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- 6958
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T20:48:05.594Z
- extracted_by
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- start_line
- 6918
- text
- the moulds, begat a corresponding disposition in the moulder, who, by
heedlessly slapping that sad dough, as stuff of little worth, was
thereby taught, in his meditations, to slap, with similar heedlessness,
his own sadder fortunes, as of still less vital consideration. To these
muddy philosophers, men and bricks were equally of clay. “What
signifies who we be—dukes or ditchers?” thought the moulders; “all is
vanity and clay.”
So slap, slap, slap, care-free and negligent, with bitter unconcern,
these dismal desperadoes flapped down the dough. If this recklessness
were vicious of them, be it so; but their vice was like that weed which
but grows on barren ground; enrich the soil, and it disappears.
For thirteen weary weeks, lorded over by the taskmaster, Israel toiled
in his pit. Though this condemned him to a sort of earthy dungeon, or
gravedigger’s hole, while he worked, yet even when liberated to his
meals, naught of a cheery nature greeted him. The yard was encamped,
with all its endless rows of tented sheds, and kilns, and mills, upon a
wild waste moor, belted round by bogs and fens. The blank horizon, like
a rope, coiled round the whole.
Sometimes the air was harsh and bleak; the ridged and mottled sky
looked scourged, or cramping fogs set in from sea, for leagues around,
ferreting out each rheumatic human bone, and racking it; the sciatic
limpers shivered; their aguish rags sponged up the mists. No shelter,
though it hailed. The sheds were for the bricks. Unless, indeed,
according to the phrase, each man was a “brick,” which, in sober
scripture, was the case; brick is no bad name for any son of Adam; Eden
was but a brickyard; what is a mortal but a few luckless shovelfuls of
clay, moulded in a mould, laid out on a sheet to dry, and ere long
quickened into his queer caprices by the sun? Are not men built into
communities just like bricks into a wall? Consider the great wall of
China: ponder the great populace of Pekin. As man serves bricks, so God
him, building him up by billions into edifices of his purposes. Man
attains not to the nobility of a brick, unless taken in the aggregate.
Yet is there a difference in brick, whether quick or dead; which, for
the last, we now shall see.
- title
- Chunk 2