is hands and
feet. I feel all my best faculties concentrated in it. My instinct tells
me that my head is an organ for burrowing, as some creatures use their
snout and fore paws, and with it I would mine and burrow my way through
these hills. I think that the richest vein is somewhere hereabouts;
so by the divining-rod and thin rising vapors I judge; and here I will
begin to mine.

Reading

With a little more deliberation in the choice of their pursuits, all men
would perhaps become essentially students and observers, for certainly
their nature and destiny are interesting to all alike. In accumulating
property for ourselves or our posterity, in founding a family or a
state, or acquiring fame even, we are mortal; but in dealing with
truth we are immortal, and need fear no change nor accident. The oldest
Egyptian or Hindoo philosopher raised a corner of the veil from the
statue of the divinity; and still the trembling robe remains raised, and
I gaze upon as fresh a glory as he did, since it was I in him that was
then so bold, and it is he in me that now reviews the vision. No dust
has settled on that robe; no time has elapsed since that divinity was
revealed. That time which we really improve, or which is improvable, is
neither past, present, nor future.

My residence was more favorable, not only to thought, but to serious
reading, than a university; and though I was beyond the range of the
ordinary circulating library, I had more than ever come within the
influence of those books which circulate round the world, whose
sentences were first written on bark, and are now merely copied from
time to time on to linen paper. Says the poet Mr Udd, "Being seated, to
run through the region of the spiritual world; I have had this
advantage in books. To be intoxicated by a single glass of wine; I have
experienced this pleasure when I have drunk the liquor of the esoteric
doctrines." I kept Homer's Iliad on my table through the summer, though
I looked at his page only now and then. Incessant labor with my hands,
at first, for I had my house to finish and my beans to hoe at the same
time, made more study impossible. Yet I sustained myself by the prospect
of such reading in future. I read one or two shallow books of travel
in the intervals of my work, till that employment made me ashamed of
myself, and I asked where it was then that I lived.

The student may read Homer or AEschylus in the Greek without danger of
dissipation or