A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers - Pennsylvania State ...

Jonas Parker, both of Shirley. They had teams with rigging
such as is used to carry barrels, and they were travelling westward.
Richardson was questioned by the Hon. Ephraim
Wood, Esq., and he said that Jonas Parker was his fellowtraveller,
and he further said that a Mr. Longley was his employer,
who promised to bear him out.” We were the men
that were gliding northward, this Sept. 1st, 1839, with still
team, and rigging not the most convenient to carry barrels,
unquestioned by any Squire or Church Deacon and ready to
bear ourselves out if need were. In the latter part of the seventeenth
century, according to the historian of Dunstable,
“Towns were directed to erect ‘a cage’ near the meeting-house,
and in this all offenders against the sanctity of the Sabbath
were confined.” Society has relaxed a little from its strictness,
one would say, but I presume that there is not less religion
than formerly. If the ligature is found to be loosened in
one part, it is only drawn the tighter in another.
You can hardly convince a man of an error in a lifetime,
but must content yourself with the reflection that the progress
of science is slow. If he is not convinced, his grandchildren
may be. The geologists tell us that it took one hundred years
Henry David Thoreau
49
to prove that fossils are organic, and one hundred and fifty
more, to prove that they are not to be referred to the Noachian
deluge. I am not sure but I should betake myself in extremities
to the liberal divinities of Greece, rather than to my
country’s God. Jehovah, though with us he has acquired new
attributes, is more absolute and unapproachable, but hardly
more divine, than Jove. He is not so much of a gentleman,
not so gracious and catholic, he does not exert so intimate
and genial an influence on nature, as many a god of the
Greeks. I should fear the infinite power and inflexible justice
of the almighty mortal, hardly as yet apotheosized, so wholly
masculine, with no Sister Juno, no Apollo, no Venus, nor
Minerva, to intercede for me, thum oi phyle’ousa’ te, k edome’n
e te. The Grecian are youthful and erring and fallen gods,
with the vices of men, but in many important respects essentially
of the divine race. In my Pantheon, Pan still reigns
in his pristine glory, with his ruddy face, his flowing beard,
and his shaggy body, his pipe and his crook, his nymph Echo,
and his chosen daughter Iambe; for the great god Pan is not
dead, as was rumored. No god ever dies. Perhaps of all the
gods of New England and of ancient Greece, I am most con-