ar, and when we do soar the company
grows thinner and thinner till there is none at all. It is either the
tribune on the plain, a sermon on the mount, or a very private ecstasy
still higher up. Use all the society that will abet you." But surely it
is no very extravagant opinion that it is better to give than to
receive, to serve than to use our companions; and above all, where there
is no question of service upon either side, that it is good to enjoy
their company like a natural man. It is curious and in some ways
dispiriting that a writer may be always best corrected out of his own
mouth; and so, to conclude, here is another passage from Thoreau which
seems aimed directly at himself: "Do not be too moral; you may cheat
yourself out of much life so.... _All fables, indeed, have their morals;
but the innocent enjoy the story._"

V

"The only obligation," says he, "which I have a right to assume is to do
at any time what I think right." "Why should we ever go abroad, even
across the way, to ask a neighbour's advice?" "There is a nearer
neighbour within, who is incessantly telling us how we should behave.
_But we wait for the neighbour without to tell us of some false, easier
way._" "The greater part of what my neighbours call good I believe in my
soul to be bad." To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of
becoming, is the only end of life. It is "when we fall behind ourselves"
that "we are cursed with duties and the neglect of duties." "I love the
wild," he says, "not less than the good." And again: "The life of a good
man will hardly improve us more than the life of a freebooter, for the
inevitable laws appear as plainly in the infringement as in the
observance, and" (mark this) "_our lives are sustained by a nearly equal
expense of virtue of some kind_." Even although he were a prig, it will
be owned he could announce a startling doctrine. "As for doing good," he
writes elsewhere, "that is one of the professions that are full.
Moreover, I have tried it fairly, and, strange as it may seem, am
satisfied that it does not agree with my constitution. Probably I should
not conscientiously and deliberately forsake my particular calling to do
the good which society demands of me, to save the universe from
annihilation; and I believe that a like but infinitely greater
steadfastness elsewhere is all that now preserves it. If you should ever
be betrayed into any of these philanthropies, do not let your left hand