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- The Project Gutenberg EBook of Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil
- Disobedience, by Henry David Thoreau
- This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
- almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
- re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
- with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
- Title: Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience
- Author: Henry David Thoreau
- Posting Date: July 12, 2008 [EBook #205]
- Release Date: January, 1995
- [Last updated: July 29, 2011]
- Language: English
- Character set encoding: UTF-8
- *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WALDEN ***
- Produced by Judith Boss, and David Widger
- WALDEN,
- and
- ON THE DUTY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE
- By Henry David Thoreau
- Contents
- =WALDEN=
- Economy
- Where I Lived, and What I Lived For
- Reading
- Sounds
- Solitude
- Visitors
- The Bean-Field
- The Village
- The Ponds
- Baker Farm
- Higher Laws
- Brute Neighbors
- House-Warming
- Former Inhabitants and Winter Visitors
- Winter Animals
- The Pond in Winter
- Spring
- Conclusion
- =ON THE DUTY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE=
- WALDEN
- Economy
- When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived
- alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had
- built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts,
- and earned my living by the labor of my hands only. I lived there two
- years and two months. At present I am a sojourner in civilized life
- again.
- I should not obtrude my affairs so much on the notice of my readers if
- very particular inquiries had not been made by my townsmen concerning
- my mode of life, which some would call impertinent, though they do not
- appear to me at all impertinent, but, considering the circumstances,
- very natural and pertinent. Some have asked what I got to eat; if I did
- not feel lonesome; if I was not afraid; and the like. Others have been
- curious to learn what portion of my income I devoted to charitable
- purposes; and some, who have large families, how many poor children
- I maintained. I will therefore ask those of my readers who feel no
- particular interest in me to pardon me if I undertake to answer some of
- these questions in this book. In most books, the _I_, or first person, is
- omitted; in this it will be retained; that, in respect to egotism, is
- the main difference. We commonly do not remember that it is, after all,
- always the first person that is speaking. I should not talk so
- much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.
- Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my
- experience. Moreover, I, on my side, require of every writer, first or
- last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what
- he has heard of other men's lives; some such account as he would send to
- his kindred from a distant land; for if he has lived sincerely, it
- must have been in a distant land to me. Perhaps these pages are more
- particularly addressed to poor students. As for the rest of my readers,
- they will accept such portions as apply to them. I trust that none will
- stretch the seams in putting on the coat, for it may do good service to
- him whom it fits.
- I would fain say something, not so much concerning the Chinese and
- Sandwich Islanders as you who read these pages, who are said to live
- in New England; something about your condition, especially your outward
- condition or circumstances in this world, in this town, what it is,
- whether it is necessary that it be as bad as it is, whether it cannot
- be improved as well as not. I have travelled a good deal in Concord;
- and everywhere, in shops, and offices, and fields, the inhabitants have
- appeared to me to be doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways. What
- I have heard of Bramins sitting exposed to four fires and looking in the
- face of the sun; or hanging suspended, with their heads downward, over
- flames; or looking at the heavens over their shoulders "until it becomes
- impossible for them to resume their natural position, while from the
- twist of the neck nothing but liquids can pass into the stomach"; or
- dwelling, chained for life, at the foot of a tree; or measuring with
- their bodies, like caterpillars, the breadth of vast empires; or
- standing on one leg on the tops of pillars--even these forms of
- conscious penance are hardly more incredible and astonishing than
- the scenes which I daily witness. The twelve labors of Hercules were
- trifling in comparison with those which my neighbors have undertaken;
- for they were only twelve, and had an end; but I could never see that
- these men slew or captured any monster or finished any labor. They have
- no friend Iolaus to burn with a hot iron the root of the hydra's head,
- but as soon as one head is crushed, two spring up.
- I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited
- farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more
- easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born in the
- open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with
- clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in. Who made them
- serfs of the soil? Why should they eat their sixty acres, when man is
- condemned to eat only his peck of dirt? Why should they begin digging
- their graves as soon as they are born? They have got to live a man's
- life, pushing all these things before them, and get on as well as they
- can. How many a poor immortal soul have I met well-nigh crushed and
- smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before
- it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean stables never cleansed,
- and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture, and woodlot!
- The portionless, who struggle with no such unnecessary inherited
- encumbrances, find it labor enough to subdue and cultivate a few cubic
- feet of flesh.
- But men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon plowed
- into the soil for compost. By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity,
- they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which
- moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It is
- a fool's life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not
- before. It is said that Deucalion and Pyrrha created men by throwing
- stones over their heads behind them:--
- Inde genus durum sumus, experiensque laborum,
- Et documenta damus qua simus origine nati.
- Or, as Raleigh rhymes it in his sonorous way,--
- "From thence our kind hard-hearted is, enduring pain and care,
- Approving that our bodies of a stony nature are."
- So much for a blind obedience to a blundering oracle, throwing the
- stones over their heads behind them, and not seeing where they fell.
- Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere
- ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and
- superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be
- plucked by them. Their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy and
- tremble too much for that. Actually, the laboring man has not leisure
- for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the
- manliest relations to men; his labor would be depreciated in the market.
- He has no time to be anything but a machine. How can he remember well
- his ignorance--which his growth requires--who has so often to use his
- knowledge? We should feed and clothe him gratuitously sometimes, and
- recruit him with our cordials, before we judge of him. The finest
- qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only
- by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one
- another thus tenderly.
- Some of you, we all know, are poor, find it hard to live, are sometimes,
- as it were, gasping for breath. I have no doubt that some of you who
- read this book are unable to pay for all the dinners which you have
- actually eaten, or for the coats and shoes which are fast wearing or are
- already worn out, and have come to this page to spend borrowed or stolen
- time, robbing your creditors of an hour. It is very evident what mean
- and sneaking lives many of you live, for my sight has been whetted by
- experience; always on the limits, trying to get into business and trying
- to get out of debt, a very ancient slough, called by the Latins _aes
- alienum_, another's brass, for some of their coins were made of brass;
- still living, and dying, and buried by this other's brass; always
- promising to pay, promising to pay, tomorrow, and dying today,
- insolvent; seeking to curry favor, to get custom, by how many modes,
- only not state-prison offenses; lying, flattering, voting, contracting
- yourselves into a nutshell of civility or dilating into an atmosphere of
- thin and vaporous generosity, that you may persuade your neighbor to let
- you make his shoes, or his hat, or his coat, or his carriage, or import
- his groceries for him; making yourselves sick, that you may lay up
- something against a sick day, something to be tucked away in an old
- chest, or in a stocking behind the plastering, or, more safely, in the
- brick bank; no matter where, no matter how much or how little.
- I sometimes wonder that we can be so frivolous, I may almost say, as to
- attend to the gross but somewhat foreign form of servitude called Negro
- Slavery, there are so many keen and subtle masters that enslave both
- North and South. It is hard to have a Southern overseer; it is worse to
- have a Northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver
- of yourself. Talk of a divinity in man! Look at the teamster on the
- highway, wending to market by day or night; does any divinity stir
- within him? His highest duty to fodder and water his horses! What is his
- destiny to him compared with the shipping interests? Does not he drive
- for Squire Make-a-stir? How godlike, how immortal, is he? See how he
- cowers and sneaks, how vaguely all the day he fears, not being immortal
- nor divine, but the slave and prisoner of his own opinion of himself, a
- fame won by his own deeds. Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with
- our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which
- determines, or rather indicates, his fate. Self-emancipation even in the
- West Indian provinces of the fancy and imagination--what Wilberforce
- is there to bring that about? Think, also, of the ladies of the land
- weaving toilet cushions against the last day, not to betray too green
- an interest in their fates! As if you could kill time without injuring
- eternity.
- The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called
- resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you
- go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the
- bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair
- is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of
- mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is
- a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.
- When we consider what, to use the words of the catechism, is the chief
- end of man, and what are the true necessaries and means of life, it
- appears as if men had deliberately chosen the common mode of living
- because they preferred it to any other. Yet they honestly think there is
- no choice left. But alert and healthy natures remember that the sun
- rose clear. It is never too late to give up our prejudices. No way of
- thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof. What
- everybody echoes or in silence passes by as true to-day may turn out to
- be falsehood to-morrow, mere smoke of opinion, which some had trusted
- for a cloud that would sprinkle fertilizing rain on their fields. What
- old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can. Old deeds
- for old people, and new deeds for new. Old people did not know enough
- once, perchance, to fetch fresh fuel to keep the fire a-going; new
- people put a little dry wood under a pot, and are whirled round the
- globe with the speed of birds, in a way to kill old people, as the
- phrase is. Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor
- as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost. One may
- almost doubt if the wisest man has learned anything of absolute value by
- living. Practically, the old have no very important advice to give the
- young, their own experience has been so partial, and their lives have
- been such miserable failures, for private reasons, as they must
- believe; and it may be that they have some faith left which belies that
- experience, and they are only less young than they were. I have lived
- some thirty years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first
- syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors. They have
- told me nothing, and probably cannot tell me anything to the purpose.
- Here is life, an experiment to a great extent untried by me; but it does
- not avail me that they have tried it. If I have any experience which I
- think valuable, I am sure to reflect that this my Mentors said nothing
- about.
- One farmer says to me, "You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it
- furnishes nothing to make bones with"; and so he religiously devotes a
- part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of
- bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with
- vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite
- of every obstacle. Some things are really necessaries of life in some
- circles, the most helpless and diseased, which in others are luxuries
- merely, and in others still are entirely unknown.
- The whole ground of human life seems to some to have been gone over by
- their predecessors, both the heights and the valleys, and all things to
- have been cared for. According to Evelyn, "the wise Solomon prescribed
- ordinances for the very distances of trees; and the Roman prætors have
- decided how often you may go into your neighbor's land to gather the
- acorns which fall on it without trespass, and what share belongs to that
- neighbor." Hippocrates has even left directions how we should cut our
- nails; that is, even with the ends of the fingers, neither shorter nor
- longer. Undoubtedly the very tedium and ennui which presume to have
- exhausted the variety and the joys of life are as old as Adam. But man's
- capacities have never been measured; nor are we to judge of what he can
- do by any precedents, so little has been tried. Whatever have been thy
- failures hitherto, "be not afflicted, my child, for who shall assign to
- thee what thou hast left undone?"
- We might try our lives by a thousand simple tests; as, for instance,
- that the same sun which ripens my beans illumines at once a system of
- earths like ours. If I had remembered this it would have prevented some
- mistakes. This was not the light in which I hoed them. The stars are the
- apexes of what wonderful triangles! What distant and different beings in
- the various mansions of the universe are contemplating the same one at
- the same moment! Nature and human life are as various as our several
- constitutions. Who shall say what prospect life offers to another? Could
- a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other's
- eyes for an instant? We should live in all the ages of the world in an
- hour; ay, in all the worlds of the ages. History, Poetry, Mythology!--I
- know of no reading of another's experience so startling and informing as
- this would be.
- The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul
- to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good
- behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well? You may say
- the wisest thing you can, old man--you who have lived seventy years, not
- without honor of a kind--I hear an irresistible voice which invites me
- away from all that. One generation abandons the enterprises of another
- like stranded vessels.
- I think that we may safely trust a good deal more than we do. We may
- waive just so much care of ourselves as we honestly bestow elsewhere.
- Nature is as well adapted to our weakness as to our strength. The
- incessant anxiety and strain of some is a well-nigh incurable form of
- disease. We are made to exaggerate the importance of what work we do;
- and yet how much is not done by us! or, what if we had been taken sick?
- How vigilant we are! determined not to live by faith if we can avoid it;
- all the day long on the alert, at night we unwillingly say our prayers
- and commit ourselves to uncertainties. So thoroughly and sincerely are
- we compelled to live, reverencing our life, and denying the possibility
- of change. This is the only way, we say; but there are as many ways as
- there can be drawn radii from one centre. All change is a miracle to
- contemplate; but it is a miracle which is taking place every instant.
- Confucius said, "To know that we know what we know, and that we do not
- know what we do not know, that is true knowledge." When one man has
- reduced a fact of the imagination to be a fact to his understanding, I
- foresee that all men at length establish their lives on that basis.
- Let us consider for a moment what most of the trouble and anxiety which
- I have referred to is about, and how much it is necessary that we be
- troubled, or at least careful. It would be some advantage to live
- a primitive and frontier life, though in the midst of an outward
- civilization, if only to learn what are the gross necessaries of life
- and what methods have been taken to obtain them; or even to look over
- the old day-books of the merchants, to see what it was that men most
- commonly bought at the stores, what they stored, that is, what are the
- grossest groceries. For the improvements of ages have had but little
- influence on the essential laws of man's existence; as our skeletons,
- probably, are not to be distinguished from those of our ancestors.
- By the words, _necessary of life_, I mean whatever, of all that man
- obtains by his own exertions, has been from the first, or from long use
- has become, so important to human life that few, if any, whether from
- savageness, or poverty, or philosophy, ever attempt to do without it. To
- many creatures there is in this sense but one necessary of life, Food.
- To the bison of the prairie it is a few inches of palatable grass,
- with water to drink; unless he seeks the Shelter of the forest or the
- mountain's shadow. None of the brute creation requires more than Food
- and Shelter. The necessaries of life for man in this climate may,
- accurately enough, be distributed under the several heads of Food,
- Shelter, Clothing, and Fuel; for not till we have secured these are
- we prepared to entertain the true problems of life with freedom and a
- prospect of success. Man has invented, not only houses, but clothes and
- cooked food; and possibly from the accidental discovery of the warmth of
- fire, and the consequent use of it, at first a luxury, arose the present
- necessity to sit by it. We observe cats and dogs acquiring the same
- second nature. By proper Shelter and Clothing we legitimately retain
- our own internal heat; but with an excess of these, or of Fuel, that
- is, with an external heat greater than our own internal, may not
- cookery properly be said to begin? Darwin, the naturalist, says of the
- inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego, that while his own party, who were well
- clothed and sitting close to a fire, were far from too warm, these naked
- savages, who were farther off, were observed, to his great surprise, "to
- be streaming with perspiration at undergoing such a roasting." So, we
- are told, the New Hollander goes naked with impunity, while the European
- shivers in his clothes. Is it impossible to combine the hardiness of
- these savages with the intellectualness of the civilized man? According
- to Liebig, man's body is a stove, and food the fuel which keeps up the
- internal combustion in the lungs. In cold weather we eat more, in warm
- less. The animal heat is the result of a slow combustion, and disease
- and death take place when this is too rapid; or for want of fuel, or
- from some defect in the draught, the fire goes out. Of course the vital
- heat is not to be confounded with fire; but so much for analogy. It
- appears, therefore, from the above list, that the expression, _animal
- life_, is nearly synonymous with the expression, _animal heat_; for while
- Food may be regarded as the Fuel which keeps up the fire within us--and
- Fuel serves only to prepare that Food or to increase the warmth of our
- bodies by addition from without--Shelter and Clothing also serve only to
- retain the heat thus generated and absorbed.
- The grand necessity, then, for our bodies, is to keep warm, to keep
- the vital heat in us. What pains we accordingly take, not only with
- our Food, and Clothing, and Shelter, but with our beds, which are our
- night-clothes, robbing the nests and breasts of birds to prepare this
- shelter within a shelter, as the mole has its bed of grass and leaves at
- the end of its burrow! The poor man is wont to complain that this is a
- cold world; and to cold, no less physical than social, we refer directly
- a great part of our ails. The summer, in some climates, makes possible
- to man a sort of Elysian life. Fuel, except to cook his Food, is
- then unnecessary; the sun is his fire, and many of the fruits are
- sufficiently cooked by its rays; while Food generally is more various,
- and more easily obtained, and Clothing and Shelter are wholly or half
- unnecessary. At the present day, and in this country, as I find by
- my own experience, a few implements, a knife, an axe, a spade, a
- wheelbarrow, etc., and for the studious, lamplight, stationery, and
- access to a few books, rank next to necessaries, and can all be obtained
- at a trifling cost. Yet some, not wise, go to the other side of the
- globe, to barbarous and unhealthy regions, and devote themselves to
- trade for ten or twenty years, in order that they may live--that is,
- keep comfortably warm--and die in New England at last. The luxuriously
- rich are not simply kept comfortably warm, but unnaturally hot; as I
- implied before, they are cooked, of course _à la mode_.
- Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are
- not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation
- of mankind. With respect to luxuries and comforts, the wisest have
- ever lived a more simple and meagre life than the poor. The ancient
- philosophers, Chinese, Hindoo, Persian, and Greek, were a class than
- which none has been poorer in outward riches, none so rich in inward. We
- know not much about them. It is remarkable that we know so much of them
- as we do. The same is true of the more modern reformers and benefactors
- of their race. None can be an impartial or wise observer of human life
- but from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary poverty.
- Of a life of luxury the fruit is luxury, whether in agriculture, or
- commerce, or literature, or art. There are nowadays professors of
- philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet it is admirable to profess because
- it was once admirable to live. To be a philosopher is not merely to have
- subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as
- to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence,
- magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not
- only theoretically, but practically. The success of great scholars and
- thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly.
- They make shift to live merely by conformity, practically as their
- fathers did, and are in no sense the progenitors of a noble race of men.
- But why do men degenerate ever? What makes families run out? What is the
- nature of the luxury which enervates and destroys nations? Are we sure
- that there is none of it in our own lives? The philosopher is in
- advance of his age even in the outward form of his life. He is not fed,
- sheltered, clothed, warmed, like his contemporaries. How can a man be a
- philosopher and not maintain his vital heat by better methods than other
- men?
- When a man is warmed by the several modes which I have described, what
- does he want next? Surely not more warmth of the same kind, as more and
- richer food, larger and more splendid houses, finer and more abundant
- clothing, more numerous, incessant, and hotter fires, and the like.
- When he has obtained those things which are necessary to life, there is
- another alternative than to obtain the superfluities; and that is, to
- adventure on life now, his vacation from humbler toil having commenced.
- The soil, it appears, is suited to the seed, for it has sent its radicle
- downward, and it may now send its shoot upward also with confidence. Why
- has man rooted himself thus firmly in the earth, but that he may rise in
- the same proportion into the heavens above?--for the nobler plants are
- valued for the fruit they bear at last in the air and light, far from
- the ground, and are not treated like the humbler esculents, which,
- though they may be biennials, are cultivated only till they have
- perfected their root, and often cut down at top for this purpose, so
- that most would not know them in their flowering season.
- I do not mean to prescribe rules to strong and valiant natures, who will
- mind their own affairs whether in heaven or hell, and perchance build
- more magnificently and spend more lavishly than the richest, without
- ever impoverishing themselves, not knowing how they live--if, indeed,
- there are any such, as has been dreamed; nor to those who find their
- encouragement and inspiration in precisely the present condition of
- things, and cherish it with the fondness and enthusiasm of lovers--and,
- to some extent, I reckon myself in this number; I do not speak to those
- who are well employed, in whatever circumstances, and they know whether
- they are well employed or not;--but mainly to the mass of men who are
- discontented, and idly complaining of the hardness of their lot or of
- the times, when they might improve them. There are some who complain
- most energetically and inconsolably of any, because they are, as they
- say, doing their duty. I also have in my mind that seemingly wealthy,
- but most terribly impoverished class of all, who have accumulated dross,
- but know not how to use it, or get rid of it, and thus have forged their
- own golden or silver fetters.
- * * * * *
- If I should attempt to tell how I have desired to spend my life in years
- past, it would probably surprise those of my readers who are somewhat
- acquainted with its actual history; it would certainly astonish those
- who know nothing about it. I will only hint at some of the enterprises
- which I have cherished.
- In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to
- improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the
- meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the
- present moment; to toe that line. You will pardon some obscurities,
- for there are more secrets in my trade than in most men's, and yet not
- voluntarily kept, but inseparable from its very nature. I would gladly
- tell all that I know about it, and never paint "No Admittance" on my
- gate.
- I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle dove, and am still
- on their trail. Many are the travellers I have spoken concerning them,
- describing their tracks and what calls they answered to. I have met one
- or two who had heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even
- seen the dove disappear behind a cloud, and they seemed as anxious to
- recover them as if they had lost them themselves.
- To anticipate, not the sunrise and the dawn merely, but, if possible,
- Nature herself! How many mornings, summer and winter, before yet any
- neighbor was stirring about his business, have I been about mine! No
- doubt, many of my townsmen have met me returning from this enterprise,
- farmers starting for Boston in the twilight, or woodchoppers going
- to their work. It is true, I never assisted the sun materially in his
- rising, but, doubt not, it was of the last importance only to be present
- at it.
- So many autumn, ay, and winter days, spent outside the town, trying to
- hear what was in the wind, to hear and carry it express! I well-nigh
- sunk all my capital in it, and lost my own breath into the bargain,
- running in the face of it. If it had concerned either of the political
- parties, depend upon it, it would have appeared in the Gazette with the
- earliest intelligence. At other times watching from the observatory of
- some cliff or tree, to telegraph any new arrival; or waiting at evening
- on the hill-tops for the sky to fall, that I might catch something,
- though I never caught much, and that, manna-wise, would dissolve again
- in the sun.
- For a long time I was reporter to a journal, of no very wide
- circulation, whose editor has never yet seen fit to print the bulk of my
- contributions, and, as is too common with writers, I got only my labor
- for my pains. However, in this case my pains were their own reward.
- For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snow-storms and
- rain-storms, and did my duty faithfully; surveyor, if not of highways,
- then of forest paths and all across-lot routes, keeping them open, and
- ravines bridged and passable at all seasons, where the public heel had
- testified to their utility.
- I have looked after the wild stock of the town, which give a faithful
- herdsman a good deal of trouble by leaping fences; and I have had an
- eye to the unfrequented nooks and corners of the farm; though I did
- not always know whether Jonas or Solomon worked in a particular
- field to-day; that was none of my business. I have watered the red
- huckleberry, the sand cherry and the nettle-tree, the red pine and
- the black ash, the white grape and the yellow violet, which might have
- withered else in dry seasons.
- In short, I went on thus for a long time (I may say it without
- boasting), faithfully minding my business, till it became more and more
- evident that my townsmen would not after all admit me into the list of
- town officers, nor make my place a sinecure with a moderate allowance.
- My accounts, which I can swear to have kept faithfully, I have, indeed,
- never got audited, still less accepted, still less paid and settled.
- However, I have not set my heart on that.
- Not long since, a strolling Indian went to sell baskets at the house
- of a well-known lawyer in my neighborhood. "Do you wish to buy any
- baskets?" he asked. "No, we do not want any," was the reply. "What!"
- exclaimed the Indian as he went out the gate, "do you mean to starve
- us?" Having seen his industrious white neighbors so well off--that
- the lawyer had only to weave arguments, and, by some magic, wealth and
- standing followed--he had said to himself: I will go into business; I
- will weave baskets; it is a thing which I can do. Thinking that when he
- had made the baskets he would have done his part, and then it would be
- the white man's to buy them. He had not discovered that it was necessary
- for him to make it worth the other's while to buy them, or at least make
- him think that it was so, or to make something else which it would be
- worth his while to buy. I too had woven a kind of basket of a delicate
- texture, but I had not made it worth any one's while to buy them. Yet
- not the less, in my case, did I think it worth my while to weave them,
- and instead of studying how to make it worth men's while to buy my
- baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them.
- The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind. Why
- should we exaggerate any one kind at the expense of the others?
- Finding that my fellow-citizens were not likely to offer me any room in
- the court house, or any curacy or living anywhere else, but I must shift
- for myself, I turned my face more exclusively than ever to the woods,
- where I was better known. I determined to go into business at once, and
- not wait to acquire the usual capital, using such slender means as I had
- already got. My purpose in going to Walden Pond was not to live cheaply
- nor to live dearly there, but to transact some private business with the
- fewest obstacles; to be hindered from accomplishing which for want of a
- little common sense, a little enterprise and business talent, appeared
- not so sad as foolish.
- I have always endeavored to acquire strict business habits; they are
- indispensable to every man. If your trade is with the Celestial Empire,
- then some small counting house on the coast, in some Salem harbor, will
- be fixture enough. You will export such articles as the country affords,
- purely native products, much ice and pine timber and a little granite,
- always in native bottoms. These will be good ventures. To oversee all
- the details yourself in person; to be at once pilot and captain, and
- owner and underwriter; to buy and sell and keep the accounts; to
- read every letter received, and write or read every letter sent; to
- superintend the discharge of imports night and day; to be upon many
- parts of the coast almost at the same time--often the richest freight
- will be discharged upon a Jersey shore;--to be your own telegraph,
- unweariedly sweeping the horizon, speaking all passing vessels bound
- coastwise; to keep up a steady despatch of commodities, for the supply
- of such a distant and exorbitant market; to keep yourself informed of
- the state of the markets, prospects of war and peace everywhere, and
- anticipate the tendencies of trade and civilization--taking advantage
- of the results of all exploring expeditions, using new passages and all
- improvements in navigation;--charts to be studied, the position of reefs
- and new lights and buoys to be ascertained, and ever, and ever, the
- logarithmic tables to be corrected, for by the error of some calculator
- the vessel often splits upon a rock that should have reached a friendly
- pier--there is the untold fate of La Prouse;--universal science to
- be kept pace with, studying the lives of all great discoverers and
- navigators, great adventurers and merchants, from Hanno and the
- Phoenicians down to our day; in fine, account of stock to be taken from
- time to time, to know how you stand. It is a labor to task the faculties
- of a man--such problems of profit and loss, of interest, of tare and
- tret, and gauging of all kinds in it, as demand a universal knowledge.
- I have thought that Walden Pond would be a good place for business,
- not solely on account of the railroad and the ice trade; it offers
- advantages which it may not be good policy to divulge; it is a good port
- and a good foundation. No Neva marshes to be filled; though you must
- everywhere build on piles of your own driving. It is said that a
- flood-tide, with a westerly wind, and ice in the Neva, would sweep St.
- Petersburg from the face of the earth.
- As this business was to be entered into without the usual capital, it
- may not be easy to conjecture where those means, that will still be
- indispensable to every such undertaking, were to be obtained. As for
- Clothing, to come at once to the practical part of the question, perhaps
- we are led oftener by the love of novelty and a regard for the opinions
- of men, in procuring it, than by a true utility. Let him who has work to
- do recollect that the object of clothing is, first, to retain the vital
- heat, and secondly, in this state of society, to cover nakedness, and
- he may judge how much of any necessary or important work may be
- accomplished without adding to his wardrobe. Kings and queens who wear
- a suit but once, though made by some tailor or dressmaker to their
- majesties, cannot know the comfort of wearing a suit that fits. They are
- no better than wooden horses to hang the clean clothes on. Every day our
- garments become more assimilated to ourselves, receiving the impress of
- the wearer's character, until we hesitate to lay them aside without such
- delay and medical appliances and some such solemnity even as our bodies.
- No man ever stood the lower in my estimation for having a patch in his
- clothes; yet I am sure that there is greater anxiety, commonly, to have
- fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched clothes, than to have a
- sound conscience. But even if the rent is not mended, perhaps the worst
- vice betrayed is improvidence. I sometimes try my acquaintances by such
- tests as this--Who could wear a patch, or two extra seams only, over
- the knee? Most behave as if they believed that their prospects for life
- would be ruined if they should do it. It would be easier for them to
- hobble to town with a broken leg than with a broken pantaloon. Often if
- an accident happens to a gentleman's legs, they can be mended; but if a
- similar accident happens to the legs of his pantaloons, there is no help
- for it; for he considers, not what is truly respectable, but what is
- respected. We know but few men, a great many coats and breeches. Dress
- a scarecrow in your last shift, you standing shiftless by, who would not
- soonest salute the scarecrow? Passing a cornfield the other day, close
- by a hat and coat on a stake, I recognized the owner of the farm. He was
- only a little more weather-beaten than when I saw him last. I have
- heard of a dog that barked at every stranger who approached his master's
- premises with clothes on, but was easily quieted by a naked thief. It is
- an interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank
- if they were divested of their clothes. Could you, in such a case,
- tell surely of any company of civilized men which belonged to the most
- respected class? When Madam Pfeiffer, in her adventurous travels round
- the world, from east to west, had got so near home as Asiatic Russia,
- she says that she felt the necessity of wearing other than a travelling
- dress, when she went to meet the authorities, for she "was now in a
- civilized country, where... people are judged of by their clothes." Even
- in our democratic New England towns the accidental possession of wealth,
- and its manifestation in dress and equipage alone, obtain for the
- possessor almost universal respect. But they yield such respect,
- numerous as they are, are so far heathen, and need to have a missionary
- sent to them. Beside, clothes introduced sewing, a kind of work which
- you may call endless; a woman's dress, at least, is never done.
- A man who has at length found something to do will not need to get a new
- suit to do it in; for him the old will do, that has lain dusty in the
- garret for an indeterminate period. Old shoes will serve a hero longer
- than they have served his valet--if a hero ever has a valet--bare feet
- are older than shoes, and he can make them do. Only they who go to
- soirées and legislative balls must have new coats, coats to change as
- often as the man changes in them. But if my jacket and trousers, my hat
- and shoes, are fit to worship God in, they will do; will they not? Who
- ever saw his old clothes--his old coat, actually worn out, resolved into
- its primitive elements, so that it was not a deed of charity to bestow
- it on some poor boy, by him perchance to be bestowed on some poorer
- still, or shall we say richer, who could do with less? I say, beware of
- all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of
- clothes. If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made to
- fit? If you have any enterprise before you, try it in your old clothes.
- All men want, not something to _do with_, but something to _do_, or rather
- something to _be_. Perhaps we should never procure a new suit, however
- ragged or dirty the old, until we have so conducted, so enterprised or
- sailed in some way, that we feel like new men in the old, and that to
- retain it would be like keeping new wine in old bottles. Our moulting
- season, like that of the fowls, must be a crisis in our lives. The loon
- retires to solitary ponds to spend it. Thus also the snake casts its
- slough, and the caterpillar its wormy coat, by an internal industry
- and expansion; for clothes are but our outmost cuticle and mortal
- coil. Otherwise we shall be found sailing under false colors, and be
- inevitably cashiered at last by our own opinion, as well as that of
- mankind.
- We don garment after garment, as if we grew like exogenous plants by
- addition without. Our outside and often thin and fanciful clothes are
- our epidermis, or false skin, which partakes not of our life, and may be
- stripped off here and there without fatal injury; our thicker garments,
- constantly worn, are our cellular integument, or cortex; but our shirts
- are our liber, or true bark, which cannot be removed without girdling
- and so destroying the man. I believe that all races at some seasons wear
- something equivalent to the shirt. It is desirable that a man be clad
- so simply that he can lay his hands on himself in the dark, and that he
- live in all respects so compactly and preparedly that, if an enemy
- take the town, he can, like the old philosopher, walk out the gate
- empty-handed without anxiety. While one thick garment is, for most
- purposes, as good as three thin ones, and cheap clothing can be obtained
- at prices really to suit customers; while a thick coat can be bought for
- five dollars, which will last as many years, thick pantaloons for two
- dollars, cowhide boots for a dollar and a half a pair, a summer hat for
- a quarter of a dollar, and a winter cap for sixty-two and a half cents,
- or a better be made at home at a nominal cost, where is he so poor that,
- clad in such a suit, of _his own earning_, there will not be found wise
- men to do him reverence?
- When I ask for a garment of a particular form, my tailoress tells me
- gravely, "They do not make them so now," not emphasizing the "They" at
- all, as if she quoted an authority as impersonal as the Fates, and I
- find it difficult to get made what I want, simply because she cannot
- believe that I mean what I say, that I am so rash. When I hear this
- oracular sentence, I am for a moment absorbed in thought, emphasizing to
- myself each word separately that I may come at the meaning of it, that I
- may find out by what degree of consanguinity _They_ are related to _me_,
- and what authority they may have in an affair which affects me so
- nearly; and, finally, I am inclined to answer her with equal mystery,
- and without any more emphasis of the "they"--"It is true, they did not
- make them so recently, but they do now." Of what use this measuring of
- me if she does not measure my character, but only the breadth of my
- shoulders, as it were a peg to hang the coat on? We worship not the
- Graces, nor the Parcae, but Fashion. She spins and weaves and cuts with
- full authority. The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveller's cap, and
- all the monkeys in America do the same. I sometimes despair of getting
- anything quite simple and honest done in this world by the help of men.
- They would have to be passed through a powerful press first, to squeeze
- their old notions out of them, so that they would not soon get upon
- their legs again; and then there would be some one in the company with a
- maggot in his head, hatched from an egg deposited there nobody knows
- when, for not even fire kills these things, and you would have lost your
- labor. Nevertheless, we will not forget that some Egyptian wheat was
- handed down to us by a mummy.
- On the whole, I think that it cannot be maintained that dressing has in
- this or any country risen to the dignity of an art. At present men make
- shift to wear what they can get. Like shipwrecked sailors, they put on
- what they can find on the beach, and at a little distance, whether of
- space or time, laugh at each other's masquerade. Every generation laughs
- at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new. We are amused at
- beholding the costume of Henry VIII, or Queen Elizabeth, as much as if
- it was that of the King and Queen of the Cannibal Islands. All costume
- off a man is pitiful or grotesque. It is only the serious eye peering
- from and the sincere life passed within it which restrain laughter and
- consecrate the costume of any people. Let Harlequin be taken with a fit
- of the colic and his trappings will have to serve that mood too. When
- the soldier is hit by a cannonball, rags are as becoming as purple.
- The childish and savage taste of men and women for new patterns keeps
- how many shaking and squinting through kaleidoscopes that they may
- discover the particular figure which this generation requires today. The
- manufacturers have learned that this taste is merely whimsical. Of two
- patterns which differ only by a few threads more or less of a particular
- color, the one will be sold readily, the other lie on the shelf, though
- it frequently happens that after the lapse of a season the latter
- becomes the most fashionable. Comparatively, tattooing is not the
- hideous custom which it is called. It is not barbarous merely because
- the printing is skin-deep and unalterable.
- I cannot believe that our factory system is the best mode by which men
- may get clothing. The condition of the operatives is becoming every day
- more like that of the English; and it cannot be wondered at, since,
- as far as I have heard or observed, the principal object is, not
- that mankind may be well and honestly clad, but, unquestionably, that
- corporations may be enriched. In the long run men hit only what they aim
- at. Therefore, though they should fail immediately, they had better aim
- at something high.
- As for a Shelter, I will not deny that this is now a necessary of
- life, though there are instances of men having done without it for
- long periods in colder countries than this. Samuel Laing says that "the
- Laplander in his skin dress, and in a skin bag which he puts over his
- head and shoulders, will sleep night after night on the snow... in a
- degree of cold which would extinguish the life of one exposed to it in
- any woollen clothing." He had seen them asleep thus. Yet he adds, "They
- are not hardier than other people." But, probably, man did not live long
- on the earth without discovering the convenience which there is in a
- house, the domestic comforts, which phrase may have originally signified
- the satisfactions of the house more than of the family; though these
- must be extremely partial and occasional in those climates where the
- house is associated in our thoughts with winter or the rainy season
- chiefly, and two thirds of the year, except for a parasol, is
- unnecessary. In our climate, in the summer, it was formerly almost
- solely a covering at night. In the Indian gazettes a wigwam was the
- symbol of a day's march, and a row of them cut or painted on the bark of
- a tree signified that so many times they had camped. Man was not made
- so large limbed and robust but that he must seek to narrow his world
- and wall in a space such as fitted him. He was at first bare and out of
- doors; but though this was pleasant enough in serene and warm weather,
- by daylight, the rainy season and the winter, to say nothing of the
- torrid sun, would perhaps have nipped his race in the bud if he had not
- made haste to clothe himself with the shelter of a house. Adam and Eve,
- according to the fable, wore the bower before other clothes. Man wanted
- a home, a place of warmth, or comfort, first of warmth, then the warmth
- of the affections.
- We may imagine a time when, in the infancy of the human race, some
- enterprising mortal crept into a hollow in a rock for shelter. Every
- child begins the world again, to some extent, and loves to stay
- outdoors, even in wet and cold. It plays house, as well as horse, having
- an instinct for it. Who does not remember the interest with which, when
- young, he looked at shelving rocks, or any approach to a cave? It was
- the natural yearning of that portion, any portion of our most primitive
- ancestor which still survived in us. From the cave we have advanced to
- roofs of palm leaves, of bark and boughs, of linen woven and stretched,
- of grass and straw, of boards and shingles, of stones and tiles. At
- last, we know not what it is to live in the open air, and our lives are
- domestic in more senses than we think. From the hearth the field is a
- great distance. It would be well, perhaps, if we were to spend more of
- our days and nights without any obstruction between us and the celestial
- bodies, if the poet did not speak so much from under a roof, or the
- saint dwell there so long. Birds do not sing in caves, nor do doves
- cherish their innocence in dovecots.
