Page:Anti-slavery and reform papers by Thoreau, Henry David.djvu/136

 Life ivitJioiit Principle. 125 After reading Howitt's account of the Australian gold- dioro-inofs one evening: I bad in mv mind^s eve, all nio^lit, the numerous valleys, with their streams, all cut up with foul pitSj from ten to one hundred feet deep, and half a dozen feet across, as close as they can be dug, and partly filled with water, — the locality to which men furiouslv rush to probe for their fortunes, — uncertain where they shall break ground, — not knowing but the gold is under their camp itself, — sometimes digging one hundred and sixty feet before they strike the vein, or then missing it by a foot, — turned into demons, and regardless of each other's rights, in their thirst for riches, — whole valleys, for thirty miles, suddenly honeycombed by the pits of the miners, so that even hundreds are drowned in them, — standing in water, and covered with mud and clay, they work niorht and dav, dviuof of exposure and disease.

Having read this, and partly forgotten it, I was thinking, accidentally, of my own unsatisfactor}' life, doing as others do ; and with that vision of the diggings still before me, I asked myself, why 1 might not be washing some gold daily, though it were only the finest particles, — why J might not sink a shaft down to the gold within me, and work that mine. T]iere is a Ballarat, a Bendigo, for you, — what though it were a sulky-gully ? At any rate, I might pursue some path, however solitary and narrow and crooked, in which I could walk with love and rever- ence. Wherever a man separates from the multitude, and goes his own way in this mood, there indeed is a fork in the road, though ordinary travellers may see only a gap in the paling. His solitary path across-lots will turn out the Jiiijltcr ivay of the two.

Men rush to California and Australia as if the true