A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers by Henry David Thoreau (literature books to read TXT) 📕

speeches into the mouths of their heroes. They may feign that Cato’s last words were

The earth, the air, and seas I know, and all
The joys and horrors of their peace and wars;
And now will view the Gods’ state and the stars,

but such are not the thoughts nor the destiny of common men. What is this heaven which they expect, if it is no better than they expect? Are they prepared for a better than they can now imagine? Where is the heaven of him who dies on a stage, in a theatre? Here or nowhere is our heaven.

Although we see celestial bodies move
Above the earth, the earth we till and love.

We can conceive of nothing more fair than something which we have experienced. “The remembrance of youth is a sigh.” We linger in manhood to tell the dreams of our childhood, and they are half forgotten ere we have learned the language. We have need to be earthborn as well as heaven-born, γηγενεῖς, as was said of the Titans of old, or in a better sense than they. There have been heroes for whom this world seemed expressly prepared, as if creation had at last succeeded; whose daily life was the stuff of which our dreams are made, and whose presence enhanced the beauty and ampleness of Nature herself. Where they walked,

Largior hic campos æther et lumine vestit
Purpureo: Solemque suum, sua sidera nôrunt.

“Here a more copious air invests the fields, and clothes with purple light; and they know their own sun and their own stars.” We love to hear some men speak, though we hear not what they say; the very air they breathe is rich and perfumed, and the sound of their voices falls on the ear like the rustling of leaves or the crackling of the fire. They stand many deep. They have the heavens for their abettors, as those who have never stood from under them, and they look at the stars with an answering ray. Their eyes are like glowworms, and their motions graceful and flowing, as if a place were already found for them, like rivers flowing through valleys. The distinctions of morality, of right and wrong, sense and nonsense, are petty, and have lost their significance, beside these pure primeval natures. When I consider the clouds stretched in stupendous masses across the sky, frowning with darkness or glowing with downy light, or gilded with the rays of the setting sun, like the battlements of a city in the heavens, their grandeur appears thrown away on the meanness of my employment; the drapery is altogether too rich for such poor acting. I am hardly worthy to be a suburban dweller outside those walls

Unless above himself he can
Erect himself, how poor a thing is man!

With our music we would fain challenge transiently another and finer sort of intercourse than our daily toil permits. The strains come back to us amended in the echo, as when a friend reads our verse. Why have they so painted the fruits, and freighted them with such fragrance as to satisfy a more than animal appetite?

I asked the schoolman, his advice was free,
But scored me out too intricate a way.

These things imply, perchance, that we live on the verge of another and purer realm, from which these odors and sounds are wafted over to us. The borders of our plot are set with flowers, whose seeds were blown from more Elysian fields adjacent. They are the potherbs of the gods. Some fairer fruits and sweeter fragrances wafted over to us, betray another realm’s vicinity. There, too, does Echo dwell, and there is the abutment of the rainbow’s arch.

A finer race and finer fed
Feast and revel o’er our head,
And we titmen are only able
To catch the fragments from their table.
Theirs is the fragrance of the fruits,
While we consume the pulp and roots.
What are the moments that we stand
Astonished on the Olympian land!

We need pray for no higher heaven than the pure senses can furnish, a purely sensuous life. Our present senses are but the rudiments of what they are destined to become. We are comparatively deaf and dumb and blind, and without smell or taste or feeling. Every generation makes the discovery that its divine vigor has been dissipated, and each sense and faculty misapplied and debauched. The ears were made not for such trivial uses as men are wont to suppose, but to hear celestial sounds. The eyes were not made for such grovelling uses as they are now put to and worn out by, but to behold beauty now invisible. May we not see God? Are we to be put off and amused in this life, as it were with a mere allegory? Is not Nature, rightly read, that of which she is commonly taken to be the symbol merely? When the common man looks into the sky, which he has not so much profaned, he thinks it less gross than the earth, and with reverence speaks of “the Heavens,” but the seer will in the same sense speak of “the Earths,” and his Father who is in them. “Did not he that made that which is within, make that which is without also?” What is it, then, to educate but to develop these divine germs called the senses? for individuals and states to deal magnanimously with the rising generation, leading it not into temptation⁠—not teach the eye to squint, nor attune the ear to profanity. But where is the instructed teacher? Where are the normal schools?

A Hindu sage said, “As a dancer, having exhibited herself to the spectator, desists from the dance, so does Nature desist, having manifested herself to soul. Nothing, in my opinion, is more gentle than Nature; once aware of having been seen, she does not again expose herself to the gaze of soul.”

It is easier to discover another such a new world as Columbus did, than to go within one