Page:The first and last journeys of Thoreau - lately discovered among his unpublished journals and manuscripts.djvu/145

 weep, they seem to weep from excess of very strength and not from weakness. It is the perspiration of a monument in the heat of summer; it is as a sacrifice—a libation—of fertile natures. We hardly know that tears have been shed. Only babes and heroes may weep.

Their pleasure and their sorrow are made of the same stuff as are the rain and the snow, the rainbow and the mist.

November 19.

Pastoral poetry belongs to a highly civilized and refined era. It is the pasture as seen from the hall window—the shepherd of the manor. Its sheep are never actually shorn nor die of the rot. The towering, misty imagination of the poet has descended into the plain and become a lowlander, and keeps flocks and herds. Between the hunting of men and boars and the feeding of sheep is a long interval. Really the shepherd's pipe is no wax-compacted reed, but made of pipe-clay, and nothing but smoke issues from it. Nowadays the sheep take care of themselves for the most part. [97]