Walden

stopping to read the riot act, no firing over the heads of the mob, in
this case. We have constructed a fate, an _Atropos_, that never turns
aside. (Let that be the name of your engine.) Men are advertised that
at a certain hour and minute these bolts will be shot toward particular
points of the compass; yet it interferes with no man’s business, and
the children go to school on the other track. We live the steadier for
it. We are all educated thus to be sons of Tell. The air is full of
invisible bolts. Every path but your own is the path of fate. Keep on
your own track, then.

What recommends commerce to me is its enterprise and bravery. It does
not clasp its hands and pray to Jupiter. I see these men every day go
about their business with more or less courage and content, doing more
even than they suspect, and perchance better employed than they could
have consciously devised. I am less affected by their heroism who stood
up for half an hour in the front line at Buena Vista, than by the
steady and cheerful valor of the men who inhabit the snow-plough for
their winter quarters; who have not merely the three-o’-clock in the
morning courage, which Bonaparte thought was the rarest, but whose