Page:Thoreau - His Home, Friends and Books (1902).djvu/228

200 men, a high value on his time, he seemed the only man of leisure in the town, always ready for any excursion that promised well, or for conversation prolonged into late hours." Again, Channing bore testimony to the ultimate end of Thoreau's life as "work." In modern life we need to ponder well Thoreau's thoughts on these two necessities for true growth. If leisure, the essential for real expansion of mind and soul, is fast becoming obsolete in this "nation in a hurry," so work, in Thoreau's use of the term, is being supplemented by nervous competition. "Work as a healthful, joyous expression of life is allied to poetry. Forty years ago he drew sharp antitheses between this true industry and the peace-destroying, soul-sapping excitements of commercialism. His readers, perforce, wonder what polemics he would have uttered against the tyrannous, nervous methods of current life. Among the most spicy passages in "Walden" is a tirade against such kind of activity, which he calls "Saint Vitus's Dance." Against the threatening national tendency to "rush," now a sad, pervasive symptom in all places, he wrote with warning,—"Men say that a stitch in time saves nine, and so they take a thousand stitches to-day to save nine to-morrow."

Like Ruskin and his pupil, William Morris, Thoreau