Page:Familiar letters of Henry David Thoreau.djvu/290

 266 FRIENDS AND FOLLOWERS. [1853,

TO HARRISON BLAKE (AT WORCESTER).

CONCORD, December 19, 1853.

ME. BLAKE, My debt has accumulated so that I should have answered your last letter at once, if I had not been the subject of what is called a press of engagements, having a lecture to write for last Wednesday, and surveying more than usual besides. It has been a kind of running fight with me, the enemy not always behind me, I trust.

True, a man cannot lift himself by his own waistbands, because he cannot get out of him self ; but he can expand himself (which is bet ter, there being no up nor down in nature), and so split his waistbands, being already within himself.

You speak of doing and being, and the van ity, real or apparent, of much doing. The suck ers I think it is they make nests in our river in the spring of more than a cart-load of small stones, amid which to deposit their ova. The other day I opened a muskrat s house. It was made of weeds, five feet broad at base, and three feet high, and far and low within it was a little cavity, only a foot in diameter, where the rat dwelt. It may seem trivial, this piling up of weeds, but so the race of muskrats is pre served. We must heap up a great pile of doing,