Page:Winter - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/347

Rh these woods, and they had their fancies and beliefs connected with the sea and the forest, which concern us quite as much as the fables of Oriental nations do. It frequently happens that the historian, though he professes more humanity than the trapper, the mountain man, or gold digger, who shoots one as a wild beast, in reality exhibits and practices a similar inhumanity to his, wielding a pen instead of a rifle.—One tells you with more contempt than pity that the Indian has no religion, holding up both hands, and this to all the shallow-brained and bigoted seems to mean something important. But it is a distinction without a difference. Pray how much more religion has the historian? If knows so much more about God than another, if he has made some discovery of truth in this direction, I would thank him to publish it in &quot;Silliman's Journal,&quot; with as few flourishes as possible. It is the spirit of humanity, that which animates both so-called savages and civilized nations, working through a man, and not the man expressing himself, that interests us most. The thought of a so-called savage tribe is generally far more just than that of a single civilized man.

I perceive that we partially die ourselves, through sympathy, at the death of each of our friends or near relatives. Each such experience