84 
WALDEN* 
From wliat southern plains comes up the voice of wail¬ 
ing ? Under what latitudes reside the heathen to whom 
we would send light? Who is that intemperate and 
brutal man whom we would redeem ? If any thing ail 
a man, so that he does not perform his functions, if 
he have a pain in his bowels even, — for that is the seat 
of sympathy,— he forthwith sets about reforming — 
the world. Being a microcosm himself, he discovers, and 
it is a true discovery, and he is the man to make it, — that 
the world has been eating green apples; to his eyes, in 
fact, the globe itself is a great green apple, which there 
is danger awful to think of that the children of men will 
nibble before it is ripe; and straightway his drastic 
philanthropy seeks out the Esquimaux and the Pata¬ 
gonian, and embraces the populous Indian and Chinese 
villages ; and thus, by a few years of philanthropic ac¬ 
tivity, the powers in the mean while using him for their 
own ends, no doubt, he cures himself of his dyspepsia, 
the globe acquires a faint blush on one or both of its 
cheeks, as if it were beginning to be ripe, and life loses its 
crudity and is once more sweet and wholesome to live. 
I never dreamed of any enormity greater than I have 
committed. I never knew, and never shall know, a 
worse man than myself. 
I believe that what so saddens the reformer is not his 
sympathy with his fellows in distress, but, though he 
be the holiest son of God, is his private ail. Let this 
be righted, let the spring come to him, the morning rise 
over his couch, and he wall forsake his generous com¬ 
panions without apology. My excuse for not lecturing 
against the use of tobacco is, that I never chewed it; 
that is a penalty which reformed tobacco-chewers have to 
pay; though there are things enough I have chewed, 
