Page:Familiar letters of Henry David Thoreau.djvu/291

 ^T. 36.] TO HARRISON BLAKE. 267

for a small diameter of being. Is it not imper ative on us that we do something, if we only work in a treadmill? And, indeed, some sort of revolving is necessary to produce a centre and nucleus of being. What exercise is to the body, employment is to the mind and morals. Consider what an amount of drudgery must be performed, how much humdrum and prosaic labor goes to any work of the least value. There are so many layers of mere white lime in every shell to that thin inner one so beautifully tinted. Let not the shell-fish think to build his house of that alone ; and pray, what are its tints to him ? Is it not his smooth, close-fitting shirt merely, whose tints are not to him, being in the dark, but only when he is gone or dead, and his shell is heaved up to light, a wreck upon the beach, do they appear. With him, too, it is a Song of the Shirt, &quot; Work, work, work ! &quot; And the work is not merely a police in the gross sense, but in the higher sense a discipline. If it is surely the means to the highest end we know, can any work be humble or disgusting? Will it not rather be elevating as a ladder, the means by which we are translated ?

How admirably the artist is made to accom plish his self -culture by devotion to his art ! The wood-sawyer, through his effort to do his work well, becomes not merely a better wood-sawyer,