WALDEN AND ON THE DUTY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE. Henry David ThoreauЧитать онлайн книгу.
and redeemers had rather
consoled the fears than confirmed the hopes of man. There is nowhere
recorded a simple and irrepressible satisfaction with the gift of life,
any memorable praise of God. All health and success does me good,
however far off and withdrawn it may appear; all disease and failure
helps to make me sad and does me evil, however much sympathy it may
have with me or I with it. If, then, we would indeed restore mankind by
truly Indian, botanic, magnetic, or natural means, let us first be as
simple and well as Nature ourselves, dispel the clouds which hang over
our own brows, and take up a little life into our pores. Do not stay to
be an overseer of the poor, but endeavor to become one of the worthies
of the world.
I read in the Gulistan, or Flower Garden, of Sheik Sadi of Shiraz, that
“They asked a wise man, saying; Of the many celebrated trees which the
Most High God has created lofty and umbrageous, they call none azad, or
free, excepting the cypress, which bears no fruit; what mystery is
there in this? He replied; Each has its appropriate produce, and
appointed season, during the continuance of which it is fresh and
blooming, and during their absence dry and withered; to neither of
which states is the cypress exposed, being always flourishing; and of
this nature are the azads, or religious independents.—Fix not thy heart
on that which is transitory; for the Dijlah, or Tigris, will continue
to flow through Bagdad after the race of caliphs is extinct: if thy
hand has plenty, be liberal as the date tree; but if it affords nothing
to give away, be an azad, or free man, like the cypress.”
COMPLEMENTAL VERSES
The Pretensions of Poverty
“Thou dost presume too much, poor needy wretch,
To claim a station in the firmament
Because thy humble cottage, or thy tub,
Nurses some lazy or pedantic virtue
In the cheap sunshine or by shady springs,
With roots and pot-herbs; where thy right hand,
Tearing those humane passions from the mind,
Upon whose stocks fair blooming virtues flourish,
Degradeth nature, and benumbeth sense,
And, Gorgon-like, turns active men to stone.
We not require the dull society
Of your necessitated temperance,
Or that unnatural stupidity
That knows nor joy nor sorrow; nor your forc’d
Falsely exalted passive fortitude
Above the active. This low abject brood,
That fix their seats in mediocrity,
Become your servile minds; but we advance
Such virtues only as admit excess,
Brave, bounteous acts, regal magnificence,
All-seeing prudence, magnanimity
That knows no bound, and that heroic virtue
For which antiquity hath left no name,
But patterns only, such as Hercules,
Achilles, Theseus. Back to thy loath’d cell;
And when thou seest the new enlightened sphere,
Study to know but what those worthies were.”
T. CAREW
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