Page:Thoreau - His Home, Friends and Books (1902).djvu/236

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THOREAU'S PHILOSOPHY

religion was of the intellect and the soul rather than of the emotions, except where his poetic sense made appeal. Rejecting narrow, sectarian formulas, satirizing the churches of his day as hospitals for sick souls, he was from first to last a Deist and a Pantheist. As his studies of various religious increased he became, like Emerson and many others of that age, broadly religious, always emphasizing the beauties and morality of the world's religions. Never did he lose faith in one Power, in Jesus, and in immortality. Reference to his Pantheism recalls Thoreau's difference with Lowell which, doubtless, affected the tone of the latter's essay in "My Study Windows." While Lowell was editor of The Atlantic, Thoreau sent to the magazine his papers on "Chesuncook," later a part of "The Maine Woods." In a sentence descriptive of a lofty pine the author said, partly in pantheistic fervor, partly in that humorous hyperbole which was his wont,—"It is as immortal as I am, and perchance will go to as high a heaven, there to tower above me still." Lowell, fearful of the result of such doctrine upon some of his readers, suppressed this portion of the paragraph, without consulting Thoreau. Such a deed was so hateful to the principles of freedom and justice in the author's nature that he recalled the rest of the essays. He