Page:The first and last journeys of Thoreau - lately discovered among his unpublished journals and manuscripts.djvu/122

 heaven with his wires, or to stuff that body with sawdust, which Nature has decreed shall return to dust again?

All the fishes that swim in the ocean can hardly atone for the wrong done by stuffing and varnishing and encasing under glass the relics of one inhabitant of the deep. Go to Italy or Egypt if you would behold these things, where bones are the natural product of the soil which bears tombs and catacombs. Would you live in a dried specimen of a world,—a pickled world? Embalming is a sin against heaven and earth,—against heaven who has recalled the soul, and set free the servile elements; against earth, who is thus robbed of her dust.

I have had my right-perceiving senses so disturbed in these haunts, as for long to mistake a veritable living man, in the attitude of repose, musing, like myself, as the time and place require, for a stuffed specimen. So are men degraded in consequence.

Monday, October 2.

There must be all degrees of life, from a stone—if we can find any starting-point— [74]