80 
WALDEN. 
be aside from my main path, and for the most part 
wholly unintended. Men say, practically, Begin where 
you are and such as you are, without aiming mainly to 
become of more worth, and with kindness aforethought 
go about doing good. If I were to preach at all in this 
strain, I should say rather, Set about being good. As if 
the sun should stop when he had kindled his fires up to 
the splendor of a moon or a star of the sixth magnitude, 
and go about like a Robin Goodfellow, peeping in at 
every cottage window, inspiring lunatics, and tainting 
meats, and making darkness visible, instead of steadily 
increasing his genial heat and beneficence till he is of 
such brightness that no mortal can look him in the face, 
and then, and in the mean while too, going about the 
world in his own orbit, doing it good, or rather, as a 
truer philosophy has discovered, the world going about 
him getting good. When Phaeton, wishing to prove 
his heavenly birth by his beneficence, had the sun’s 
chariot but one day, and drove out of the beaten track, 
he burned several blocks of houses in the lower streets 
of heaven, and scorched the surface of the earth, and 
dried up every spring, and made the great desert of 
Sahara, till at length Jupiter hurled him headlong to 
the earth with a thunderbolt, and the sun, through grief 
at his death, did not shine for a year. 
There is no odor so bad as that which arises from 
goodness tainted. It is human, it is divine, carrion. If 
I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my 
house with the conscious design of doing me good, I 
should run for my life, as from that dry and parching 
wind of the African deserts called the simoom, which 
fills the mouth and nose and ears and eyes with dust till 
you are suffocated, for fear that I should get some of 
