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nydus/Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil DisobediencePublic

Henry David Thoreau recounts his two-year experience living in a self-built house on the shore of Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts. He addresses inquiries regarding his solitary lifestyle, labor, and philosophy while advocating for a sincere and personal approach to writing.

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Table of Contents

Higher Laws

various fruits which succeed it. Man flows at once to God when the channel of purity is open. By turns our purity inspires and our impurity casts us down. He is blessed who is assured that the animal is dying out in him day by day, and the divine being established. Perhaps there is none but has cause for shame on account of the inferior and brutish nature to which he is allied. I fear that we are such gods or demigods only as fauns and satyrs, the divine allied to beasts, the creatures of appetite, and that, to some extent, our very life is our disgrace.—

“How happy’s he who hath due place assigned

To his beasts and disafforested his mind!

*    *    *    *    *

Can use this horse, goat, wolf, and ev’ry beast,

And is not ass himself to all the rest!

Else man not only is the herd of swine,

But he’s those devils too which did incline

Them to a headlong rage, and made them worse.”

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