Page:Winter - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/124

110 itself in this case private property, and standing in a man's cow-yard. New Hampshire courts have lately been deciding, as if it were for them to decide, whether the top of Mt. Washington belonged to A. or to B., and it being decided in favor of B., as I hear, he went up one winter with the proper officers and took formal possession. But I think that the top of Mt. Washington should not be private property; it should be but an opportunity for modesty and reverence, or if only to suggest that earth has higher uses than we commonly put her to.

Thus we behave like oxen in a flower garden. The true fruit of nature can only be plucked with a delicate hand not bribed by any earthly reward, and a fluttering heart. No hired man can help us to gather this crop. How few ever get beyond feeding, clothing, sheltering, and warming themselves in this world, and begin to treat themselves as intellectual and moral beings. Most men, it seems to me, do not care for Nature, and would sell their share in all her beauty, as long as they may live, for a stated sum. Thank God, men cannot as yet fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth. We are safe on that side for the present. We cut down the few old oaks which witnessed the transfer of the township from the Indian to the white man, and commence our museum with a cartridge-box taken from a British soldier in 1775.