- However, if one designs to construct a dwelling-house, it behooves him
- to exercise a little Yankee shrewdness, lest after all he find himself
- in a workhouse, a labyrinth without a clue, a museum, an almshouse, a
- prison, or a splendid mausoleum instead. Consider first how slight a
- shelter is absolutely necessary. I have seen Penobscot Indians, in this
- town, living in tents of thin cotton cloth, while the snow was nearly a
- foot deep around them, and I thought that they would be glad to have
- it deeper to keep out the wind. Formerly, when how to get my living
- honestly, with freedom left for my proper pursuits, was a question
- which vexed me even more than it does now, for unfortunately I am become
- somewhat callous, I used to see a large box by the railroad, six feet
- long by three wide, in which the laborers locked up their tools at
- night; and it suggested to me that every man who was hard pushed might
- get such a one for a dollar, and, having bored a few auger holes in it,
- to admit the air at least, get into it when it rained and at night, and
- hook down the lid, and so have freedom in his love, and in his soul
- be free. This did not appear the worst, nor by any means a despicable
- alternative. You could sit up as late as you pleased, and, whenever you
- got up, go abroad without any landlord or house-lord dogging you for
- rent. Many a man is harassed to death to pay the rent of a larger and
- more luxurious box who would not have frozen to death in such a box as
- this. I am far from jesting. Economy is a subject which admits of being
- treated with levity, but it cannot so be disposed of. A comfortable
- house for a rude and hardy race, that lived mostly out of doors, was
- once made here almost entirely of such materials as Nature furnished
- ready to their hands. Gookin, who was superintendent of the Indians
- subject to the Massachusetts Colony, writing in 1674, says, "The best
- of their houses are covered very neatly, tight and warm, with barks of
- trees, slipped from their bodies at those seasons when the sap is up,
- and made into great flakes, with pressure of weighty timber, when they
- are green.... The meaner sort are covered with mats which they make of
- a kind of bulrush, and are also indifferently tight and warm, but not
- so good as the former.... Some I have seen, sixty or a hundred feet
- long and thirty feet broad.... I have often lodged in their wigwams, and
- found them as warm as the best English houses." He adds that they were
- commonly carpeted and lined within with well-wrought embroidered mats,
- and were furnished with various utensils. The Indians had advanced so
- far as to regulate the effect of the wind by a mat suspended over the
- hole in the roof and moved by a string. Such a lodge was in the first
- instance constructed in a day or two at most, and taken down and put up
- in a few hours; and every family owned one, or its apartment in one.
- In the savage state every family owns a shelter as good as the best, and
- sufficient for its coarser and simpler wants; but I think that I speak
- within bounds when I say that, though the birds of the air have their
- nests, and the foxes their holes, and the savages their wigwams, in
- modern civilized society not more than one half the families own a
- shelter. In the large towns and cities, where civilization especially
- prevails, the number of those who own a shelter is a very small fraction
- of the whole. The rest pay an annual tax for this outside garment of
- all, become indispensable summer and winter, which would buy a village
- of Indian wigwams, but now helps to keep them poor as long as they live.
- I do not mean to insist here on the disadvantage of hiring compared with
- owning, but it is evident that the savage owns his shelter because it
- costs so little, while the civilized man hires his commonly because he
- cannot afford to own it; nor can he, in the long run, any better afford
- to hire. But, answers one, by merely paying this tax, the poor civilized
- man secures an abode which is a palace compared with the savage's. An
- annual rent of from twenty-five to a hundred dollars (these are the
- country rates) entitles him to the benefit of the improvements
- of centuries, spacious apartments, clean paint and paper, Rumford
- fire-place, back plastering, Venetian blinds, copper pump, spring lock,
- a commodious cellar, and many other things. But how happens it that he
- who is said to enjoy these things is so commonly a poor civilized
- man, while the savage, who has them not, is rich as a savage? If it
- is asserted that civilization is a real advance in the condition
- of man--and I think that it is, though only the wise improve their
- advantages--it must be shown that it has produced better dwellings
- without making them more costly; and the cost of a thing is the amount
- of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it,
- immediately or in the long run. An average house in this neighborhood
- costs perhaps eight hundred dollars, and to lay up this sum will take
- from ten to fifteen years of the laborer's life, even if he is not
- encumbered with a family--estimating the pecuniary value of every man's
- labor at one dollar a day, for if some receive more, others receive
- less;--so that he must have spent more than half his life commonly
- before his wigwam will be earned. If we suppose him to pay a rent
- instead, this is but a doubtful choice of evils. Would the savage have
- been wise to exchange his wigwam for a palace on these terms?
- It may be guessed that I reduce almost the whole advantage of holding
- this superfluous property as a fund in store against the future, so
- far as the individual is concerned, mainly to the defraying of
- funeral expenses. But perhaps a man is not required to bury himself.
- Nevertheless this points to an important distinction between the
- civilized man and the savage; and, no doubt, they have designs on us for
- our benefit, in making the life of a civilized people an _institution_, in
- which the life of the individual is to a great extent absorbed, in order
- to preserve and perfect that of the race. But I wish to show at what a
- sacrifice this advantage is at present obtained, and to suggest that we
- may possibly so live as to secure all the advantage without suffering
- any of the disadvantage. What mean ye by saying that the poor ye have
- always with you, or that the fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the
- children's teeth are set on edge?
- "As I live, saith the Lord God, ye shall not have occasion any more to
- use this proverb in Israel.
- "Behold all souls are mine; as the soul of the father, so also the soul
- of the son is mine: the soul that sinneth, it shall die."
- When I consider my neighbors, the farmers of Concord, who are at least
- as well off as the other classes, I find that for the most part they
- have been toiling twenty, thirty, or forty years, that they may become
- the real owners of their farms, which commonly they have inherited with
- encumbrances, or else bought with hired money--and we may regard one
- third of that toil as the cost of their houses--but commonly they have
- not paid for them yet. It is true, the encumbrances sometimes outweigh
- the value of the farm, so that the farm itself becomes one great
- encumbrance, and still a man is found to inherit it, being well
- acquainted with it, as he says. On applying to the assessors, I am
- surprised to learn that they cannot at once name a dozen in the town who
- own their farms free and clear. If you would know the history of these
- homesteads, inquire at the bank where they are mortgaged. The man who
- has actually paid for his farm with labor on it is so rare that every
- neighbor can point to him. I doubt if there are three such men in
- Concord. What has been said of the merchants, that a very large
- majority, even ninety-seven in a hundred, are sure to fail, is equally
- true of the farmers. With regard to the merchants, however, one of them
- says pertinently that a great part of their failures are not genuine
- pecuniary failures, but merely failures to fulfil their engagements,
- because it is inconvenient; that is, it is the moral character that
- breaks down. But this puts an infinitely worse face on the matter, and
- suggests, beside, that probably not even the other three succeed in
- saving their souls, but are perchance bankrupt in a worse sense than
- they who fail honestly. Bankruptcy and repudiation are the springboards
- from which much of our civilization vaults and turns its somersets, but
- the savage stands on the unelastic plank of famine. Yet the Middlesex
- Cattle Show goes off here with _éclat_ annually, as if all the joints of
- the agricultural machine were suent.
- The farmer is endeavoring to solve the problem of a livelihood by a
- formula more complicated than the problem itself. To get his shoestrings
- he speculates in herds of cattle. With consummate skill he has set his
- trap with a hair spring to catch comfort and independence, and then, as
- he turned away, got his own leg into it. This is the reason he is poor;
- and for a similar reason we are all poor in respect to a thousand savage
- comforts, though surrounded by luxuries. As Chapman sings,
- "The false society of men--
- --for earthly greatness
- All heavenly comforts rarefies to air."
- And when the farmer has got his house, he may not be the richer but the
- poorer for it, and it be the house that has got him. As I understand
- it, that was a valid objection urged by Momus against the house which
- Minerva made, that she "had not made it movable, by which means a bad
- neighborhood might be avoided"; and it may still be urged, for our
- houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather
- than housed in them; and the bad neighborhood to be avoided is our own
- scurvy selves. I know one or two families, at least, in this town, who,
- for nearly a generation, have been wishing to sell their houses in
- the outskirts and move into the village, but have not been able to
- accomplish it, and only death will set them free.
- Granted that the majority are able at last either to own or hire the
- modern house with all its improvements. While civilization has been
- improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to
- inhabit them. It has created palaces, but it was not so easy to create
- noblemen and kings. And _if the civilized man's pursuits are no worthier
- than the savage's, if he is employed the greater part of his life in
- obtaining gross necessaries and comforts merely, why should he have a
- better dwelling than the former?_
- But how do the poor minority fare? Perhaps it will be found that just in
- proportion as some have been placed in outward circumstances above the
- savage, others have been degraded below him. The luxury of one class
- is counterbalanced by the indigence of another. On the one side is the
- palace, on the other are the almshouse and "silent poor." The myriads
- who built the pyramids to be the tombs of the Pharaohs were fed on
- garlic, and it may be were not decently buried themselves. The mason who
- finishes the cornice of the palace returns at night perchance to a hut
- not so good as a wigwam. It is a mistake to suppose that, in a country
- where the usual evidences of civilization exist, the condition of a very
- large body of the inhabitants may not be as degraded as that of savages.
- I refer to the degraded poor, not now to the degraded rich. To know this
- I should not need to look farther than to the shanties which everywhere
- border our railroads, that last improvement in civilization; where I see
- in my daily walks human beings living in sties, and all winter with an
- open door, for the sake of light, without any visible, often imaginable,
- wood-pile, and the forms of both old and young are permanently
- contracted by the long habit of shrinking from cold and misery, and the
- development of all their limbs and faculties is checked. It certainly
- is fair to look at that class by whose labor the works which distinguish
- this generation are accomplished. Such too, to a greater or less extent,
- is the condition of the operatives of every denomination in England,
- which is the great workhouse of the world. Or I could refer you to
- Ireland, which is marked as one of the white or enlightened spots on the
- map. Contrast the physical condition of the Irish with that of the North
- American Indian, or the South Sea Islander, or any other savage race
- before it was degraded by contact with the civilized man. Yet I have no
- doubt that that people's rulers are as wise as the average of civilized
- rulers. Their condition only proves what squalidness may consist with
- civilization. I hardly need refer now to the laborers in our Southern
- States who produce the staple exports of this country, and are
- themselves a staple production of the South. But to confine myself to
- those who are said to be in _moderate_ circumstances.
- Most men appear never to have considered what a house is, and are
- actually though needlessly poor all their lives because they think that
- they must have such a one as their neighbors have. As if one were
- to wear any sort of coat which the tailor might cut out for him, or,
- gradually leaving off palm-leaf hat or cap of woodchuck skin, complain
- of hard times because he could not afford to buy him a crown! It is
- possible to invent a house still more convenient and luxurious than we
- have, which yet all would admit that man could not afford to pay for.
- Shall we always study to obtain more of these things, and not sometimes
- to be content with less? Shall the respectable citizen thus gravely
- teach, by precept and example, the necessity of the young man's
- providing a certain number of superfluous glow-shoes, and umbrellas, and
- empty guest chambers for empty guests, before he dies? Why should not
- our furniture be as simple as the Arab's or the Indian's? When I think
- of the benefactors of the race, whom we have apotheosized as messengers
- from heaven, bearers of divine gifts to man, I do not see in my mind any
- retinue at their heels, any carload of fashionable furniture. Or what
- if I were to allow--would it not be a singular allowance?--that our
- furniture should be more complex than the Arab's, in proportion as we
- are morally and intellectually his superiors! At present our houses are
- cluttered and defiled with it, and a good housewife would sweep out
- the greater part into the dust hole, and not leave her morning's work
- undone. Morning work! By the blushes of Aurora and the music of Memnon,
- what should be man's _morning work_ in this world? I had three pieces of
- limestone on my desk, but I was terrified to find that they required to
- be dusted daily, when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still,
- and threw them out the window in disgust. How, then, could I have a
- furnished house? I would rather sit in the open air, for no dust gathers
- on the grass, unless where man has broken ground.
- It is the luxurious and dissipated who set the fashions which the herd
- so diligently follow. The traveller who stops at the best houses, so
- called, soon discovers this, for the publicans presume him to be a
- Sardanapalus, and if he resigned himself to their tender mercies he
- would soon be completely emasculated. I think that in the railroad car
- we are inclined to spend more on luxury than on safety and convenience,
- and it threatens without attaining these to become no better than a
- modern drawing-room, with its divans, and ottomans, and sun-shades,
- and a hundred other oriental things, which we are taking west with us,
- invented for the ladies of the harem and the effeminate natives of the
- Celestial Empire, which Jonathan should be ashamed to know the names
- of. I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself than be
- crowded on a velvet cushion. I would rather ride on earth in an ox
- cart, with a free circulation, than go to heaven in the fancy car of an
- excursion train and breathe a _malaria_ all the way.
- The very simplicity and nakedness of man's life in the primitive ages
- imply this advantage, at least, that they left him still but a sojourner
- in nature. When he was refreshed with food and sleep, he contemplated
- his journey again. He dwelt, as it were, in a tent in this world, and
- was either threading the valleys, or crossing the plains, or climbing
- the mountain-tops. But lo! men have become the tools of their tools. The
- man who independently plucked the fruits when he was hungry is become a
- farmer; and he who stood under a tree for shelter, a housekeeper. We
- now no longer camp as for a night, but have settled down on earth and
- forgotten heaven. We have adopted Christianity merely as an improved
- method of _agri_-culture. We have built for this world a family mansion,
- and for the next a family tomb. The best works of art are the expression
- of man's struggle to free himself from this condition, but the effect
- of our art is merely to make this low state comfortable and that higher
- state to be forgotten. There is actually no place in this village for a
- work of _fine_ art, if any had come down to us, to stand, for our lives,
- our houses and streets, furnish no proper pedestal for it. There is not
- a nail to hang a picture on, nor a shelf to receive the bust of a hero
- or a saint. When I consider how our houses are built and paid for, or
- not paid for, and their internal economy managed and sustained, I wonder
- that the floor does not give way under the visitor while he is admiring
- the gewgaws upon the mantelpiece, and let him through into the cellar,
- to some solid and honest though earthy foundation. I cannot but perceive
- that this so-called rich and refined life is a thing jumped at, and I
- do not get on in the enjoyment of the fine arts which adorn it, my
- attention being wholly occupied with the jump; for I remember that the
- greatest genuine leap, due to human muscles alone, on record, is that of
- certain wandering Arabs, who are said to have cleared twenty-five feet
- on level ground. Without factitious support, man is sure to come to
- earth again beyond that distance. The first question which I am tempted
- to put to the proprietor of such great impropriety is, Who bolsters
- you? Are you one of the ninety-seven who fail, or the three who succeed?
- Answer me these questions, and then perhaps I may look at your bawbles
- and find them ornamental. The cart before the horse is neither beautiful
- nor useful. Before we can adorn our houses with beautiful objects the
- walls must be stripped, and our lives must be stripped, and beautiful
- housekeeping and beautiful living be laid for a foundation: now, a taste
- for the beautiful is most cultivated out of doors, where there is no
- house and no housekeeper.
- Old Johnson, in his "Wonder-Working Providence," speaking of the first
- settlers of this town, with whom he was contemporary, tells us that
- "they burrow themselves in the earth for their first shelter under some
- hillside, and, casting the soil aloft upon timber, they make a smoky
- fire against the earth, at the highest side." They did not "provide them
- houses," says he, "till the earth, by the Lord's blessing, brought forth
- bread to feed them," and the first year's crop was so light that
- "they were forced to cut their bread very thin for a long season." The
- secretary of the Province of New Netherland, writing in Dutch, in 1650,
- for the information of those who wished to take up land there, states
- more particularly that "those in New Netherland, and especially in New
- England, who have no means to build farmhouses at first according to
- their wishes, dig a square pit in the ground, cellar fashion, six or
- seven feet deep, as long and as broad as they think proper, case the
- earth inside with wood all round the wall, and line the wood with the
- bark of trees or something else to prevent the caving in of the earth;
- floor this cellar with plank, and wainscot it overhead for a ceiling,
- raise a roof of spars clear up, and cover the spars with bark or green
- sods, so that they can live dry and warm in these houses with their
- entire families for two, three, and four years, it being understood that
- partitions are run through those cellars which are adapted to the size
- of the family. The wealthy and principal men in New England, in the
- beginning of the colonies, commenced their first dwelling-houses in
- this fashion for two reasons: firstly, in order not to waste time in
- building, and not to want food the next season; secondly, in order not
- to discourage poor laboring people whom they brought over in numbers
- from Fatherland. In the course of three or four years, when the country
- became adapted to agriculture, they built themselves handsome houses,
- spending on them several thousands."
- In this course which our ancestors took there was a show of prudence
- at least, as if their principle were to satisfy the more pressing wants
- first. But are the more pressing wants satisfied now? When I think of
- acquiring for myself one of our luxurious dwellings, I am deterred, for,
- so to speak, the country is not yet adapted to _human_ culture, and we are
- still forced to cut our _spiritual_ bread far thinner than our forefathers
- did their wheaten. Not that all architectural ornament is to be
- neglected even in the rudest periods; but let our houses first be
- lined with beauty, where they come in contact with our lives, like the
- tenement of the shellfish, and not overlaid with it. But, alas! I have
- been inside one or two of them, and know what they are lined with.
- Though we are not so degenerate but that we might possibly live in a
- cave or a wigwam or wear skins today, it certainly is better to accept
- the advantages, though so dearly bought, which the invention and
- industry of mankind offer. In such a neighborhood as this, boards and
- shingles, lime and bricks, are cheaper and more easily obtained than
- suitable caves, or whole logs, or bark in sufficient quantities, or
- even well-tempered clay or flat stones. I speak understandingly on this
- subject, for I have made myself acquainted with it both theoretically
- and practically. With a little more wit we might use these materials so
- as to become richer than the richest now are, and make our civilization
- a blessing. The civilized man is a more experienced and wiser savage.
- But to make haste to my own experiment.
- Near the end of March, 1845, I borrowed an axe and went down to the
- woods by Walden Pond, nearest to where I intended to build my house, and
- began to cut down some tall, arrowy white pines, still in their youth,
- for timber. It is difficult to begin without borrowing, but perhaps it
- is the most generous course thus to permit your fellow-men to have an
- interest in your enterprise. The owner of the axe, as he released his
- hold on it, said that it was the apple of his eye; but I returned it
- sharper than I received it. It was a pleasant hillside where I worked,
- covered with pine woods, through which I looked out on the pond, and a
- small open field in the woods where pines and hickories were springing
- up. The ice in the pond was not yet dissolved, though there were some
- open spaces, and it was all dark-colored and saturated with water. There
- were some slight flurries of snow during the days that I worked there;
- but for the most part when I came out on to the railroad, on my
- way home, its yellow sand heap stretched away gleaming in the hazy
- atmosphere, and the rails shone in the spring sun, and I heard the lark
- and pewee and other birds already come to commence another year with us.
- They were pleasant spring days, in which the winter of man's discontent
- was thawing as well as the earth, and the life that had lain torpid
- began to stretch itself. One day, when my axe had come off and I had cut
- a green hickory for a wedge, driving it with a stone, and had placed the
- whole to soak in a pond-hole in order to swell the wood, I saw a striped
- snake run into the water, and he lay on the bottom, apparently without
- inconvenience, as long as I stayed there, or more than a quarter of
- an hour; perhaps because he had not yet fairly come out of the torpid
- state. It appeared to me that for a like reason men remain in their
- present low and primitive condition; but if they should feel the
- influence of the spring of springs arousing them, they would of
- necessity rise to a higher and more ethereal life. I had previously seen
- the snakes in frosty mornings in my path with portions of their bodies
- still numb and inflexible, waiting for the sun to thaw them. On the 1st
- of April it rained and melted the ice, and in the early part of the day,
- which was very foggy, I heard a stray goose groping about over the pond
- and cackling as if lost, or like the spirit of the fog.
- So I went on for some days cutting and hewing timber, and also studs
- and rafters, all with my narrow axe, not having many communicable or
- scholar-like thoughts, singing to myself,--
- Men say they know many things;
- But lo! they have taken wings--
- The arts and sciences,
- And a thousand appliances;
- The wind that blows
- Is all that any body knows.
- I hewed the main timbers six inches square, most of the studs on two
- sides only, and the rafters and floor timbers on one side, leaving
- the rest of the bark on, so that they were just as straight and much
- stronger than sawed ones. Each stick was carefully mortised or tenoned
- by its stump, for I had borrowed other tools by this time. My days in
- the woods were not very long ones; yet I usually carried my dinner of
- bread and butter, and read the newspaper in which it was wrapped, at
- noon, sitting amid the green pine boughs which I had cut off, and to my
- bread was imparted some of their fragrance, for my hands were covered
- with a thick coat of pitch. Before I had done I was more the friend than
- the foe of the pine tree, though I had cut down some of them, having
- become better acquainted with it. Sometimes a rambler in the wood was
- attracted by the sound of my axe, and we chatted pleasantly over the
- chips which I had made.
- By the middle of April, for I made no haste in my work, but rather made
- the most of it, my house was framed and ready for the raising. I had
- already bought the shanty of James Collins, an Irishman who worked on
- the Fitchburg Railroad, for boards. James Collins' shanty was considered
- an uncommonly fine one. When I called to see it he was not at home. I
- walked about the outside, at first unobserved from within, the window
- was so deep and high. It was of small dimensions, with a peaked cottage
- roof, and not much else to be seen, the dirt being raised five feet all
- around as if it were a compost heap. The roof was the soundest part,
- though a good deal warped and made brittle by the sun. Doorsill there
- was none, but a perennial passage for the hens under the door board.
- Mrs. C. came to the door and asked me to view it from the inside. The
- hens were driven in by my approach. It was dark, and had a dirt floor
- for the most part, dank, clammy, and aguish, only here a board and there
- a board which would not bear removal. She lighted a lamp to show me the
- inside of the roof and the walls, and also that the board floor extended
- under the bed, warning me not to step into the cellar, a sort of dust
- hole two feet deep. In her own words, they were "good boards overhead,
- good boards all around, and a good window"--of two whole squares
- originally, only the cat had passed out that way lately. There was a
- stove, a bed, and a place to sit, an infant in the house where it
- was born, a silk parasol, gilt-framed looking-glass, and a patent new
- coffee-mill nailed to an oak sapling, all told. The bargain was soon
- concluded, for James had in the meanwhile returned. I to pay four
- dollars and twenty-five cents tonight, he to vacate at five tomorrow
- morning, selling to nobody else meanwhile: I to take possession at
- six. It were well, he said, to be there early, and anticipate certain
- indistinct but wholly unjust claims on the score of ground rent and
- fuel. This he assured me was the only encumbrance. At six I passed
- him and his family on the road. One large bundle held their all--bed,
- coffee-mill, looking-glass, hens--all but the cat; she took to the woods
- and became a wild cat, and, as I learned afterward, trod in a trap set
- for woodchucks, and so became a dead cat at last.
- I took down this dwelling the same morning, drawing the nails, and
- removed it to the pond-side by small cartloads, spreading the boards
- on the grass there to bleach and warp back again in the sun. One early
- thrush gave me a note or two as I drove along the woodland path. I
- was informed treacherously by a young Patrick that neighbor Seeley,
- an Irishman, in the intervals of the carting, transferred the still
- tolerable, straight, and drivable nails, staples, and spikes to his
- pocket, and then stood when I came back to pass the time of day, and
- look freshly up, unconcerned, with spring thoughts, at the devastation;
- there being a dearth of work, as he said. He was there to represent
- spectatordom, and help make this seemingly insignificant event one with
- the removal of the gods of Troy.
- I dug my cellar in the side of a hill sloping to the south, where
- a woodchuck had formerly dug his burrow, down through sumach and
- blackberry roots, and the lowest stain of vegetation, six feet square
- by seven deep, to a fine sand where potatoes would not freeze in any
- winter. The sides were left shelving, and not stoned; but the sun having
- never shone on them, the sand still keeps its place. It was but two
- hours' work. I took particular pleasure in this breaking of ground,
- for in almost all latitudes men dig into the earth for an equable
- temperature. Under the most splendid house in the city is still to be
- found the cellar where they store their roots as of old, and long after
- the superstructure has disappeared posterity remark its dent in the
- earth. The house is still but a sort of porch at the entrance of a
- burrow.
- At length, in the beginning of May, with the help of some of my
- acquaintances, rather to improve so good an occasion for neighborliness
- than from any necessity, I set up the frame of my house. No man was ever
- more honored in the character of his raisers than I. They are destined,
- I trust, to assist at the raising of loftier structures one day. I began
- to occupy my house on the 4th of July, as soon as it was boarded and
- roofed, for the boards were carefully feather-edged and lapped, so that
- it was perfectly impervious to rain, but before boarding I laid the
- foundation of a chimney at one end, bringing two cartloads of stones up
- the hill from the pond in my arms. I built the chimney after my hoeing
- in the fall, before a fire became necessary for warmth, doing my cooking
- in the meanwhile out of doors on the ground, early in the morning: which
- mode I still think is in some respects more convenient and agreeable
- than the usual one. When it stormed before my bread was baked, I fixed
- a few boards over the fire, and sat under them to watch my loaf, and
- passed some pleasant hours in that way. In those days, when my hands
- were much employed, I read but little, but the least scraps of paper
- which lay on the ground, my holder, or tablecloth, afforded me as much
- entertainment, in fact answered the same purpose as the Iliad.
- * * * * *
- It would be worth the while to build still more deliberately than I did,
- considering, for instance, what foundation a door, a window, a cellar,
- a garret, have in the nature of man, and perchance never raising any
- superstructure until we found a better reason for it than our temporal
- necessities even. There is some of the same fitness in a man's building
- his own house that there is in a bird's building its own nest. Who
- knows but if men constructed their dwellings with their own hands, and
- provided food for themselves and families simply and honestly enough,
- the poetic faculty would be universally developed, as birds universally
- sing when they are so engaged? But alas! we do like cowbirds and
- cuckoos, which lay their eggs in nests which other birds have built, and
- cheer no traveller with their chattering and unmusical notes. Shall we
- forever resign the pleasure of construction to the carpenter? What does
- architecture amount to in the experience of the mass of men? I never
- in all my walks came across a man engaged in so simple and natural an
- occupation as building his house. We belong to the community. It is
- not the tailor alone who is the ninth part of a man; it is as much the
- preacher, and the merchant, and the farmer. Where is this division of
- labor to end? and what object does it finally serve? No doubt another
- _may_ also think for me; but it is not therefore desirable that he should
- do so to the exclusion of my thinking for myself.
- True, there are architects so called in this country, and I have
- heard of one at least possessed with the idea of making architectural
- ornaments have a core of truth, a necessity, and hence a beauty, as if
- it were a revelation to him. All very well perhaps from his point
- of view, but only a little better than the common dilettantism. A
- sentimental reformer in architecture, he began at the cornice, not
- at the foundation. It was only how to put a core of truth within the
- ornaments, that every sugarplum, in fact, might have an almond or
- caraway seed in it--though I hold that almonds are most wholesome
- without the sugar--and not how the inhabitant, the indweller, might
- build truly within and without, and let the ornaments take care of
- themselves. What reasonable man ever supposed that ornaments were
- something outward and in the skin merely--that the tortoise got his
- spotted shell, or the shell-fish its mother-o'-pearl tints, by such a
- contract as the inhabitants of Broadway their Trinity Church? But a man
- has no more to do with the style of architecture of his house than a
- tortoise with that of its shell: nor need the soldier be so idle as to
- try to paint the precise color of his virtue on his standard. The enemy
- will find it out. He may turn pale when the trial comes. This man seemed
- to me to lean over the cornice, and timidly whisper his half truth
- to the rude occupants who really knew it better than he. What of
- architectural beauty I now see, I know has gradually grown from within
- outward, out of the necessities and character of the indweller, who is
- the only builder--out of some unconscious truthfulness, and nobleness,
- without ever a thought for the appearance and whatever additional beauty
- of this kind is destined to be produced will be preceded by a like
- unconscious beauty of life. The most interesting dwellings in this
- country, as the painter knows, are the most unpretending, humble
- log huts and cottages of the poor commonly; it is the life of the
- inhabitants whose shells they are, and not any peculiarity in their
- surfaces merely, which makes them picturesque; and equally interesting
- will be the citizen's suburban box, when his life shall be as simple and
- as agreeable to the imagination, and there is as little straining after
- effect in the style of his dwelling. A great proportion of architectural
- ornaments are literally hollow, and a September gale would strip them
- off, like borrowed plumes, without injury to the substantials. They can
- do without architecture who have no olives nor wines in the cellar. What
- if an equal ado were made about the ornaments of style in literature,
- and the architects of our bibles spent as much time about their cornices
- as the architects of our churches do? So are made the _belles-lettres_ and
- the _beaux-arts_ and their professors. Much it concerns a man, forsooth,
- how a few sticks are slanted over him or under him, and what colors
- are daubed upon his box. It would signify somewhat, if, in any earnest
- sense, he slanted them and daubed it; but the spirit having departed out
- of the tenant, it is of a piece with constructing his own coffin--the
- architecture of the grave--and "carpenter" is but another name for
- "coffin-maker." One man says, in his despair or indifference to life,
- take up a handful of the earth at your feet, and paint your house that
- color. Is he thinking of his last and narrow house? Toss up a copper for
- it as well. What an abundance of leisure he must have! Why do you take
- up a handful of dirt? Better paint your house your own complexion; let
- it turn pale or blush for you. An enterprise to improve the style of
- cottage architecture! When you have got my ornaments ready, I will wear
- them.
- Before winter I built a chimney, and shingled the sides of my house,
- which were already impervious to rain, with imperfect and sappy shingles
- made of the first slice of the log, whose edges I was obliged to
- straighten with a plane.
- I have thus a tight shingled and plastered house, ten feet wide by
- fifteen long, and eight-feet posts, with a garret and a closet, a large
- window on each side, two trap doors, one door at the end, and a brick
- fireplace opposite. The exact cost of my house, paying the usual price
- for such materials as I used, but not counting the work, all of which
- was done by myself, was as follows; and I give the details because very
- few are able to tell exactly what their houses cost, and fewer still, if
- any, the separate cost of the various materials which compose them:--
- Boards.......................... $ 8.03-1/2, mostly shanty boards.
- Refuse shingles for roof sides... 4.00
- Laths............................ 1.25
- Two second-hand windows
- with glass.................... 2.43
- One thousand old brick........... 4.00
- Two casks of lime................ 2.40 That was high.
- Hair............................. 0.31 More than I needed.
- Mantle-tree iron................. 0.15
- Nails............................ 3.90
- Hinges and screws................ 0.14
- Latch............................ 0.10
- Chalk............................ 0.01
- Transportation................... 1.40 I carried a good part
- -------- on my back.
- In all...................... $28.12-1/2
- These are all the materials, excepting the timber, stones, and sand,
- which I claimed by squatter's right. I have also a small woodshed
- adjoining, made chiefly of the stuff which was left after building the
- house.
- I intend to build me a house which will surpass any on the main street
- in Concord in grandeur and luxury, as soon as it pleases me as much and
- will cost me no more than my present one.
- I thus found that the student who wishes for a shelter can obtain one
- for a lifetime at an expense not greater than the rent which he now pays
- annually. If I seem to boast more than is becoming, my excuse is that
- I brag for humanity rather than for myself; and my shortcomings and
- inconsistencies do not affect the truth of my statement. Notwithstanding
- much cant and hypocrisy--chaff which I find it difficult to separate
- from my wheat, but for which I am as sorry as any man--I will breathe
- freely and stretch myself in this respect, it is such a relief to both
- the moral and physical system; and I am resolved that I will not through
- humility become the devil's attorney. I will endeavor to speak a good
- word for the truth. At Cambridge College the mere rent of a student's
- room, which is only a little larger than my own, is thirty dollars each
- year, though the corporation had the advantage of building thirty-two
- side by side and under one roof, and the occupant suffers the
- inconvenience of many and noisy neighbors, and perhaps a residence in
- the fourth story. I cannot but think that if we had more true wisdom
- in these respects, not only less education would be needed, because,
- forsooth, more would already have been acquired, but the pecuniary
- expense of getting an education would in a great measure vanish. Those
- conveniences which the student requires at Cambridge or elsewhere cost
- him or somebody else ten times as great a sacrifice of life as they
- would with proper management on both sides. Those things for which
- the most money is demanded are never the things which the student most
- wants. Tuition, for instance, is an important item in the term bill,
- while for the far more valuable education which he gets by associating
- with the most cultivated of his contemporaries no charge is made. The
- mode of founding a college is, commonly, to get up a subscription of
- dollars and cents, and then, following blindly the principles of a
- division of labor to its extreme--a principle which should never be
- followed but with circumspection--to call in a contractor who makes this
- a subject of speculation, and he employs Irishmen or other operatives
- actually to lay the foundations, while the students that are to be
- are said to be fitting themselves for it; and for these oversights
- successive generations have to pay. I think that it would be better _than
- this_, for the students, or those who desire to be benefited by it, even
- to lay the foundation themselves. The student who secures his coveted
- leisure and retirement by systematically shirking any labor necessary to
- man obtains but an ignoble and unprofitable leisure, defrauding himself
- of the experience which alone can make leisure fruitful. "But," says
- one, "you do not mean that the students should go to work with their
- hands instead of their heads?" I do not mean that exactly, but I mean
- something which he might think a good deal like that; I mean that they
- should not _play_ life, or _study_ it merely, while the community supports
- them at this expensive game, but earnestly live it from beginning to
- end. How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the
- experiment of living? Methinks this would exercise their minds as much
- as mathematics. If I wished a boy to know something about the arts and
- sciences, for instance, I would not pursue the common course, which
- is merely to send him into the neighborhood of some professor, where
- anything is professed and practised but the art of life;--to survey the
- world through a telescope or a microscope, and never with his natural
- eye; to study chemistry, and not learn how his bread is made, or
- mechanics, and not learn how it is earned; to discover new satellites to
- Neptune, and not detect the motes in his eyes, or to what vagabond he
- is a satellite himself; or to be devoured by the monsters that swarm all
- around him, while contemplating the monsters in a drop of vinegar. Which
- would have advanced the most at the end of a month--the boy who had made
- his own jackknife from the ore which he had dug and smelted, reading
- as much as would be necessary for this--or the boy who had attended
- the lectures on metallurgy at the Institute in the meanwhile, and had
- received a Rodgers' penknife from his father? Which would be most likely
- to cut his fingers?... To my astonishment I was informed on leaving
- college that I had studied navigation!--why, if I had taken one turn
- down the harbor I should have known more about it. Even the poor student
- studies and is taught only _political_ economy, while that economy
- of living which is synonymous with philosophy is not even sincerely
- professed in our colleges. The consequence is, that while he is reading
- Adam Smith, Ricardo, and Say, he runs his father in debt irretrievably.
- As with our colleges, so with a hundred "modern improvements"; there
- is an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance. The
- devil goes on exacting compound interest to the last for his early share
- and numerous succeeding investments in them. Our inventions are wont to
- be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They
- are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already
- but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York.
- We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine
- to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to
- communicate. Either is in such a predicament as the man who was
- earnest to be introduced to a distinguished deaf woman, but when he was
- presented, and one end of her ear trumpet was put into his hand, had
- nothing to say. As if the main object were to talk fast and not to talk
- sensibly. We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old
- World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first news that
- will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the
- Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough. After all, the man whose horse
- trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most important messages;
- he is not an evangelist, nor does he come round eating locusts and wild
- honey. I doubt if Flying Childers ever carried a peck of corn to mill.
- One says to me, "I wonder that you do not lay up money; you love to
- travel; you might take the cars and go to Fitchburg today and see the
- country." But I am wiser than that. I have learned that the swiftest
- traveller is he that goes afoot. I say to my friend, Suppose we try
- who will get there first. The distance is thirty miles; the fare ninety
- cents. That is almost a day's wages. I remember when wages were sixty
- cents a day for laborers on this very road. Well, I start now on foot,
- and get there before night; I have travelled at that rate by the week
- together. You will in the meanwhile have earned your fare, and arrive
- there some time tomorrow, or possibly this evening, if you are lucky
- enough to get a job in season. Instead of going to Fitchburg, you will
- be working here the greater part of the day. And so, if the railroad
- reached round the world, I think that I should keep ahead of you; and
- as for seeing the country and getting experience of that kind, I should
- have to cut your acquaintance altogether.
