Page:A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.djvu/76

70 Among them a man could make himself a god out of a piece of wood in a few minutes, which would frighten him out of his wits.

I fancy that some indefatigable spinster of the old school, who had the supreme felicity to be born in "days that tried men's souls," hearing this, may say with Nestor, another of the old school, "But you are younger than I. For time was when I conversed with greater men than you. For not at any time have I seen such men nor shall see them, as Perithous, and Dryas, and noiusva Zauv," that is probably Washington, sole "Shepherd of the People." And when Apollo has now six times rolled westward, or seemed to roll, and now for the sixth time shows his face in the east, eyes well nigh glazed, long glassed, which have fluctuated only between lamb's wool and worsted, explore ceaselessly some good sermon book. For six days shalt thou labor and do all thy knitting, but on the seventh, forsooth, thy reading. Happy we who can bask in this warm September sun, which illumines all creatures, as well when they rest as when they toil, not without a feeling of gratitude; whose life is as blameless, how blame-worthy soever it may be, on the Lord's Mona-day as on his Suna-day.

There are various, nay incredible faiths; why should we be alarmed at any of them? What man believes, God believes. Long as I have lived, and many blasphemers as I have heard and seen, I have never yet heard or witnessed any direct and conscious blasphemy or irreverence; but of indirect and habitual enough. Where is the man who is guilty of direct and personal insolence to Him that made him?—Yet there are certain current expressions of blasphemous modes of viewing things,—as, frequently, when we say, " He is doing a good business,"—more