n hour for every crystalline form of clay
and flint, and we shall be near the need of shaping the gray flint stone
that is to weigh upon our feet. And we would fain dance a measure or two
before that cumber is laid upon them: there having been hitherto much
piping to which we have not danced. And we must leave time for loving,
if we are to take Marmontel's wise peasant's word for it, "_Il n'y a de
bon que c'a!_" And if there should be fighting to do also? and weeping?
and much burying? truly, we had better make haste.

65. Which means, simply, that we must lose neither strength nor moment.
Hurry is not haste; but economy is, and rightness is. Whatever is
rightly done stays with us, to support another right beyond, or higher
up: whatever is wrongly done, vanishes; and by the blank, betrays what
we would have built above. Wasting no word, no thought, no doing, we
shall have speed enough; but then there is that farther question, what
shall we do?--what we are fittest (worthiest, that is) to do, and what
is best worth doing? Note that word "worthy," both of the man and the
thing, for the two dignities go together. Is _it_ worth the pains? Are
we worth the task? The dignity of a man depends wholly upon this
harmony. If his task is above him, he will be undignified in failure; if
he is above it, he will be undignified in success. His own composure and
nobleness must be according to the composure of his thought to his toil.

66. As I was dreaming over this, my eyes fell by chance on a page of my
favorite thirteenth century psalter, just where two dragons, one with
red legs, and another with green,--one with a blue tail on a purple
ground, and the other with a rosy tail on a golden ground, follow the
verse "_Quis ascendet in montem Domini_," and begin the solemn "_Qui non
accepit in vano animam suam_." Who hath not lift up his soul unto
vanity, we have it; and [Greek: elaben epi mataio], the Greeks (not that
I know what that means accurately): broadly, they all mean, "who has not
received nor given his soul in vain," this is the man who can make
haste, even uphill, the only haste worth making; and it must be up the
right hill, too: not that Corinthian Acropolis, of which, I suppose, the
white specter stood eighteen hundred feet high, in Hades, for Sisyphus
to roll his fantastic stone up--image, himself, forever of the greater
part of our wise mortal work.

67. Now all this time, whatever the reader may think, I have never for