- Such is the universal law, which no man can ever outwit, and with regard
- to the railroad even we may say it is as broad as it is long. To make
- a railroad round the world available to all mankind is equivalent to
- grading the whole surface of the planet. Men have an indistinct notion
- that if they keep up this activity of joint stocks and spades long
- enough all will at length ride somewhere, in next to no time, and for
- nothing; but though a crowd rushes to the depot, and the conductor
- shouts "All aboard!" when the smoke is blown away and the vapor
- condensed, it will be perceived that a few are riding, but the rest are
- run over--and it will be called, and will be, "A melancholy accident."
- No doubt they can ride at last who shall have earned their fare, that
- is, if they survive so long, but they will probably have lost their
- elasticity and desire to travel by that time. This spending of the
- best part of one's life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable
- liberty during the least valuable part of it reminds me of the
- Englishman who went to India to make a fortune first, in order that he
- might return to England and live the life of a poet. He should have gone
- up garret at once. "What!" exclaim a million Irishmen starting up from
- all the shanties in the land, "is not this railroad which we have built
- a good thing?" Yes, I answer, comparatively good, that is, you might
- have done worse; but I wish, as you are brothers of mine, that you could
- have spent your time better than digging in this dirt.
- * * * * *
- Before I finished my house, wishing to earn ten or twelve dollars by
- some honest and agreeable method, in order to meet my unusual expenses,
- I planted about two acres and a half of light and sandy soil near it
- chiefly with beans, but also a small part with potatoes, corn, peas, and
- turnips. The whole lot contains eleven acres, mostly growing up to pines
- and hickories, and was sold the preceding season for eight dollars and
- eight cents an acre. One farmer said that it was "good for nothing but
- to raise cheeping squirrels on." I put no manure whatever on this
- land, not being the owner, but merely a squatter, and not expecting to
- cultivate so much again, and I did not quite hoe it all once. I got out
- several cords of stumps in plowing, which supplied me with fuel for
- a long time, and left small circles of virgin mould, easily
- distinguishable through the summer by the greater luxuriance of the
- beans there. The dead and for the most part unmerchantable wood behind
- my house, and the driftwood from the pond, have supplied the remainder
- of my fuel. I was obliged to hire a team and a man for the plowing,
- though I held the plow myself. My farm outgoes for the first season
- were, for implements, seed, work, etc., $14.72-1/2. The seed corn was given
- me. This never costs anything to speak of, unless you plant more than
- enough. I got twelve bushels of beans, and eighteen bushels of potatoes,
- beside some peas and sweet corn. The yellow corn and turnips were too
- late to come to anything. My whole income from the farm was
- $ 23.44
- Deducting the outgoes............ 14.72-1/2
- --------
- There are left.................. $ 8.71-1/2
- beside produce consumed and on hand at the time this estimate was made
- of the value of $4.50--the amount on hand much more than balancing a
- little grass which I did not raise. All things considered, that is,
- considering the importance of a man's soul and of today, notwithstanding
- the short time occupied by my experiment, nay, partly even because of
- its transient character, I believe that that was doing better than any
- farmer in Concord did that year.
- The next year I did better still, for I spaded up all the land which I
- required, about a third of an acre, and I learned from the experience
- of both years, not being in the least awed by many celebrated works on
- husbandry, Arthur Young among the rest, that if one would live simply
- and eat only the crop which he raised, and raise no more than he ate,
- and not exchange it for an insufficient quantity of more luxurious and
- expensive things, he would need to cultivate only a few rods of ground,
- and that it would be cheaper to spade up that than to use oxen to plow
- it, and to select a fresh spot from time to time than to manure the old,
- and he could do all his necessary farm work as it were with his left
- hand at odd hours in the summer; and thus he would not be tied to an ox,
- or horse, or cow, or pig, as at present. I desire to speak impartially
- on this point, and as one not interested in the success or failure of
- the present economical and social arrangements. I was more independent
- than any farmer in Concord, for I was not anchored to a house or farm,
- but could follow the bent of my genius, which is a very crooked one,
- every moment. Beside being better off than they already, if my house had
- been burned or my crops had failed, I should have been nearly as well
- off as before.
- I am wont to think that men are not so much the keepers of herds as
- herds are the keepers of men, the former are so much the freer. Men and
- oxen exchange work; but if we consider necessary work only, the oxen
- will be seen to have greatly the advantage, their farm is so much the
- larger. Man does some of his part of the exchange work in his six weeks
- of haying, and it is no boy's play. Certainly no nation that lived
- simply in all respects, that is, no nation of philosophers, would commit
- so great a blunder as to use the labor of animals. True, there never was
- and is not likely soon to be a nation of philosophers, nor am I certain
- it is desirable that there should be. However, _I_ should never have
- broken a horse or bull and taken him to board for any work he might do
- for me, for fear I should become a horseman or a herdsman merely; and if
- society seems to be the gainer by so doing, are we certain that what is
- one man's gain is not another's loss, and that the stable-boy has equal
- cause with his master to be satisfied? Granted that some public works
- would not have been constructed without this aid, and let man share the
- glory of such with the ox and horse; does it follow that he could not
- have accomplished works yet more worthy of himself in that case? When
- men begin to do, not merely unnecessary or artistic, but luxurious and
- idle work, with their assistance, it is inevitable that a few do all the
- exchange work with the oxen, or, in other words, become the slaves of
- the strongest. Man thus not only works for the animal within him, but,
- for a symbol of this, he works for the animal without him. Though we
- have many substantial houses of brick or stone, the prosperity of the
- farmer is still measured by the degree to which the barn overshadows the
- house. This town is said to have the largest houses for oxen, cows, and
- horses hereabouts, and it is not behindhand in its public buildings; but
- there are very few halls for free worship or free speech in this county.
- It should not be by their architecture, but why not even by their power
- of abstract thought, that nations should seek to commemorate themselves?
- How much more admirable the Bhagvat-Geeta than all the ruins of the
- East! Towers and temples are the luxury of princes. A simple and
- independent mind does not toil at the bidding of any prince. Genius is
- not a retainer to any emperor, nor is its material silver, or gold, or
- marble, except to a trifling extent. To what end, pray, is so much stone
- hammered? In Arcadia, when I was there, I did not see any hammering
- stone. Nations are possessed with an insane ambition to perpetuate the
- memory of themselves by the amount of hammered stone they leave. What if
- equal pains were taken to smooth and polish their manners? One piece of
- good sense would be more memorable than a monument as high as the moon.
- I love better to see stones in place. The grandeur of Thebes was a
- vulgar grandeur. More sensible is a rod of stone wall that bounds an
- honest man's field than a hundred-gated Thebes that has wandered farther
- from the true end of life. The religion and civilization which are
- barbaric and heathenish build splendid temples; but what you might call
- Christianity does not. Most of the stone a nation hammers goes toward
- its tomb only. It buries itself alive. As for the Pyramids, there is
- nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could
- be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for
- some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to
- have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs. I might
- possibly invent some excuse for them and him, but I have no time for it.
- As for the religion and love of art of the builders, it is much the same
- all the world over, whether the building be an Egyptian temple or the
- United States Bank. It costs more than it comes to. The mainspring is
- vanity, assisted by the love of garlic and bread and butter. Mr. Balcom,
- a promising young architect, designs it on the back of his Vitruvius,
- with hard pencil and ruler, and the job is let out to Dobson & Sons,
- stonecutters. When the thirty centuries begin to look down on it,
- mankind begin to look up at it. As for your high towers and monuments,
- there was a crazy fellow once in this town who undertook to dig through
- to China, and he got so far that, as he said, he heard the Chinese pots
- and kettles rattle; but I think that I shall not go out of my way to
- admire the hole which he made. Many are concerned about the monuments
- of the West and the East--to know who built them. For my part, I should
- like to know who in those days did not build them--who were above such
- trifling. But to proceed with my statistics.
- By surveying, carpentry, and day-labor of various other kinds in the
- village in the meanwhile, for I have as many trades as fingers, I had
- earned $13.34. The expense of food for eight months, namely, from July
- 4th to March 1st, the time when these estimates were made, though I
- lived there more than two years--not counting potatoes, a little green
- corn, and some peas, which I had raised, nor considering the value of
- what was on hand at the last date--was
- Rice.................... $ 1.73-1/2
- Molasses................. 1.73 Cheapest form of the
- saccharine.
- Rye meal................. 1.04-3/4
- Indian meal.............. 0.99-3/4 Cheaper than rye.
- Pork..................... 0.22
- All experiments which failed:
- Flour.................... 0.88 Costs more than Indian meal,
- both money and trouble.
- Sugar.................... 0.80
- Lard..................... 0.65
- Apples................... 0.25
- Dried apple.............. 0.22
- Sweet potatoes........... 0.10
- One pumpkin.............. 0.06
- One watermelon........... 0.02
- Salt..................... 0.03
- Yes, I did eat $8.74, all told; but I should not thus unblushingly
- publish my guilt, if I did not know that most of my readers were equally
- guilty with myself, and that their deeds would look no better in print.
- The next year I sometimes caught a mess of fish for my dinner, and
- once I went so far as to slaughter a woodchuck which ravaged my
- bean-field--effect his transmigration, as a Tartar would say--and devour
- him, partly for experiment's sake; but though it afforded me a momentary
- enjoyment, notwithstanding a musky flavor, I saw that the longest use
- would not make that a good practice, however it might seem to have your
- woodchucks ready dressed by the village butcher.
- Clothing and some incidental expenses within the same dates, though
- little can be inferred from this item, amounted to
- $8.40-3/4
- Oil and some household utensils........ 2.00
- So that all the pecuniary outgoes, excepting for washing and mending,
- which for the most part were done out of the house, and their bills have
- not yet been received--and these are all and more than all the ways by
- which money necessarily goes out in this part of the world--were
- House................................. $ 28.12-1/2
- Farm one year........................... 14.72-1/2
- Food eight months....................... 8.74
- Clothing, etc., eight months............ 8.40-3/4
- Oil, etc., eight months................. 2.00
- ------------
- In all............................ $ 61.99-3/4
- I address myself now to those of my readers who have a living to get.
- And to meet this I have for farm produce sold
- $23.44
- Earned by day-labor.................... 13.34
- --------
- In all............................. $36.78,
- which subtracted from the sum of the outgoes leaves a balance of $25.21-3/4
- on the one side--this being very nearly the means with which I
- started, and the measure of expenses to be incurred--and on the
- other, beside the leisure and independence and health thus secured, a
- comfortable house for me as long as I choose to occupy it.
- These statistics, however accidental and therefore uninstructive they
- may appear, as they have a certain completeness, have a certain value
- also. Nothing was given me of which I have not rendered some account.
- It appears from the above estimate, that my food alone cost me in money
- about twenty-seven cents a week. It was, for nearly two years after
- this, rye and Indian meal without yeast, potatoes, rice, a very little
- salt pork, molasses, and salt; and my drink, water. It was fit that I
- should live on rice, mainly, who love so well the philosophy of India.
- To meet the objections of some inveterate cavillers, I may as well
- state, that if I dined out occasionally, as I always had done, and I
- trust shall have opportunities to do again, it was frequently to the
- detriment of my domestic arrangements. But the dining out, being, as
- I have stated, a constant element, does not in the least affect a
- comparative statement like this.
- I learned from my two years' experience that it would cost incredibly
- little trouble to obtain one's necessary food, even in this latitude;
- that a man may use as simple a diet as the animals, and yet retain
- health and strength. I have made a satisfactory dinner, satisfactory
- on several accounts, simply off a dish of purslane (_Portulaca oleracea_)
- which I gathered in my cornfield, boiled and salted. I give the Latin on
- account of the savoriness of the trivial name. And pray what more can
- a reasonable man desire, in peaceful times, in ordinary noons, than a
- sufficient number of ears of green sweet corn boiled, with the addition
- of salt? Even the little variety which I used was a yielding to the
- demands of appetite, and not of health. Yet men have come to such a pass
- that they frequently starve, not for want of necessaries, but for want
- of luxuries; and I know a good woman who thinks that her son lost his
- life because he took to drinking water only.
- The reader will perceive that I am treating the subject rather from an
- economic than a dietetic point of view, and he will not venture to put
- my abstemiousness to the test unless he has a well-stocked larder.
- Bread I at first made of pure Indian meal and salt, genuine hoe-cakes,
- which I baked before my fire out of doors on a shingle or the end of a
- stick of timber sawed off in building my house; but it was wont to get
- smoked and to have a piny flavor. I tried flour also; but have at last
- found a mixture of rye and Indian meal most convenient and agreeable. In
- cold weather it was no little amusement to bake several small loaves of
- this in succession, tending and turning them as carefully as an Egyptian
- his hatching eggs. They were a real cereal fruit which I ripened, and
- they had to my senses a fragrance like that of other noble fruits, which
- I kept in as long as possible by wrapping them in cloths. I made a study
- of the ancient and indispensable art of bread-making, consulting such
- authorities as offered, going back to the primitive days and first
- invention of the unleavened kind, when from the wildness of nuts and
- meats men first reached the mildness and refinement of this diet, and
- travelling gradually down in my studies through that accidental souring
- of the dough which, it is supposed, taught the leavening process, and
- through the various fermentations thereafter, till I came to "good,
- sweet, wholesome bread," the staff of life. Leaven, which some deem the
- soul of bread, the _spiritus_ which fills its cellular tissue, which is
- religiously preserved like the vestal fire--some precious bottleful,
- I suppose, first brought over in the Mayflower, did the business for
- America, and its influence is still rising, swelling, spreading, in
- cerealian billows over the land--this seed I regularly and faithfully
- procured from the village, till at length one morning I forgot the
- rules, and scalded my yeast; by which accident I discovered that even
- this was not indispensable--for my discoveries were not by the synthetic
- but analytic process--and I have gladly omitted it since, though most
- housewives earnestly assured me that safe and wholesome bread without
- yeast might not be, and elderly people prophesied a speedy decay of the
- vital forces. Yet I find it not to be an essential ingredient, and after
- going without it for a year am still in the land of the living; and I
- am glad to escape the trivialness of carrying a bottleful in my pocket,
- which would sometimes pop and discharge its contents to my discomfiture.
- It is simpler and more respectable to omit it. Man is an animal who
- more than any other can adapt himself to all climates and circumstances.
- Neither did I put any sal-soda, or other acid or alkali, into my bread.
- It would seem that I made it according to the recipe which Marcus
- Porcius Cato gave about two centuries before Christ. "Panem depsticium
- sic facito. Manus mortariumque bene lavato. Farinam in mortarium
- indito, aquae paulatim addito, subigitoque pulchre. Ubi bene subegeris,
- defingito, coquitoque sub testu." Which I take to mean,--"Make kneaded
- bread thus. Wash your hands and trough well. Put the meal into the
- trough, add water gradually, and knead it thoroughly. When you have
- kneaded it well, mould it, and bake it under a cover," that is, in a
- baking kettle. Not a word about leaven. But I did not always use this
- staff of life. At one time, owing to the emptiness of my purse, I saw
- none of it for more than a month.
- Every New Englander might easily raise all his own breadstuffs in this
- land of rye and Indian corn, and not depend on distant and fluctuating
- markets for them. Yet so far are we from simplicity and independence
- that, in Concord, fresh and sweet meal is rarely sold in the shops, and
- hominy and corn in a still coarser form are hardly used by any. For the
- most part the farmer gives to his cattle and hogs the grain of his own
- producing, and buys flour, which is at least no more wholesome, at a
- greater cost, at the store. I saw that I could easily raise my bushel
- or two of rye and Indian corn, for the former will grow on the poorest
- land, and the latter does not require the best, and grind them in a
- hand-mill, and so do without rice and pork; and if I must have some
- concentrated sweet, I found by experiment that I could make a very good
- molasses either of pumpkins or beets, and I knew that I needed only to
- set out a few maples to obtain it more easily still, and while these
- were growing I could use various substitutes beside those which I have
- named. "For," as the Forefathers sang,--
- "we can make liquor to sweeten our lips
- Of pumpkins and parsnips and walnut-tree chips."
- Finally, as for salt, that grossest of groceries, to obtain this might
- be a fit occasion for a visit to the seashore, or, if I did without it
- altogether, I should probably drink the less water. I do not learn that
- the Indians ever troubled themselves to go after it.
- Thus I could avoid all trade and barter, so far as my food was
- concerned, and having a shelter already, it would only remain to get
- clothing and fuel. The pantaloons which I now wear were woven in a
- farmer's family--thank Heaven there is so much virtue still in man; for
- I think the fall from the farmer to the operative as great and memorable
- as that from the man to the farmer;--and in a new country, fuel is an
- encumbrance. As for a habitat, if I were not permitted still to squat,
- I might purchase one acre at the same price for which the land I
- cultivated was sold--namely, eight dollars and eight cents. But as it
- was, I considered that I enhanced the value of the land by squatting on
- it.
- There is a certain class of unbelievers who sometimes ask me such
- questions as, if I think that I can live on vegetable food alone; and
- to strike at the root of the matter at once--for the root is faith--I
- am accustomed to answer such, that I can live on board nails. If they
- cannot understand that, they cannot understand much that I have to say.
- For my part, I am glad to hear of experiments of this kind being tried;
- as that a young man tried for a fortnight to live on hard, raw corn on
- the ear, using his teeth for all mortar. The squirrel tribe tried the
- same and succeeded. The human race is interested in these experiments,
- though a few old women who are incapacitated for them, or who own their
- thirds in mills, may be alarmed.
- * * * * *
- My furniture, part of which I made myself--and the rest cost me nothing
- of which I have not rendered an account--consisted of a bed, a table, a
- desk, three chairs, a looking-glass three inches in diameter, a pair of
- tongs and andirons, a kettle, a skillet, and a frying-pan, a dipper, a
- wash-bowl, two knives and forks, three plates, one cup, one spoon, a jug
- for oil, a jug for molasses, and a japanned lamp. None is so poor that
- he need sit on a pumpkin. That is shiftlessness. There is a plenty of
- such chairs as I like best in the village garrets to be had for taking
- them away. Furniture! Thank God, I can sit and I can stand without the
- aid of a furniture warehouse. What man but a philosopher would not
- be ashamed to see his furniture packed in a cart and going up country
- exposed to the light of heaven and the eyes of men, a beggarly account
- of empty boxes? That is Spaulding's furniture. I could never tell from
- inspecting such a load whether it belonged to a so-called rich man or a
- poor one; the owner always seemed poverty-stricken. Indeed, the more
- you have of such things the poorer you are. Each load looks as if it
- contained the contents of a dozen shanties; and if one shanty is poor,
- this is a dozen times as poor. Pray, for what do we _move_ ever but to
- get rid of our furniture, our _exuviæ_: at last to go from this world to
- another newly furnished, and leave this to be burned? It is the same as
- if all these traps were buckled to a man's belt, and he could not
- move over the rough country where our lines are cast without dragging
- them--dragging his trap. He was a lucky fox that left his tail in the
- trap. The muskrat will gnaw his third leg off to be free. No wonder man
- has lost his elasticity. How often he is at a dead set! "Sir, if I may
- be so bold, what do you mean by a dead set?" If you are a seer, whenever
- you meet a man you will see all that he owns, ay, and much that he
- pretends to disown, behind him, even to his kitchen furniture and all
- the trumpery which he saves and will not burn, and he will appear to be
- harnessed to it and making what headway he can. I think that the man
- is at a dead set who has got through a knot-hole or gateway where his
- sledge load of furniture cannot follow him. I cannot but feel compassion
- when I hear some trig, compact-looking man, seemingly free, all girded
- and ready, speak of his "furniture," as whether it is insured or not.
- "But what shall I do with my furniture?"--My gay butterfly is entangled
- in a spider's web then. Even those who seem for a long while not to
- have any, if you inquire more narrowly you will find have some stored
- in somebody's barn. I look upon England today as an old gentleman who is
- travelling with a great deal of baggage, trumpery which has accumulated
- from long housekeeping, which he has not the courage to burn; great
- trunk, little trunk, bandbox, and bundle. Throw away the first three at
- least. It would surpass the powers of a well man nowadays to take up his
- bed and walk, and I should certainly advise a sick one to lay down his
- bed and run. When I have met an immigrant tottering under a bundle which
- contained his all--looking like an enormous wen which had grown out of
- the nape of his neck--I have pitied him, not because that was his all,
- but because he had all _that_ to carry. If I have got to drag my trap, I
- will take care that it be a light one and do not nip me in a vital part.
- But perchance it would be wisest never to put one's paw into it.
- I would observe, by the way, that it costs me nothing for curtains, for
- I have no gazers to shut out but the sun and moon, and I am willing that
- they should look in. The moon will not sour milk nor taint meat of mine,
- nor will the sun injure my furniture or fade my carpet; and if he is
- sometimes too warm a friend, I find it still better economy to retreat
- behind some curtain which nature has provided, than to add a single item
- to the details of housekeeping. A lady once offered me a mat, but as
- I had no room to spare within the house, nor time to spare within or
- without to shake it, I declined it, preferring to wipe my feet on the
- sod before my door. It is best to avoid the beginnings of evil.
- Not long since I was present at the auction of a deacon's effects, for
- his life had not been ineffectual:--
- "The evil that men do lives after them."
- As usual, a great proportion was trumpery which had begun to accumulate
- in his father's day. Among the rest was a dried tapeworm. And now, after
- lying half a century in his garret and other dust holes, these things
- were not burned; instead of a _bonfire_, or purifying destruction of
- them, there was an _auction_, or increasing of them. The neighbors eagerly
- collected to view them, bought them all, and carefully transported them
- to their garrets and dust holes, to lie there till their estates are
- settled, when they will start again. When a man dies he kicks the dust.
- The customs of some savage nations might, perchance, be profitably
- imitated by us, for they at least go through the semblance of casting
- their slough annually; they have the idea of the thing, whether they
- have the reality or not. Would it not be well if we were to celebrate
- such a "busk," or "feast of first fruits," as Bartram describes to have
- been the custom of the Mucclasse Indians? "When a town celebrates the
- busk," says he, "having previously provided themselves with new clothes,
- new pots, pans, and other household utensils and furniture, they collect
- all their worn out clothes and other despicable things, sweep and
- cleanse their houses, squares, and the whole town of their filth, which
- with all the remaining grain and other old provisions they cast together
- into one common heap, and consume it with fire. After having taken
- medicine, and fasted for three days, all the fire in the town is
- extinguished. During this fast they abstain from the gratification of
- every appetite and passion whatever. A general amnesty is proclaimed;
- all malefactors may return to their town."
- "On the fourth morning, the high priest, by rubbing dry wood together,
- produces new fire in the public square, from whence every habitation in
- the town is supplied with the new and pure flame."
- They then feast on the new corn and fruits, and dance and sing for three
- days, "and the four following days they receive visits and rejoice with
- their friends from neighboring towns who have in like manner purified
- and prepared themselves."
- The Mexicans also practised a similar purification at the end of every
- fifty-two years, in the belief that it was time for the world to come to
- an end.
- I have scarcely heard of a truer sacrament, that is, as the dictionary
- defines it, "outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace,"
- than this, and I have no doubt that they were originally inspired
- directly from Heaven to do thus, though they have no Biblical record of
- the revelation.
- * * * * *
- For more than five years I maintained myself thus solely by the labor
- of my hands, and I found that, by working about six weeks in a year, I
- could meet all the expenses of living. The whole of my winters, as well
- as most of my summers, I had free and clear for study. I have thoroughly
- tried school-keeping, and found that my expenses were in proportion, or
- rather out of proportion, to my income, for I was obliged to dress and
- train, not to say think and believe, accordingly, and I lost my time
- into the bargain. As I did not teach for the good of my fellow-men, but
- simply for a livelihood, this was a failure. I have tried trade but I
- found that it would take ten years to get under way in that, and that
- then I should probably be on my way to the devil. I was actually afraid
- that I might by that time be doing what is called a good business. When
- formerly I was looking about to see what I could do for a living, some
- sad experience in conforming to the wishes of friends being fresh in
- my mind to tax my ingenuity, I thought often and seriously of picking
- huckleberries; that surely I could do, and its small profits might
- suffice--for my greatest skill has been to want but little--so little
- capital it required, so little distraction from my wonted moods, I
- foolishly thought. While my acquaintances went unhesitatingly into trade
- or the professions, I contemplated this occupation as most like theirs;
- ranging the hills all summer to pick the berries which came in my way,
- and thereafter carelessly dispose of them; so, to keep the flocks of
- Admetus. I also dreamed that I might gather the wild herbs, or carry
- evergreens to such villagers as loved to be reminded of the woods, even
- to the city, by hay-cart loads. But I have since learned that trade
- curses everything it handles; and though you trade in messages from
- heaven, the whole curse of trade attaches to the business.
- As I preferred some things to others, and especially valued my freedom,
- as I could fare hard and yet succeed well, I did not wish to spend
- my time in earning rich carpets or other fine furniture, or delicate
- cookery, or a house in the Grecian or the Gothic style just yet. If
- there are any to whom it is no interruption to acquire these things,
- and who know how to use them when acquired, I relinquish to them the
- pursuit. Some are "industrious," and appear to love labor for its own
- sake, or perhaps because it keeps them out of worse mischief; to such I
- have at present nothing to say. Those who would not know what to do with
- more leisure than they now enjoy, I might advise to work twice as
- hard as they do--work till they pay for themselves, and get their free
- papers. For myself I found that the occupation of a day-laborer was the
- most independent of any, especially as it required only thirty or forty
- days in a year to support one. The laborer's day ends with the going
- down of the sun, and he is then free to devote himself to his chosen
- pursuit, independent of his labor; but his employer, who speculates from
- month to month, has no respite from one end of the year to the other.
- In short, I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to maintain
- one's self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime, if we will
- live simply and wisely; as the pursuits of the simpler nations are still
- the sports of the more artificial. It is not necessary that a man should
- earn his living by the sweat of his brow, unless he sweats easier than I
- do.
- One young man of my acquaintance, who has inherited some acres, told me
- that he thought he should live as I did, _if he had the means_. I would
- not have any one adopt _my_ mode of living on any account; for, beside
- that before he has fairly learned it I may have found out another for
- myself, I desire that there may be as many different persons in the
- world as possible; but I would have each one be very careful to find
- out and pursue _his own_ way, and not his father's or his mother's or his
- neighbor's instead. The youth may build or plant or sail, only let him
- not be hindered from doing that which he tells me he would like to do.
- It is by a mathematical point only that we are wise, as the sailor or
- the fugitive slave keeps the polestar in his eye; but that is sufficient
- guidance for all our life. We may not arrive at our port within a
- calculable period, but we would preserve the true course.
- Undoubtedly, in this case, what is true for one is truer still for a
- thousand, as a large house is not proportionally more expensive than a
- small one, since one roof may cover, one cellar underlie, and one wall
- separate several apartments. But for my part, I preferred the solitary
- dwelling. Moreover, it will commonly be cheaper to build the whole
- yourself than to convince another of the advantage of the common wall;
- and when you have done this, the common partition, to be much cheaper,
- must be a thin one, and that other may prove a bad neighbor, and also
- not keep his side in repair. The only co-operation which is commonly
- possible is exceedingly partial and superficial; and what little true
- co-operation there is, is as if it were not, being a harmony inaudible
- to men. If a man has faith, he will co-operate with equal faith
- everywhere; if he has not faith, he will continue to live like the rest
- of the world, whatever company he is joined to. To co-operate in the
- highest as well as the lowest sense, means _to get our living together_. I
- heard it proposed lately that two young men should travel together over
- the world, the one without money, earning his means as he went, before
- the mast and behind the plow, the other carrying a bill of exchange in
- his pocket. It was easy to see that they could not long be companions or
- co-operate, since one would not _operate_ at all. They would part at
- the first interesting crisis in their adventures. Above all, as I have
- implied, the man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with
- another must wait till that other is ready, and it may be a long time
- before they get off.
- * * * * *
- But all this is very selfish, I have heard some of my townsmen say.
- I confess that I have hitherto indulged very little in philanthropic
- enterprises. I have made some sacrifices to a sense of duty, and among
- others have sacrificed this pleasure also. There are those who have
- used all their arts to persuade me to undertake the support of some
- poor family in the town; and if I had nothing to do--for the devil finds
- employment for the idle--I might try my hand at some such pastime as
- that. However, when I have thought to indulge myself in this respect,
- and lay their Heaven under an obligation by maintaining certain poor
- persons in all respects as comfortably as I maintain myself, and have
- even ventured so far as to make them the offer, they have one and all
- unhesitatingly preferred to remain poor. While my townsmen and women are
- devoted in so many ways to the good of their fellows, I trust that one
- at least may be spared to other and less humane pursuits. You must have
- a genius for charity as well as for anything else. As for Doing-good,
- that is one of the professions which are full. Moreover, I have tried it
- fairly, and, strange as it may seem, am satisfied that it does not agree
- with my constitution. Probably I should not consciously and deliberately
- forsake my particular calling to do the good which society demands of
- me, to save the universe from annihilation; and I believe that a like
- but infinitely greater steadfastness elsewhere is all that now preserves
- it. But I would not stand between any man and his genius; and to him who
- does this work, which I decline, with his whole heart and soul and life,
- I would say, Persevere, even if the world call it doing evil, as it is
- most likely they will.
- I am far from supposing that my case is a peculiar one; no doubt many of
- my readers would make a similar defence. At doing something--I will not
- engage that my neighbors shall pronounce it good--I do not hesitate to
- say that I should be a capital fellow to hire; but what that is, it is
- for my employer to find out. What _good_ I do, in the common sense of
- that word, must be aside from my main path, and for the most part wholly
- unintended. Men say, practically, Begin where you are and such as you
- are, without aiming mainly to become of more worth, and with kindness
- aforethought go about doing good. If I were to preach at all in this
- strain, I should say rather, Set about being good. As if the sun should
- stop when he had kindled his fires up to the splendor of a moon or
- a star of the sixth magnitude, and go about like a Robin Goodfellow,
- peeping in at every cottage window, inspiring lunatics, and tainting
- meats, and making darkness visible, instead of steadily increasing his
- genial heat and beneficence till he is of such brightness that no mortal
- can look him in the face, and then, and in the meanwhile too, going
- about the world in his own orbit, doing it good, or rather, as a truer
- philosophy has discovered, the world going about him getting good. When
- Phaeton, wishing to prove his heavenly birth by his beneficence, had the
- sun's chariot but one day, and drove out of the beaten track, he burned
- several blocks of houses in the lower streets of heaven, and scorched
- the surface of the earth, and dried up every spring, and made the great
- desert of Sahara, till at length Jupiter hurled him headlong to the
- earth with a thunderbolt, and the sun, through grief at his death, did
- not shine for a year.
- There is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness tainted. It
- is human, it is divine, carrion. If I knew for a certainty that a man
- was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good,
- I should run for my life, as from that dry and parching wind of the
- African deserts called the simoom, which fills the mouth and nose and
- ears and eyes with dust till you are suffocated, for fear that I should
- get some of his good done to me--some of its virus mingled with my
- blood. No--in this case I would rather suffer evil the natural way.
- A man is not a good _man_ to me because he will feed me if I should be
- starving, or warm me if I should be freezing, or pull me out of a ditch
- if I should ever fall into one. I can find you a Newfoundland dog that
- will do as much. Philanthropy is not love for one's fellow-man in the
- broadest sense. Howard was no doubt an exceedingly kind and worthy man
- in his way, and has his reward; but, comparatively speaking, what are a
- hundred Howards to _us_, if their philanthropy do not help us in our
- best estate, when we are most worthy to be helped? I never heard of a
- philanthropic meeting in which it was sincerely proposed to do any good
- to me, or the like of me.
- The Jesuits were quite balked by those Indians who, being burned at
- the stake, suggested new modes of torture to their tormentors. Being
- superior to physical suffering, it sometimes chanced that they were
- superior to any consolation which the missionaries could offer; and the
- law to do as you would be done by fell with less persuasiveness on the
- ears of those who, for their part, did not care how they were done by,
- who loved their enemies after a new fashion, and came very near freely
- forgiving them all they did.
- Be sure that you give the poor the aid they most need, though it be your
- example which leaves them far behind. If you give money, spend yourself
- with it, and do not merely abandon it to them. We make curious mistakes
- sometimes. Often the poor man is not so cold and hungry as he is
- dirty and ragged and gross. It is partly his taste, and not merely his
- misfortune. If you give him money, he will perhaps buy more rags with
- it. I was wont to pity the clumsy Irish laborers who cut ice on the
- pond, in such mean and ragged clothes, while I shivered in my more tidy
- and somewhat more fashionable garments, till, one bitter cold day, one
- who had slipped into the water came to my house to warm him, and I saw
- him strip off three pairs of pants and two pairs of stockings ere he got
- down to the skin, though they were dirty and ragged enough, it is true,
- and that he could afford to refuse the _extra_ garments which I offered
- him, he had so many _intra_ ones. This ducking was the very thing he
- needed. Then I began to pity myself, and I saw that it would be a
- greater charity to bestow on me a flannel shirt than a whole slop-shop
- on him. There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who
- is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest
- amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of
- life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve. It is
- the pious slave-breeder devoting the proceeds of every tenth slave to
- buy a Sunday's liberty for the rest. Some show their kindness to the
- poor by employing them in their kitchens. Would they not be kinder if
- they employed themselves there? You boast of spending a tenth part of
- your income in charity; maybe you should spend the nine tenths so, and
- done with it. Society recovers only a tenth part of the property then.
- Is this owing to the generosity of him in whose possession it is found,
- or to the remissness of the officers of justice?
- Philanthropy is almost the only virtue which is sufficiently appreciated
- by mankind. Nay, it is greatly overrated; and it is our selfishness
- which overrates it. A robust poor man, one sunny day here in Concord,
- praised a fellow-townsman to me, because, as he said, he was kind to the
- poor; meaning himself. The kind uncles and aunts of the race are more
- esteemed than its true spiritual fathers and mothers. I once heard a
- reverend lecturer on England, a man of learning and intelligence,
- after enumerating her scientific, literary, and political worthies,
- Shakespeare, Bacon, Cromwell, Milton, Newton, and others, speak next of
- her Christian heroes, whom, as if his profession required it of him,
- he elevated to a place far above all the rest, as the greatest of the
- great. They were Penn, Howard, and Mrs. Fry. Every one must feel the
- falsehood and cant of this. The last were not England's best men and
- women; only, perhaps, her best philanthropists.
- I would not subtract anything from the praise that is due to
- philanthropy, but merely demand justice for all who by their lives
- and works are a blessing to mankind. I do not value chiefly a man's
- uprightness and benevolence, which are, as it were, his stem and leaves.
- Those plants of whose greenness withered we make herb tea for the sick
- serve but a humble use, and are most employed by quacks. I want the
- flower and fruit of a man; that some fragrance be wafted over from him
- to me, and some ripeness flavor our intercourse. His goodness must not
- be a partial and transitory act, but a constant superfluity, which costs
- him nothing and of which he is unconscious. This is a charity that hides
- a multitude of sins. The philanthropist too often surrounds mankind with
- the remembrance of his own castoff griefs as an atmosphere, and calls it
- sympathy. We should impart our courage, and not our despair, our health
- and ease, and not our disease, and take care that this does not spread
- by contagion. From what southern plains comes up the voice of wailing?
- Under what latitudes reside the heathen to whom we would send light? Who
- is that intemperate and brutal man whom we would redeem? If anything ail
- a man, so that he does not perform his functions, if he have a pain in
- his bowels even--for that is the seat of sympathy--he forthwith sets
- about reforming--the world. Being a microcosm himself, he discovers--and
- it is a true discovery, and he is the man to make it--that the world has
- been eating green apples; to his eyes, in fact, the globe itself is
- a great green apple, which there is danger awful to think of that the
- children of men will nibble before it is ripe; and straightway his
- drastic philanthropy seeks out the Esquimau and the Patagonian, and
- embraces the populous Indian and Chinese villages; and thus, by a few
- years of philanthropic activity, the powers in the meanwhile using him
- for their own ends, no doubt, he cures himself of his dyspepsia, the
- globe acquires a faint blush on one or both of its cheeks, as if it were
- beginning to be ripe, and life loses its crudity and is once more sweet
- and wholesome to live. I never dreamed of any enormity greater than I
- have committed. I never knew, and never shall know, a worse man than
- myself.
