Page:Summer - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/70

60 come out thus by day for fear of fishes, and probably the nocturnal or vespertinal fishes, as eels and pouts, do not touch them. I think I see them all over Walden by day, and if so, it may be because there is not much danger from fishes in that very deep water.

June 7, 1841. We are accustomed to exaggerate the immobility and stagnation of those eras [the early Oriental], as of the waters which leveled the steppes; but those slow revolving &quot;years of the gods&quot; were as rapid to all the needs of virtue as these bustling and hasty seasons. Man stands to revere, he kneels to pray. Methinks history will have to be tried by new tests to show what centuries were rapid and what slow. Corn grows in the night. Will this bustling era detain the future reader longer? Will the earth seem to have conversed more with the heavens during these times? Who is writing better Vedas? How science and art spread and flourished, how trivial conveniences were multiplied, that-which is the gossip of the world is not recorded in them, and if they are left out of our scriptures, too, what will remain?

Since the battle of Bunker Hill we think the world has not been at a stand-still.

June 7, 1851. My practicalness is not to be trusted to the last. To be sure, I go upon my