114 
WALDEN. 
lulls us as a luxury and suffers the nobler faculties to 
sleep the while, but what we have to stand on tip¬ 
toe to read and devote our most alert and wakeful 
hours to. 
I think that having learned our letters we should read 
the best that is in literature, and not be forever repeat¬ 
ing our a b abs, and words of one syllable, in the fourth 
or fifth classes, sitting on the lowest and foremost form 
all our lives. Most men are satisfied if they read or 
hear read, and perchance have been convicted by the 
wisdom of one good book, the Bible, and for the rest of 
their lives vegetate and dissipate their faculties in what 
is called easy reading. There is a work in several 
volumes in our Circulating Library entitled Little Bead¬ 
ing, which I thought referred to a town of that name 
which I had not been to. There are those who, like 
cormorants and ostriches, can digest all sorts of this, 
even after the fullest dinner of meats and vegetables, 
for they suffer nothing to be wasted. If others are the 
machines to provide this provender, they are the ma¬ 
chines to read it. They read the nine thousandth tale 
about Zebulon and Sephronia, and how they loved as 
none had ever loved before, and neither did the course 
of their true love run smooth, — at any rate, how it did 
run and stumble, and get up again and go on! how 
some poor unfortunate got up on to a steeple, who had 
better never have gone up as far as the belfry; and 
then, having needlessly got him up there, the happy nov¬ 
elist rings the bell for all the world to come together and 
hear, O dear! how he did get down again! For my 
part, I think that they had better metamorphose all such 
aspiring heroes of universal noveldom into man weather¬ 
cocks, as they used to put heroes among the constella- 
