Page:Anti-slavery and reform papers by Thoreau, Henry David.djvu/141

 130 Anti- Slavery and Refonn Papers.

sills are rotten. What stuff is the man made of who is not coexistent in our thought with the purest and subtilest truth ? I often accuse my finest acquaintances of an immense frivolity; for, while there are manners and compliments we do not meet, we do not teach one another the lessons of honesty and sincerity that the brutes do, or of steadiness and solidity that the rocks do. The fault is commonly mutual, however; for we do not habitually demand any more of each other.

That excitement about Kossuth, consider how cha- racteristic, but superficial, it was ! — only another kind of politics or dancing. ][en were making speeches to him all over the country, but each expressed only the thought, or the want of thought, of the multitude. No man stood on truth. They were merely banded together, as usual, one leaning on another, and all together on nothing; as the Hindoos made the world rest on an elephant, the elephant on a tortoise, and the tortoise on a serpent, and had nothing to put under the serpent.

For all fruit of that stir we have the Kossuth hat.

Just so hollow and ineffectual, for the most part, is our ordinary conyersation. Surface meets surface. When our life ceases to be inward and private, conversation de- generates into mere gossip. We rarely meet a man who can tell us any news which he has not read in a news- paper, or been told by his neighbor; and, for the most part, the only difference between us and our fellow is that he has seen the newspaper, or been out to tea, and we have not. In proportion as our inward life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the post-office.

You may depend on it, that the poor fellow who walks away with the greatest number of letters^ proud of hi^