Page:The first and last journeys of Thoreau - lately discovered among his unpublished journals and manuscripts.djvu/68

 fertile ground we walk upon, but the leaves that flutter over our heads. The newest is but the oldest, made visible to our senses. When we dig up the soil from a thousand feet below the surface, we call it, and the plants which spring from it, new; and when our vision pierces deeper into space, and detects a remoter star, we call that new also. It had shone only to itself, and quite superior to our observation. And now in an instant and distinctly it is shown to these woods as if its rays had travelled hither from Eternity. So are these old truths like serene lakes in the horizon, at length revealed to us, which have so long been reflecting their own sky in their bosom. And thus serene is Antiquity always, like the horizon in which the wind never blows. Silenter and silenter grows the memory as she wanders farther back. When I revolve it again in my mind, gazing into the West at evening, whether these ordinances of the Hindoos are to be passed by as the whims of an Asiatic brain, I seem to see the divine Brahma himself sitting in the angle of a cloud and revealing himself to the senile Menu; and this [20]