Page:The first and last journeys of Thoreau - lately discovered among his unpublished journals and manuscripts.djvu/67

 Why will we be imposed on by antiquity? Is the babe young? When I behold it, it seems more ancient than Nestor or the Sibyl, and wears the wrinkles of Saturn himself. It is more venerable than the oldest man, and does not soon learn to attend to these new things. And do we live but in the present? How broad a line is that?

I sit now on a stump whose rings number centuries of growth. If I look around, I see that the sod is composed of the remains of just such stumps—ancestors to this. The earth is covered with mould. I thrust this stick many æons deep in its surface. With my heel I make a deeper furrow than the elements have ploughed here for a thousand years; and I unearth walnuts and acorns which were buried before the Vedas were written. If I listen, I hear the croaking of frogs, which is older than the slime of Egypt; or the distant drumming of a partridge on a log, as if it were the pulse-beat of the summer air. I raise my fairest and freshest flowers in the old mould. Why! what we would fain call new is not skin deep; the earth is not yet stained by it. It is not the [19]