Page:The first and last journeys of Thoreau - lately discovered among his unpublished journals and manuscripts.djvu/121

 We think the ancients were foolish who worshipped the sun. I would worship it forever if I had grace to do so. Observe how a New England farmer moves in the midst of Nature,—his potato and grain fields; and consider how poets have dreamed that the more religious shepherd lived; and ask which was the wiser, which made the highest use of Nature? As if the Earth were made to yield pumpkins mainly! Did you ever observe that the seasons were ripening another kind of fruit?

Men have a strange taste for death who prefer to go to a museum to behold the cast-off garments of life, rather than handle the life itself. Where is the proper herbarium, the cabinet of shells, the museum of skeletons, but in the meadow where the flowers bloomed, or by the seaside where the tide cast up the fish, or on the hills where the beast laid down his life? Where the skeleton of the traveller reposes in the grass,—there may it profitably be studied. What right has mortal man to parade any skeleton on its legs, when we see the gods have unloosed its sinews? what right to imitate [73]