Page:The first and last journeys of Thoreau - lately discovered among his unpublished journals and manuscripts.djvu/113

 of dormant creatures, who have such a superfluity of life, while man is pining; enveloped in thick folds of life impervious to winter. I love to think, as I walk over the snowy plain, of those happy dreamers that lie in the sod. The poet is a sort of dormouse; early in the autumn he goes into winter-quarters till the sun shall fetch the year about. But most men lead a starved existence, like hawks that would fain keep on the wing and trust to pick up a sparrow now and then.

I hate museums; there is nothing so weighs upon the spirits. They are catacombs of Nature. They are preserved death. One green bud of spring, one willow-catkin, one faint trill from some migrating sparrow, might set the world on its legs again. I know not whether I muse most at the bodies stuffed with cotton and sawdust, or those stuffed with bowels and fleshy fibre outside the cases. The life that is in a single green weed is of more worth than all this death. They are very much like the written history of the world, and I read Rollin and Ferguson with the same feeling. [65]