- I believe that what so saddens the reformer is not his sympathy with his
- fellows in distress, but, though he be the holiest son of God, is
- his private ail. Let this be righted, let the spring come to him, the
- morning rise over his couch, and he will forsake his generous companions
- without apology. My excuse for not lecturing against the use of
- tobacco is, that I never chewed it, that is a penalty which reformed
- tobacco-chewers have to pay; though there are things enough I have
- chewed which I could lecture against. If you should ever be betrayed
- into any of these philanthropies, do not let your left hand know what
- your right hand does, for it is not worth knowing. Rescue the drowning
- and tie your shoestrings. Take your time, and set about some free labor.
- Our manners have been corrupted by communication with the saints. Our
- hymn-books resound with a melodious cursing of God and enduring Him
- forever. One would say that even the prophets and redeemers had rather
- consoled the fears than confirmed the hopes of man. There is nowhere
- recorded a simple and irrepressible satisfaction with the gift of
- life, any memorable praise of God. All health and success does me good,
- however far off and withdrawn it may appear; all disease and failure
- helps to make me sad and does me evil, however much sympathy it may have
- with me or I with it. If, then, we would indeed restore mankind by truly
- Indian, botanic, magnetic, or natural means, let us first be as simple
- and well as Nature ourselves, dispel the clouds which hang over our own
- brows, and take up a little life into our pores. Do not stay to be an
- overseer of the poor, but endeavor to become one of the worthies of the
- world.
- I read in the Gulistan, or Flower Garden, of Sheik Sadi of Shiraz, that
- "they asked a wise man, saying: Of the many celebrated trees which the
- Most High God has created lofty and umbrageous, they call none azad, or
- free, excepting the cypress, which bears no fruit; what mystery is there
- in this? He replied, Each has its appropriate produce, and appointed
- season, during the continuance of which it is fresh and blooming, and
- during their absence dry and withered; to neither of which states is the
- cypress exposed, being always flourishing; and of this nature are the
- azads, or religious independents.--Fix not thy heart on that which is
- transitory; for the Dijlah, or Tigris, will continue to flow through
- Bagdad after the race of caliphs is extinct: if thy hand has plenty, be
- liberal as the date tree; but if it affords nothing to give away, be an
- azad, or free man, like the cypress."
- COMPLEMENTAL VERSES
- The Pretensions of Poverty
- Thou dost presume too much, poor needy wretch,
- To claim a station in the firmament
- Because thy humble cottage, or thy tub,
- Nurses some lazy or pedantic virtue
- In the cheap sunshine or by shady springs,
- With roots and pot-herbs; where thy right hand,
- Tearing those humane passions from the mind,
- Upon whose stocks fair blooming virtues flourish,
- Degradeth nature, and benumbeth sense,
- And, Gorgon-like, turns active men to stone.
- We not require the dull society
- Of your necessitated temperance,
- Or that unnatural stupidity
- That knows nor joy nor sorrow; nor your forc'd
- Falsely exalted passive fortitude
- Above the active. This low abject brood,
- That fix their seats in mediocrity,
- Become your servile minds; but we advance
- Such virtues only as admit excess,
- Brave, bounteous acts, regal magnificence,
- All-seeing prudence, magnanimity
- That knows no bound, and that heroic virtue
- For which antiquity hath left no name,
- But patterns only, such as Hercules,
- Achilles, Theseus. Back to thy loath'd cell;
- And when thou seest the new enlightened sphere,
- Study to know but what those worthies were.
- T. CAREW
- Where I Lived, and What I Lived For
- At a certain season of our life we are accustomed to consider every spot
- as the possible site of a house. I have thus surveyed the country on
- every side within a dozen miles of where I live. In imagination I have
- bought all the farms in succession, for all were to be bought, and I
- knew their price. I walked over each farmer's premises, tasted his wild
- apples, discoursed on husbandry with him, took his farm at his price, at
- any price, mortgaging it to him in my mind; even put a higher price on
- it--took everything but a deed of it--took his word for his deed, for I
- dearly love to talk--cultivated it, and him too to some extent, I trust,
- and withdrew when I had enjoyed it long enough, leaving him to carry it
- on. This experience entitled me to be regarded as a sort of real-estate
- broker by my friends. Wherever I sat, there I might live, and the
- landscape radiated from me accordingly. What is a house but a _sedes_, a
- seat?--better if a country seat. I discovered many a site for a house
- not likely to be soon improved, which some might have thought too far
- from the village, but to my eyes the village was too far from it. Well,
- there I might live, I said; and there I did live, for an hour, a summer
- and a winter life; saw how I could let the years run off, buffet the
- winter through, and see the spring come in. The future inhabitants of
- this region, wherever they may place their houses, may be sure that they
- have been anticipated. An afternoon sufficed to lay out the land into
- orchard, wood-lot, and pasture, and to decide what fine oaks or pines
- should be left to stand before the door, and whence each blasted tree
- could be seen to the best advantage; and then I let it lie, fallow,
- perchance, for a man is rich in proportion to the number of things which
- he can afford to let alone.
- My imagination carried me so far that I even had the refusal of several
- farms--the refusal was all I wanted--but I never got my fingers burned
- by actual possession. The nearest that I came to actual possession was
- when I bought the Hollowell place, and had begun to sort my seeds, and
- collected materials with which to make a wheelbarrow to carry it on or
- off with; but before the owner gave me a deed of it, his wife--every man
- has such a wife--changed her mind and wished to keep it, and he offered
- me ten dollars to release him. Now, to speak the truth, I had but ten
- cents in the world, and it surpassed my arithmetic to tell, if I was
- that man who had ten cents, or who had a farm, or ten dollars, or all
- together. However, I let him keep the ten dollars and the farm too, for
- I had carried it far enough; or rather, to be generous, I sold him the
- farm for just what I gave for it, and, as he was not a rich man, made
- him a present of ten dollars, and still had my ten cents, and seeds, and
- materials for a wheelbarrow left. I found thus that I had been a rich
- man without any damage to my poverty. But I retained the landscape, and
- I have since annually carried off what it yielded without a wheelbarrow.
- With respect to landscapes,
- "I am monarch of all I _survey_,
- My right there is none to dispute."
- I have frequently seen a poet withdraw, having enjoyed the most valuable
- part of a farm, while the crusty farmer supposed that he had got a few
- wild apples only. Why, the owner does not know it for many years when
- a poet has put his farm in rhyme, the most admirable kind of invisible
- fence, has fairly impounded it, milked it, skimmed it, and got all the
- cream, and left the farmer only the skimmed milk.
- The real attractions of the Hollowell farm, to me, were: its complete
- retirement, being, about two miles from the village, half a mile from
- the nearest neighbor, and separated from the highway by a broad field;
- its bounding on the river, which the owner said protected it by its fogs
- from frosts in the spring, though that was nothing to me; the gray color
- and ruinous state of the house and barn, and the dilapidated fences,
- which put such an interval between me and the last occupant; the hollow
- and lichen-covered apple trees, gnawed by rabbits, showing what kind of
- neighbors I should have; but above all, the recollection I had of it
- from my earliest voyages up the river, when the house was concealed
- behind a dense grove of red maples, through which I heard the house-dog
- bark. I was in haste to buy it, before the proprietor finished getting
- out some rocks, cutting down the hollow apple trees, and grubbing up
- some young birches which had sprung up in the pasture, or, in short, had
- made any more of his improvements. To enjoy these advantages I was ready
- to carry it on; like Atlas, to take the world on my shoulders--I never
- heard what compensation he received for that--and do all those things
- which had no other motive or excuse but that I might pay for it and
- be unmolested in my possession of it; for I knew all the while that it
- would yield the most abundant crop of the kind I wanted, if I could only
- afford to let it alone. But it turned out as I have said.
- All that I could say, then, with respect to farming on a large scale--I
- have always cultivated a garden--was, that I had had my seeds ready.
- Many think that seeds improve with age. I have no doubt that time
- discriminates between the good and the bad; and when at last I shall
- plant, I shall be less likely to be disappointed. But I would say to my
- fellows, once for all, As long as possible live free and uncommitted. It
- makes but little difference whether you are committed to a farm or the
- county jail.
- Old Cato, whose "De Re Rusticâ" is my "Cultivator," says--and the only
- translation I have seen makes sheer nonsense of the passage--"When you
- think of getting a farm turn it thus in your mind, not to buy greedily;
- nor spare your pains to look at it, and do not think it enough to go
- round it once. The oftener you go there the more it will please you, if
- it is good." I think I shall not buy greedily, but go round and round it
- as long as I live, and be buried in it first, that it may please me the
- more at last.
- * * * * *
- The present was my next experiment of this kind, which I purpose to
- describe more at length, for convenience putting the experience of two
- years into one. As I have said, I do not propose to write an ode
- to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning,
- standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up.
- When first I took up my abode in the woods, that is, began to spend my
- nights as well as days there, which, by accident, was on Independence
- Day, or the Fourth of July, 1845, my house was not finished for winter,
- but was merely a defence against the rain, without plastering or
- chimney, the walls being of rough, weather-stained boards, with wide
- chinks, which made it cool at night. The upright white hewn studs and
- freshly planed door and window casings gave it a clean and airy look,
- especially in the morning, when its timbers were saturated with dew, so
- that I fancied that by noon some sweet gum would exude from them. To my
- imagination it retained throughout the day more or less of this auroral
- character, reminding me of a certain house on a mountain which I had
- visited a year before. This was an airy and unplastered cabin, fit
- to entertain a travelling god, and where a goddess might trail her
- garments. The winds which passed over my dwelling were such as sweep
- over the ridges of mountains, bearing the broken strains, or celestial
- parts only, of terrestrial music. The morning wind forever blows, the
- poem of creation is uninterrupted; but few are the ears that hear it.
- Olympus is but the outside of the earth everywhere.
- The only house I had been the owner of before, if I except a boat, was
- a tent, which I used occasionally when making excursions in the summer,
- and this is still rolled up in my garret; but the boat, after passing
- from hand to hand, has gone down the stream of time. With this more
- substantial shelter about me, I had made some progress toward
- settling in the world. This frame, so slightly clad, was a sort of
- crystallization around me, and reacted on the builder. It was suggestive
- somewhat as a picture in outlines. I did not need to go outdoors to take
- the air, for the atmosphere within had lost none of its freshness. It
- was not so much within doors as behind a door where I sat, even in the
- rainiest weather. The Harivansa says, "An abode without birds is like
- a meat without seasoning." Such was not my abode, for I found myself
- suddenly neighbor to the birds; not by having imprisoned one, but having
- caged myself near them. I was not only nearer to some of those which
- commonly frequent the garden and the orchard, but to those smaller and
- more thrilling songsters of the forest which never, or rarely, serenade
- a villager--the wood thrush, the veery, the scarlet tanager, the field
- sparrow, the whip-poor-will, and many others.
- I was seated by the shore of a small pond, about a mile and a half south
- of the village of Concord and somewhat higher than it, in the midst of
- an extensive wood between that town and Lincoln, and about two miles
- south of that our only field known to fame, Concord Battle Ground; but
- I was so low in the woods that the opposite shore, half a mile off, like
- the rest, covered with wood, was my most distant horizon. For the first
- week, whenever I looked out on the pond it impressed me like a tarn high
- up on the side of a mountain, its bottom far above the surface of other
- lakes, and, as the sun arose, I saw it throwing off its nightly clothing
- of mist, and here and there, by degrees, its soft ripples or its smooth
- reflecting surface was revealed, while the mists, like ghosts, were
- stealthily withdrawing in every direction into the woods, as at the
- breaking up of some nocturnal conventicle. The very dew seemed to
- hang upon the trees later into the day than usual, as on the sides of
- mountains.
- This small lake was of most value as a neighbor in the intervals of a
- gentle rain-storm in August, when, both air and water being perfectly
- still, but the sky overcast, mid-afternoon had all the serenity of
- evening, and the wood thrush sang around, and was heard from shore to
- shore. A lake like this is never smoother than at such a time; and the
- clear portion of the air above it being, shallow and darkened by clouds,
- the water, full of light and reflections, becomes a lower heaven itself
- so much the more important. From a hill-top near by, where the wood had
- been recently cut off, there was a pleasing vista southward across
- the pond, through a wide indentation in the hills which form the shore
- there, where their opposite sides sloping toward each other suggested a
- stream flowing out in that direction through a wooded valley, but stream
- there was none. That way I looked between and over the near green
- hills to some distant and higher ones in the horizon, tinged with blue.
- Indeed, by standing on tiptoe I could catch a glimpse of some of
- the peaks of the still bluer and more distant mountain ranges in the
- northwest, those true-blue coins from heaven's own mint, and also of
- some portion of the village. But in other directions, even from this
- point, I could not see over or beyond the woods which surrounded me. It
- is well to have some water in your neighborhood, to give buoyancy to and
- float the earth. One value even of the smallest well is, that when you
- look into it you see that earth is not continent but insular. This is
- as important as that it keeps butter cool. When I looked across the
- pond from this peak toward the Sudbury meadows, which in time of flood
- I distinguished elevated perhaps by a mirage in their seething valley,
- like a coin in a basin, all the earth beyond the pond appeared like
- a thin crust insulated and floated even by this small sheet of
- interverting water, and I was reminded that this on which I dwelt was
- but _dry land_.
- Though the view from my door was still more contracted, I did not
- feel crowded or confined in the least. There was pasture enough for my
- imagination. The low shrub oak plateau to which the opposite shore
- arose stretched away toward the prairies of the West and the steppes of
- Tartary, affording ample room for all the roving families of men.
- "There are none happy in the world but beings who enjoy freely a
- vast horizon"--said Damodara, when his herds required new and larger
- pastures.
- Both place and time were changed, and I dwelt nearer to those parts of
- the universe and to those eras in history which had most attracted
- me. Where I lived was as far off as many a region viewed nightly by
- astronomers. We are wont to imagine rare and delectable places in some
- remote and more celestial corner of the system, behind the constellation
- of Cassiopeia's Chair, far from noise and disturbance. I discovered that
- my house actually had its site in such a withdrawn, but forever new and
- unprofaned, part of the universe. If it were worth the while to settle
- in those parts near to the Pleiades or the Hyades, to Aldebaran or
- Altair, then I was really there, or at an equal remoteness from the life
- which I had left behind, dwindled and twinkling with as fine a ray to
- my nearest neighbor, and to be seen only in moonless nights by him. Such
- was that part of creation where I had squatted;
- "There was a shepherd that did live,
- And held his thoughts as high
- As were the mounts whereon his flocks
- Did hourly feed him by."
- What should we think of the shepherd's life if his flocks always
- wandered to higher pastures than his thoughts?
- Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal
- simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself. I have been as
- sincere a worshipper of Aurora as the Greeks. I got up early and bathed
- in the pond; that was a religious exercise, and one of the best things
- which I did. They say that characters were engraven on the bathing tub
- of King Tchingthang to this effect: "Renew thyself completely each
- day; do it again, and again, and forever again." I can understand that.
- Morning brings back the heroic ages. I was as much affected by the faint
- hum of a mosquito making its invisible and unimaginable tour through
- my apartment at earliest dawn, when I was sitting with door and windows
- open, as I could be by any trumpet that ever sang of fame. It was
- Homer's requiem; itself an Iliad and Odyssey in the air, singing its own
- wrath and wanderings. There was something cosmical about it; a standing
- advertisement, till forbidden, of the everlasting vigor and fertility of
- the world. The morning, which is the most memorable season of the day,
- is the awakening hour. Then there is least somnolence in us; and for an
- hour, at least, some part of us awakes which slumbers all the rest of
- the day and night. Little is to be expected of that day, if it can be
- called a day, to which we are not awakened by our Genius, but by the
- mechanical nudgings of some servitor, are not awakened by our own
- newly acquired force and aspirations from within, accompanied by
- the undulations of celestial music, instead of factory bells, and a
- fragrance filling the air--to a higher life than we fell asleep from;
- and thus the darkness bear its fruit, and prove itself to be good,
- no less than the light. That man who does not believe that each day
- contains an earlier, more sacred, and auroral hour than he has yet
- profaned, has despaired of life, and is pursuing a descending and
- darkening way. After a partial cessation of his sensuous life, the soul
- of man, or its organs rather, are reinvigorated each day, and his Genius
- tries again what noble life it can make. All memorable events, I should
- say, transpire in morning time and in a morning atmosphere. The Vedas
- say, "All intelligences awake with the morning." Poetry and art, and
- the fairest and most memorable of the actions of men, date from such an
- hour. All poets and heroes, like Memnon, are the children of Aurora, and
- emit their music at sunrise. To him whose elastic and vigorous thought
- keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning. It matters not
- what the clocks say or the attitudes and labors of men. Morning is when
- I am awake and there is a dawn in me. Moral reform is the effort to
- throw off sleep. Why is it that men give so poor an account of their day
- if they have not been slumbering? They are not such poor calculators.
- If they had not been overcome with drowsiness, they would have performed
- something. The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only
- one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion,
- only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake
- is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How
- could I have looked him in the face?
- We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical
- aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake
- us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than
- the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious
- endeavor. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or
- to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far
- more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through
- which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the
- day, that is the highest of arts. Every man is tasked to make his life,
- even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated
- and critical hour. If we refused, or rather used up, such paltry
- information as we get, the oracles would distinctly inform us how this
- might be done.
- I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only
- the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to
- teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did
- not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish
- to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to
- live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and
- Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad
- swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its
- lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole
- and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or
- if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true
- account of it in my next excursion. For most men, it appears to me, are
- in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God,
- and have _somewhat hastily_ concluded that it is the chief end of man here
- to "glorify God and enjoy him forever."
- Still we live meanly, like ants; though the fable tells us that we were
- long ago changed into men; like pygmies we fight with cranes; it is
- error upon error, and clout upon clout, and our best virtue has for its
- occasion a superfluous and evitable wretchedness. Our life is frittered
- away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten
- fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest.
- Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or
- three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half
- a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail. In the midst of
- this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and
- quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has
- to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his
- port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed
- who succeeds. Simplify, simplify. Instead of three meals a day, if it
- be necessary eat but one; instead of a hundred dishes, five; and reduce
- other things in proportion. Our life is like a German Confederacy, made
- up of petty states, with its boundary forever fluctuating, so that even
- a German cannot tell you how it is bounded at any moment. The nation
- itself, with all its so-called internal improvements, which, by the way
- are all external and superficial, is just such an unwieldy and overgrown
- establishment, cluttered with furniture and tripped up by its own traps,
- ruined by luxury and heedless expense, by want of calculation and a
- worthy aim, as the million households in the land; and the only cure for
- it, as for them, is in a rigid economy, a stern and more than Spartan
- simplicity of life and elevation of purpose. It lives too fast. Men
- think that it is essential that the _Nation_ have commerce, and export
- ice, and talk through a telegraph, and ride thirty miles an hour,
- without a doubt, whether _they_ do or not; but whether we should live
- like baboons or like men, is a little uncertain. If we do not get out
- sleepers, and forge rails, and devote days and nights to the work,
- but go to tinkering upon our _lives_ to improve _them_, who will build
- railroads? And if railroads are not built, how shall we get to heaven
- in season? But if we stay at home and mind our business, who will want
- railroads? We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us. Did you
- ever think what those sleepers are that underlie the railroad? Each one
- is a man, an Irishman, or a Yankee man. The rails are laid on them, and
- they are covered with sand, and the cars run smoothly over them. They
- are sound sleepers, I assure you. And every few years a new lot is laid
- down and run over; so that, if some have the pleasure of riding on a
- rail, others have the misfortune to be ridden upon. And when they run
- over a man that is walking in his sleep, a supernumerary sleeper in the
- wrong position, and wake him up, they suddenly stop the cars, and make
- a hue and cry about it, as if this were an exception. I am glad to know
- that it takes a gang of men for every five miles to keep the sleepers
- down and level in their beds as it is, for this is a sign that they may
- sometime get up again.
- Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? We are determined
- to be starved before we are hungry. Men say that a stitch in time saves
- nine, and so they take a thousand stitches today to save nine tomorrow.
- As for _work_, we haven't any of any consequence. We have the Saint Vitus'
- dance, and cannot possibly keep our heads still. If I should only give
- a few pulls at the parish bell-rope, as for a fire, that is, without
- setting the bell, there is hardly a man on his farm in the outskirts of
- Concord, notwithstanding that press of engagements which was his excuse
- so many times this morning, nor a boy, nor a woman, I might almost say,
- but would forsake all and follow that sound, not mainly to save property
- from the flames, but, if we will confess the truth, much more to see
- it burn, since burn it must, and we, be it known, did not set it on
- fire--or to see it put out, and have a hand in it, if that is done as
- handsomely; yes, even if it were the parish church itself. Hardly a man
- takes a half-hour's nap after dinner, but when he wakes he holds up his
- head and asks, "What's the news?" as if the rest of mankind had stood
- his sentinels. Some give directions to be waked every half-hour,
- doubtless for no other purpose; and then, to pay for it, they tell what
- they have dreamed. After a night's sleep the news is as indispensable
- as the breakfast. "Pray tell me anything new that has happened to a man
- anywhere on this globe"--and he reads it over his coffee and rolls, that
- a man has had his eyes gouged out this morning on the Wachito River;
- never dreaming the while that he lives in the dark unfathomed mammoth
- cave of this world, and has but the rudiment of an eye himself.
- For my part, I could easily do without the post-office. I think that
- there are very few important communications made through it. To speak
- critically, I never received more than one or two letters in my life--I
- wrote this some years ago--that were worth the postage. The penny-post
- is, commonly, an institution through which you seriously offer a man
- that penny for his thoughts which is so often safely offered in jest.
- And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we
- read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house
- burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow
- run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot
- of grasshoppers in the winter--we never need read of another. One is
- enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for
- a myriad instances and applications? To a philosopher all _news_, as it
- is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over
- their tea. Yet not a few are greedy after this gossip. There was such
- a rush, as I hear, the other day at one of the offices to learn the
- foreign news by the last arrival, that several large squares of plate
- glass belonging to the establishment were broken by the pressure--news
- which I seriously think a ready wit might write a twelve-month, or
- twelve years, beforehand with sufficient accuracy. As for Spain, for
- instance, if you know how to throw in Don Carlos and the Infanta,
- and Don Pedro and Seville and Granada, from time to time in the right
- proportions--they may have changed the names a little since I saw the
- papers--and serve up a bull-fight when other entertainments fail, it
- will be true to the letter, and give us as good an idea of the exact
- state or ruin of things in Spain as the most succinct and lucid reports
- under this head in the newspapers: and as for England, almost the last
- significant scrap of news from that quarter was the revolution of 1649;
- and if you have learned the history of her crops for an average year,
- you never need attend to that thing again, unless your speculations are
- of a merely pecuniary character. If one may judge who rarely looks into
- the newspapers, nothing new does ever happen in foreign parts, a French
- revolution not excepted.
- What news! how much more important to know what that is which was never
- old! "Kieou-he-yu (great dignitary of the state of Wei) sent a man to
- Khoung-tseu to know his news. Khoung-tseu caused the messenger to be
- seated near him, and questioned him in these terms: What is your
- master doing? The messenger answered with respect: My master desires
- to diminish the number of his faults, but he cannot come to the end of
- them. The messenger being gone, the philosopher remarked: What a worthy
- messenger! What a worthy messenger!" The preacher, instead of vexing the
- ears of drowsy farmers on their day of rest at the end of the week--for
- Sunday is the fit conclusion of an ill-spent week, and not the fresh
- and brave beginning of a new one--with this one other draggle-tail of
- a sermon, should shout with thundering voice, "Pause! Avast! Why so
- seeming fast, but deadly slow?"
- Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is
- fabulous. If men would steadily observe realities only, and not allow
- themselves to be deluded, life, to compare it with such things as we
- know, would be like a fairy tale and the Arabian Nights' Entertainments.
- If we respected only what is inevitable and has a right to be, music and
- poetry would resound along the streets. When we are unhurried and wise,
- we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and
- absolute existence, that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the
- shadow of the reality. This is always exhilarating and sublime. By
- closing the eyes and slumbering, and consenting to be deceived by
- shows, men establish and confirm their daily life of routine and
- habit everywhere, which still is built on purely illusory foundations.
- Children, who play life, discern its true law and relations more clearly
- than men, who fail to live it worthily, but who think that they are
- wiser by experience, that is, by failure. I have read in a Hindoo book,
- that "there was a king's son, who, being expelled in infancy from his
- native city, was brought up by a forester, and, growing up to maturity
- in that state, imagined himself to belong to the barbarous race with
- which he lived. One of his father's ministers having discovered him,
- revealed to him what he was, and the misconception of his character was
- removed, and he knew himself to be a prince. So soul," continues the
- Hindoo philosopher, "from the circumstances in which it is placed,
- mistakes its own character, until the truth is revealed to it by some
- holy teacher, and then it knows itself to be Brahme." I perceive that
- we inhabitants of New England live this mean life that we do because our
- vision does not penetrate the surface of things. We think that that _is_
- which _appears_ to be. If a man should walk through this town and see only
- the reality, where, think you, would the "Mill-dam" go to? If he should
- give us an account of the realities he beheld there, we should not
- recognize the place in his description. Look at a meeting-house, or a
- court-house, or a jail, or a shop, or a dwelling-house, and say what
- that thing really is before a true gaze, and they would all go to pieces
- in your account of them. Men esteem truth remote, in the outskirts of
- the system, behind the farthest star, before Adam and after the last
- man. In eternity there is indeed something true and sublime. But all
- these times and places and occasions are now and here. God himself
- culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the
- lapse of all the ages. And we are enabled to apprehend at all what is
- sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of
- the reality that surrounds us. The universe constantly and obediently
- answers to our conceptions; whether we travel fast or slow, the track is
- laid for us. Let us spend our lives in conceiving then. The poet or
- the artist never yet had so fair and noble a design but some of his
- posterity at least could accomplish it.
- Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown off
- the track by every nutshell and mosquito's wing that falls on the
- rails. Let us rise early and fast, or break fast, gently and without
- perturbation; let company come and let company go, let the bells ring
- and the children cry--determined to make a day of it. Why should we
- knock under and go with the stream? Let us not be upset and overwhelmed
- in that terrible rapid and whirlpool called a dinner, situated in the
- meridian shallows. Weather this danger and you are safe, for the rest of
- the way is down hill. With unrelaxed nerves, with morning vigor, sail
- by it, looking another way, tied to the mast like Ulysses. If the engine
- whistles, let it whistle till it is hoarse for its pains. If the bell
- rings, why should we run? We will consider what kind of music they are
- like. Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward
- through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and
- delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through
- Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through
- Church and State, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we
- come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call _reality_, and
- say, This is, and no mistake; and then begin, having a _point d'appui_,
- below freshet and frost and fire, a place where you might found a
- wall or a state, or set a lamp-post safely, or perhaps a gauge, not
- a Nilometer, but a Realometer, that future ages might know how deep a
- freshet of shams and appearances had gathered from time to time. If you
- stand right fronting and face to face to a fact, you will see the sun
- glimmer on both its surfaces, as if it were a scimitar, and feel its
- sweet edge dividing you through the heart and marrow, and so you will
- happily conclude your mortal career. Be it life or death, we crave only
- reality. If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats
- and feel cold in the extremities; if we are alive, let us go about our
- business.
- Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I
- drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin
- current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in
- the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count one. I know
- not the first letter of the alphabet. I have always been regretting that
- I was not as wise as the day I was born. The intellect is a cleaver; it
- discerns and rifts its way into the secret of things. I do not wish to
- be any more busy with my hands than is necessary. My head is hands and
- feet. I feel all my best faculties concentrated in it. My instinct tells
- me that my head is an organ for burrowing, as some creatures use their
- snout and fore paws, and with it I would mine and burrow my way through
- these hills. I think that the richest vein is somewhere hereabouts;
- so by the divining-rod and thin rising vapors I judge; and here I will
- begin to mine.
- Reading
- With a little more deliberation in the choice of their pursuits, all men
- would perhaps become essentially students and observers, for certainly
- their nature and destiny are interesting to all alike. In accumulating
- property for ourselves or our posterity, in founding a family or a
- state, or acquiring fame even, we are mortal; but in dealing with
- truth we are immortal, and need fear no change nor accident. The oldest
- Egyptian or Hindoo philosopher raised a corner of the veil from the
- statue of the divinity; and still the trembling robe remains raised, and
- I gaze upon as fresh a glory as he did, since it was I in him that was
- then so bold, and it is he in me that now reviews the vision. No dust
- has settled on that robe; no time has elapsed since that divinity was
- revealed. That time which we really improve, or which is improvable, is
- neither past, present, nor future.
- My residence was more favorable, not only to thought, but to serious
- reading, than a university; and though I was beyond the range of the
- ordinary circulating library, I had more than ever come within the
- influence of those books which circulate round the world, whose
- sentences were first written on bark, and are now merely copied from
- time to time on to linen paper. Says the poet Mîr Camar Uddîn Mast,
- "Being seated, to run through the region of the spiritual world; I have
- had this advantage in books. To be intoxicated by a single glass of
- wine; I have experienced this pleasure when I have drunk the liquor of
- the esoteric doctrines." I kept Homer's Iliad on my table through the
- summer, though I looked at his page only now and then. Incessant labor
- with my hands, at first, for I had my house to finish and my beans to
- hoe at the same time, made more study impossible. Yet I sustained myself
- by the prospect of such reading in future. I read one or two shallow
- books of travel in the intervals of my work, till that employment made
- me ashamed of myself, and I asked where it was then that _I_ lived.
- The student may read Homer or Æschylus in the Greek without danger of
- dissipation or luxuriousness, for it implies that he in some measure
- emulate their heroes, and consecrate morning hours to their pages. The
- heroic books, even if printed in the character of our mother tongue,
- will always be in a language dead to degenerate times; and we must
- laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line, conjecturing a
- larger sense than common use permits out of what wisdom and valor and
- generosity we have. The modern cheap and fertile press, with all its
- translations, has done little to bring us nearer to the heroic writers
- of antiquity. They seem as solitary, and the letter in which they
- are printed as rare and curious, as ever. It is worth the expense of
- youthful days and costly hours, if you learn only some words of an
- ancient language, which are raised out of the trivialness of the street,
- to be perpetual suggestions and provocations. It is not in vain that the
- farmer remembers and repeats the few Latin words which he has heard. Men
- sometimes speak as if the study of the classics would at length make way
- for more modern and practical studies; but the adventurous student will
- always study classics, in whatever language they may be written and
- however ancient they may be. For what are the classics but the noblest
- recorded thoughts of man? They are the only oracles which are not
- decayed, and there are such answers to the most modern inquiry in them
- as Delphi and Dodona never gave. We might as well omit to study Nature
- because she is old. To read well, that is, to read true books in a true
- spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than
- any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training
- such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole
- life to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly
- as they were written. It is not enough even to be able to speak the
- language of that nation by which they are written, for there is a
- memorable interval between the spoken and the written language, the
- language heard and the language read. The one is commonly transitory,
- a sound, a tongue, a dialect merely, almost brutish, and we learn
- it unconsciously, like the brutes, of our mothers. The other is the
- maturity and experience of that; if that is our mother tongue, this is
- our father tongue, a reserved and select expression, too significant to
- be heard by the ear, which we must be born again in order to speak. The
- crowds of men who merely spoke the Greek and Latin tongues in the Middle
- Ages were not entitled by the accident of birth to read the works of
- genius written in those languages; for these were not written in
- that Greek or Latin which they knew, but in the select language of
- literature. They had not learned the nobler dialects of Greece and Rome,
- but the very materials on which they were written were waste paper to
- them, and they prized instead a cheap contemporary literature. But when
- the several nations of Europe had acquired distinct though rude written
- languages of their own, sufficient for the purposes of their rising
- literatures, then first learning revived, and scholars were enabled to
- discern from that remoteness the treasures of antiquity. What the Roman
- and Grecian multitude could not _hear_, after the lapse of ages a few
- scholars _read_, and a few scholars only are still reading it.
- However much we may admire the orator's occasional bursts of eloquence,
- the noblest written words are commonly as far behind or above the
- fleeting spoken language as the firmament with its stars is behind
- the clouds. _There_ are the stars, and they who can may read them.
- The astronomers forever comment on and observe them. They are not
- exhalations like our daily colloquies and vaporous breath. What is
- called eloquence in the forum is commonly found to be rhetoric in the
- study. The orator yields to the inspiration of a transient occasion, and
- speaks to the mob before him, to those who can _hear_ him; but the writer,
- whose more equable life is his occasion, and who would be distracted
- by the event and the crowd which inspire the orator, speaks to the
- intellect and health of mankind, to all in any age who can _understand_
- him.
- No wonder that Alexander carried the Iliad with him on his expeditions
- in a precious casket. A written word is the choicest of relics. It is
- something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any
- other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself. It may
- be translated into every language, and not only be read but actually
- breathed from all human lips;--not be represented on canvas or in marble
- only, but be carved out of the breath of life itself. The symbol of
- an ancient man's thought becomes a modern man's speech. Two thousand
- summers have imparted to the monuments of Grecian literature, as to her
- marbles, only a maturer golden and autumnal tint, for they have carried
- their own serene and celestial atmosphere into all lands to protect them
- against the corrosion of time. Books are the treasured wealth of the
- world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations. Books, the
- oldest and the best, stand naturally and rightfully on the shelves of
- every cottage. They have no cause of their own to plead, but while they
- enlighten and sustain the reader his common sense will not refuse
- them. Their authors are a natural and irresistible aristocracy in
- every society, and, more than kings or emperors, exert an influence on
- mankind. When the illiterate and perhaps scornful trader has earned by
- enterprise and industry his coveted leisure and independence, and is
- admitted to the circles of wealth and fashion, he turns inevitably at
- last to those still higher but yet inaccessible circles of intellect and
- genius, and is sensible only of the imperfection of his culture and the
- vanity and insufficiency of all his riches, and further proves his
- good sense by the pains which he takes to secure for his children that
- intellectual culture whose want he so keenly feels; and thus it is that
- he becomes the founder of a family.
- Those who have not learned to read the ancient classics in the language
- in which they were written must have a very imperfect knowledge of the
- history of the human race; for it is remarkable that no transcript of
- them has ever been made into any modern tongue, unless our civilization
- itself may be regarded as such a transcript. Homer has never yet been
- printed in English, nor Æschylus, nor Virgil even--works as refined, as
- solidly done, and as beautiful almost as the morning itself; for
- later writers, say what we will of their genius, have rarely, if ever,
- equalled the elaborate beauty and finish and the lifelong and heroic
- literary labors of the ancients. They only talk of forgetting them who
- never knew them. It will be soon enough to forget them when we have the
- learning and the genius which will enable us to attend to and appreciate
- them. That age will be rich indeed when those relics which we call
- Classics, and the still older and more than classic but even less known
- Scriptures of the nations, shall have still further accumulated, when
- the Vaticans shall be filled with Vedas and Zendavestas and Bibles, with
- Homers and Dantes and Shakespeares, and all the centuries to come shall
- have successively deposited their trophies in the forum of the world. By
- such a pile we may hope to scale heaven at last.
- The works of the great poets have never yet been read by mankind,
- for only great poets can read them. They have only been read as the
- multitude read the stars, at most astrologically, not astronomically.
- Most men have learned to read to serve a paltry convenience, as they
- have learned to cipher in order to keep accounts and not be cheated in
- trade; but of reading as a noble intellectual exercise they know little
- or nothing; yet this only is reading, in a high sense, not that which
- lulls us as a luxury and suffers the nobler faculties to sleep the
- while, but what we have to stand on tip-toe to read and devote our most
- alert and wakeful hours to.
- I think that having learned our letters we should read the best that is
- in literature, and not be forever repeating our a-b-abs, and words of
- one syllable, in the fourth or fifth classes, sitting on the lowest and
- foremost form all our lives. Most men are satisfied if they read or hear
- read, and perchance have been convicted by the wisdom of one good book,
- the Bible, and for the rest of their lives vegetate and dissipate their
- faculties in what is called easy reading. There is a work in several
- volumes in our Circulating Library entitled "Little Reading," which I
- thought referred to a town of that name which I had not been to. There
- are those who, like cormorants and ostriches, can digest all sorts of
- this, even after the fullest dinner of meats and vegetables, for they
- suffer nothing to be wasted. If others are the machines to provide
- this provender, they are the machines to read it. They read the nine
- thousandth tale about Zebulon and Sophronia, and how they loved as none
- had ever loved before, and neither did the course of their true love run
- smooth--at any rate, how it did run and stumble, and get up again and
- go on! how some poor unfortunate got up on to a steeple, who had better
- never have gone up as far as the belfry; and then, having needlessly
- got him up there, the happy novelist rings the bell for all the world to
- come together and hear, O dear! how he did get down again! For my part,
- I think that they had better metamorphose all such aspiring heroes of
- universal noveldom into man weather-cocks, as they used to put heroes
- among the constellations, and let them swing round there till they are
- rusty, and not come down at all to bother honest men with their pranks.
