that my case is a peculiar one; no doubt

many of my readers would make a similar defence. At doing something

-- I will not engage that my neighbors shall pronounce it good -- I

do not hesitate to say that I should be a capital fellow to hire;

but what that is, it is for my employer to find out. What good I

do, in the common sense of that word, must be aside from my main

path, and for the most part wholly unintended. Men say,

practically, Begin where you are and such as you are, without aiming

mainly to become of more worth, and with kindness aforethought go

about doing good. If I were to preach at all in this strain, I

should say rather, Set about being good. As if the sun should stop

when he had kindled his fires up to the splendor of a moon or a star

of the sixth magnitude, and go about like a Robin Goodfellow,

peeping in at every cottage window, inspiring lunatics, and tainting

meats, and making darkness visible, instead of steadily increasing

his genial heat and beneficence till he is of such brightness that

no mortal can look him in the face, and then, and in the meanwhile

too, going about the world in his own orbit, doing it good, or

rather, as a truer philosophy has discovered, the world going about

him getting good. When Phaeton, wishing to prove his heavenly birth

by his beneficence, had the sun's chariot but one day, and drove out

of the beaten track, he burned several blocks of houses in the lower

streets of heaven, and scorched the surface of the earth, and dried

up every spring, and made the great desert of Sahara, till at length

Jupiter hurled him headlong to the earth with a thunderbolt, and the

sun, through grief at his death, did not shine for a year.

There is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness

tainted. It is human, it is divine, carrion. If I knew for a

certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious

design of doing me good, I should run for my life, as from that dry

and parching wind of the African deserts called the simoom, which

fills the mouth and nose and ears and eyes with dust till you are

suffocated, for fear that I should get some of his good done to me

-- some of its virus mingled with my blood. No -- in this case I

would rather suffer evil the natural way. A man is not a good man

to me because he will feed me if I should be starving, or warm me if

I should be freezing, or pull me out of a ditch if I should ever

fall into one. I can find you a Newfoundland dog that will do as

much. Philanthropy is not love for one's fellow-man in the broadest

sense. Howard was no doubt an exceedingly kind and worthy man in

his way, and has his reward; but, comparatively speaking, what are a

hundred Howards to us, if their philanthropy do not help us in our

best estate, when we are most worthy to be helped? I never heard of

a philanthropic meeting in which it was sincerely proposed to do any

good to me, or the like of me.

The Jesuits were quite balked by those Indians who, being burned

at the stake, suggested new modes of torture to their tormentors.

Being superior to physical suffering, it sometimes chanced that they

were superior to any consolation which the missionaries could offer;

and the law to do as you would be done by fell with less

persuasiveness on the ears of those who, for their part, did not

care how they were done by, who loved their enemies after a new

fashion, and came very near freely forgiving them all they did.

Be sure that you give the poor the aid they most need, though it

be your example which leaves them far behind. If you give money,

spend yourself with it, and do not merely abandon it to them. We

make curious mistakes sometimes. Often the poor man is not so cold

and hungry as he is dirty and ragged and gross. It is partly his

taste, and not merely his misfortune. If you give him money, he

will perhaps buy more rags with it. I was wont to pity the clumsy

Irish laborers who cut ice on the pond, in such mean and ragged

clothes, while I shivered in my more tidy and somewhat more

fashionable garments, till, one bitter cold day, one who had slipped

into the water came to my house to warm him, and I saw him strip off

three pairs of pants and two pairs of stockings ere he got down to

the skin, though they were dirty and ragged enough, it is true, and

that he could afford to refuse the extra garments which I offered

him, he had so many intra ones. This ducking was the very thing he

needed. Then I began to pity myself, and I saw that it would be a

greater charity to bestow on me a flannel shirt than a whole

slop-shop on him. There are a thousand hacking at the branches of

evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who

bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing

the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives

in vain to relieve. It is the pious slave-breeder devoting the

proceeds of every tenth slave to buy a Sunday's liberty for the

rest. Some show their kindness to the poor by employing them in

their kitchens. Would they not be kinder if they employed

themselves there? You boast of spending a tenth part of your income

in charity; maybe you should spend the nine tenths so, and done with

it. Society recovers only a tenth part of the property then. Is

this owing to the generosity of him in whose possession it is found,

or to the remissness of the officers of justice?

Philanthropy is almost the only virtue which is sufficiently

appreciated by mankind. Nay, it is greatly overrated; and it is our

selfishness which overrates it. A robust poor man, one sunny day

here in Concord, praised a fellow-townsman to me, because, as he

said, he was kind to the poor; meaning himself. The kind uncles and

aunts of the race are more esteemed than its true spiritual fathers

and mothers. I once heard a reverend lecturer on England, a man of

learning and intelligence, after enumerating her scientific,

literary, and political worthies, Shakespeare, Bacon, Cromwell,

Milton, Newton, and others, speak next of her Christian heroes,

whom, as if his profession required it of him, he elevated to a

place far above all the rest, as the greatest of the great. They

were Penn, Howard, and Mrs. Fry. Every one must feel the falsehood

and cant of this. The last were not England's best men and women;

only, perhaps, her best philanthropists.

