n itself; and we
must have a reason to allege to our own conscience why we should
continue to exist upon this crowded earth. If Thoreau had simply dwelt
in his house at Walden, a lover of trees, birds, and fishes, and the
open air and virtue, a reader of wise books, an idle, selfish
self-improver, he would have managed to cheat Admetus, but, to cling to
metaphor, the devil would have had him in the end. Those who can avoid
toil altogether and dwell in the Arcadia of private means, and even
those who can, by abstinence, reduce the necessary amount of it to some
six weeks a year, having the more liberty, have only the higher moral
obligation to be up and doing in the interest of man.

The second passage is this: "There is a far more important and warming
heat, commonly lost, which precedes the burning of the wood. It is the
smoke of industry, which is incense. I had been so thoroughly warmed in
body and spirit, that when at length my fuel was housed, I came near
selling it to the ashman, as if I had extracted all its heat." Industry
is, in itself and when properly chosen, delightful and profitable to the
worker; and when your toil has been a pleasure, you have not, as Thoreau
says, "earned money merely," but money, health, delight, and moral
profit, all in one. "We must heap up a great pile of doing for a small
diameter of being," he says in another place; and then exclaims, "How
admirably the artist is made to accomplish his self-culture by devotion
to his art!" We may escape uncongenial toil, only to devote ourselves to
that which is congenial. It is only to transact some higher business
that even Apollo dare play the truant from Admetus. We must all work for
the sake of work; we must all work, as Thoreau says again, in any
"absorbing pursuit--it does not much matter what, so it be honest"; but
the most profitable work is that which combines into one continued
effort the largest proportion of the powers and desires of a man's
nature; that into which he will plunge with ardour, and from which he
will desist with reluctance; in which he will know the weariness of
fatigue, but not that of satiety; and which will be ever fresh,
pleasing, and stimulating to his taste. Such work holds a man together,
braced at all points; it does not suffer him to doze or wander; it keeps
him actively conscious of himself, yet raised among superior interests;
it gives him the profit of industry with the pleasures of a pastime.
This is what hi