- The next time the novelist rings the bell I will not stir though the
- meeting-house burn down. "The Skip of the Tip-Toe-Hop, a Romance of the
- Middle Ages, by the celebrated author of 'Tittle-Tol-Tan,' to appear
- in monthly parts; a great rush; don't all come together." All this
- they read with saucer eyes, and erect and primitive curiosity, and with
- unwearied gizzard, whose corrugations even yet need no sharpening, just
- as some little four-year-old bencher his two-cent gilt-covered
- edition of Cinderella--without any improvement, that I can see, in the
- pronunciation, or accent, or emphasis, or any more skill in extracting
- or inserting the moral. The result is dulness of sight, a stagnation of
- the vital circulations, and a general deliquium and sloughing off of all
- the intellectual faculties. This sort of gingerbread is baked daily and
- more sedulously than pure wheat or rye-and-Indian in almost every oven,
- and finds a surer market.
- The best books are not read even by those who are called good readers.
- What does our Concord culture amount to? There is in this town, with a
- very few exceptions, no taste for the best or for very good books even
- in English literature, whose words all can read and spell. Even the
- college-bred and so-called liberally educated men here and elsewhere
- have really little or no acquaintance with the English classics; and
- as for the recorded wisdom of mankind, the ancient classics and Bibles,
- which are accessible to all who will know of them, there are the
- feeblest efforts anywhere made to become acquainted with them. I know a
- woodchopper, of middle age, who takes a French paper, not for news as he
- says, for he is above that, but to "keep himself in practice," he being
- a Canadian by birth; and when I ask him what he considers the best thing
- he can do in this world, he says, beside this, to keep up and add to
- his English. This is about as much as the college-bred generally do or
- aspire to do, and they take an English paper for the purpose. One who
- has just come from reading perhaps one of the best English books will
- find how many with whom he can converse about it? Or suppose he comes
- from reading a Greek or Latin classic in the original, whose praises are
- familiar even to the so-called illiterate; he will find nobody at all
- to speak to, but must keep silence about it. Indeed, there is hardly the
- professor in our colleges, who, if he has mastered the difficulties of
- the language, has proportionally mastered the difficulties of the wit
- and poetry of a Greek poet, and has any sympathy to impart to the
- alert and heroic reader; and as for the sacred Scriptures, or Bibles of
- mankind, who in this town can tell me even their titles? Most men do not
- know that any nation but the Hebrews have had a scripture. A man, any
- man, will go considerably out of his way to pick up a silver dollar; but
- here are golden words, which the wisest men of antiquity have uttered,
- and whose worth the wise of every succeeding age have assured us
- of;--and yet we learn to read only as far as Easy Reading, the primers
- and class-books, and when we leave school, the "Little Reading," and
- story-books, which are for boys and beginners; and our reading, our
- conversation and thinking, are all on a very low level, worthy only of
- pygmies and manikins.
- I aspire to be acquainted with wiser men than this our Concord soil has
- produced, whose names are hardly known here. Or shall I hear the name of
- Plato and never read his book? As if Plato were my townsman and I never
- saw him--my next neighbor and I never heard him speak or attended to
- the wisdom of his words. But how actually is it? His Dialogues, which
- contain what was immortal in him, lie on the next shelf, and yet I never
- read them. We are underbred and low-lived and illiterate; and in this
- respect I confess I do not make any very broad distinction between
- the illiterateness of my townsman who cannot read at all and the
- illiterateness of him who has learned to read only what is for
- children and feeble intellects. We should be as good as the worthies of
- antiquity, but partly by first knowing how good they were. We are a race
- of tit-men, and soar but little higher in our intellectual flights than
- the columns of the daily paper.
- It is not all books that are as dull as their readers. There are
- probably words addressed to our condition exactly, which, if we could
- really hear and understand, would be more salutary than the morning or
- the spring to our lives, and possibly put a new aspect on the face of
- things for us. How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the
- reading of a book! The book exists for us, perchance, which will explain
- our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we
- may find somewhere uttered. These same questions that disturb and puzzle
- and confound us have in their turn occurred to all the wise men; not one
- has been omitted; and each has answered them, according to his ability,
- by his words and his life. Moreover, with wisdom we shall learn
- liberality. The solitary hired man on a farm in the outskirts of
- Concord, who has had his second birth and peculiar religious experience,
- and is driven as he believes into the silent gravity and exclusiveness
- by his faith, may think it is not true; but Zoroaster, thousands of
- years ago, travelled the same road and had the same experience; but
- he, being wise, knew it to be universal, and treated his neighbors
- accordingly, and is even said to have invented and established worship
- among men. Let him humbly commune with Zoroaster then, and through the
- liberalizing influence of all the worthies, with Jesus Christ himself,
- and let "our church" go by the board.
- We boast that we belong to the Nineteenth Century and are making the
- most rapid strides of any nation. But consider how little this village
- does for its own culture. I do not wish to flatter my townsmen, nor to
- be flattered by them, for that will not advance either of us. We need
- to be provoked--goaded like oxen, as we are, into a trot. We have a
- comparatively decent system of common schools, schools for infants only;
- but excepting the half-starved Lyceum in the winter, and latterly
- the puny beginning of a library suggested by the State, no school for
- ourselves. We spend more on almost any article of bodily aliment or
- ailment than on our mental aliment. It is time that we had uncommon
- schools, that we did not leave off our education when we begin to be men
- and women. It is time that villages were universities, and their elder
- inhabitants the fellows of universities, with leisure--if they are,
- indeed, so well off--to pursue liberal studies the rest of their lives.
- Shall the world be confined to one Paris or one Oxford forever? Cannot
- students be boarded here and get a liberal education under the skies of
- Concord? Can we not hire some Abelard to lecture to us? Alas! what with
- foddering the cattle and tending the store, we are kept from school too
- long, and our education is sadly neglected. In this country, the village
- should in some respects take the place of the nobleman of Europe. It
- should be the patron of the fine arts. It is rich enough. It wants only
- the magnanimity and refinement. It can spend money enough on such things
- as farmers and traders value, but it is thought Utopian to propose
- spending money for things which more intelligent men know to be of
- far more worth. This town has spent seventeen thousand dollars on a
- town-house, thank fortune or politics, but probably it will not spend so
- much on living wit, the true meat to put into that shell, in a hundred
- years. The one hundred and twenty-five dollars annually subscribed for a
- Lyceum in the winter is better spent than any other equal sum raised in
- the town. If we live in the Nineteenth Century, why should we not enjoy
- the advantages which the Nineteenth Century offers? Why should our life
- be in any respect provincial? If we will read newspapers, why not
- skip the gossip of Boston and take the best newspaper in the world at
- once?--not be sucking the pap of "neutral family" papers, or browsing
- "Olive Branches" here in New England. Let the reports of all the learned
- societies come to us, and we will see if they know anything. Why
- should we leave it to Harper & Brothers and Redding & Co. to select
- our reading? As the nobleman of cultivated taste surrounds himself
- with whatever conduces to his culture--genius--learning--wit--books--
- paintings--statuary--music--philosophical instruments, and the like; so
- let the village do--not stop short at a pedagogue, a parson, a sexton, a
- parish library, and three selectmen, because our Pilgrim forefathers got
- through a cold winter once on a bleak rock with these. To act
- collectively is according to the spirit of our institutions; and I am
- confident that, as our circumstances are more flourishing, our means are
- greater than the nobleman's. New England can hire all the wise men in
- the world to come and teach her, and board them round the while, and not
- be provincial at all. That is the _uncommon_ school we want. Instead of
- noblemen, let us have noble villages of men. If it is necessary, omit
- one bridge over the river, go round a little there, and throw one arch
- at least over the darker gulf of ignorance which surrounds us.
- Sounds
- But while we are confined to books, though the most select and classic,
- and read only particular written languages, which are themselves but
- dialects and provincial, we are in danger of forgetting the language
- which all things and events speak without metaphor, which alone is
- copious and standard. Much is published, but little printed. The rays
- which stream through the shutter will be no longer remembered when the
- shutter is wholly removed. No method nor discipline can supersede the
- necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history or
- philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society,
- or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of
- looking always at what is to be seen? Will you be a reader, a student
- merely, or a seer? Read your fate, see what is before you, and walk on
- into futurity.
- I did not read books the first summer; I hoed beans. Nay, I often did
- better than this. There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice
- the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or
- hands. I love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes, in a summer morning,
- having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise
- till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs,
- in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sing around or
- flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in at
- my west window, or the noise of some traveller's wagon on the distant
- highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time. I grew in those seasons
- like corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of the
- hands would have been. They were not time subtracted from my life, but
- so much over and above my usual allowance. I realized what the Orientals
- mean by contemplation and the forsaking of works. For the most part, I
- minded not how the hours went. The day advanced as if to light some
- work of mine; it was morning, and lo, now it is evening, and nothing
- memorable is accomplished. Instead of singing like the birds, I silently
- smiled at my incessant good fortune. As the sparrow had its trill,
- sitting on the hickory before my door, so had I my chuckle or suppressed
- warble which he might hear out of my nest. My days were not days of the
- week, bearing the stamp of any heathen deity, nor were they minced into
- hours and fretted by the ticking of a clock; for I lived like the Puri
- Indians, of whom it is said that "for yesterday, today, and tomorrow
- they have only one word, and they express the variety of meaning by
- pointing backward for yesterday forward for tomorrow, and overhead for
- the passing day." This was sheer idleness to my fellow-townsmen, no
- doubt; but if the birds and flowers had tried me by their standard, I
- should not have been found wanting. A man must find his occasions in
- himself, it is true. The natural day is very calm, and will hardly
- reprove his indolence.
- I had this advantage, at least, in my mode of life, over those who were
- obliged to look abroad for amusement, to society and the theatre, that
- my life itself was become my amusement and never ceased to be novel.
- It was a drama of many scenes and without an end. If we were always,
- indeed, getting our living, and regulating our lives according to the
- last and best mode we had learned, we should never be troubled with
- ennui. Follow your genius closely enough, and it will not fail to show
- you a fresh prospect every hour. Housework was a pleasant pastime. When
- my floor was dirty, I rose early, and, setting all my furniture out of
- doors on the grass, bed and bedstead making but one budget, dashed water
- on the floor, and sprinkled white sand from the pond on it, and then
- with a broom scrubbed it clean and white; and by the time the villagers
- had broken their fast the morning sun had dried my house sufficiently to
- allow me to move in again, and my meditations were almost uninterupted.
- It was pleasant to see my whole household effects out on the grass,
- making a little pile like a gypsy's pack, and my three-legged table,
- from which I did not remove the books and pen and ink, standing amid the
- pines and hickories. They seemed glad to get out themselves, and as if
- unwilling to be brought in. I was sometimes tempted to stretch an awning
- over them and take my seat there. It was worth the while to see the sun
- shine on these things, and hear the free wind blow on them; so much more
- interesting most familiar objects look out of doors than in the house. A
- bird sits on the next bough, life-everlasting grows under the table,
- and blackberry vines run round its legs; pine cones, chestnut burs, and
- strawberry leaves are strewn about. It looked as if this was the way
- these forms came to be transferred to our furniture, to tables, chairs,
- and bedsteads--because they once stood in their midst.
- My house was on the side of a hill, immediately on the edge of
- the larger wood, in the midst of a young forest of pitch pines and
- hickories, and half a dozen rods from the pond, to which a narrow
- footpath led down the hill. In my front yard grew the strawberry,
- blackberry, and life-everlasting, johnswort and goldenrod, shrub oaks
- and sand cherry, blueberry and groundnut. Near the end of May, the sand
- cherry (_Cerasus pumila_) adorned the sides of the path with its delicate
- flowers arranged in umbels cylindrically about its short stems, which
- last, in the fall, weighed down with good-sized and handsome cherries,
- fell over in wreaths like rays on every side. I tasted them out of
- compliment to Nature, though they were scarcely palatable. The sumach
- (_Rhus glabra_) grew luxuriantly about the house, pushing up through the
- embankment which I had made, and growing five or six feet the first
- season. Its broad pinnate tropical leaf was pleasant though strange to
- look on. The large buds, suddenly pushing out late in the spring from
- dry sticks which had seemed to be dead, developed themselves as by
- magic into graceful green and tender boughs, an inch in diameter; and
- sometimes, as I sat at my window, so heedlessly did they grow and tax
- their weak joints, I heard a fresh and tender bough suddenly fall like
- a fan to the ground, when there was not a breath of air stirring, broken
- off by its own weight. In August, the large masses of berries, which,
- when in flower, had attracted many wild bees, gradually assumed their
- bright velvety crimson hue, and by their weight again bent down and
- broke the tender limbs.
- * * * * *
- As I sit at my window this summer afternoon, hawks are circling about my
- clearing; the tantivy of wild pigeons, flying by two and threes athwart
- my view, or perching restless on the white pine boughs behind my house,
- gives a voice to the air; a fish hawk dimples the glassy surface of the
- pond and brings up a fish; a mink steals out of the marsh before my door
- and seizes a frog by the shore; the sedge is bending under the weight of
- the reed-birds flitting hither and thither; and for the last half-hour I
- have heard the rattle of railroad cars, now dying away and then reviving
- like the beat of a partridge, conveying travellers from Boston to the
- country. For I did not live so out of the world as that boy who, as I
- hear, was put out to a farmer in the east part of the town, but ere long
- ran away and came home again, quite down at the heel and homesick. He
- had never seen such a dull and out-of-the-way place; the folks were all
- gone off; why, you couldn't even hear the whistle! I doubt if there is
- such a place in Massachusetts now:--
- "In truth, our village has become a butt
- For one of those fleet railroad shafts, and o'er
- Our peaceful plain its soothing sound is--Concord."
- The Fitchburg Railroad touches the pond about a hundred rods south of
- where I dwell. I usually go to the village along its causeway, and am,
- as it were, related to society by this link. The men on the freight
- trains, who go over the whole length of the road, bow to me as to an old
- acquaintance, they pass me so often, and apparently they take me for an
- employee; and so I am. I too would fain be a track-repairer somewhere in
- the orbit of the earth.
- The whistle of the locomotive penetrates my woods summer and winter,
- sounding like the scream of a hawk sailing over some farmer's yard,
- informing me that many restless city merchants are arriving within the
- circle of the town, or adventurous country traders from the other side.
- As they come under one horizon, they shout their warning to get off the
- track to the other, heard sometimes through the circles of two towns.
- Here come your groceries, country; your rations, countrymen! Nor is
- there any man so independent on his farm that he can say them nay. And
- here's your pay for them! screams the countryman's whistle; timber like
- long battering-rams going twenty miles an hour against the city's walls,
- and chairs enough to seat all the weary and heavy-laden that dwell
- within them. With such huge and lumbering civility the country hands a
- chair to the city. All the Indian huckleberry hills are stripped, all
- the cranberry meadows are raked into the city. Up comes the cotton, down
- goes the woven cloth; up comes the silk, down goes the woollen; up come
- the books, but down goes the wit that writes them.
- When I meet the engine with its train of cars moving off with planetary
- motion--or, rather, like a comet, for the beholder knows not if with
- that velocity and with that direction it will ever revisit this system,
- since its orbit does not look like a returning curve--with its steam
- cloud like a banner streaming behind in golden and silver wreaths, like
- many a downy cloud which I have seen, high in the heavens, unfolding its
- masses to the light--as if this traveling demigod, this cloud-compeller,
- would ere long take the sunset sky for the livery of his train; when
- I hear the iron horse make the hills echo with his snort like thunder,
- shaking the earth with his feet, and breathing fire and smoke from his
- nostrils (what kind of winged horse or fiery dragon they will put into
- the new Mythology I don't know), it seems as if the earth had got a
- race now worthy to inhabit it. If all were as it seems, and men made the
- elements their servants for noble ends! If the cloud that hangs over the
- engine were the perspiration of heroic deeds, or as beneficent as that
- which floats over the farmer's fields, then the elements and Nature
- herself would cheerfully accompany men on their errands and be their
- escort.
- I watch the passage of the morning cars with the same feeling that I
- do the rising of the sun, which is hardly more regular. Their train
- of clouds stretching far behind and rising higher and higher, going to
- heaven while the cars are going to Boston, conceals the sun for a minute
- and casts my distant field into the shade, a celestial train beside
- which the petty train of cars which hugs the earth is but the barb
- of the spear. The stabler of the iron horse was up early this winter
- morning by the light of the stars amid the mountains, to fodder and
- harness his steed. Fire, too, was awakened thus early to put the vital
- heat in him and get him off. If the enterprise were as innocent as it is
- early! If the snow lies deep, they strap on his snowshoes, and, with the
- giant plow, plow a furrow from the mountains to the seaboard, in which
- the cars, like a following drill-barrow, sprinkle all the restless men
- and floating merchandise in the country for seed. All day the fire-steed
- flies over the country, stopping only that his master may rest, and I am
- awakened by his tramp and defiant snort at midnight, when in some remote
- glen in the woods he fronts the elements incased in ice and snow; and he
- will reach his stall only with the morning star, to start once more on
- his travels without rest or slumber. Or perchance, at evening, I hear
- him in his stable blowing off the superfluous energy of the day, that he
- may calm his nerves and cool his liver and brain for a few hours of
- iron slumber. If the enterprise were as heroic and commanding as it is
- protracted and unwearied!
- Far through unfrequented woods on the confines of towns, where once only
- the hunter penetrated by day, in the darkest night dart these bright
- saloons without the knowledge of their inhabitants; this moment stopping
- at some brilliant station-house in town or city, where a social crowd
- is gathered, the next in the Dismal Swamp, scaring the owl and fox. The
- startings and arrivals of the cars are now the epochs in the village
- day. They go and come with such regularity and precision, and their
- whistle can be heard so far, that the farmers set their clocks by them,
- and thus one well-conducted institution regulates a whole country.
- Have not men improved somewhat in punctuality since the railroad was
- invented? Do they not talk and think faster in the depot than they did
- in the stage-office? There is something electrifying in the atmosphere
- of the former place. I have been astonished at the miracles it has
- wrought; that some of my neighbors, who, I should have prophesied, once
- for all, would never get to Boston by so prompt a conveyance, are on
- hand when the bell rings. To do things "railroad fashion" is now the
- byword; and it is worth the while to be warned so often and so sincerely
- by any power to get off its track. There is no stopping to read the
- riot act, no firing over the heads of the mob, in this case. We have
- constructed a fate, an _Atropos_, that never turns aside. (Let that be
- the name of your engine.) Men are advertised that at a certain hour and
- minute these bolts will be shot toward particular points of the compass;
- yet it interferes with no man's business, and the children go to school
- on the other track. We live the steadier for it. We are all educated
- thus to be sons of Tell. The air is full of invisible bolts. Every path
- but your own is the path of fate. Keep on your own track, then.
- What recommends commerce to me is its enterprise and bravery. It does
- not clasp its hands and pray to Jupiter. I see these men every day go
- about their business with more or less courage and content, doing more
- even than they suspect, and perchance better employed than they could
- have consciously devised. I am less affected by their heroism who stood
- up for half an hour in the front line at Buena Vista, than by the steady
- and cheerful valor of the men who inhabit the snowplow for their winter
- quarters; who have not merely the three-o'-clock-in-the-morning courage,
- which Bonaparte thought was the rarest, but whose courage does not go to
- rest so early, who go to sleep only when the storm sleeps or the sinews
- of their iron steed are frozen. On this morning of the Great Snow,
- perchance, which is still raging and chilling men's blood, I bear the
- muffled tone of their engine bell from out the fog bank of their chilled
- breath, which announces that the cars _are coming_, without long delay,
- notwithstanding the veto of a New England northeast snow-storm, and
- I behold the plowmen covered with snow and rime, their heads peering,
- above the mould-board which is turning down other than daisies and the
- nests of field mice, like bowlders of the Sierra Nevada, that occupy an
- outside place in the universe.
- Commerce is unexpectedly confident and serene, alert, adventurous, and
- unwearied. It is very natural in its methods withal, far more so than
- many fantastic enterprises and sentimental experiments, and hence its
- singular success. I am refreshed and expanded when the freight train
- rattles past me, and I smell the stores which go dispensing their odors
- all the way from Long Wharf to Lake Champlain, reminding me of foreign
- parts, of coral reefs, and Indian oceans, and tropical climes, and the
- extent of the globe. I feel more like a citizen of the world at the
- sight of the palm-leaf which will cover so many flaxen New England heads
- the next summer, the Manilla hemp and cocoanut husks, the old junk,
- gunny bags, scrap iron, and rusty nails. This carload of torn sails is
- more legible and interesting now than if they should be wrought into
- paper and printed books. Who can write so graphically the history of
- the storms they have weathered as these rents have done? They are
- proof-sheets which need no correction. Here goes lumber from the Maine
- woods, which did not go out to sea in the last freshet, risen four
- dollars on the thousand because of what did go out or was split up;
- pine, spruce, cedar--first, second, third, and fourth qualities,
- so lately all of one quality, to wave over the bear, and moose, and
- caribou. Next rolls Thomaston lime, a prime lot, which will get far
- among the hills before it gets slacked. These rags in bales, of all hues
- and qualities, the lowest condition to which cotton and linen descend,
- the final result of dress--of patterns which are now no longer cried up,
- unless it be in Milwaukee, as those splendid articles, English, French,
- or American prints, ginghams, muslins, etc., gathered from all quarters
- both of fashion and poverty, going to become paper of one color or a
- few shades only, on which, forsooth, will be written tales of real life,
- high and low, and founded on fact! This closed car smells of salt fish,
- the strong New England and commercial scent, reminding me of the Grand
- Banks and the fisheries. Who has not seen a salt fish, thoroughly
- cured for this world, so that nothing can spoil it, and putting the
- perseverance of the saints to the blush? with which you may sweep or
- pave the streets, and split your kindlings, and the teamster shelter
- himself and his lading against sun, wind, and rain behind it--and the
- trader, as a Concord trader once did, hang it up by his door for a sign
- when he commences business, until at last his oldest customer cannot
- tell surely whether it be animal, vegetable, or mineral, and yet it
- shall be as pure as a snowflake, and if it be put into a pot and boiled,
- will come out an excellent dun-fish for a Saturday's dinner. Next
- Spanish hides, with the tails still preserving their twist and the angle
- of elevation they had when the oxen that wore them were careering over
- the pampas of the Spanish Main--a type of all obstinacy, and evincing
- how almost hopeless and incurable are all constitutional vices. I
- confess, that practically speaking, when I have learned a man's real
- disposition, I have no hopes of changing it for the better or worse
- in this state of existence. As the Orientals say, "A cur's tail may be
- warmed, and pressed, and bound round with ligatures, and after a twelve
- years' labor bestowed upon it, still it will retain its natural form."
- The only effectual cure for such inveteracies as these tails exhibit is
- to make glue of them, which I believe is what is usually done with them,
- and then they will stay put and stick. Here is a hogshead of molasses
- or of brandy directed to John Smith, Cuttingsville, Vermont, some
- trader among the Green Mountains, who imports for the farmers near his
- clearing, and now perchance stands over his bulkhead and thinks of
- the last arrivals on the coast, how they may affect the price for him,
- telling his customers this moment, as he has told them twenty times
- before this morning, that he expects some by the next train of prime
- quality. It is advertised in the Cuttingsville Times.
- While these things go up other things come down. Warned by the whizzing
- sound, I look up from my book and see some tall pine, hewn on far
- northern hills, which has winged its way over the Green Mountains and
- the Connecticut, shot like an arrow through the township within ten
- minutes, and scarce another eye beholds it; going
- "to be the mast
- Of some great ammiral."
- And hark! here comes the cattle-train bearing the cattle of a thousand
- hills, sheepcots, stables, and cow-yards in the air, drovers with their
- sticks, and shepherd boys in the midst of their flocks, all but the
- mountain pastures, whirled along like leaves blown from the mountains by
- the September gales. The air is filled with the bleating of calves and
- sheep, and the hustling of oxen, as if a pastoral valley were going by.
- When the old bell-wether at the head rattles his bell, the mountains
- do indeed skip like rams and the little hills like lambs. A carload
- of drovers, too, in the midst, on a level with their droves now, their
- vocation gone, but still clinging to their useless sticks as their badge
- of office. But their dogs, where are they? It is a stampede to them;
- they are quite thrown out; they have lost the scent. Methinks I hear
- them barking behind the Peterboro' Hills, or panting up the western
- slope of the Green Mountains. They will not be in at the death. Their
- vocation, too, is gone. Their fidelity and sagacity are below par now.
- They will slink back to their kennels in disgrace, or perchance run wild
- and strike a league with the wolf and the fox. So is your pastoral life
- whirled past and away. But the bell rings, and I must get off the track
- and let the cars go by;--
- What's the railroad to me?
- I never go to see
- Where it ends.
- It fills a few hollows,
- And makes banks for the swallows,
- It sets the sand a-blowing,
- And the blackberries a-growing,
- but I cross it like a cart-path in the woods. I will not have my eyes
- put out and my ears spoiled by its smoke and steam and hissing.
- * * * * *
- Now that the cars are gone by and all the restless world with them, and
- the fishes in the pond no longer feel their rumbling, I am more alone
- than ever. For the rest of the long afternoon, perhaps, my meditations
- are interrupted only by the faint rattle of a carriage or team along the
- distant highway.
- Sometimes, on Sundays, I heard the bells, the Lincoln, Acton, Bedford,
- or Concord bell, when the wind was favorable, a faint, sweet, and, as
- it were, natural melody, worth importing into the wilderness. At
- a sufficient distance over the woods this sound acquires a certain
- vibratory hum, as if the pine needles in the horizon were the strings of
- a harp which it swept. All sound heard at the greatest possible distance
- produces one and the same effect, a vibration of the universal lyre,
- just as the intervening atmosphere makes a distant ridge of earth
- interesting to our eyes by the azure tint it imparts to it. There came
- to me in this case a melody which the air had strained, and which had
- conversed with every leaf and needle of the wood, that portion of the
- sound which the elements had taken up and modulated and echoed from vale
- to vale. The echo is, to some extent, an original sound, and therein
- is the magic and charm of it. It is not merely a repetition of what was
- worth repeating in the bell, but partly the voice of the wood; the same
- trivial words and notes sung by a wood-nymph.
- At evening, the distant lowing of some cow in the horizon beyond the
- woods sounded sweet and melodious, and at first I would mistake it for
- the voices of certain minstrels by whom I was sometimes serenaded, who
- might be straying over hill and dale; but soon I was not unpleasantly
- disappointed when it was prolonged into the cheap and natural music of
- the cow. I do not mean to be satirical, but to express my appreciation
- of those youths' singing, when I state that I perceived clearly that
- it was akin to the music of the cow, and they were at length one
- articulation of Nature.
- Regularly at half-past seven, in one part of the summer, after the
- evening train had gone by, the whip-poor-wills chanted their vespers for
- half an hour, sitting on a stump by my door, or upon the ridge-pole of
- the house. They would begin to sing almost with as much precision as a
- clock, within five minutes of a particular time, referred to the setting
- of the sun, every evening. I had a rare opportunity to become acquainted
- with their habits. Sometimes I heard four or five at once in different
- parts of the wood, by accident one a bar behind another, and so near me
- that I distinguished not only the cluck after each note, but often that
- singular buzzing sound like a fly in a spider's web, only proportionally
- louder. Sometimes one would circle round and round me in the woods a few
- feet distant as if tethered by a string, when probably I was near its
- eggs. They sang at intervals throughout the night, and were again as
- musical as ever just before and about dawn.
- When other birds are still, the screech owls take up the strain, like
- mourning women their ancient u-lu-lu. Their dismal scream is truly Ben
- Jonsonian. Wise midnight hags! It is no honest and blunt tu-whit tu-who
- of the poets, but, without jesting, a most solemn graveyard ditty, the
- mutual consolations of suicide lovers remembering the pangs and the
- delights of supernal love in the infernal groves. Yet I love to hear
- their wailing, their doleful responses, trilled along the woodside;
- reminding me sometimes of music and singing birds; as if it were the
- dark and tearful side of music, the regrets and sighs that would fain be
- sung. They are the spirits, the low spirits and melancholy forebodings,
- of fallen souls that once in human shape night-walked the earth and did
- the deeds of darkness, now expiating their sins with their wailing hymns
- or threnodies in the scenery of their transgressions. They give me a
- new sense of the variety and capacity of that nature which is our common
- dwelling. _Oh-o-o-o-o that I never had been bor-r-r-r-n!_ sighs one on
- this side of the pond, and circles with the restlessness of despair
- to some new perch on the gray oaks. Then--_that I never had been
- bor-r-r-r-n!_ echoes another on the farther side with tremulous
- sincerity, and--_bor-r-r-r-n!_ comes faintly from far in the Lincoln
- woods.
- I was also serenaded by a hooting owl. Near at hand you could fancy
- it the most melancholy sound in Nature, as if she meant by this to
- stereotype and make permanent in her choir the dying moans of a human
- being--some poor weak relic of mortality who has left hope behind, and
- howls like an animal, yet with human sobs, on entering the dark valley,
- made more awful by a certain gurgling melodiousness--I find myself
- beginning with the letters _gl_ when I try to imitate it--expressive of
- a mind which has reached the gelatinous, mildewy stage in the
- mortification of all healthy and courageous thought. It reminded me
- of ghouls and idiots and insane howlings. But now one answers from far
- woods in a strain made really melodious by distance--_Hoo hoo hoo,
- hoorer hoo_; and indeed for the most part it suggested only pleasing
- associations, whether heard by day or night, summer or winter.
- I rejoice that there are owls. Let them do the idiotic and maniacal
- hooting for men. It is a sound admirably suited to swamps and twilight
- woods which no day illustrates, suggesting a vast and undeveloped nature
- which men have not recognized. They represent the stark twilight and
- unsatisfied thoughts which all have. All day the sun has shone on the
- surface of some savage swamp, where the single spruce stands hung with
- usnea lichens, and small hawks circulate above, and the chickadee lisps
- amid the evergreens, and the partridge and rabbit skulk beneath; but now
- a more dismal and fitting day dawns, and a different race of creatures
- awakes to express the meaning of Nature there.
- Late in the evening I heard the distant rumbling of wagons over
- bridges--a sound heard farther than almost any other at night--the
- baying of dogs, and sometimes again the lowing of some disconsolate cow
- in a distant barn-yard. In the mean-while all the shore rang with the
- trump of bullfrogs, the sturdy spirits of ancient wine-bibbers and
- wassailers, still unrepentant, trying to sing a catch in their Stygian
- lake--if the Walden nymphs will pardon the comparison, for though there
- are almost no weeds, there are frogs there--who would fain keep up the
- hilarious rules of their old festal tables, though their voices have
- waxed hoarse and solemnly grave, mocking at mirth, and the wine has lost
- its flavor, and become only liquor to distend their paunches, and sweet
- intoxication never comes to drown the memory of the past, but mere
- saturation and waterloggedness and distention. The most aldermanic, with
- his chin upon a heart-leaf, which serves for a napkin to his drooling
- chaps, under this northern shore quaffs a deep draught of the
- once scorned water, and passes round the cup with the ejaculation
- _tr-r-r-oonk, tr-r-r--oonk, tr-r-r-oonk!_ and straightway comes over the
- water from some distant cove the same password repeated, where the
- next in seniority and girth has gulped down to his mark; and when this
- observance has made the circuit of the shores, then ejaculates the
- master of ceremonies, with satisfaction, _tr-r-r-oonk!_ and each in
- his turn repeats the same down to the least distended, leakiest, and
- flabbiest paunched, that there be no mistake; and then the howl goes
- round again and again, until the sun disperses the morning mist, and
- only the patriarch is not under the pond, but vainly bellowing _troonk_
- from time to time, and pausing for a reply.
- I am not sure that I ever heard the sound of cock-crowing from my
- clearing, and I thought that it might be worth the while to keep a
- cockerel for his music merely, as a singing bird. The note of this once
- wild Indian pheasant is certainly the most remarkable of any bird's, and
- if they could be naturalized without being domesticated, it would soon
- become the most famous sound in our woods, surpassing the clangor of the
- goose and the hooting of the owl; and then imagine the cackling of the
- hens to fill the pauses when their lords' clarions rested! No wonder
- that man added this bird to his tame stock--to say nothing of the eggs
- and drumsticks. To walk in a winter morning in a wood where these birds
- abounded, their native woods, and hear the wild cockerels crow on the
- trees, clear and shrill for miles over the resounding earth, drowning
- the feebler notes of other birds--think of it! It would put nations on
- the alert. Who would not be early to rise, and rise earlier and earlier
- every successive day of his life, till he became unspeakably healthy,
- wealthy, and wise? This foreign bird's note is celebrated by the poets
- of all countries along with the notes of their native songsters. All
- climates agree with brave Chanticleer. He is more indigenous even than
- the natives. His health is ever good, his lungs are sound, his spirits
- never flag. Even the sailor on the Atlantic and Pacific is awakened by
- his voice; but its shrill sound never roused me from my slumbers. I kept
- neither dog, cat, cow, pig, nor hens, so that you would have said
- there was a deficiency of domestic sounds; neither the churn, nor the
- spinning-wheel, nor even the singing of the kettle, nor the hissing of
- the urn, nor children crying, to comfort one. An old-fashioned man would
- have lost his senses or died of ennui before this. Not even rats in the
- wall, for they were starved out, or rather were never baited in--only
- squirrels on the roof and under the floor, a whip-poor-will on the
- ridge-pole, a blue jay screaming beneath the window, a hare or woodchuck
- under the house, a screech owl or a cat owl behind it, a flock of wild
- geese or a laughing loon on the pond, and a fox to bark in the night.
- Not even a lark or an oriole, those mild plantation birds, ever visited
- my clearing. No cockerels to crow nor hens to cackle in the yard. No
- yard! but unfenced nature reaching up to your very sills. A young forest
- growing up under your meadows, and wild sumachs and blackberry vines
- breaking through into your cellar; sturdy pitch pines rubbing and
- creaking against the shingles for want of room, their roots reaching
- quite under the house. Instead of a scuttle or a blind blown off in the
- gale--a pine tree snapped off or torn up by the roots behind your
- house for fuel. Instead of no path to the front-yard gate in the Great
- Snow--no gate--no front-yard--and no path to the civilized world.
- Solitude
- This is a delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense, and
- imbibes delight through every pore. I go and come with a strange liberty
- in Nature, a part of herself. As I walk along the stony shore of the
- pond in my shirt-sleeves, though it is cool as well as cloudy and windy,
- and I see nothing special to attract me, all the elements are unusually
- congenial to me. The bullfrogs trump to usher in the night, and the note
- of the whip-poor-will is borne on the rippling wind from over the water.
- Sympathy with the fluttering alder and poplar leaves almost takes away
- my breath; yet, like the lake, my serenity is rippled but not ruffled.
- These small waves raised by the evening wind are as remote from storm
- as the smooth reflecting surface. Though it is now dark, the wind still
- blows and roars in the wood, the waves still dash, and some creatures
- lull the rest with their notes. The repose is never complete. The
- wildest animals do not repose, but seek their prey now; the fox, and
- skunk, and rabbit, now roam the fields and woods without fear. They are
- Nature's watchmen--links which connect the days of animated life.
- When I return to my house I find that visitors have been there and left
- their cards, either a bunch of flowers, or a wreath of evergreen, or a
- name in pencil on a yellow walnut leaf or a chip. They who come rarely
- to the woods take some little piece of the forest into their hands
- to play with by the way, which they leave, either intentionally or
- accidentally. One has peeled a willow wand, woven it into a ring, and
- dropped it on my table. I could always tell if visitors had called in
- my absence, either by the bended twigs or grass, or the print of their
- shoes, and generally of what sex or age or quality they were by some
- slight trace left, as a flower dropped, or a bunch of grass plucked and
- thrown away, even as far off as the railroad, half a mile distant, or by
- the lingering odor of a cigar or pipe. Nay, I was frequently notified of
- the passage of a traveller along the highway sixty rods off by the scent
- of his pipe.
