Page:The first and last journeys of Thoreau - lately discovered among his unpublished journals and manuscripts.djvu/108

 the slight pride and satisfaction, and even emphatic and exaggerated style, in which the old naturalists speak of the operations of Nature. They are better qualified to appreciate than to discriminate the facts. Modern science is deficient in this poetic perception. The assertions of the ancient naturalists are not without value even when disproved.

"The Greeks," says Goethe, "had a common proverb, λάγος καθεύδωυ, 'a sleeping hare,' for a dissembler or counterfeiter, because the hare sees when she sleeps; for this is an admirable and rare work of Nature, that all the residue of her bodily parts take their rest, but the eye standeth continually sentinel." Facts must be learned directly and personally. The collector of facts must possess a perfect physical organization; the philosopher a perfect intellectual organization. But in the true poet they are so fairly but mysteriously balanced, that we can see the results of both, and generalize even the widest deductions of philosophy.

Seed, stalk, flower,—for as yet the fruit eludes our grasp,—and whether we had best eat it or plant it is uncertain. At any rate, [60]