Page:Anti-slavery and reform papers by Thoreau, Henry David.djvu/71

 6o Ajiti-Slavejy and Refoinn Papers.

a day for being hung, take the year round ; but then he stands a chance to save a considerable part of his soul — and such a soul ! — when joii do not. No doubt you can get more in your market for a quart of milk than for a quart of blood ; but that is not the market that heroes carry their blood to.

Such do not know that like the seed is the fruit, and that, in the moral world, when good seed is planted, good fruit is inevitable, and does not depend on our watering and cultivating ; that when you plant, or bury, a hero in his field, a crop of heroes is sure to spring up.

This is a seed of such force and vitality that it does not ask our leave to germinate.

The momentary charge at Balaclava, in obedience to a blundering command, proving what a perfect machine the soldier is, has, properly enough, been celebrated by a poet laureate ; but the steady, and for the most part successful, charge of this man, for some years, against the legions of slavery, in obedience to an infinitely higher command, is as much more memorable than that as an intelligent and conscientious man is superior to a machine. Do you think that will go unsung ? undoubtedly insane." So they proceed to live their sane, and wise, and altogether admirable lives, reading their Plutarch a little, but chiefly pausing at that feat of Put- nam, who was let down into a wolPs den ; and in this wise they nourish themselves for brave and patriotic deeds some time or other. The Tract Society could afford to print that story of Putnam. You might open the district schools with the reading of it, for there is nothing about Slavery or the Church in it; unless it
 * ' Served him right," — ^^ A dangerous man," — ^^ He is