- There is commonly sufficient space about us. Our horizon is never quite
- at our elbows. The thick wood is not just at our door, nor the pond, but
- somewhat is always clearing, familiar and worn by us, appropriated and
- fenced in some way, and reclaimed from Nature. For what reason have I
- this vast range and circuit, some square miles of unfrequented forest,
- for my privacy, abandoned to me by men? My nearest neighbor is a mile
- distant, and no house is visible from any place but the hill-tops within
- half a mile of my own. I have my horizon bounded by woods all to myself;
- a distant view of the railroad where it touches the pond on the one
- hand, and of the fence which skirts the woodland road on the other. But
- for the most part it is as solitary where I live as on the prairies. It
- is as much Asia or Africa as New England. I have, as it were, my own sun
- and moon and stars, and a little world all to myself. At night there was
- never a traveller passed my house, or knocked at my door, more than if
- I were the first or last man; unless it were in the spring, when at long
- intervals some came from the village to fish for pouts--they plainly
- fished much more in the Walden Pond of their own natures, and baited
- their hooks with darkness--but they soon retreated, usually with light
- baskets, and left "the world to darkness and to me," and the black
- kernel of the night was never profaned by any human neighborhood. I
- believe that men are generally still a little afraid of the dark,
- though the witches are all hung, and Christianity and candles have been
- introduced.
- Yet I experienced sometimes that the most sweet and tender, the most
- innocent and encouraging society may be found in any natural object,
- even for the poor misanthrope and most melancholy man. There can be no
- very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of Nature and has
- his senses still. There was never yet such a storm but it was Æolian
- music to a healthy and innocent ear. Nothing can rightly compel a simple
- and brave man to a vulgar sadness. While I enjoy the friendship of the
- seasons I trust that nothing can make life a burden to me. The gentle
- rain which waters my beans and keeps me in the house today is not drear
- and melancholy, but good for me too. Though it prevents my hoeing them,
- it is of far more worth than my hoeing. If it should continue so long as
- to cause the seeds to rot in the ground and destroy the potatoes in the
- low lands, it would still be good for the grass on the uplands, and,
- being good for the grass, it would be good for me. Sometimes, when I
- compare myself with other men, it seems as if I were more favored by the
- gods than they, beyond any deserts that I am conscious of; as if I had
- a warrant and surety at their hands which my fellows have not, and were
- especially guided and guarded. I do not flatter myself, but if it be
- possible they flatter me. I have never felt lonesome, or in the least
- oppressed by a sense of solitude, but once, and that was a few weeks
- after I came to the woods, when, for an hour, I doubted if the near
- neighborhood of man was not essential to a serene and healthy life. To
- be alone was something unpleasant. But I was at the same time conscious
- of a slight insanity in my mood, and seemed to foresee my recovery.
- In the midst of a gentle rain while these thoughts prevailed, I was
- suddenly sensible of such sweet and beneficent society in Nature, in
- the very pattering of the drops, and in every sound and sight around my
- house, an infinite and unaccountable friendliness all at once like
- an atmosphere sustaining me, as made the fancied advantages of human
- neighborhood insignificant, and I have never thought of them since.
- Every little pine needle expanded and swelled with sympathy and
- befriended me. I was so distinctly made aware of the presence of
- something kindred to me, even in scenes which we are accustomed to call
- wild and dreary, and also that the nearest of blood to me and humanest
- was not a person nor a villager, that I thought no place could ever be
- strange to me again.
- "Mourning untimely consumes the sad;
- Few are their days in the land of the living,
- Beautiful daughter of Toscar."
- Some of my pleasantest hours were during the long rain-storms in the
- spring or fall, which confined me to the house for the afternoon as well
- as the forenoon, soothed by their ceaseless roar and pelting; when an
- early twilight ushered in a long evening in which many thoughts had time
- to take root and unfold themselves. In those driving northeast rains
- which tried the village houses so, when the maids stood ready with mop
- and pail in front entries to keep the deluge out, I sat behind my door
- in my little house, which was all entry, and thoroughly enjoyed its
- protection. In one heavy thunder-shower the lightning struck a large
- pitch pine across the pond, making a very conspicuous and perfectly
- regular spiral groove from top to bottom, an inch or more deep, and four
- or five inches wide, as you would groove a walking-stick. I passed it
- again the other day, and was struck with awe on looking up and beholding
- that mark, now more distinct than ever, where a terrific and resistless
- bolt came down out of the harmless sky eight years ago. Men frequently
- say to me, "I should think you would feel lonesome down there, and want
- to be nearer to folks, rainy and snowy days and nights especially." I
- am tempted to reply to such--This whole earth which we inhabit is but
- a point in space. How far apart, think you, dwell the two most distant
- inhabitants of yonder star, the breadth of whose disk cannot be
- appreciated by our instruments? Why should I feel lonely? is not our
- planet in the Milky Way? This which you put seems to me not to be the
- most important question. What sort of space is that which separates
- a man from his fellows and makes him solitary? I have found that no
- exertion of the legs can bring two minds much nearer to one another.
- What do we want most to dwell near to? Not to many men surely,
- the depot, the post-office, the bar-room, the meeting-house, the
- school-house, the grocery, Beacon Hill, or the Five Points, where men
- most congregate, but to the perennial source of our life, whence in all
- our experience we have found that to issue, as the willow stands near
- the water and sends out its roots in that direction. This will vary with
- different natures, but this is the place where a wise man will dig
- his cellar.... I one evening overtook one of my townsmen, who has
- accumulated what is called "a handsome property"--though I never got a
- _fair_ view of it--on the Walden road, driving a pair of cattle to market,
- who inquired of me how I could bring my mind to give up so many of the
- comforts of life. I answered that I was very sure I liked it passably
- well; I was not joking. And so I went home to my bed, and left him
- to pick his way through the darkness and the mud to Brighton--or
- Bright-town--which place he would reach some time in the morning.
- Any prospect of awakening or coming to life to a dead man makes
- indifferent all times and places. The place where that may occur is
- always the same, and indescribably pleasant to all our senses. For the
- most part we allow only outlying and transient circumstances to make our
- occasions. They are, in fact, the cause of our distraction. Nearest
- to all things is that power which fashions their being. _Next_ to us the
- grandest laws are continually being executed. _Next_ to us is not the
- workman whom we have hired, with whom we love so well to talk, but the
- workman whose work we are.
- "How vast and profound is the influence of the subtile powers of Heaven
- and of Earth!"
- "We seek to perceive them, and we do not see them; we seek to hear them,
- and we do not hear them; identified with the substance of things, they
- cannot be separated from them."
- "They cause that in all the universe men purify and sanctify their
- hearts, and clothe themselves in their holiday garments to offer
- sacrifices and oblations to their ancestors. It is an ocean of subtile
- intelligences. They are everywhere, above us, on our left, on our right;
- they environ us on all sides."
- We are the subjects of an experiment which is not a little interesting
- to me. Can we not do without the society of our gossips a little while
- under these circumstances--have our own thoughts to cheer us? Confucius
- says truly, "Virtue does not remain as an abandoned orphan; it must of
- necessity have neighbors."
- With thinking we may be beside ourselves in a sane sense. By a
- conscious effort of the mind we can stand aloof from actions and their
- consequences; and all things, good and bad, go by us like a torrent. We
- are not wholly involved in Nature. I may be either the driftwood in the
- stream, or Indra in the sky looking down on it. I _may_ be affected by a
- theatrical exhibition; on the other hand, I _may not_ be affected by an
- actual event which appears to concern me much more. I only know myself
- as a human entity; the scene, so to speak, of thoughts and affections;
- and am sensible of a certain doubleness by which I can stand as remote
- from myself as from another. However intense my experience, I am
- conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it
- were, is not a part of me, but spectator, sharing no experience, but
- taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play,
- it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It
- was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was
- concerned. This doubleness may easily make us poor neighbors and friends
- sometimes.
- I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in
- company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love
- to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as
- solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among
- men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is
- always alone, let him be where he will. Solitude is not measured by the
- miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows. The really
- diligent student in one of the crowded hives of Cambridge College is as
- solitary as a dervish in the desert. The farmer can work alone in the
- field or the woods all day, hoeing or chopping, and not feel lonesome,
- because he is employed; but when he comes home at night he cannot sit
- down in a room alone, at the mercy of his thoughts, but must be where he
- can "see the folks," and recreate, and, as he thinks, remunerate himself
- for his day's solitude; and hence he wonders how the student can sit
- alone in the house all night and most of the day without ennui and "the
- blues"; but he does not realize that the student, though in the house,
- is still at work in _his_ field, and chopping in _his_ woods, as the farmer
- in his, and in turn seeks the same recreation and society that the
- latter does, though it may be a more condensed form of it.
- Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not
- having had time to acquire any new value for each other. We meet at
- meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of that old
- musty cheese that we are. We have had to agree on a certain set of
- rules, called etiquette and politeness, to make this frequent meeting
- tolerable and that we need not come to open war. We meet at the
- post-office, and at the sociable, and about the fireside every night;
- we live thick and are in each other's way, and stumble over one another,
- and I think that we thus lose some respect for one another.
- Certainly less frequency would suffice for all important and hearty
- communications. Consider the girls in a factory--never alone, hardly in
- their dreams. It would be better if there were but one inhabitant to
- a square mile, as where I live. The value of a man is not in his skin,
- that we should touch him.
- I have heard of a man lost in the woods and dying of famine and
- exhaustion at the foot of a tree, whose loneliness was relieved by the
- grotesque visions with which, owing to bodily weakness, his diseased
- imagination surrounded him, and which he believed to be real. So also,
- owing to bodily and mental health and strength, we may be continually
- cheered by a like but more normal and natural society, and come to know
- that we are never alone.
- I have a great deal of company in my house; especially in the morning,
- when nobody calls. Let me suggest a few comparisons, that some one may
- convey an idea of my situation. I am no more lonely than the loon in the
- pond that laughs so loud, or than Walden Pond itself. What company has
- that lonely lake, I pray? And yet it has not the blue devils, but the
- blue angels in it, in the azure tint of its waters. The sun is alone,
- except in thick weather, when there sometimes appear to be two, but one
- is a mock sun. God is alone--but the devil, he is far from being alone;
- he sees a great deal of company; he is legion. I am no more lonely than
- a single mullein or dandelion in a pasture, or a bean leaf, or sorrel,
- or a horse-fly, or a bumblebee. I am no more lonely than the Mill Brook,
- or a weathercock, or the north star, or the south wind, or an April
- shower, or a January thaw, or the first spider in a new house.
- I have occasional visits in the long winter evenings, when the snow
- falls fast and the wind howls in the wood, from an old settler and
- original proprietor, who is reported to have dug Walden Pond, and stoned
- it, and fringed it with pine woods; who tells me stories of old time
- and of new eternity; and between us we manage to pass a cheerful evening
- with social mirth and pleasant views of things, even without apples
- or cider--a most wise and humorous friend, whom I love much, who keeps
- himself more secret than ever did Goffe or Whalley; and though he is
- thought to be dead, none can show where he is buried. An elderly dame,
- too, dwells in my neighborhood, invisible to most persons, in whose
- odorous herb garden I love to stroll sometimes, gathering simples and
- listening to her fables; for she has a genius of unequalled fertility,
- and her memory runs back farther than mythology, and she can tell me the
- original of every fable, and on what fact every one is founded, for the
- incidents occurred when she was young. A ruddy and lusty old dame, who
- delights in all weathers and seasons, and is likely to outlive all her
- children yet.
- The indescribable innocence and beneficence of Nature--of sun and wind
- and rain, of summer and winter--such health, such cheer, they afford
- forever! and such sympathy have they ever with our race, that all Nature
- would be affected, and the sun's brightness fade, and the winds would
- sigh humanely, and the clouds rain tears, and the woods shed their
- leaves and put on mourning in midsummer, if any man should ever for a
- just cause grieve. Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I
- not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself?
- What is the pill which will keep us well, serene, contented? Not my or
- thy great-grandfather's, but our great-grandmother Nature's universal,
- vegetable, botanic medicines, by which she has kept herself young
- always, outlived so many old Parrs in her day, and fed her health with
- their decaying fatness. For my panacea, instead of one of those quack
- vials of a mixture dipped from Acheron and the Dead Sea, which come out
- of those long shallow black-schooner looking wagons which we sometimes
- see made to carry bottles, let me have a draught of undiluted morning
- air. Morning air! If men will not drink of this at the fountainhead
- of the day, why, then, we must even bottle up some and sell it in the
- shops, for the benefit of those who have lost their subscription ticket
- to morning time in this world. But remember, it will not keep quite till
- noonday even in the coolest cellar, but drive out the stopples long
- ere that and follow westward the steps of Aurora. I am no worshipper of
- Hygeia, who was the daughter of that old herb-doctor Æsculapius, and
- who is represented on monuments holding a serpent in one hand, and in
- the other a cup out of which the serpent sometimes drinks; but rather
- of Hebe, cup-bearer to Jupiter, who was the daughter of Juno and wild
- lettuce, and who had the power of restoring gods and men to the vigor of
- youth. She was probably the only thoroughly sound-conditioned, healthy,
- and robust young lady that ever walked the globe, and wherever she came
- it was spring.
- Visitors
- I think that I love society as much as most, and am ready enough to
- fasten myself like a bloodsucker for the time to any full-blooded man
- that comes in my way. I am naturally no hermit, but might possibly sit
- out the sturdiest frequenter of the bar-room, if my business called me
- thither.
- I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship,
- three for society. When visitors came in larger and unexpected
- numbers there was but the third chair for them all, but they generally
- economized the room by standing up. It is surprising how many great men
- and women a small house will contain. I have had twenty-five or thirty
- souls, with their bodies, at once under my roof, and yet we often parted
- without being aware that we had come very near to one another. Many
- of our houses, both public and private, with their almost innumerable
- apartments, their huge halls and their cellars for the storage of wines
- and other munitions of peace, appear to be extravagantly large for their
- inhabitants. They are so vast and magnificent that the latter seem to be
- only vermin which infest them. I am surprised when the herald blows his
- summons before some Tremont or Astor or Middlesex House, to see come
- creeping out over the piazza for all inhabitants a ridiculous mouse,
- which soon again slinks into some hole in the pavement.
- One inconvenience I sometimes experienced in so small a house, the
- difficulty of getting to a sufficient distance from my guest when we
- began to utter the big thoughts in big words. You want room for your
- thoughts to get into sailing trim and run a course or two before they
- make their port. The bullet of your thought must have overcome its
- lateral and ricochet motion and fallen into its last and steady course
- before it reaches the ear of the hearer, else it may plow out again
- through the side of his head. Also, our sentences wanted room to unfold
- and form their columns in the interval. Individuals, like nations, must
- have suitable broad and natural boundaries, even a considerable neutral
- ground, between them. I have found it a singular luxury to talk across
- the pond to a companion on the opposite side. In my house we were so
- near that we could not begin to hear--we could not speak low enough to
- be heard; as when you throw two stones into calm water so near that they
- break each other's undulations. If we are merely loquacious and loud
- talkers, then we can afford to stand very near together, cheek by
- jowl, and feel each other's breath; but if we speak reservedly and
- thoughtfully, we want to be farther apart, that all animal heat and
- moisture may have a chance to evaporate. If we would enjoy the most
- intimate society with that in each of us which is without, or above,
- being spoken to, we must not only be silent, but commonly so far apart
- bodily that we cannot possibly hear each other's voice in any case.
- Referred to this standard, speech is for the convenience of those who
- are hard of hearing; but there are many fine things which we cannot say
- if we have to shout. As the conversation began to assume a loftier and
- grander tone, we gradually shoved our chairs farther apart till they
- touched the wall in opposite corners, and then commonly there was not
- room enough.
- My "best" room, however, my withdrawing room, always ready for company,
- on whose carpet the sun rarely fell, was the pine wood behind my house.
- Thither in summer days, when distinguished guests came, I took them, and
- a priceless domestic swept the floor and dusted the furniture and kept
- the things in order.
- If one guest came he sometimes partook of my frugal meal, and it was no
- interruption to conversation to be stirring a hasty-pudding, or
- watching the rising and maturing of a loaf of bread in the ashes, in the
- meanwhile. But if twenty came and sat in my house there was nothing said
- about dinner, though there might be bread enough for two, more than if
- eating were a forsaken habit; but we naturally practised abstinence; and
- this was never felt to be an offence against hospitality, but the most
- proper and considerate course. The waste and decay of physical life,
- which so often needs repair, seemed miraculously retarded in such a
- case, and the vital vigor stood its ground. I could entertain thus a
- thousand as well as twenty; and if any ever went away disappointed or
- hungry from my house when they found me at home, they may depend upon
- it that I sympathized with them at least. So easy is it, though many
- housekeepers doubt it, to establish new and better customs in the place
- of the old. You need not rest your reputation on the dinners you give.
- For my own part, I was never so effectually deterred from frequenting a
- man's house, by any kind of Cerberus whatever, as by the parade one made
- about dining me, which I took to be a very polite and roundabout hint
- never to trouble him so again. I think I shall never revisit those
- scenes. I should be proud to have for the motto of my cabin those lines
- of Spenser which one of my visitors inscribed on a yellow walnut leaf
- for a card:--
- "Arrivèd there, the little house they fill,
- Ne looke for entertainment where none was;
- Rest is their feast, and all things at their will:
- The noblest mind the best contentment has."
- When Winslow, afterward governor of the Plymouth Colony, went with a
- companion on a visit of ceremony to Massasoit on foot through the woods,
- and arrived tired and hungry at his lodge, they were well received by
- the king, but nothing was said about eating that day. When the night
- arrived, to quote their own words--"He laid us on the bed with himself
- and his wife, they at the one end and we at the other, it being only
- planks laid a foot from the ground and a thin mat upon them. Two more of
- his chief men, for want of room, pressed by and upon us; so that we were
- worse weary of our lodging than of our journey." At one o'clock the next
- day Massasoit "brought two fishes that he had shot," about thrice as big
- as a bream. "These being boiled, there were at least forty looked for a
- share in them; the most eat of them. This meal only we had in two nights
- and a day; and had not one of us bought a partridge, we had taken our
- journey fasting." Fearing that they would be light-headed for want of
- food and also sleep, owing to "the savages' barbarous singing, (for they
- use to sing themselves asleep,)" and that they might get home while they
- had strength to travel, they departed. As for lodging, it is true they
- were but poorly entertained, though what they found an inconvenience was
- no doubt intended for an honor; but as far as eating was concerned, I do
- not see how the Indians could have done better. They had nothing to
- eat themselves, and they were wiser than to think that apologies could
- supply the place of food to their guests; so they drew their belts
- tighter and said nothing about it. Another time when Winslow visited
- them, it being a season of plenty with them, there was no deficiency in
- this respect.
- As for men, they will hardly fail one anywhere. I had more visitors
- while I lived in the woods than at any other period in my life; I mean
- that I had some. I met several there under more favorable circumstances
- than I could anywhere else. But fewer came to see me on trivial
- business. In this respect, my company was winnowed by my mere distance
- from town. I had withdrawn so far within the great ocean of solitude,
- into which the rivers of society empty, that for the most part, so
- far as my needs were concerned, only the finest sediment was deposited
- around me. Beside, there were wafted to me evidences of unexplored and
- uncultivated continents on the other side.
- Who should come to my lodge this morning but a true Homeric or
- Paphlagonian man--he had so suitable and poetic a name that I am sorry I
- cannot print it here--a Canadian, a woodchopper and post-maker, who can
- hole fifty posts in a day, who made his last supper on a woodchuck which
- his dog caught. He, too, has heard of Homer, and, "if it were not for
- books," would "not know what to do rainy days," though perhaps he has
- not read one wholly through for many rainy seasons. Some priest who
- could pronounce the Greek itself taught him to read his verse in the
- Testament in his native parish far away; and now I must translate to
- him, while he holds the book, Achilles' reproof to Patroclus for his sad
- countenance.--"Why are you in tears, Patroclus, like a young girl?"--
- "Or have you alone heard some news from Phthia?
- They say that Menoetius lives yet, son of Actor,
- And Peleus lives, son of Æacus, among the Myrmidons,
- Either of whom having died, we should greatly grieve."
- He says, "That's good." He has a great bundle of white oak bark under
- his arm for a sick man, gathered this Sunday morning. "I suppose there's
- no harm in going after such a thing to-day," says he. To him Homer was a
- great writer, though what his writing was about he did not know. A more
- simple and natural man it would be hard to find. Vice and disease, which
- cast such a sombre moral hue over the world, seemed to have hardly any
- existence for him. He was about twenty-eight years old, and had left
- Canada and his father's house a dozen years before to work in the
- States, and earn money to buy a farm with at last, perhaps in his native
- country. He was cast in the coarsest mould; a stout but sluggish body,
- yet gracefully carried, with a thick sunburnt neck, dark bushy hair, and
- dull sleepy blue eyes, which were occasionally lit up with expression.
- He wore a flat gray cloth cap, a dingy wool-colored greatcoat, and
- cowhide boots. He was a great consumer of meat, usually carrying his
- dinner to his work a couple of miles past my house--for he chopped all
- summer--in a tin pail; cold meats, often cold woodchucks, and coffee in
- a stone bottle which dangled by a string from his belt; and sometimes he
- offered me a drink. He came along early, crossing my bean-field, though
- without anxiety or haste to get to his work, such as Yankees exhibit.
- He wasn't a-going to hurt himself. He didn't care if he only earned his
- board. Frequently he would leave his dinner in the bushes, when his
- dog had caught a woodchuck by the way, and go back a mile and a half to
- dress it and leave it in the cellar of the house where he boarded, after
- deliberating first for half an hour whether he could not sink it in the
- pond safely till nightfall--loving to dwell long upon these themes. He
- would say, as he went by in the morning, "How thick the pigeons are! If
- working every day were not my trade, I could get all the meat I should
- want by hunting-pigeons, woodchucks, rabbits, partridges--by gosh! I
- could get all I should want for a week in one day."
- He was a skilful chopper, and indulged in some flourishes and ornaments
- in his art. He cut his trees level and close to the ground, that the
- sprouts which came up afterward might be more vigorous and a sled might
- slide over the stumps; and instead of leaving a whole tree to support
- his corded wood, he would pare it away to a slender stake or splinter
- which you could break off with your hand at last.
- He interested me because he was so quiet and solitary and so happy
- withal; a well of good humor and contentment which overflowed at his
- eyes. His mirth was without alloy. Sometimes I saw him at his work
- in the woods, felling trees, and he would greet me with a laugh of
- inexpressible satisfaction, and a salutation in Canadian French, though
- he spoke English as well. When I approached him he would suspend his
- work, and with half-suppressed mirth lie along the trunk of a pine which
- he had felled, and, peeling off the inner bark, roll it up into a ball
- and chew it while he laughed and talked. Such an exuberance of animal
- spirits had he that he sometimes tumbled down and rolled on the ground
- with laughter at anything which made him think and tickled him. Looking
- round upon the trees he would exclaim--"By George! I can enjoy myself
- well enough here chopping; I want no better sport." Sometimes, when at
- leisure, he amused himself all day in the woods with a pocket pistol,
- firing salutes to himself at regular intervals as he walked. In the
- winter he had a fire by which at noon he warmed his coffee in a kettle;
- and as he sat on a log to eat his dinner the chickadees would sometimes
- come round and alight on his arm and peck at the potato in his fingers;
- and he said that he "liked to have the little _fellers_ about him."
- In him the animal man chiefly was developed. In physical endurance and
- contentment he was cousin to the pine and the rock. I asked him once
- if he was not sometimes tired at night, after working all day; and he
- answered, with a sincere and serious look, "Gorrappit, I never was tired
- in my life." But the intellectual and what is called spiritual man in
- him were slumbering as in an infant. He had been instructed only in that
- innocent and ineffectual way in which the Catholic priests teach the
- aborigines, by which the pupil is never educated to the degree of
- consciousness, but only to the degree of trust and reverence, and a
- child is not made a man, but kept a child. When Nature made him, she
- gave him a strong body and contentment for his portion, and propped him
- on every side with reverence and reliance, that he might live out his
- threescore years and ten a child. He was so genuine and unsophisticated
- that no introduction would serve to introduce him, more than if you
- introduced a woodchuck to your neighbor. He had got to find him out as
- you did. He would not play any part. Men paid him wages for work, and
- so helped to feed and clothe him; but he never exchanged opinions with
- them. He was so simply and naturally humble--if he can be called humble
- who never aspires--that humility was no distinct quality in him, nor
- could he conceive of it. Wiser men were demigods to him. If you told
- him that such a one was coming, he did as if he thought that anything so
- grand would expect nothing of himself, but take all the responsibility
- on itself, and let him be forgotten still. He never heard the sound of
- praise. He particularly reverenced the writer and the preacher. Their
- performances were miracles. When I told him that I wrote considerably,
- he thought for a long time that it was merely the handwriting which I
- meant, for he could write a remarkably good hand himself. I sometimes
- found the name of his native parish handsomely written in the snow by
- the highway, with the proper French accent, and knew that he had passed.
- I asked him if he ever wished to write his thoughts. He said that he had
- read and written letters for those who could not, but he never tried to
- write thoughts--no, he could not, he could not tell what to put first,
- it would kill him, and then there was spelling to be attended to at the
- same time!
- I heard that a distinguished wise man and reformer asked him if he did
- not want the world to be changed; but he answered with a chuckle of
- surprise in his Canadian accent, not knowing that the question had ever
- been entertained before, "No, I like it well enough." It would have
- suggested many things to a philosopher to have dealings with him. To
- a stranger he appeared to know nothing of things in general; yet I
- sometimes saw in him a man whom I had not seen before, and I did not
- know whether he was as wise as Shakespeare or as simply ignorant as
- a child, whether to suspect him of a fine poetic consciousness or of
- stupidity. A townsman told me that when he met him sauntering through
- the village in his small close-fitting cap, and whistling to himself, he
- reminded him of a prince in disguise.
- His only books were an almanac and an arithmetic, in which last he was
- considerably expert. The former was a sort of cyclopaedia to him, which
- he supposed to contain an abstract of human knowledge, as indeed it does
- to a considerable extent. I loved to sound him on the various reforms
- of the day, and he never failed to look at them in the most simple and
- practical light. He had never heard of such things before. Could he do
- without factories? I asked. He had worn the home-made Vermont gray, he
- said, and that was good. Could he dispense with tea and coffee? Did this
- country afford any beverage beside water? He had soaked hemlock leaves
- in water and drank it, and thought that was better than water in warm
- weather. When I asked him if he could do without money, he showed the
- convenience of money in such a way as to suggest and coincide with the
- most philosophical accounts of the origin of this institution, and the
- very derivation of the word _pecunia_. If an ox were his property, and he
- wished to get needles and thread at the store, he thought it would be
- inconvenient and impossible soon to go on mortgaging some portion of
- the creature each time to that amount. He could defend many institutions
- better than any philosopher, because, in describing them as they
- concerned him, he gave the true reason for their prevalence, and
- speculation had not suggested to him any other. At another time, hearing
- Plato's definition of a man--a biped without feathers--and that one
- exhibited a cock plucked and called it Plato's man, he thought it
- an important difference that the _knees_ bent the wrong way. He would
- sometimes exclaim, "How I love to talk! By George, I could talk all
- day!" I asked him once, when I had not seen him for many months, if he
- had got a new idea this summer. "Good Lord"--said he, "a man that has
- to work as I do, if he does not forget the ideas he has had, he will do
- well. May be the man you hoe with is inclined to race; then, by gorry,
- your mind must be there; you think of weeds." He would sometimes ask me
- first on such occasions, if I had made any improvement. One winter day I
- asked him if he was always satisfied with himself, wishing to suggest a
- substitute within him for the priest without, and some higher motive for
- living. "Satisfied!" said he; "some men are satisfied with one thing,
- and some with another. One man, perhaps, if he has got enough, will be
- satisfied to sit all day with his back to the fire and his belly to the
- table, by George!" Yet I never, by any manoeuvring, could get him to
- take the spiritual view of things; the highest that he appeared to
- conceive of was a simple expediency, such as you might expect an
- animal to appreciate; and this, practically, is true of most men. If
- I suggested any improvement in his mode of life, he merely answered,
- without expressing any regret, that it was too late. Yet he thoroughly
- believed in honesty and the like virtues.
- There was a certain positive originality, however slight, to be detected
- in him, and I occasionally observed that he was thinking for himself and
- expressing his own opinion, a phenomenon so rare that I would any day
- walk ten miles to observe it, and it amounted to the re-origination of
- many of the institutions of society. Though he hesitated, and perhaps
- failed to express himself distinctly, he always had a presentable
- thought behind. Yet his thinking was so primitive and immersed in his
- animal life, that, though more promising than a merely learned man's,
- it rarely ripened to anything which can be reported. He suggested that
- there might be men of genius in the lowest grades of life, however
- permanently humble and illiterate, who take their own view always, or do
- not pretend to see at all; who are as bottomless even as Walden Pond was
- thought to be, though they may be dark and muddy.
- Many a traveller came out of his way to see me and the inside of my
- house, and, as an excuse for calling, asked for a glass of water. I told
- them that I drank at the pond, and pointed thither, offering to lend
- them a dipper. Far off as I lived, I was not exempted from the annual
- visitation which occurs, methinks, about the first of April, when
- everybody is on the move; and I had my share of good luck, though there
- were some curious specimens among my visitors. Half-witted men from the
- almshouse and elsewhere came to see me; but I endeavored to make them
- exercise all the wit they had, and make their confessions to me; in such
- cases making wit the theme of our conversation; and so was compensated.
- Indeed, I found some of them to be wiser than the so-called _overseers_
- of the poor and selectmen of the town, and thought it was time that the
- tables were turned. With respect to wit, I learned that there was not
- much difference between the half and the whole. One day, in particular,
- an inoffensive, simple-minded pauper, whom with others I had often seen
- used as fencing stuff, standing or sitting on a bushel in the fields to
- keep cattle and himself from straying, visited me, and expressed a wish
- to live as I did. He told me, with the utmost simplicity and truth,
- quite superior, or rather _inferior_, to anything that is called humility,
- that he was "deficient in intellect." These were his words. The Lord
- had made him so, yet he supposed the Lord cared as much for him as for
- another. "I have always been so," said he, "from my childhood; I never
- had much mind; I was not like other children; I am weak in the head. It
- was the Lord's will, I suppose." And there he was to prove the truth
- of his words. He was a metaphysical puzzle to me. I have rarely met a
- fellowman on such promising ground--it was so simple and sincere and so
- true all that he said. And, true enough, in proportion as he appeared
- to humble himself was he exalted. I did not know at first but it was the
- result of a wise policy. It seemed that from such a basis of truth and
- frankness as the poor weak-headed pauper had laid, our intercourse might
- go forward to something better than the intercourse of sages.
- I had some guests from those not reckoned commonly among the town's
- poor, but who should be; who are among the world's poor, at any rate;
- guests who appeal, not to your hospitality, but to your _hospitalality_;
- who earnestly wish to be helped, and preface their appeal with the
- information that they are resolved, for one thing, never to help
- themselves. I require of a visitor that he be not actually starving,
- though he may have the very best appetite in the world, however he got
- it. Objects of charity are not guests. Men who did not know when their
- visit had terminated, though I went about my business again, answering
- them from greater and greater remoteness. Men of almost every degree of
- wit called on me in the migrating season. Some who had more wits than
- they knew what to do with; runaway slaves with plantation manners, who
- listened from time to time, like the fox in the fable, as if they heard
- the hounds a-baying on their track, and looked at me beseechingly, as
- much as to say,--
- "O Christian, will you send me back?
- One real runaway slave, among the rest, whom I helped to forward toward
- the north star. Men of one idea, like a hen with one chicken, and that
- a duckling; men of a thousand ideas, and unkempt heads, like those hens
- which are made to take charge of a hundred chickens, all in pursuit
- of one bug, a score of them lost in every morning's dew--and become
- frizzled and mangy in consequence; men of ideas instead of legs, a sort
- of intellectual centipede that made you crawl all over. One man proposed
- a book in which visitors should write their names, as at the White
- Mountains; but, alas! I have too good a memory to make that necessary.
- I could not but notice some of the peculiarities of my visitors. Girls
- and boys and young women generally seemed glad to be in the woods. They
- looked in the pond and at the flowers, and improved their time. Men of
- business, even farmers, thought only of solitude and employment, and of
- the great distance at which I dwelt from something or other; and though
- they said that they loved a ramble in the woods occasionally, it was
- obvious that they did not. Restless committed men, whose time was an
- taken up in getting a living or keeping it; ministers who spoke of God
- as if they enjoyed a monopoly of the subject, who could not bear all
- kinds of opinions; doctors, lawyers, uneasy housekeepers who pried
- into my cupboard and bed when I was out--how came Mrs.--to know that my
- sheets were not as clean as hers?--young men who had ceased to be young,
- and had concluded that it was safest to follow the beaten track of the
- professions--all these generally said that it was not possible to do so
- much good in my position. Ay! there was the rub. The old and infirm and
- the timid, of whatever age or sex, thought most of sickness, and sudden
- accident and death; to them life seemed full of danger--what danger is
- there if you don't think of any?--and they thought that a prudent man
- would carefully select the safest position, where Dr. B. might be
- on hand at a moment's warning. To them the village was literally a
- _com-munity_, a league for mutual defence, and you would suppose that they
- would not go a-huckleberrying without a medicine chest. The amount of
- it is, if a man is alive, there is always danger that he may die,
- though the danger must be allowed to be less in proportion as he is
- dead-and-alive to begin with. A man sits as many risks as he runs.
- Finally, there were the self-styled reformers, the greatest bores of
- all, who thought that I was forever singing,--
- This is the house that I built;
- This is the man that lives in the house that I built;
- but they did not know that the third line was,
- These are the folks that worry the man
- That lives in the house that I built.
- I did not fear the hen-harriers, for I kept no chickens; but I feared
- the men-harriers rather.
- I had more cheering visitors than the last. Children come a-berrying,
- railroad men taking a Sunday morning walk in clean shirts, fishermen and
- hunters, poets and philosophers; in short, all honest pilgrims, who came
- out to the woods for freedom's sake, and really left the village behind,
- I was ready to greet with--"Welcome, Englishmen! welcome, Englishmen!"
- for I had had communication with that race.
- The Bean-Field
- Meanwhile my beans, the length of whose rows, added together, was seven
- miles already planted, were impatient to be hoed, for the earliest had
- grown considerably before the latest were in the ground; indeed they
- were not easily to be put off. What was the meaning of this so steady
- and self-respecting, this small Herculean labor, I knew not. I came to
- love my rows, my beans, though so many more than I wanted. They attached
- me to the earth, and so I got strength like Antaeus. But why should I
- raise them? Only Heaven knows. This was my curious labor all summer--to
- make this portion of the earth's surface, which had yielded only
- cinquefoil, blackberries, johnswort, and the like, before, sweet wild
- fruits and pleasant flowers, produce instead this pulse. What shall I
- learn of beans or beans of me? I cherish them, I hoe them, early and
- late I have an eye to them; and this is my day's work. It is a fine
- broad leaf to look on. My auxiliaries are the dews and rains which water
- this dry soil, and what fertility is in the soil itself, which for the
- most part is lean and effete. My enemies are worms, cool days, and most
- of all woodchucks. The last have nibbled for me a quarter of an acre
- clean. But what right had I to oust johnswort and the rest, and break
- up their ancient herb garden? Soon, however, the remaining beans will be
- too tough for them, and go forward to meet new foes.
- When I was four years old, as I well remember, I was brought from Boston
- to this my native town, through these very woods and this field, to
- the pond. It is one of the oldest scenes stamped on my memory. And now
- to-night my flute has waked the echoes over that very water. The pines
- still stand here older than I; or, if some have fallen, I have cooked
- my supper with their stumps, and a new growth is rising all around,
- preparing another aspect for new infant eyes. Almost the same johnswort
- springs from the same perennial root in this pasture, and even I have at
- length helped to clothe that fabulous landscape of my infant dreams, and
- one of the results of my presence and influence is seen in these bean
- leaves, corn blades, and potato vines.
- I planted about two acres and a half of upland; and as it was only about
- fifteen years since the land was cleared, and I myself had got out
- two or three cords of stumps, I did not give it any manure; but in the
- course of the summer it appeared by the arrowheads which I turned up in
- hoeing, that an extinct nation had anciently dwelt here and planted corn
- and beans ere white men came to clear the land, and so, to some extent,
- had exhausted the soil for this very crop.
