Page:Anti-slavery and reform papers by Thoreau, Henry David.djvu/146

 Life without Principle. 135 are, and be careful what objects and what subjects we thrust on their attention. Read not the Times. Eead the Eternities. Conventionalities are at length as bad as impurities. Even the facts of science may dust the mind bv their dryness, unless they are in a sense effaced each morning, or rather rendered fertile by the dews of fresh and living truth. Knowledge does not come to us by details, but in flashes of light from heaven. Yes, every thought that passes through the mind helps to wear and tear it, and to deepen the ruts, which, as in the streets of Pompeii, evince how much it has been used.

How manv thino^s there are concerninof which we miofht well deliberate whether we had better know them, — had better let their peddling-carts be driven, even at the slowest trot or walk_, over that bridge of glorious span by which we trust to pass at last from the farthest brink of time to the nearest shore of eternity ! Have we no culture, no refinement, — but skill only to live coarsely and serve the devil ? — to acquire a little worldl}^ wealth, or fame, or liberty, and make a false show with it, as if we were all husk and shell, with no tender and living: kernel to us ? 8hall our institutions be like those chest- nut-burrs which contain abortive nuts, perfect only to prick the fingers ? America is said to be the arena on which the battle of freedom is to be fought; but surely it cannot be freedom in a merely political sense that is meant. Even if we grant that the American has freed himself from a poli- ^ tical tyrant, he is still the slave of an economical and moral tyrant. Xow that the republic, — the res-puUicaj — has been settled, it is time to look after the res-privatiij — the private state^ — to see^ as the Roman senate charged