Page:The first and last journeys of Thoreau - lately discovered among his unpublished journals and manuscripts.djvu/116

 our gross experiences into fine moralities. Sometimes we would fain see events as merely material,—wooden, rigid, dead; but again we are reminded that we actually inform them with better life, by which they live; that they are the slaves and creatures of our conduct. When dull and sensual, I believe they are corn-stalks good for cattle,—neither more nor less. The laws of Nature are science; but, in an enlightened moment, they are morality and modes of divine life. In a medium intellectual state they are æsthetics. What makes us think that time has lapsed is that we have relapsed.

Strictly speaking, there can be no criticism of poetry other than a separating of that which is poetry from that which is not,—a detecting of falsehood. From the remotest antiquity we detect in the literature of all nations, here and there, words of a loftier tone and purport than are required to transact the daily business of life. As Scott says, they float down the sea of time like the fragments of a parted wreck,—sounds which echo up among the stars rather than through the valleys of earth; and yet are heard plainly [68]