- Before yet any woodchuck or squirrel had run across the road, or the
- sun had got above the shrub oaks, while all the dew was on, though the
- farmers warned me against it--I would advise you to do all your work
- if possible while the dew is on--I began to level the ranks of haughty
- weeds in my bean-field and throw dust upon their heads. Early in the
- morning I worked barefooted, dabbling like a plastic artist in the dewy
- and crumbling sand, but later in the day the sun blistered my feet.
- There the sun lighted me to hoe beans, pacing slowly backward and
- forward over that yellow gravelly upland, between the long green rows,
- fifteen rods, the one end terminating in a shrub oak copse where I
- could rest in the shade, the other in a blackberry field where the
- green berries deepened their tints by the time I had made another
- bout. Removing the weeds, putting fresh soil about the bean stems, and
- encouraging this weed which I had sown, making the yellow soil express
- its summer thought in bean leaves and blossoms rather than in wormwood
- and piper and millet grass, making the earth say beans instead of
- grass--this was my daily work. As I had little aid from horses or
- cattle, or hired men or boys, or improved implements of husbandry, I was
- much slower, and became much more intimate with my beans than usual.
- But labor of the hands, even when pursued to the verge of drudgery,
- is perhaps never the worst form of idleness. It has a constant and
- imperishable moral, and to the scholar it yields a classic result. A
- very _agricola laboriosus_ was I to travellers bound westward through
- Lincoln and Wayland to nobody knows where; they sitting at their ease in
- gigs, with elbows on knees, and reins loosely hanging in festoons; I the
- home-staying, laborious native of the soil. But soon my homestead was
- out of their sight and thought. It was the only open and cultivated
- field for a great distance on either side of the road, so they made the
- most of it; and sometimes the man in the field heard more of travellers'
- gossip and comment than was meant for his ear: "Beans so late! peas
- so late!"--for I continued to plant when others had begun to hoe--the
- ministerial husbandman had not suspected it. "Corn, my boy, for fodder;
- corn for fodder." "Does he _live_ there?" asks the black bonnet of the
- gray coat; and the hard-featured farmer reins up his grateful dobbin to
- inquire what you are doing where he sees no manure in the furrow, and
- recommends a little chip dirt, or any little waste stuff, or it may be
- ashes or plaster. But here were two acres and a half of furrows, and
- only a hoe for cart and two hands to draw it--there being an aversion
- to other carts and horses--and chip dirt far away. Fellow-travellers as
- they rattled by compared it aloud with the fields which they had passed,
- so that I came to know how I stood in the agricultural world. This was
- one field not in Mr. Coleman's report. And, by the way, who estimates
- the value of the crop which nature yields in the still wilder fields
- unimproved by man? The crop of _English_ hay is carefully weighed, the
- moisture calculated, the silicates and the potash; but in all dells and
- pond-holes in the woods and pastures and swamps grows a rich and various
- crop only unreaped by man. Mine was, as it were, the connecting link
- between wild and cultivated fields; as some states are civilized, and
- others half-civilized, and others savage or barbarous, so my field was,
- though not in a bad sense, a half-cultivated field. They were
- beans cheerfully returning to their wild and primitive state that I
- cultivated, and my hoe played the _Ranz des Vaches_ for them.
- Near at hand, upon the topmost spray of a birch, sings the brown
- thrasher--or red mavis, as some love to call him--all the morning, glad
- of your society, that would find out another farmer's field if yours
- were not here. While you are planting the seed, he cries--"Drop it, drop
- it--cover it up, cover it up--pull it up, pull it up, pull it up." But
- this was not corn, and so it was safe from such enemies as he. You may
- wonder what his rigmarole, his amateur Paganini performances on one
- string or on twenty, have to do with your planting, and yet prefer it to
- leached ashes or plaster. It was a cheap sort of top dressing in which I
- had entire faith.
- As I drew a still fresher soil about the rows with my hoe, I disturbed
- the ashes of unchronicled nations who in primeval years lived under
- these heavens, and their small implements of war and hunting were
- brought to the light of this modern day. They lay mingled with other
- natural stones, some of which bore the marks of having been burned by
- Indian fires, and some by the sun, and also bits of pottery and glass
- brought hither by the recent cultivators of the soil. When my hoe
- tinkled against the stones, that music echoed to the woods and the
- sky, and was an accompaniment to my labor which yielded an instant and
- immeasurable crop. It was no longer beans that I hoed, nor I that hoed
- beans; and I remembered with as much pity as pride, if I remembered at
- all, my acquaintances who had gone to the city to attend the oratorios.
- The nighthawk circled overhead in the sunny afternoons--for I sometimes
- made a day of it--like a mote in the eye, or in heaven's eye, falling
- from time to time with a swoop and a sound as if the heavens were rent,
- torn at last to very rags and tatters, and yet a seamless cope remained;
- small imps that fill the air and lay their eggs on the ground on bare
- sand or rocks on the tops of hills, where few have found them; graceful
- and slender like ripples caught up from the pond, as leaves are raised
- by the wind to float in the heavens; such kindredship is in nature.
- The hawk is aerial brother of the wave which he sails over and surveys,
- those his perfect air-inflated wings answering to the elemental
- unfledged pinions of the sea. Or sometimes I watched a pair of
- hen-hawks circling high in the sky, alternately soaring and descending,
- approaching, and leaving one another, as if they were the embodiment of
- my own thoughts. Or I was attracted by the passage of wild pigeons from
- this wood to that, with a slight quivering winnowing sound and carrier
- haste; or from under a rotten stump my hoe turned up a sluggish
- portentous and outlandish spotted salamander, a trace of Egypt and
- the Nile, yet our contemporary. When I paused to lean on my hoe, these
- sounds and sights I heard and saw anywhere in the row, a part of the
- inexhaustible entertainment which the country offers.
- On gala days the town fires its great guns, which echo like popguns to
- these woods, and some waifs of martial music occasionally penetrate thus
- far. To me, away there in my bean-field at the other end of the town,
- the big guns sounded as if a puffball had burst; and when there was a
- military turnout of which I was ignorant, I have sometimes had a vague
- sense all the day of some sort of itching and disease in the horizon,
- as if some eruption would break out there soon, either scarlatina or
- canker-rash, until at length some more favorable puff of wind, making
- haste over the fields and up the Wayland road, brought me information of
- the "trainers." It seemed by the distant hum as if somebody's bees had
- swarmed, and that the neighbors, according to Virgil's advice, by a
- faint _tintinnabulum_ upon the most sonorous of their domestic utensils,
- were endeavoring to call them down into the hive again. And when the
- sound died quite away, and the hum had ceased, and the most favorable
- breezes told no tale, I knew that they had got the last drone of them
- all safely into the Middlesex hive, and that now their minds were bent
- on the honey with which it was smeared.
- I felt proud to know that the liberties of Massachusetts and of our
- fatherland were in such safe keeping; and as I turned to my hoeing again
- I was filled with an inexpressible confidence, and pursued my labor
- cheerfully with a calm trust in the future.
- When there were several bands of musicians, it sounded as if all the
- village was a vast bellows and all the buildings expanded and collapsed
- alternately with a din. But sometimes it was a really noble and
- inspiring strain that reached these woods, and the trumpet that sings
- of fame, and I felt as if I could spit a Mexican with a good relish--for
- why should we always stand for trifles?--and looked round for a
- woodchuck or a skunk to exercise my chivalry upon. These martial strains
- seemed as far away as Palestine, and reminded me of a march of crusaders
- in the horizon, with a slight tantivy and tremulous motion of the elm
- tree tops which overhang the village. This was one of the _great_ days;
- though the sky had from my clearing only the same everlastingly great
- look that it wears daily, and I saw no difference in it.
- It was a singular experience that long acquaintance which I cultivated
- with beans, what with planting, and hoeing, and harvesting, and
- threshing, and picking over and selling them--the last was the hardest
- of all--I might add eating, for I did taste. I was determined to know
- beans. When they were growing, I used to hoe from five o'clock in the
- morning till noon, and commonly spent the rest of the day about other
- affairs. Consider the intimate and curious acquaintance one makes with
- various kinds of weeds--it will bear some iteration in the account, for
- there was no little iteration in the labor--disturbing their delicate
- organizations so ruthlessly, and making such invidious distinctions
- with his hoe, levelling whole ranks of one species, and sedulously
- cultivating another. That's Roman wormwood--that's pigweed--that's
- sorrel--that's piper-grass--have at him, chop him up, turn his roots
- upward to the sun, don't let him have a fibre in the shade, if you do
- he'll turn himself t' other side up and be as green as a leek in two
- days. A long war, not with cranes, but with weeds, those Trojans who
- had sun and rain and dews on their side. Daily the beans saw me come
- to their rescue armed with a hoe, and thin the ranks of their enemies,
- filling up the trenches with weedy dead. Many a lusty crest--waving
- Hector, that towered a whole foot above his crowding comrades, fell
- before my weapon and rolled in the dust.
- Those summer days which some of my contemporaries devoted to the fine
- arts in Boston or Rome, and others to contemplation in India, and others
- to trade in London or New York, I thus, with the other farmers of New
- England, devoted to husbandry. Not that I wanted beans to eat, for I
- am by nature a Pythagorean, so far as beans are concerned, whether they
- mean porridge or voting, and exchanged them for rice; but, perchance, as
- some must work in fields if only for the sake of tropes and expression,
- to serve a parable-maker one day. It was on the whole a rare amusement,
- which, continued too long, might have become a dissipation. Though I
- gave them no manure, and did not hoe them all once, I hoed them unusually
- well as far as I went, and was paid for it in the end, "there being in
- truth," as Evelyn says, "no compost or laetation whatsoever comparable
- to this continual motion, repastination, and turning of the mould with
- the spade." "The earth," he adds elsewhere, "especially if fresh, has a
- certain magnetism in it, by which it attracts the salt, power, or virtue
- (call it either) which gives it life, and is the logic of all the labor
- and stir we keep about it, to sustain us; all dungings and other sordid
- temperings being but the vicars succedaneous to this improvement."
- Moreover, this being one of those "worn-out and exhausted lay fields
- which enjoy their sabbath," had perchance, as Sir Kenelm Digby thinks
- likely, attracted "vital spirits" from the air. I harvested twelve
- bushels of beans.
- But to be more particular, for it is complained that Mr. Coleman has
- reported chiefly the expensive experiments of gentlemen farmers, my
- outgoes were,--
- For a hoe................................... $ 0.54
- Plowing, harrowing, and furrowing............ 7.50 Too much.
- Beans for seed............................... 3.12-1/2
- Potatoes for seed............................ 1.33
- Peas for seed................................ 0.40
- Turnip seed.................................. 0.06
- White line for crow fence.................... 0.02
- Horse cultivator and boy three hours......... 1.00
- Horse and cart to get crop................... 0.75
- --------
- In all.................................. $14.72-1/2
- My income was (patrem familias vendacem, non emacem esse oportet), from
- Nine bushels and twelve quarts of beans sold.. $16.94
- Five " large potatoes..................... 2.50
- Nine " small.............................. 2.25
- Grass........................................... 1.00
- Stalks.......................................... 0.75
- --------
- In all.................................... $23.44
- Leaving a pecuniary profit,
- as I have elsewhere said, of.............. $8.71-1/2
- This is the result of my experience in raising beans: Plant the common
- small white bush bean about the first of June, in rows three feet by
- eighteen inches apart, being careful to select fresh round and unmixed
- seed. First look out for worms, and supply vacancies by planting anew.
- Then look out for woodchucks, if it is an exposed place, for they will
- nibble off the earliest tender leaves almost clean as they go; and
- again, when the young tendrils make their appearance, they have notice
- of it, and will shear them off with both buds and young pods, sitting
- erect like a squirrel. But above all harvest as early as possible, if
- you would escape frosts and have a fair and salable crop; you may save
- much loss by this means.
- This further experience also I gained: I said to myself, I will not
- plant beans and corn with so much industry another summer, but such
- seeds, if the seed is not lost, as sincerity, truth, simplicity, faith,
- innocence, and the like, and see if they will not grow in this soil,
- even with less toil and manurance, and sustain me, for surely it has
- not been exhausted for these crops. Alas! I said this to myself; but now
- another summer is gone, and another, and another, and I am obliged to
- say to you, Reader, that the seeds which I planted, if indeed they _were_
- the seeds of those virtues, were wormeaten or had lost their vitality,
- and so did not come up. Commonly men will only be brave as their fathers
- were brave, or timid. This generation is very sure to plant corn and
- beans each new year precisely as the Indians did centuries ago and
- taught the first settlers to do, as if there were a fate in it. I saw an
- old man the other day, to my astonishment, making the holes with a hoe
- for the seventieth time at least, and not for himself to lie down in!
- But why should not the New Englander try new adventures, and not lay
- so much stress on his grain, his potato and grass crop, and his
- orchards--raise other crops than these? Why concern ourselves so much
- about our beans for seed, and not be concerned at all about a new
- generation of men? We should really be fed and cheered if when we met a
- man we were sure to see that some of the qualities which I have named,
- which we all prize more than those other productions, but which are
- for the most part broadcast and floating in the air, had taken root
- and grown in him. Here comes such a subtile and ineffable quality,
- for instance, as truth or justice, though the slightest amount or new
- variety of it, along the road. Our ambassadors should be instructed to
- send home such seeds as these, and Congress help to distribute them over
- all the land. We should never stand upon ceremony with sincerity. We
- should never cheat and insult and banish one another by our meanness, if
- there were present the kernel of worth and friendliness. We should not
- meet thus in haste. Most men I do not meet at all, for they seem not to
- have time; they are busy about their beans. We would not deal with a man
- thus plodding ever, leaning on a hoe or a spade as a staff between his
- work, not as a mushroom, but partially risen out of the earth, something
- more than erect, like swallows alighted and walking on the ground:--
- "And as he spake, his wings would now and then
- Spread, as he meant to fly, then close again--"
- so that we should suspect that we might be conversing with an angel.
- Bread may not always nourish us; but it always does us good, it even
- takes stiffness out of our joints, and makes us supple and buoyant, when
- we knew not what ailed us, to recognize any generosity in man or Nature,
- to share any unmixed and heroic joy.
- Ancient poetry and mythology suggest, at least, that husbandry was once
- a sacred art; but it is pursued with irreverent haste and heedlessness
- by us, our object being to have large farms and large crops merely.
- We have no festival, nor procession, nor ceremony, not excepting our
- cattle-shows and so-called Thanksgivings, by which the farmer expresses
- a sense of the sacredness of his calling, or is reminded of its sacred
- origin. It is the premium and the feast which tempt him. He sacrifices
- not to Ceres and the Terrestrial Jove, but to the infernal Plutus
- rather. By avarice and selfishness, and a grovelling habit, from which
- none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property, or the means
- of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is
- degraded with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows
- Nature but as a robber. Cato says that the profits of agriculture are
- particularly pious or just (_maximeque pius quaestus_), and according
- to Varro the old Romans "called the same earth Mother and Ceres, and
- thought that they who cultivated it led a pious and useful life, and
- that they alone were left of the race of King Saturn."
- We are wont to forget that the sun looks on our cultivated fields and
- on the prairies and forests without distinction. They all reflect and
- absorb his rays alike, and the former make but a small part of the
- glorious picture which he beholds in his daily course. In his view
- the earth is all equally cultivated like a garden. Therefore we should
- receive the benefit of his light and heat with a corresponding trust and
- magnanimity. What though I value the seed of these beans, and harvest
- that in the fall of the year? This broad field which I have looked at
- so long looks not to me as the principal cultivator, but away from me to
- influences more genial to it, which water and make it green. These
- beans have results which are not harvested by me. Do they not grow for
- woodchucks partly? The ear of wheat (in Latin _spica_, obsoletely _speca_,
- from _spe_, hope) should not be the only hope of the husbandman; its
- kernel or grain (_granum_ from _gerendo_, bearing) is not all that it
- bears. How, then, can our harvest fail? Shall I not rejoice also at
- the abundance of the weeds whose seeds are the granary of the birds? It
- matters little comparatively whether the fields fill the farmer's barns.
- The true husbandman will cease from anxiety, as the squirrels manifest
- no concern whether the woods will bear chestnuts this year or not, and
- finish his labor with every day, relinquishing all claim to the produce
- of his fields, and sacrificing in his mind not only his first but his
- last fruits also.
- The Village
- After hoeing, or perhaps reading and writing, in the forenoon, I usually
- bathed again in the pond, swimming across one of its coves for a stint,
- and washed the dust of labor from my person, or smoothed out the last
- wrinkle which study had made, and for the afternoon was absolutely free.
- Every day or two I strolled to the village to hear some of the gossip
- which is incessantly going on there, circulating either from mouth to
- mouth, or from newspaper to newspaper, and which, taken in homoeopathic
- doses, was really as refreshing in its way as the rustle of leaves and
- the peeping of frogs. As I walked in the woods to see the birds and
- squirrels, so I walked in the village to see the men and boys; instead
- of the wind among the pines I heard the carts rattle. In one direction
- from my house there was a colony of muskrats in the river meadows; under
- the grove of elms and buttonwoods in the other horizon was a village
- of busy men, as curious to me as if they had been prairie-dogs, each
- sitting at the mouth of its burrow, or running over to a neighbor's to
- gossip. I went there frequently to observe their habits. The village
- appeared to me a great news room; and on one side, to support it, as
- once at Redding & Company's on State Street, they kept nuts and raisins,
- or salt and meal and other groceries. Some have such a vast appetite
- for the former commodity, that is, the news, and such sound digestive
- organs, that they can sit forever in public avenues without stirring,
- and let it simmer and whisper through them like the Etesian winds, or
- as if inhaling ether, it only producing numbness and insensibility to
- pain--otherwise it would often be painful to bear--without affecting the
- consciousness. I hardly ever failed, when I rambled through the village,
- to see a row of such worthies, either sitting on a ladder sunning
- themselves, with their bodies inclined forward and their eyes glancing
- along the line this way and that, from time to time, with a voluptuous
- expression, or else leaning against a barn with their hands in their
- pockets, like caryatides, as if to prop it up. They, being commonly out
- of doors, heard whatever was in the wind. These are the coarsest mills,
- in which all gossip is first rudely digested or cracked up before it is
- emptied into finer and more delicate hoppers within doors. I observed
- that the vitals of the village were the grocery, the bar-room, the
- post-office, and the bank; and, as a necessary part of the machinery,
- they kept a bell, a big gun, and a fire-engine, at convenient places;
- and the houses were so arranged as to make the most of mankind, in
- lanes and fronting one another, so that every traveller had to run the
- gauntlet, and every man, woman, and child might get a lick at him. Of
- course, those who were stationed nearest to the head of the line, where
- they could most see and be seen, and have the first blow at him, paid
- the highest prices for their places; and the few straggling inhabitants
- in the outskirts, where long gaps in the line began to occur, and the
- traveller could get over walls or turn aside into cow-paths, and so
- escape, paid a very slight ground or window tax. Signs were hung out
- on all sides to allure him; some to catch him by the appetite, as the
- tavern and victualling cellar; some by the fancy, as the dry goods store
- and the jeweller's; and others by the hair or the feet or the skirts,
- as the barber, the shoemaker, or the tailor. Besides, there was a still
- more terrible standing invitation to call at every one of these houses,
- and company expected about these times. For the most part I escaped
- wonderfully from these dangers, either by proceeding at once boldly and
- without deliberation to the goal, as is recommended to those who run the
- gauntlet, or by keeping my thoughts on high things, like Orpheus, who,
- "loudly singing the praises of the gods to his lyre, drowned the voices
- of the Sirens, and kept out of danger." Sometimes I bolted suddenly,
- and nobody could tell my whereabouts, for I did not stand much about
- gracefulness, and never hesitated at a gap in a fence. I was even
- accustomed to make an irruption into some houses, where I was well
- entertained, and after learning the kernels and very last sieveful of
- news--what had subsided, the prospects of war and peace, and whether the
- world was likely to hold together much longer--I was let out through the
- rear avenues, and so escaped to the woods again.
- It was very pleasant, when I stayed late in town, to launch myself into
- the night, especially if it was dark and tempestuous, and set sail from
- some bright village parlor or lecture room, with a bag of rye or Indian
- meal upon my shoulder, for my snug harbor in the woods, having made all
- tight without and withdrawn under hatches with a merry crew of thoughts,
- leaving only my outer man at the helm, or even tying up the helm when it
- was plain sailing. I had many a genial thought by the cabin fire "as I
- sailed." I was never cast away nor distressed in any weather, though
- I encountered some severe storms. It is darker in the woods, even in
- common nights, than most suppose. I frequently had to look up at the
- opening between the trees above the path in order to learn my route,
- and, where there was no cart-path, to feel with my feet the faint track
- which I had worn, or steer by the known relation of particular trees
- which I felt with my hands, passing between two pines for instance, not
- more than eighteen inches apart, in the midst of the woods, invariably,
- in the darkest night. Sometimes, after coming home thus late in a dark
- and muggy night, when my feet felt the path which my eyes could not see,
- dreaming and absent-minded all the way, until I was aroused by having to
- raise my hand to lift the latch, I have not been able to recall a single
- step of my walk, and I have thought that perhaps my body would find its
- way home if its master should forsake it, as the hand finds its way to
- the mouth without assistance. Several times, when a visitor chanced to
- stay into evening, and it proved a dark night, I was obliged to conduct
- him to the cart-path in the rear of the house, and then point out to him
- the direction he was to pursue, and in keeping which he was to be guided
- rather by his feet than his eyes. One very dark night I directed thus
- on their way two young men who had been fishing in the pond. They lived
- about a mile off through the woods, and were quite used to the route.
- A day or two after one of them told me that they wandered about the
- greater part of the night, close by their own premises, and did not get
- home till toward morning, by which time, as there had been several
- heavy showers in the meanwhile, and the leaves were very wet, they were
- drenched to their skins. I have heard of many going astray even in the
- village streets, when the darkness was so thick that you could cut it
- with a knife, as the saying is. Some who live in the outskirts, having
- come to town a-shopping in their wagons, have been obliged to put up for
- the night; and gentlemen and ladies making a call have gone half a mile
- out of their way, feeling the sidewalk only with their feet, and not
- knowing when they turned. It is a surprising and memorable, as well
- as valuable experience, to be lost in the woods any time. Often in a
- snow-storm, even by day, one will come out upon a well-known road and
- yet find it impossible to tell which way leads to the village. Though he
- knows that he has travelled it a thousand times, he cannot recognize
- a feature in it, but it is as strange to him as if it were a road in
- Siberia. By night, of course, the perplexity is infinitely greater.
- In our most trivial walks, we are constantly, though unconsciously,
- steering like pilots by certain well-known beacons and headlands, and if
- we go beyond our usual course we still carry in our minds the bearing
- of some neighboring cape; and not till we are completely lost, or turned
- round--for a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut
- in this world to be lost--do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness
- of nature. Every man has to learn the points of compass again as often
- as he awakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction. Not till we are
- lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to
- find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our
- relations.
- One afternoon, near the end of the first summer, when I went to the
- village to get a shoe from the cobbler's, I was seized and put into
- jail, because, as I have elsewhere related, I did not pay a tax to, or
- recognize the authority of, the State which buys and sells men, women,
- and children, like cattle, at the door of its senate-house. I had gone
- down to the woods for other purposes. But, wherever a man goes, men
- will pursue and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can,
- constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society. It is
- true, I might have resisted forcibly with more or less effect, might
- have run "amok" against society; but I preferred that society should run
- "amok" against me, it being the desperate party. However, I was released
- the next day, obtained my mended shoe, and returned to the woods in
- season to get my dinner of huckleberries on Fair Haven Hill. I was never
- molested by any person but those who represented the State. I had no
- lock nor bolt but for the desk which held my papers, not even a nail
- to put over my latch or windows. I never fastened my door night or day,
- though I was to be absent several days; not even when the next fall
- I spent a fortnight in the woods of Maine. And yet my house was more
- respected than if it had been surrounded by a file of soldiers. The
- tired rambler could rest and warm himself by my fire, the literary amuse
- himself with the few books on my table, or the curious, by opening my
- closet door, see what was left of my dinner, and what prospect I had of
- a supper. Yet, though many people of every class came this way to the
- pond, I suffered no serious inconvenience from these sources, and I
- never missed anything but one small book, a volume of Homer, which
- perhaps was improperly gilded, and this I trust a soldier of our camp
- has found by this time. I am convinced, that if all men were to live as
- simply as I then did, thieving and robbery would be unknown. These take
- place only in communities where some have got more than is sufficient
- while others have not enough. The Pope's Homers would soon get properly
- distributed.
- "Nec bella fuerunt,
- Faginus astabat dum scyphus ante dapes."
- "Nor wars did men molest,
- When only beechen bowls were in request."
- "You who govern public affairs, what need have you to employ
- punishments? Love virtue, and the people will be virtuous. The virtues
- of a superior man are like the wind; the virtues of a common man are
- like the grass--the grass, when the wind passes over it, bends."
- The Ponds
- Sometimes, having had a surfeit of human society and gossip, and worn
- out all my village friends, I rambled still farther westward than I
- habitually dwell, into yet more unfrequented parts of the town, "to
- fresh woods and pastures new," or, while the sun was setting, made my
- supper of huckleberries and blueberries on Fair Haven Hill, and laid up
- a store for several days. The fruits do not yield their true flavor to
- the purchaser of them, nor to him who raises them for the market. There
- is but one way to obtain it, yet few take that way. If you would know
- the flavor of huckleberries, ask the cowboy or the partridge. It is a
- vulgar error to suppose that you have tasted huckleberries who never
- plucked them. A huckleberry never reaches Boston; they have not been
- known there since they grew on her three hills. The ambrosial and
- essential part of the fruit is lost with the bloom which is rubbed off
- in the market cart, and they become mere provender. As long as Eternal
- Justice reigns, not one innocent huckleberry can be transported thither
- from the country's hills.
- Occasionally, after my hoeing was done for the day, I joined some
- impatient companion who had been fishing on the pond since morning,
- as silent and motionless as a duck or a floating leaf, and, after
- practising various kinds of philosophy, had concluded commonly, by the
- time I arrived, that he belonged to the ancient sect of Cænobites.
- There was one older man, an excellent fisher and skilled in all kinds of
- woodcraft, who was pleased to look upon my house as a building erected
- for the convenience of fishermen; and I was equally pleased when he sat
- in my doorway to arrange his lines. Once in a while we sat together on
- the pond, he at one end of the boat, and I at the other; but not many
- words passed between us, for he had grown deaf in his later years, but
- he occasionally hummed a psalm, which harmonized well enough with my
- philosophy. Our intercourse was thus altogether one of unbroken harmony,
- far more pleasing to remember than if it had been carried on by speech.
- When, as was commonly the case, I had none to commune with, I used
- to raise the echoes by striking with a paddle on the side of my boat,
- filling the surrounding woods with circling and dilating sound, stirring
- them up as the keeper of a menagerie his wild beasts, until I elicited a
- growl from every wooded vale and hillside.
- In warm evenings I frequently sat in the boat playing the flute, and
- saw the perch, which I seem to have charmed, hovering around me, and
- the moon travelling over the ribbed bottom, which was strewed with the
- wrecks of the forest. Formerly I had come to this pond adventurously,
- from time to time, in dark summer nights, with a companion, and, making
- a fire close to the water's edge, which we thought attracted the fishes,
- we caught pouts with a bunch of worms strung on a thread, and when we
- had done, far in the night, threw the burning brands high into the air
- like skyrockets, which, coming down into the pond, were quenched with
- a loud hissing, and we were suddenly groping in total darkness. Through
- this, whistling a tune, we took our way to the haunts of men again. But
- now I had made my home by the shore.
- Sometimes, after staying in a village parlor till the family had all
- retired, I have returned to the woods, and, partly with a view to the
- next day's dinner, spent the hours of midnight fishing from a boat by
- moonlight, serenaded by owls and foxes, and hearing, from time to time,
- the creaking note of some unknown bird close at hand. These experiences
- were very memorable and valuable to me--anchored in forty feet of
- water, and twenty or thirty rods from the shore, surrounded sometimes
- by thousands of small perch and shiners, dimpling the surface with their
- tails in the moonlight, and communicating by a long flaxen line with
- mysterious nocturnal fishes which had their dwelling forty feet below,
- or sometimes dragging sixty feet of line about the pond as I drifted in
- the gentle night breeze, now and then feeling a slight vibration along
- it, indicative of some life prowling about its extremity, of dull
- uncertain blundering purpose there, and slow to make up its mind.
- At length you slowly raise, pulling hand over hand, some horned pout
- squeaking and squirming to the upper air. It was very queer, especially
- in dark nights, when your thoughts had wandered to vast and cosmogonal
- themes in other spheres, to feel this faint jerk, which came to
- interrupt your dreams and link you to Nature again. It seemed as if I
- might next cast my line upward into the air, as well as downward into
- this element, which was scarcely more dense. Thus I caught two fishes as
- it were with one hook.
- * * * * *
- The scenery of Walden is on a humble scale, and, though very beautiful,
- does not approach to grandeur, nor can it much concern one who has not
- long frequented it or lived by its shore; yet this pond is so remarkable
- for its depth and purity as to merit a particular description. It is
- a clear and deep green well, half a mile long and a mile and three
- quarters in circumference, and contains about sixty-one and a half
- acres; a perennial spring in the midst of pine and oak woods, without
- any visible inlet or outlet except by the clouds and evaporation. The
- surrounding hills rise abruptly from the water to the height of forty to
- eighty feet, though on the southeast and east they attain to about one
- hundred and one hundred and fifty feet respectively, within a quarter
- and a third of a mile. They are exclusively woodland. All our Concord
- waters have two colors at least; one when viewed at a distance, and
- another, more proper, close at hand. The first depends more on the
- light, and follows the sky. In clear weather, in summer, they appear
- blue at a little distance, especially if agitated, and at a great
- distance all appear alike. In stormy weather they are sometimes of a
- dark slate-color. The sea, however, is said to be blue one day and green
- another without any perceptible change in the atmosphere. I have seen
- our river, when, the landscape being covered with snow, both water and
- ice were almost as green as grass. Some consider blue "to be the color
- of pure water, whether liquid or solid." But, looking directly down into
- our waters from a boat, they are seen to be of very different colors.
- Walden is blue at one time and green at another, even from the same
- point of view. Lying between the earth and the heavens, it partakes of
- the color of both. Viewed from a hilltop it reflects the color of the
- sky; but near at hand it is of a yellowish tint next the shore where
- you can see the sand, then a light green, which gradually deepens to a
- uniform dark green in the body of the pond. In some lights, viewed
- even from a hilltop, it is of a vivid green next the shore. Some have
- referred this to the reflection of the verdure; but it is equally green
- there against the railroad sandbank, and in the spring, before the
- leaves are expanded, and it may be simply the result of the prevailing
- blue mixed with the yellow of the sand. Such is the color of its iris.
- This is that portion, also, where in the spring, the ice being warmed
- by the heat of the sun reflected from the bottom, and also transmitted
- through the earth, melts first and forms a narrow canal about the still
- frozen middle. Like the rest of our waters, when much agitated, in clear
- weather, so that the surface of the waves may reflect the sky at the
- right angle, or because there is more light mixed with it, it appears
- at a little distance of a darker blue than the sky itself; and at such
- a time, being on its surface, and looking with divided vision, so as to
- see the reflection, I have discerned a matchless and indescribable light
- blue, such as watered or changeable silks and sword blades suggest, more
- cerulean than the sky itself, alternating with the original dark green
- on the opposite sides of the waves, which last appeared but muddy in
- comparison. It is a vitreous greenish blue, as I remember it, like those
- patches of the winter sky seen through cloud vistas in the west before
- sundown. Yet a single glass of its water held up to the light is as
- colorless as an equal quantity of air. It is well known that a large
- plate of glass will have a green tint, owing, as the makers say, to its
- "body," but a small piece of the same will be colorless. How large a
- body of Walden water would be required to reflect a green tint I have
- never proved. The water of our river is black or a very dark brown to
- one looking directly down on it, and, like that of most ponds, imparts
- to the body of one bathing in it a yellowish tinge; but this water is
- of such crystalline purity that the body of the bather appears of an
- alabaster whiteness, still more unnatural, which, as the limbs are
- magnified and distorted withal, produces a monstrous effect, making fit
- studies for a Michael Angelo.
- The water is so transparent that the bottom can easily be discerned at
- the depth of twenty-five or thirty feet. Paddling over it, you may see,
- many feet beneath the surface, the schools of perch and shiners,
- perhaps only an inch long, yet the former easily distinguished by their
- transverse bars, and you think that they must be ascetic fish that find
- a subsistence there. Once, in the winter, many years ago, when I had
- been cutting holes through the ice in order to catch pickerel, as I
- stepped ashore I tossed my axe back on to the ice, but, as if some evil
- genius had directed it, it slid four or five rods directly into one of
- the holes, where the water was twenty-five feet deep. Out of curiosity,
- I lay down on the ice and looked through the hole, until I saw the axe
- a little on one side, standing on its head, with its helve erect and
- gently swaying to and fro with the pulse of the pond; and there it
- might have stood erect and swaying till in the course of time the handle
- rotted off, if I had not disturbed it. Making another hole directly over
- it with an ice chisel which I had, and cutting down the longest
- birch which I could find in the neighborhood with my knife, I made a
- slip-noose, which I attached to its end, and, letting it down carefully,
- passed it over the knob of the handle, and drew it by a line along the
- birch, and so pulled the axe out again.
- The shore is composed of a belt of smooth rounded white stones like
- paving-stones, excepting one or two short sand beaches, and is so steep
- that in many places a single leap will carry you into water over your
- head; and were it not for its remarkable transparency, that would be the
- last to be seen of its bottom till it rose on the opposite side. Some
- think it is bottomless. It is nowhere muddy, and a casual observer would
- say that there were no weeds at all in it; and of noticeable plants,
- except in the little meadows recently overflowed, which do not properly
- belong to it, a closer scrutiny does not detect a flag nor a bulrush,
- nor even a lily, yellow or white, but only a few small heart-leaves and
- potamogetons, and perhaps a water-target or two; all which however a
- bather might not perceive; and these plants are clean and bright like
- the element they grow in. The stones extend a rod or two into the water,
- and then the bottom is pure sand, except in the deepest parts, where
- there is usually a little sediment, probably from the decay of the
- leaves which have been wafted on to it so many successive falls, and a
- bright green weed is brought up on anchors even in midwinter.
- We have one other pond just like this, White Pond, in Nine Acre Corner,
- about two and a half miles westerly; but, though I am acquainted with
- most of the ponds within a dozen miles of this centre I do not know a
- third of this pure and well-like character. Successive nations perchance
- have drank at, admired, and fathomed it, and passed away, and still its
- water is green and pellucid as ever. Not an intermitting spring! Perhaps
- on that spring morning when Adam and Eve were driven out of Eden Walden
- Pond was already in existence, and even then breaking up in a gentle
- spring rain accompanied with mist and a southerly wind, and covered with
- myriads of ducks and geese, which had not heard of the fall, when still
- such pure lakes sufficed them. Even then it had commenced to rise and
- fall, and had clarified its waters and colored them of the hue they now
- wear, and obtained a patent of Heaven to be the only Walden Pond in
- the world and distiller of celestial dews. Who knows in how many
- unremembered nations' literatures this has been the Castalian Fountain?
- or what nymphs presided over it in the Golden Age? It is a gem of the
- first water which Concord wears in her coronet.
- Yet perchance the first who came to this well have left some trace of
- their footsteps. I have been surprised to detect encircling the pond,
- even where a thick wood has just been cut down on the shore, a narrow
- shelf-like path in the steep hillside, alternately rising and falling,
- approaching and receding from the water's edge, as old probably as the
- race of man here, worn by the feet of aboriginal hunters, and still from
- time to time unwittingly trodden by the present occupants of the land.
- This is particularly distinct to one standing on the middle of the pond
- in winter, just after a light snow has fallen, appearing as a clear
- undulating white line, unobscured by weeds and twigs, and very obvious
- a quarter of a mile off in many places where in summer it is hardly
- distinguishable close at hand. The snow reprints it, as it were, in
- clear white type alto-relievo. The ornamented grounds of villas which
- will one day be built here may still preserve some trace of this.
