Page:Winter - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/421

407 vogue in the last century, how foolish and use less they are seen to be, and yet we use equally absurd ones with faith to-day.

Feb. 19, 1841. A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. I do not see how any can be written more, but this is the last effusion of genius. It is slipping out of my fingers while I read. It creates no atmosphere in which it may be perused, but one in which its teachings may be practiced. It confers on me such wealth that I lay it down with the least regret. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting. So I can not stay to hear a good sermon, and applaud at the conclusion, but shall be half-way to Thermopylæ before that. We linger in manhood to tell the dreams of our childhood, and they are half forgotten ere we acquire the faculty of expressing them.

It is the unexplored grandeur of the storm which keeps up the spirits of the traveler. When I contemplate a hard and bare life in the woods, I find my last consolation in its untrivialness. Shipwreck is less distressing because the breakers do not trifle with us. We are resigned as long as we recognize the sober and solemn mystery of nature. The dripping mariner finds consolation and sympathy in the infinite