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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Walden by Henry David Thoreau: prevails so much more widely and fatally?
I do not suppose that I have attained to obscurity, but I should
be proud if no more fatal fault were found with my pages on this
score than was found with the Walden ice. Southern customers
objected to its blue color, which is the evidence of its purity, as
if it were muddy, and preferred the Cambridge ice, which is white,
but tastes of weeds. The purity men love is like the mists which
envelop the earth, and not like the azure ether beyond.
Some are dinning in our ears that we Americans, and moderns
generally, are intellectual dwarfs compared with the ancients, or
even the Elizabethan men. But what is that to the purpose? A
Walden |
