Page:Familiar letters of Henry David Thoreau.djvu/217

 J5T.30.] TO HARRISON BLAKE. 193

in any true sense living a new or a better life. The outward is only the outside of that which is within. Men are not concealed under habits, but are revealed by them ; they are their true clothes. I care not how curious a reason they may give for their abiding by them. Circum stances are not rigid and unyielding, but our habits are rigid. We are apt to speak vaguely sometimes, as if a divine life were to be grafted on to or built over this present as a suitable foundation. This might do if we could so build over our old life as to exclude from it all the warmth of our affection, and addle it, as the thrush builds over the cuckoo s egg, and lays her own atop, and hatches that only ; but the fact is, we so there is the partition hatch them both, and the cuckoo s always by a day first, and that young bird crowds the young thrushes out of the nest. No. Destroy the cuck oo s egg, or build a new nest.

Change is change. No new life occupies the old bodies ; they decay. It is born, and grows, and flourishes. Men very pathetically inform the old, accept and wear it Why put up with the almshouse when you may go to heaven ? It is embalming, no more. Let alone your oint ments and your linen swathes, and go into an infant s body. You see in the catacombs of Egypt the result of that experiment, that is the end of it.