http://www.davemckay.co.uk/philosophy/emerson/emerson.php?name=emerson.07.society.07
SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE:
CHAPTER VII. WORKS AND DAYS

Many facts concur to show that we must look deeper for our salvation than to steam,  photo-graphs,  balloons or astronomy.’ These tools have some questionable properties. They are reagents. Machinery is aggressive. The weaver becomes a web, the machinist a machine. If you do not use the tools, they use you. All tools are in one sense edge-tools, and dangerous. A man builds a fine house; and now he has a master, and a task for life: he is to furnish, watch, show it, and keep it in repair, the rest of his days.2 A man has a reputation, and is no longer free, but must respect that. A man makes a picture or a book, and, if it succeeds, ‘t is often the worse for him. I saw a brave man the other day, hitherto as free as the hawk or the fox of the wilderness, constructing his cabinet of drawers for shells, eggs, minerals and mounted birds.
It was easy to see that he was amusing himself with making pretty links for his own limbs.