Page:Winter - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/279

Rh facts and names and dates communicate more than we suspect. Whether the flower looks better in the nosegay than in the meadow where it grew, and we had to wet our feet to get it! Is the scholastic air any advantage?

Jan. 28, 1852. Perhaps I can never find so good a setting for my thoughts as I shall thus have taken them out of. The crystal never sparkles more brightly than in the cavern. The world has always loved best the fable with the moral. The children could read the fable alone—the grown up read both. The truth so told has the best advantage of the most abstract statement, for it is not the less universally applicable. Where else will you ever find the cement for your thoughts? How will you ever rivet them together without leaving the marks of the file? Yet Plutarch did not so. Montaigne did not so. Men have written travels in this form, but perhaps no man's daily life has been rich enough to be journalized. Our life should be so active and progressive as to be a journey. Our meals should all be of journey cake and hasty pudding. We should be more alert, see the sun rise, not keep fashionable hours, enter a house, our own house as a khan or caravansary. At noon I did not dine, I ate my journey cake, I quenched my thirst at a spring or a brook. As I sat at the table, the hospitality was so perfect and the