I would not subtract anything from the praise that is due to

philanthropy, but merely demand justice for all who by their lives

and works are a blessing to mankind. I do not value chiefly a man's

uprightness and benevolence, which are, as it were, his stem and

leaves. Those plants of whose greenness withered we make herb tea

for the sick serve but a humble use, and are most employed by

quacks. I want the flower and fruit of a man; that some fragrance

be wafted over from him to me, and some ripeness flavor our

intercourse. His goodness must not be a partial and transitory act,

but a constant superfluity, which costs him nothing and of which he

is unconscious. This is a charity that hides a multitude of sins.

The philanthropist too often surrounds mankind with the remembrance

of his own castoff griefs as an atmosphere, and calls it sympathy.

We should impart our courage, and not our despair, our health and

ease, and not our disease, and take care that this does not spread

by contagion. From what southern plains comes up the voice of

wailing? Under what latitudes reside the heathen to whom we would

send light? Who is that intemperate and brutal man whom we would

redeem? If anything ail a man, so that he does not perform his

functions, if he have a pain in his bowels even -- for that is the

seat of sympathy -- he forthwith sets about reforming -- the world.

Being a microcosm himself, he discovers -- and it is a true

discovery, and he is the man to make it -- that the world has been

eating green apples; to his eyes, in fact, the globe itself is a

great green apple, which there is danger awful to think of that the

children of men will nibble before it is ripe; and straightway his

drastic philanthropy seeks out the Esquimau and the Patagonian, and

embraces the populous Indian and Chinese villages; and thus, by a

few years of philanthropic activity, the powers in the meanwhile

using him for their own ends, no doubt, he cures himself of his

dyspepsia, the globe acquires a faint blush on one or both of its

cheeks, as if it were beginning to be ripe, and life loses its

crudity and is once more sweet and wholesome to live. I never

dreamed of any enormity greater than I have committed. I never

knew, and never shall know, a worse man than myself.

I believe that what so saddens the reformer is not his sympathy

with his fellows in distress, but, though he be the holiest son of

God, is his private ail. Let this be righted, let the spring come

to him, the morning rise over his couch, and he will forsake his

generous companions without apology. My excuse for not lecturing

against the use of tobacco is, that I never chewed it, that is a

penalty which reformed tobacco-chewers have to pay; though there are

things enough I have chewed which I could lecture against. If you

should ever be betrayed into any of these philanthropies, do not let

your left hand know what your right hand does, for it is not worth

knowing. Rescue the drowning and tie your shoestrings. Take your

time, and set about some free labor.

Our manners have been corrupted by communication with the

saints. Our hymn-books resound with a melodious cursing of God and

enduring Him forever. One would say that even the prophets and

redeemers had rather consoled the fears than confirmed the hopes of

man. There is nowhere recorded a simple and irrepressible

satisfaction with the gift of life, any memorable praise of God.

All health and success does me good, however far off and withdrawn

it may appear; all disease and failure helps to make me sad and does

me evil, however much sympathy it may have with me or I with it.

If, then, we would indeed restore mankind by truly Indian, botanic,

magnetic, or natural means, let us first be as simple and well as

Nature ourselves, dispel the clouds which hang over our own brows,

and take up a little life into our pores. Do not stay to be an

overseer of the poor, but endeavor to become one of the worthies of

the world.

I read in the Gulistan, or Flower Garden, of Sheik Sadi of

Shiraz, that "they asked a wise man, saying: Of the many celebrated

trees which the Most High God has created lofty and umbrageous, they

call none azad, or free, excepting the cypress, which bears no

fruit; what mystery is there in this? He replied, Each has its

appropriate produce, and appointed season, during the continuance of

which it is fresh and blooming, and during their absence dry and

withered; to neither of which states is the cypress exposed, being

always flourishing; and of this nature are the azads, or religious

independents. -- Fix not thy heart on that which is transitory; for

the Dijlah, or Tigris, will continue to flow through Bagdad after

the race of caliphs is extinct: if thy hand has plenty, be liberal

as the date tree; but if it affords nothing to give away, be an

azad, or free man, like the cypress."

COMPLEMENTAL VERSES

The Pretensions of Poverty

Thou dost presume too much, poor needy wretch,

To claim a station in the firmament

Because thy humble cottage, or thy tub,

Nurses some lazy or pedantic virtue

In the cheap sunshine or by shady springs,

With roots and pot-herbs; where thy right hand,

Tearing those humane passions from the mind,

Upon whose stocks fair blooming virtues flourish,

Degradeth nature, and benumbeth sense,

And, Gorgon-like, turns active men to stone.

We not require the dull society

Of your necessitated temperance,

Or that unnatural stupidity

That knows nor joy nor sorrow; nor your forc'd

Falsely exalted passive fortitude

Above the active. This low abject brood,

That fix their seats in mediocrity,

Become your servile minds; but we advance

Such virtues only as admit excess,

Brave, bounteous acts, regal magnificence,

All-seeing prudence, magnanimity

That knows no bound, and that heroic virtue

For which antiquity hath left no name,

But patterns only, such as Hercules,

Achilles, Theseus. Back to thy loath'd cell;

And when thou seest the new enlightened sphere,

Study to know but what those worthies were.

T. CAREW