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PinkMonkey.com Digital Library - PinkMonkey.com-Walden by Henry David Thoreau


The life in us is like the water in the river. It may rise this year
higher than man has ever known it, and flood the parched uplands;
even this may be the eventful year, which will drown out all our
muskrats. It was not always dry land where we dwell. I see far inland
the banks which the stream anciently washed, before science began
to record its freshets. Every one has heard the story which has gone
the rounds of New England, of a strong and beautiful bug which
came out of the dry leaf of an old table of apple-tree wood, which
had stood in a farmer’s kitchen for sixty years, first in Connecticut,
and afterward in Massachusetts-from an egg deposited in the living
tree many years earlier still, as appeared by counting the annual
layers beyond it; which was heard gnawing out for several weeks,
hatched perchance by the heat of an urn. Who does not feel his faith
in a resurrection and immortality strengthened by hearing of this?
Who knows what beautiful and winged life, whose egg has been
buried for ages under many concentric layers of woodenness in the
dead dry life of society, deposited at first in the alburnum of the
green and living tree, which has been gradually converted into the
semblance of its well-seasoned tomb-heard perchance gnawing out
now for years by the astonished family of man, as they sat round the
festive board-may unexpectedly come forth from amidst society’s
most trivial and handselled furniture, to enjoy its perfect summer life
at last!

I do not say that John or Jonathan will realize all this; but such is the
character of that morrow which mere lapse of time can never make
to dawn. The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only
that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn.
The sun is but a morning star.

THE END
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PinkMonkey.com Digital Library - PinkMonkey.com-Walden by Henry David Thoreau



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