Essays, Henry David Thoreau [ebook reader with android os txt] 📗

heathen we do not bind God to his creatures, in this supposed necessity of destiny; and so on the contrary we do not rob those beautiful creatures of their powers and offices⁠ ⁠… And that they wholly direct the reasonless mind, I am resolved: for all those which were created mortal, as birds, beasts, and the like, are left to their natural appetites; over all which, celestial bodies (as instruments and executioners of God’s providence) have absolute dominion⁠ ⁠… And Saint Augustine says, Deus regit inferiora corpora per superiora; God ruleth the bodies below by those above.’⁠ ⁠… It was therefore truly affirmed, Sapiens adiuvabit opus astrorum, quemadmodum agrlcola terrae naturam; ‘A wise man assisteth the work of the stars, as the husbandman helpeth the nature of the soil.’ Lastly, we ought all to know, that God created the stars as he did the rest of the universal; whose influences may be called his reserved and unwritten laws⁠ ⁠… But it was well said of Plotinus, that the stars were significant, but not efficient, giving them yet something less than their due: and therefore as I do not consent with them, who would make those glorious creatures of God virtueless: so I think that we derogate from his eternal and absolute power and providence, to ascribe to them the same dominion over our immortal souls, which they have over all bodily substances, and perishable natures: for the souls of men loving and fearing God, receive influence from that divine light it self, whereof the sun’s clarity, and that of the stars, is by Plato called but a shadow, Lumen est umbra Dei, et Deus est lumen luminis; ‘Light is the shadow of God’s brightness, who is the light of light.’ ”

We are reminded by this of Du Bartas’s poem on the “Probability of the Celestial Orbs being inhabited,” translated by Sylvester:13

I’ll ne’er believe that the arch-Architect
With all these fires the heavenly arches deck’d
Only for show, and with their glistering shields
T’ amaze poor shepherds, watching in the fields;
I’ll ne’er believe that the least flow’r that pranks
Our garden borders, or the common banks,
And the least stone, that in her warming lap
Our kind nurse Earth doth covetously wrap,
Hath some peculiar virtue of its own,
And that the glorious stars of heav’n have none.

Nor is the following brief review and exaltation of the subject of all history unworthy of a place in this History of the World:

“Man, thus compounded and formed by God, was an abstract, or model, or brief story in the universal:⁠ ⁠… for out of the earth and dust was formed the flesh of man, and therefore heavy and lumpish; the bones of his body we may compare to the hard rocks and stones, and therefore strong and durable; of which Ovid:

Inde genus durum sumus experiensque laborum,
Et documenta damus, qua simus origine nati:

From thence our kind hard-hearted is,
Enduring pain and care,
Approving, that our bodies of
A stony nature are.

His blood, which disperseth it self by the branches of veins through all the body, may be resembled to those waters, which are carried by brooks and rivers over all the earth; his breath to the air, his natural heat to the enclosed warmth which the earth hath in it self, which, stirred up by the heat of the sun, assisteth nature in the speedier procreation of those varieties, which the earth bringeth forth; our radical moisture, oil or balsamum (whereon the natural heat feedeth and is maintained) is resembled to the fat and fertility of the earth; the hairs of man’s body, which adorns, or overshadows it, to the grass, which covereth the upper face and skin of the earth; our generative power, to nature, which produceth all things; our determinations, to the light, wandering, and unstable clouds, carried everywhere with uncertain winds; our eyes to the light of the sun and moon; and the beauty of our youth, to the flowers of the spring, which, either in a very short time, or with the sun’s heat, dry up and wither away, or the fierce puffs of wind blow them from the stalks; the thoughts of our mind, to the motion of angels; and our pure understanding (formerly called mens, and that which always looketh upwards) to those intellectual natures, which are always present with God; and lastly, our immortal souls (while they are righteous) are by God himself beautified with the title of his own image and similitude.”

But man is not in all things like nature: “For this tide of man’s life, after it once turneth and declineth, ever runneth with a perpetual ebb and falling stream, but never floweth again, our leaf once fallen, springeth no more; neither doth the sun or the summer adorn us again with the garments of new leaves and flowers.”

There is a flowing rhythm in some of these sentences like the rippling of rivers, hardly to be matched in any prose or verse. The following is his poem on the decay of Oracles and Pantheism:

“The fire which the Chaldeans worshipped for a god, is crept into every man’s chimney, which the lack of fuel starveth, water quencheth, and want of air suffocateth: Jupiter is no more vexed with Juno’s jealousies; death hath persuaded him to chastity, and her to patience; and that time which hath devoured it self, hath also eaten up both the bodies and images of him and his; yea, their stately temples of stone and dureful marble. The houses and sumptuous buildings erected to Baal, can nowhere be found upon the earth; nor any monument of that glorious temple consecrated to Diana. There are none now in Phoenicia, that lament the death of Adonis; nor any in Libya, Creta, Thessalia, or elsewhere, that can ask counsel or help from Jupiter. The great god Pan hath broken his pipes; Apollo’s priests are become speechless; and the trade of riddles in oracles, with the devil’s telling men’s fortunes therein, is taken up by counterfeit