Page:Familiar letters of Henry David Thoreau.djvu/122

 98 YEARS OF DISCIPLINE. [1843,

and even the best people in it are a part of it, and talk coolly about it. The pigs in the street are the most respectable part of the population. When will the world learn that a million men are of no importance compared with one man ? But I must wait for a shower of shillings, or at least a slight dew or mizzling of sixpences, be fore I explore New York very far.

The sea-beach is the best thing I have seen. It is very solitary and remote, and you only re member New York occasionally. The distances, too, along the shore, and inland in sight of it, are unaccountably great and startling. The sea seems very near from the hills, but it proves a long way over the plain, and yet you may be wet with the spray before you can believe that you are there. The far seems near, and the near far. Many rods from the beach, I step aside for the Atlantic, and I see men drag up their boats on to the sand, with oxen, stepping about amid the surf, as if it were possible they might draw up Sandy Hook.

I do not feel myself especially serviceable to the good people with whom I live, except as in flictions are sanctified to the righteous. And so, too, must I serve the boy. I can look to the Latin and mathematics sharply, and for the rest behave myself. But I cannot be in his neigh borhood hereafter as his Educator, of course, but