8 
WALDEN. 
unnecessary inherited encumbrances, find it labor enough 
to subdue and cultivate a few cubic feet of flesh. 
But men labor under a mistake. The better part of 
the man is soon ploughed into the soil for compost. By a 
seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are em¬ 
ployed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures 
which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break 
through and steal. It is a fool’s life, as they will find 
when they get to the end of it, if not before. It is said 
that Deucalion and Pyrrha created men by throwing 
stones over their heads behind them: — 
Inde genus durum sumus, experiensque laborum, 
Et documenta damus qua simus origine nati. 
Or, as Raleigh rhymes it in his sonorous way, — 
“From thence our kind hard-hearted is, enduring pain and care, 
Approving that our bodies of a stony nature are.” 
So much for a blind obedience to a blundering oracle, 
throwing the stones over their heads behind them, and 
not seeing where they fell. 
Most men, even in this comparatively free country, 
through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied 
with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors 
of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them. 
Their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy and 
tremble too much for that. Actually, the laboring man 
has not leisure for a true integrity day by day ; he can¬ 
not afford to sustain the manliest relations to men; his 
labor would be depreciated in the market. He has no 
time to be any thing but a machine. How can he 
remember well his ignorance — which his growth re¬ 
quires — who has so often to use his knowledge ? We 
