Page:Winter - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/242

228 parish rafts in a prose mood. What care I to see galleries full of representations of heathen gods, when I can see actual living ones, by an infinitely superior artist. If you read the Rig Veda, oldest of books, as it were, describing a very primitive people and condition of things, you hear in their prayers of a still older, more primitive and aboriginal race in their midst and roundabout, warring on them, arid seizing their flocks and herds, infesting their pastures. Thus is it in another sense in all communities, and hence the prisons and police. I hear these guns going to-day, and I must confess they are to me a springlike and exhilarating sound, like the cock-crowing, though each one may report the death of a muskrat. This, methinks, or the like of this, with whatever mixture of dross, is the real morning or evening hymn that goes up from these vales to-day, and which the stars echo. This is the best sort of glorifying God and enjoying Him that at all prevails here to-day. As a mother loves to see her children take nourishment and expand, so God loves to see his children thrive on the nutriment He has furnished them. These aboriginal men cannot be repressed, but under some guise or other they survive and reappear continually. Just as simply as the crow picks up the worms which are over the fields, having been washed out by the