Page:The writings of Henry David Thoreau, v2.djvu/23

 well-nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture, and woodlot! The portionless, who struggle with no such unnecessary inherited encumbrances, find it labor enough to subdue and cultivate a few cubic feet of flesh.

But men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon plowed into the soil for compost. By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It is a fool's life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before. It is said that Deucalion and Pyrrha created men by throwing stones over their heads behind them:


 * Inde genus durum sumus, experiensque laborum,
 * Et documenta damus qua simus origine nati.

Or, as Raleigh rhymes it in his sonorous way,


 * "From thence our kind hard-hearted is, enduring pain and care,
 * Approving that our bodies of a stony nature are."