Henry David Thoreau 189 



and I shall shudder to think that the next 

 question will be: 'What did you do while you 

 were warm?' ' It is not enough to have 

 earned our livelihood. Either the earning 

 should have been serviceable to mankind or 

 something else must follow. To live is some- 

 times difficult, but it is never meritorious in 

 itself, and we must have a reason to give our 

 own conscience why we should continue to 

 exist upon this earth. Again he says, speaking 

 of his wood: "There is a far more important 

 and warming heat, commonly lost, which pre- 

 cedes 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 ex- 

 tracted all its heat." Thus Thoreau was not 

 an idler by any means. Industry was a passion 

 with him, but it must be productive industry. 

 There is not a day when Thoreau does not 

 record some useful work in his diary. He 

 writes, he works his garden, he chops down 

 trees, he helps others. The art he loved was 

 literature. He believed in good books; his 