- The pond rises and falls, but whether regularly or not, and within what
- period, nobody knows, though, as usual, many pretend to know. It is
- commonly higher in the winter and lower in the summer, though not
- corresponding to the general wet and dryness. I can remember when it
- was a foot or two lower, and also when it was at least five feet higher,
- than when I lived by it. There is a narrow sand-bar running into it,
- with very deep water on one side, on which I helped boil a kettle of
- chowder, some six rods from the main shore, about the year 1824, which
- it has not been possible to do for twenty-five years; and, on the other
- hand, my friends used to listen with incredulity when I told them, that
- a few years later I was accustomed to fish from a boat in a secluded
- cove in the woods, fifteen rods from the only shore they knew, which
- place was long since converted into a meadow. But the pond has risen
- steadily for two years, and now, in the summer of '52, is just five feet
- higher than when I lived there, or as high as it was thirty years ago,
- and fishing goes on again in the meadow. This makes a difference of
- level, at the outside, of six or seven feet; and yet the water shed by
- the surrounding hills is insignificant in amount, and this overflow must
- be referred to causes which affect the deep springs. This same
- summer the pond has begun to fall again. It is remarkable that this
- fluctuation, whether periodical or not, appears thus to require many
- years for its accomplishment. I have observed one rise and a part of two
- falls, and I expect that a dozen or fifteen years hence the water will
- again be as low as I have ever known it. Flint's Pond, a mile eastward,
- allowing for the disturbance occasioned by its inlets and outlets,
- and the smaller intermediate ponds also, sympathize with Walden, and
- recently attained their greatest height at the same time with the
- latter. The same is true, as far as my observation goes, of White Pond.
- This rise and fall of Walden at long intervals serves this use at least;
- the water standing at this great height for a year or more, though it
- makes it difficult to walk round it, kills the shrubs and trees which
- have sprung up about its edge since the last rise--pitch pines, birches,
- alders, aspens, and others--and, falling again, leaves an unobstructed
- shore; for, unlike many ponds and all waters which are subject to a
- daily tide, its shore is cleanest when the water is lowest. On the side
- of the pond next my house a row of pitch pines, fifteen feet high, has
- been killed and tipped over as if by a lever, and thus a stop put to
- their encroachments; and their size indicates how many years have
- elapsed since the last rise to this height. By this fluctuation the pond
- asserts its title to a shore, and thus the _shore_ is _shorn_, and the
- trees cannot hold it by right of possession. These are the lips of the
- lake, on which no beard grows. It licks its chaps from time to time.
- When the water is at its height, the alders, willows, and maples send
- forth a mass of fibrous red roots several feet long from all sides of
- their stems in the water, and to the height of three or four feet from
- the ground, in the effort to maintain themselves; and I have known the
- high blueberry bushes about the shore, which commonly produce no fruit,
- bear an abundant crop under these circumstances.
- Some have been puzzled to tell how the shore became so regularly paved.
- My townsmen have all heard the tradition--the oldest people tell me that
- they heard it in their youth--that anciently the Indians were holding
- a pow-wow upon a hill here, which rose as high into the heavens as the
- pond now sinks deep into the earth, and they used much profanity, as
- the story goes, though this vice is one of which the Indians were never
- guilty, and while they were thus engaged the hill shook and suddenly
- sank, and only one old squaw, named Walden, escaped, and from her the
- pond was named. It has been conjectured that when the hill shook these
- stones rolled down its side and became the present shore. It is very
- certain, at any rate, that once there was no pond here, and now there
- is one; and this Indian fable does not in any respect conflict with the
- account of that ancient settler whom I have mentioned, who remembers
- so well when he first came here with his divining-rod, saw a thin vapor
- rising from the sward, and the hazel pointed steadily downward, and he
- concluded to dig a well here. As for the stones, many still think that
- they are hardly to be accounted for by the action of the waves on these
- hills; but I observe that the surrounding hills are remarkably full of
- the same kind of stones, so that they have been obliged to pile them
- up in walls on both sides of the railroad cut nearest the pond; and,
- moreover, there are most stones where the shore is most abrupt; so that,
- unfortunately, it is no longer a mystery to me. I detect the paver. If
- the name was not derived from that of some English locality--Saffron
- Walden, for instance--one might suppose that it was called originally
- _Walled-in_ Pond.
- The pond was my well ready dug. For four months in the year its water is
- as cold as it is pure at all times; and I think that it is then as good
- as any, if not the best, in the town. In the winter, all water which is
- exposed to the air is colder than springs and wells which are protected
- from it. The temperature of the pond water which had stood in the room
- where I sat from five o'clock in the afternoon till noon the next day,
- the sixth of March, 1846, the thermometer having been up to 65º or 70º
- some of the time, owing partly to the sun on the roof, was 42º, or one
- degree colder than the water of one of the coldest wells in the village
- just drawn. The temperature of the Boiling Spring the same day was 45º,
- or the warmest of any water tried, though it is the coldest that I know
- of in summer, when, beside, shallow and stagnant surface water is not
- mingled with it. Moreover, in summer, Walden never becomes so warm as
- most water which is exposed to the sun, on account of its depth. In the
- warmest weather I usually placed a pailful in my cellar, where it
- became cool in the night, and remained so during the day; though I also
- resorted to a spring in the neighborhood. It was as good when a week old
- as the day it was dipped, and had no taste of the pump. Whoever camps
- for a week in summer by the shore of a pond, needs only bury a pail of
- water a few feet deep in the shade of his camp to be independent of the
- luxury of ice.
- There have been caught in Walden pickerel, one weighing seven pounds--to
- say nothing of another which carried off a reel with great velocity,
- which the fisherman safely set down at eight pounds because he did
- not see him--perch and pouts, some of each weighing over two pounds,
- shiners, chivins or roach (_Leuciscus pulchellus_), a very few breams, and
- a couple of eels, one weighing four pounds--I am thus particular because
- the weight of a fish is commonly its only title to fame, and these are
- the only eels I have heard of here;--also, I have a faint recollection
- of a little fish some five inches long, with silvery sides and a
- greenish back, somewhat dace-like in its character, which I mention here
- chiefly to link my facts to fable. Nevertheless, this pond is not very
- fertile in fish. Its pickerel, though not abundant, are its chief boast.
- I have seen at one time lying on the ice pickerel of at least three
- different kinds: a long and shallow one, steel-colored, most like those
- caught in the river; a bright golden kind, with greenish reflections
- and remarkably deep, which is the most common here; and another,
- golden-colored, and shaped like the last, but peppered on the sides with
- small dark brown or black spots, intermixed with a few faint blood-red
- ones, very much like a trout. The specific name _reticulatus_ would not
- apply to this; it should be _guttatus_ rather. These are all very firm
- fish, and weigh more than their size promises. The shiners, pouts, and
- perch also, and indeed all the fishes which inhabit this pond, are much
- cleaner, handsomer, and firmer-fleshed than those in the river and most
- other ponds, as the water is purer, and they can easily be distinguished
- from them. Probably many ichthyologists would make new varieties of some
- of them. There are also a clean race of frogs and tortoises, and a
- few mussels in it; muskrats and minks leave their traces about it, and
- occasionally a travelling mud-turtle visits it. Sometimes, when I pushed
- off my boat in the morning, I disturbed a great mud-turtle which had
- secreted himself under the boat in the night. Ducks and geese frequent
- it in the spring and fall, the white-bellied swallows (_Hirundo bicolor_)
- skim over it, and the peetweets (_Totanus macularius_) "teeter" along its
- stony shores all summer. I have sometimes disturbed a fish hawk sitting
- on a white pine over the water; but I doubt if it is ever profaned by
- the wind of a gull, like Fair Haven. At most, it tolerates one annual
- loon. These are all the animals of consequence which frequent it now.
- You may see from a boat, in calm weather, near the sandy eastern shore,
- where the water is eight or ten feet deep, and also in some other parts
- of the pond, some circular heaps half a dozen feet in diameter by a foot
- in height, consisting of small stones less than a hen's egg in size,
- where all around is bare sand. At first you wonder if the Indians
- could have formed them on the ice for any purpose, and so, when the ice
- melted, they sank to the bottom; but they are too regular and some of
- them plainly too fresh for that. They are similar to those found in
- rivers; but as there are no suckers nor lampreys here, I know not by
- what fish they could be made. Perhaps they are the nests of the chivin.
- These lend a pleasing mystery to the bottom.
- The shore is irregular enough not to be monotonous. I have in my mind's
- eye the western, indented with deep bays, the bolder northern, and the
- beautifully scalloped southern shore, where successive capes overlap
- each other and suggest unexplored coves between. The forest has never
- so good a setting, nor is so distinctly beautiful, as when seen from the
- middle of a small lake amid hills which rise from the water's edge; for
- the water in which it is reflected not only makes the best foreground in
- such a case, but, with its winding shore, the most natural and agreeable
- boundary to it. There is no rawness nor imperfection in its edge there,
- as where the axe has cleared a part, or a cultivated field abuts on it.
- The trees have ample room to expand on the water side, and each sends
- forth its most vigorous branch in that direction. There Nature has woven
- a natural selvage, and the eye rises by just gradations from the low
- shrubs of the shore to the highest trees. There are few traces of man's
- hand to be seen. The water laves the shore as it did a thousand years
- ago.
- A lake is the landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature. It is
- earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of
- his own nature. The fluviatile trees next the shore are the slender
- eyelashes which fringe it, and the wooded hills and cliffs around are
- its overhanging brows.
- Standing on the smooth sandy beach at the east end of the pond, in
- a calm September afternoon, when a slight haze makes the opposite
- shore-line indistinct, I have seen whence came the expression, "the
- glassy surface of a lake." When you invert your head, it looks like
- a thread of finest gossamer stretched across the valley, and gleaming
- against the distant pine woods, separating one stratum of the atmosphere
- from another. You would think that you could walk dry under it to the
- opposite hills, and that the swallows which skim over might perch on it.
- Indeed, they sometimes dive below this line, as it were by mistake, and
- are undeceived. As you look over the pond westward you are obliged to
- employ both your hands to defend your eyes against the reflected as well
- as the true sun, for they are equally bright; and if, between the two,
- you survey its surface critically, it is literally as smooth as glass,
- except where the skater insects, at equal intervals scattered over its
- whole extent, by their motions in the sun produce the finest imaginable
- sparkle on it, or, perchance, a duck plumes itself, or, as I have said,
- a swallow skims so low as to touch it. It may be that in the distance a
- fish describes an arc of three or four feet in the air, and there is one
- bright flash where it emerges, and another where it strikes the water;
- sometimes the whole silvery arc is revealed; or here and there, perhaps,
- is a thistle-down floating on its surface, which the fishes dart at and
- so dimple it again. It is like molten glass cooled but not congealed,
- and the few motes in it are pure and beautiful like the imperfections in
- glass. You may often detect a yet smoother and darker water, separated
- from the rest as if by an invisible cobweb, boom of the water nymphs,
- resting on it. From a hilltop you can see a fish leap in almost any
- part; for not a pickerel or shiner picks an insect from this smooth
- surface but it manifestly disturbs the equilibrium of the whole lake.
- It is wonderful with what elaborateness this simple fact is
- advertised--this piscine murder will out--and from my distant perch I
- distinguish the circling undulations when they are half a dozen rods
- in diameter. You can even detect a water-bug (_Gyrinus_) ceaselessly
- progressing over the smooth surface a quarter of a mile off; for they
- furrow the water slightly, making a conspicuous ripple bounded by two
- diverging lines, but the skaters glide over it without rippling it
- perceptibly. When the surface is considerably agitated there are no
- skaters nor water-bugs on it, but apparently, in calm days, they leave
- their havens and adventurously glide forth from the shore by short
- impulses till they completely cover it. It is a soothing employment,
- on one of those fine days in the fall when all the warmth of the sun
- is fully appreciated, to sit on a stump on such a height as this,
- overlooking the pond, and study the dimpling circles which are
- incessantly inscribed on its otherwise invisible surface amid the
- reflected skies and trees. Over this great expanse there is no
- disturbance but it is thus at once gently smoothed away and assuaged,
- as, when a vase of water is jarred, the trembling circles seek the shore
- and all is smooth again. Not a fish can leap or an insect fall on the
- pond but it is thus reported in circling dimples, in lines of beauty, as
- it were the constant welling up of its fountain, the gentle pulsing of
- its life, the heaving of its breast. The thrills of joy and thrills
- of pain are undistinguishable. How peaceful the phenomena of the lake!
- Again the works of man shine as in the spring. Ay, every leaf and twig
- and stone and cobweb sparkles now at mid-afternoon as when covered with
- dew in a spring morning. Every motion of an oar or an insect produces a
- flash of light; and if an oar falls, how sweet the echo!
- In such a day, in September or October, Walden is a perfect forest
- mirror, set round with stones as precious to my eye as if fewer or
- rarer. Nothing so fair, so pure, and at the same time so large, as a
- lake, perchance, lies on the surface of the earth. Sky water. It needs
- no fence. Nations come and go without defiling it. It is a mirror which
- no stone can crack, whose quicksilver will never wear off, whose gilding
- Nature continually repairs; no storms, no dust, can dim its surface ever
- fresh;--a mirror in which all impurity presented to it sinks, swept and
- dusted by the sun's hazy brush--this the light dust-cloth--which retains
- no breath that is breathed on it, but sends its own to float as clouds
- high above its surface, and be reflected in its bosom still.
- A field of water betrays the spirit that is in the air. It is
- continually receiving new life and motion from above. It is intermediate
- in its nature between land and sky. On land only the grass and trees
- wave, but the water itself is rippled by the wind. I see where the
- breeze dashes across it by the streaks or flakes of light. It is
- remarkable that we can look down on its surface. We shall, perhaps,
- look down thus on the surface of air at length, and mark where a still
- subtler spirit sweeps over it.
- The skaters and water-bugs finally disappear in the latter part of
- October, when the severe frosts have come; and then and in November,
- usually, in a calm day, there is absolutely nothing to ripple the
- surface. One November afternoon, in the calm at the end of a rain-storm
- of several days' duration, when the sky was still completely overcast
- and the air was full of mist, I observed that the pond was remarkably
- smooth, so that it was difficult to distinguish its surface; though it
- no longer reflected the bright tints of October, but the sombre November
- colors of the surrounding hills. Though I passed over it as gently as
- possible, the slight undulations produced by my boat extended almost
- as far as I could see, and gave a ribbed appearance to the reflections.
- But, as I was looking over the surface, I saw here and there at a
- distance a faint glimmer, as if some skater insects which had escaped
- the frosts might be collected there, or, perchance, the surface, being
- so smooth, betrayed where a spring welled up from the bottom. Paddling
- gently to one of these places, I was surprised to find myself surrounded
- by myriads of small perch, about five inches long, of a rich bronze
- color in the green water, sporting there, and constantly rising to
- the surface and dimpling it, sometimes leaving bubbles on it. In such
- transparent and seemingly bottomless water, reflecting the clouds,
- I seemed to be floating through the air as in a balloon, and their
- swimming impressed me as a kind of flight or hovering, as if they were
- a compact flock of birds passing just beneath my level on the right or
- left, their fins, like sails, set all around them. There were many such
- schools in the pond, apparently improving the short season before winter
- would draw an icy shutter over their broad skylight, sometimes giving
- to the surface an appearance as if a slight breeze struck it, or a few
- rain-drops fell there. When I approached carelessly and alarmed them,
- they made a sudden splash and rippling with their tails, as if one had
- struck the water with a brushy bough, and instantly took refuge in the
- depths. At length the wind rose, the mist increased, and the waves began
- to run, and the perch leaped much higher than before, half out of water,
- a hundred black points, three inches long, at once above the surface.
- Even as late as the fifth of December, one year, I saw some dimples on
- the surface, and thinking it was going to rain hard immediately, the
- air being full of mist, I made haste to take my place at the oars and row
- homeward; already the rain seemed rapidly increasing, though I felt
- none on my cheek, and I anticipated a thorough soaking. But suddenly the
- dimples ceased, for they were produced by the perch, which the noise
- of my oars had seared into the depths, and I saw their schools dimly
- disappearing; so I spent a dry afternoon after all.
- An old man who used to frequent this pond nearly sixty years ago, when
- it was dark with surrounding forests, tells me that in those days he
- sometimes saw it all alive with ducks and other water-fowl, and that
- there were many eagles about it. He came here a-fishing, and used an
- old log canoe which he found on the shore. It was made of two white pine
- logs dug out and pinned together, and was cut off square at the ends.
- It was very clumsy, but lasted a great many years before it became
- water-logged and perhaps sank to the bottom. He did not know whose it
- was; it belonged to the pond. He used to make a cable for his anchor of
- strips of hickory bark tied together. An old man, a potter, who lived
- by the pond before the Revolution, told him once that there was an iron
- chest at the bottom, and that he had seen it. Sometimes it would come
- floating up to the shore; but when you went toward it, it would go back
- into deep water and disappear. I was pleased to hear of the old log
- canoe, which took the place of an Indian one of the same material but
- more graceful construction, which perchance had first been a tree on the
- bank, and then, as it were, fell into the water, to float there for a
- generation, the most proper vessel for the lake. I remember that when I
- first looked into these depths there were many large trunks to be seen
- indistinctly lying on the bottom, which had either been blown over
- formerly, or left on the ice at the last cutting, when wood was cheaper;
- but now they have mostly disappeared.
- When I first paddled a boat on Walden, it was completely surrounded by
- thick and lofty pine and oak woods, and in some of its coves grape-vines
- had run over the trees next the water and formed bowers under which a
- boat could pass. The hills which form its shores are so steep, and the
- woods on them were then so high, that, as you looked down from the west
- end, it had the appearance of an amphitheatre for some land of sylvan
- spectacle. I have spent many an hour, when I was younger, floating over
- its surface as the zephyr willed, having paddled my boat to the middle,
- and lying on my back across the seats, in a summer forenoon, dreaming
- awake, until I was aroused by the boat touching the sand, and I arose to
- see what shore my fates had impelled me to; days when idleness was the
- most attractive and productive industry. Many a forenoon have I stolen
- away, preferring to spend thus the most valued part of the day; for I
- was rich, if not in money, in sunny hours and summer days, and spent
- them lavishly; nor do I regret that I did not waste more of them in
- the workshop or the teacher's desk. But since I left those shores the
- woodchoppers have still further laid them waste, and now for many a
- year there will be no more rambling through the aisles of the wood,
- with occasional vistas through which you see the water. My Muse may be
- excused if she is silent henceforth. How can you expect the birds to
- sing when their groves are cut down?
- Now the trunks of trees on the bottom, and the old log canoe, and the
- dark surrounding woods, are gone, and the villagers, who scarcely know
- where it lies, instead of going to the pond to bathe or drink, are
- thinking to bring its water, which should be as sacred as the Ganges
- at least, to the village in a pipe, to wash their dishes with!--to
- earn their Walden by the turning of a cock or drawing of a plug! That
- devilish Iron Horse, whose ear-rending neigh is heard throughout the
- town, has muddied the Boiling Spring with his foot, and he it is that
- has browsed off all the woods on Walden shore, that Trojan horse, with a
- thousand men in his belly, introduced by mercenary Greeks! Where is the
- country's champion, the Moore of Moore Hill, to meet him at the Deep Cut
- and thrust an avenging lance between the ribs of the bloated pest?
- Nevertheless, of all the characters I have known, perhaps Walden wears
- best, and best preserves its purity. Many men have been likened to it,
- but few deserve that honor. Though the woodchoppers have laid bare first
- this shore and then that, and the Irish have built their sties by it,
- and the railroad has infringed on its border, and the ice-men have
- skimmed it once, it is itself unchanged, the same water which my
- youthful eyes fell on; all the change is in me. It has not acquired one
- permanent wrinkle after all its ripples. It is perennially young, and
- I may stand and see a swallow dip apparently to pick an insect from its
- surface as of yore. It struck me again tonight, as if I had not seen it
- almost daily for more than twenty years--Why, here is Walden, the same
- woodland lake that I discovered so many years ago; where a forest was
- cut down last winter another is springing up by its shore as lustily as
- ever; the same thought is welling up to its surface that was then; it
- is the same liquid joy and happiness to itself and its Maker, ay, and it
- may be to me. It is the work of a brave man surely, in whom there was no
- guile! He rounded this water with his hand, deepened and clarified it in
- his thought, and in his will bequeathed it to Concord. I see by its face
- that it is visited by the same reflection; and I can almost say, Walden,
- is it you?
- It is no dream of mine,
- To ornament a line;
- I cannot come nearer to God and Heaven
- Than I live to Walden even.
- I am its stony shore,
- And the breeze that passes o'er;
- In the hollow of my hand
- Are its water and its sand,
- And its deepest resort
- Lies high in my thought.
- The cars never pause to look at it; yet I fancy that the engineers and
- firemen and brakemen, and those passengers who have a season ticket and
- see it often, are better men for the sight. The engineer does not forget
- at night, or his nature does not, that he has beheld this vision of
- serenity and purity once at least during the day. Though seen but once,
- it helps to wash out State Street and the engine's soot. One proposes
- that it be called "God's Drop."
- I have said that Walden has no visible inlet nor outlet, but it is on
- the one hand distantly and indirectly related to Flint's Pond, which is
- more elevated, by a chain of small ponds coming from that quarter, and
- on the other directly and manifestly to Concord River, which is lower,
- by a similar chain of ponds through which in some other geological
- period it may have flowed, and by a little digging, which God forbid,
- it can be made to flow thither again. If by living thus reserved and
- austere, like a hermit in the woods, so long, it has acquired such
- wonderful purity, who would not regret that the comparatively impure
- waters of Flint's Pond should be mingled with it, or itself should ever
- go to waste its sweetness in the ocean wave?
- * * * * *
- Flint's, or Sandy Pond, in Lincoln, our greatest lake and inland sea,
- lies about a mile east of Walden. It is much larger, being said to
- contain one hundred and ninety-seven acres, and is more fertile in fish;
- but it is comparatively shallow, and not remarkably pure. A walk through
- the woods thither was often my recreation. It was worth the while, if
- only to feel the wind blow on your cheek freely, and see the waves run,
- and remember the life of mariners. I went a-chestnutting there in the
- fall, on windy days, when the nuts were dropping into the water and were
- washed to my feet; and one day, as I crept along its sedgy shore, the
- fresh spray blowing in my face, I came upon the mouldering wreck of a
- boat, the sides gone, and hardly more than the impression of its flat
- bottom left amid the rushes; yet its model was sharply defined, as if it
- were a large decayed pad, with its veins. It was as impressive a wreck
- as one could imagine on the seashore, and had as good a moral. It is by
- this time mere vegetable mould and undistinguishable pond shore, through
- which rushes and flags have pushed up. I used to admire the ripple marks
- on the sandy bottom, at the north end of this pond, made firm and hard
- to the feet of the wader by the pressure of the water, and the rushes
- which grew in Indian file, in waving lines, corresponding to these
- marks, rank behind rank, as if the waves had planted them. There also
- I have found, in considerable quantities, curious balls, composed
- apparently of fine grass or roots, of pipewort perhaps, from half an
- inch to four inches in diameter, and perfectly spherical. These wash
- back and forth in shallow water on a sandy bottom, and are sometimes
- cast on the shore. They are either solid grass, or have a little sand in
- the middle. At first you would say that they were formed by the action
- of the waves, like a pebble; yet the smallest are made of equally coarse
- materials, half an inch long, and they are produced only at one season
- of the year. Moreover, the waves, I suspect, do not so much construct
- as wear down a material which has already acquired consistency. They
- preserve their form when dry for an indefinite period.
- _Flint's Pond!_ Such is the poverty of our nomenclature. What right had
- the unclean and stupid farmer, whose farm abutted on this sky water,
- whose shores he has ruthlessly laid bare, to give his name to it? Some
- skin-flint, who loved better the reflecting surface of a dollar, or a
- bright cent, in which he could see his own brazen face; who regarded
- even the wild ducks which settled in it as trespassers; his fingers
- grown into crooked and bony talons from the long habit of grasping
- harpy-like;--so it is not named for me. I go not there to see him nor to
- hear of him; who never saw it, who never bathed in it, who never loved
- it, who never protected it, who never spoke a good word for it, nor
- thanked God that He had made it. Rather let it be named from the fishes
- that swim in it, the wild fowl or quadrupeds which frequent it, the wild
- flowers which grow by its shores, or some wild man or child the thread
- of whose history is interwoven with its own; not from him who could show
- no title to it but the deed which a like-minded neighbor or legislature
- gave him--him who thought only of its money value; whose presence
- perchance cursed all the shores; who exhausted the land around it, and
- would fain have exhausted the waters within it; who regretted only that
- it was not English hay or cranberry meadow--there was nothing to redeem
- it, forsooth, in his eyes--and would have drained and sold it for the
- mud at its bottom. It did not turn his mill, and it was no _privilege_ to
- him to behold it. I respect not his labors, his farm where everything
- has its price, who would carry the landscape, who would carry his God,
- to market, if he could get anything for him; who goes to market _for_ his
- god as it is; on whose farm nothing grows free, whose fields bear no
- crops, whose meadows no flowers, whose trees no fruits, but dollars; who
- loves not the beauty of his fruits, whose fruits are not ripe for him
- till they are turned to dollars. Give me the poverty that enjoys true
- wealth. Farmers are respectable and interesting to me in proportion as
- they are poor--poor farmers. A model farm! where the house stands like a
- fungus in a muckheap, chambers for men, horses, oxen, and swine, cleansed
- and uncleansed, all contiguous to one another! Stocked with men! A great
- grease-spot, redolent of manures and buttermilk! Under a high state of
- cultivation, being manured with the hearts and brains of men! As if you
- were to raise your potatoes in the churchyard! Such is a model farm.
- No, no; if the fairest features of the landscape are to be named after
- men, let them be the noblest and worthiest men alone. Let our lakes
- receive as true names at least as the Icarian Sea, where "still the
- shore" a "brave attempt resounds."
- * * * * *
- Goose Pond, of small extent, is on my way to Flint's; Fair Haven, an
- expansion of Concord River, said to contain some seventy acres, is a
- mile southwest; and White Pond, of about forty acres, is a mile and a
- half beyond Fair Haven. This is my lake country. These, with Concord
- River, are my water privileges; and night and day, year in year out,
- they grind such grist as I carry to them.
- Since the wood-cutters, and the railroad, and I myself have profaned
- Walden, perhaps the most attractive, if not the most beautiful, of all
- our lakes, the gem of the woods, is White Pond;--a poor name from its
- commonness, whether derived from the remarkable purity of its waters or
- the color of its sands. In these as in other respects, however, it is
- a lesser twin of Walden. They are so much alike that you would say they
- must be connected under ground. It has the same stony shore, and its
- waters are of the same hue. As at Walden, in sultry dog-day weather,
- looking down through the woods on some of its bays which are not so deep
- but that the reflection from the bottom tinges them, its waters are of
- a misty bluish-green or glaucous color. Many years since I used to go
- there to collect the sand by cartloads, to make sandpaper with, and I
- have continued to visit it ever since. One who frequents it proposes to
- call it Virid Lake. Perhaps it might be called Yellow Pine Lake, from
- the following circumstance. About fifteen years ago you could see the
- top of a pitch pine, of the kind called yellow pine hereabouts, though
- it is not a distinct species, projecting above the surface in deep
- water, many rods from the shore. It was even supposed by some that the
- pond had sunk, and this was one of the primitive forest that formerly
- stood there. I find that even so long ago as 1792, in a "Topographical
- Description of the Town of Concord," by one of its citizens, in the
- Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, the author, after
- speaking of Walden and White Ponds, adds, "In the middle of the latter
- may be seen, when the water is very low, a tree which appears as if it
- grew in the place where it now stands, although the roots are fifty feet
- below the surface of the water; the top of this tree is broken off, and
- at that place measures fourteen inches in diameter." In the spring of
- '49 I talked with the man who lives nearest the pond in Sudbury, who
- told me that it was he who got out this tree ten or fifteen years
- before. As near as he could remember, it stood twelve or fifteen rods
- from the shore, where the water was thirty or forty feet deep. It was
- in the winter, and he had been getting out ice in the forenoon, and had
- resolved that in the afternoon, with the aid of his neighbors, he would
- take out the old yellow pine. He sawed a channel in the ice toward the
- shore, and hauled it over and along and out on to the ice with oxen;
- but, before he had gone far in his work, he was surprised to find that
- it was wrong end upward, with the stumps of the branches pointing down,
- and the small end firmly fastened in the sandy bottom. It was about
- a foot in diameter at the big end, and he had expected to get a good
- saw-log, but it was so rotten as to be fit only for fuel, if for that.
- He had some of it in his shed then. There were marks of an axe and of
- woodpeckers on the butt. He thought that it might have been a dead tree
- on the shore, but was finally blown over into the pond, and after the
- top had become water-logged, while the butt-end was still dry and light,
- had drifted out and sunk wrong end up. His father, eighty years old,
- could not remember when it was not there. Several pretty large logs may
- still be seen lying on the bottom, where, owing to the undulation of the
- surface, they look like huge water snakes in motion.
- This pond has rarely been profaned by a boat, for there is little in it
- to tempt a fisherman. Instead of the white lily, which requires mud, or
- the common sweet flag, the blue flag (_Iris versicolor_) grows thinly in
- the pure water, rising from the stony bottom all around the shore, where
- it is visited by hummingbirds in June; and the color both of its bluish
- blades and its flowers and especially their reflections, is in singular
- harmony with the glaucous water.
- White Pond and Walden are great crystals on the surface of the earth,
- Lakes of Light. If they were permanently congealed, and small enough
- to be clutched, they would, perchance, be carried off by slaves, like
- precious stones, to adorn the heads of emperors; but being liquid, and
- ample, and secured to us and our successors forever, we disregard them,
- and run after the diamond of Kohinoor. They are too pure to have a
- market value; they contain no muck. How much more beautiful than our
- lives, how much more transparent than our characters, are they! We
- never learned meanness of them. How much fairer than the pool before the
- farmer's door, in which his ducks swim! Hither the clean wild ducks come.
- Nature has no human inhabitant who appreciates her. The birds with their
- plumage and their notes are in harmony with the flowers, but what
- youth or maiden conspires with the wild luxuriant beauty of Nature? She
- flourishes most alone, far from the towns where they reside. Talk of
- heaven! ye disgrace earth.
- Baker Farm
- Sometimes I rambled to pine groves, standing like temples, or like
- fleets at sea, full-rigged, with wavy boughs, and rippling with light,
- so soft and green and shady that the Druids would have forsaken their
- oaks to worship in them; or to the cedar wood beyond Flint's Pond, where
- the trees, covered with hoary blue berries, spiring higher and higher,
- are fit to stand before Valhalla, and the creeping juniper covers the
- ground with wreaths full of fruit; or to swamps where the usnea lichen
- hangs in festoons from the white spruce trees, and toadstools, round
- tables of the swamp gods, cover the ground, and more beautiful fungi
- adorn the stumps, like butterflies or shells, vegetable winkles; where
- the swamp-pink and dogwood grow, the red alderberry glows like eyes of
- imps, the waxwork grooves and crushes the hardest woods in its folds,
- and the wild holly berries make the beholder forget his home with their
- beauty, and he is dazzled and tempted by nameless other wild forbidden
- fruits, too fair for mortal taste. Instead of calling on some scholar,
- I paid many a visit to particular trees, of kinds which are rare in this
- neighborhood, standing far away in the middle of some pasture, or in the
- depths of a wood or swamp, or on a hilltop; such as the black birch, of
- which we have some handsome specimens two feet in diameter; its cousin,
- the yellow birch, with its loose golden vest, perfumed like the first;
- the beech, which has so neat a bole and beautifully lichen-painted,
- perfect in all its details, of which, excepting scattered specimens, I
- know but one small grove of sizable trees left in the township, supposed
- by some to have been planted by the pigeons that were once baited with
- beechnuts near by; it is worth the while to see the silver grain
- sparkle when you split this wood; the bass; the hornbeam; the _Celtis
- occidentalis_, or false elm, of which we have but one well-grown; some
- taller mast of a pine, a shingle tree, or a more perfect hemlock than
- usual, standing like a pagoda in the midst of the woods; and many
- others I could mention. These were the shrines I visited both summer and
- winter.
- Once it chanced that I stood in the very abutment of a rainbow's arch,
- which filled the lower stratum of the atmosphere, tinging the grass and
- leaves around, and dazzling me as if I looked through colored crystal.
- It was a lake of rainbow light, in which, for a short while, I lived
- like a dolphin. If it had lasted longer it might have tinged my
- employments and life. As I walked on the railroad causeway, I used
- to wonder at the halo of light around my shadow, and would fain fancy
- myself one of the elect. One who visited me declared that the shadows
- of some Irishmen before him had no halo about them, that it was only
- natives that were so distinguished. Benvenuto Cellini tells us in his
- memoirs, that, after a certain terrible dream or vision which he had
- during his confinement in the castle of St. Angelo a resplendent light
- appeared over the shadow of his head at morning and evening, whether
- he was in Italy or France, and it was particularly conspicuous when the
- grass was moist with dew. This was probably the same phenomenon to which
- I have referred, which is especially observed in the morning, but also
- at other times, and even by moonlight. Though a constant one, it is
- not commonly noticed, and, in the case of an excitable imagination like
- Cellini's, it would be basis enough for superstition. Beside, he tells
- us that he showed it to very few. But are they not indeed distinguished
- who are conscious that they are regarded at all?
- * * * * *
- I set out one afternoon to go a-fishing to Fair Haven, through the
- woods, to eke out my scanty fare of vegetables. My way led through
- Pleasant Meadow, an adjunct of the Baker Farm, that retreat of which a
- poet has since sung, beginning,--
- "Thy entry is a pleasant field,
- Which some mossy fruit trees yield
- Partly to a ruddy brook,
- By gliding musquash undertook,
- And mercurial trout,
- Darting about."
- I thought of living there before I went to Walden. I "hooked" the
- apples, leaped the brook, and scared the musquash and the trout. It
- was one of those afternoons which seem indefinitely long before one,
- in which many events may happen, a large portion of our natural life,
- though it was already half spent when I started. By the way there came
- up a shower, which compelled me to stand half an hour under a pine,
- piling boughs over my head, and wearing my handkerchief for a shed; and
- when at length I had made one cast over the pickerelweed, standing up
- to my middle in water, I found myself suddenly in the shadow of a cloud,
- and the thunder began to rumble with such emphasis that I could do no
- more than listen to it. The gods must be proud, thought I, with such
- forked flashes to rout a poor unarmed fisherman. So I made haste for
- shelter to the nearest hut, which stood half a mile from any road, but
- so much the nearer to the pond, and had long been uninhabited:--
- "And here a poet builded,
- In the completed years,
- For behold a trivial cabin
- That to destruction steers."
- So the Muse fables. But therein, as I found, dwelt now John Field, an
- Irishman, and his wife, and several children, from the broad-faced boy
- who assisted his father at his work, and now came running by his
- side from the bog to escape the rain, to the wrinkled, sibyl-like,
- cone-headed infant that sat upon its father's knee as in the palaces
- of nobles, and looked out from its home in the midst of wet and hunger
- inquisitively upon the stranger, with the privilege of infancy, not
- knowing but it was the last of a noble line, and the hope and cynosure
- of the world, instead of John Field's poor starveling brat. There we sat
- together under that part of the roof which leaked the least, while it
- showered and thundered without. I had sat there many times of old
- before the ship was built that floated his family to America. An honest,
- hard-working, but shiftless man plainly was John Field; and his wife,
- she too was brave to cook so many successive dinners in the recesses of
- that lofty stove; with round greasy face and bare breast, still thinking
- to improve her condition one day; with the never absent mop in one hand,
- and yet no effects of it visible anywhere. The chickens, which had also
- taken shelter here from the rain, stalked about the room like members
- of the family, too humanized, methought, to roast well. They stood and
- looked in my eye or pecked at my shoe significantly. Meanwhile my
- host told me his story, how hard he worked "bogging" for a neighboring
- farmer, turning up a meadow with a spade or bog hoe at the rate of ten
- dollars an acre and the use of the land with manure for one year, and
- his little broad-faced son worked cheerfully at his father's side the
- while, not knowing how poor a bargain the latter had made. I tried to
- help him with my experience, telling him that he was one of my nearest
- neighbors, and that I too, who came a-fishing here, and looked like a
- loafer, was getting my living like himself; that I lived in a tight,
- light, and clean house, which hardly cost more than the annual rent of
- such a ruin as his commonly amounts to; and how, if he chose, he might
- in a month or two build himself a palace of his own; that I did not use
- tea, nor coffee, nor butter, nor milk, nor fresh meat, and so did not
- have to work to get them; again, as I did not work hard, I did not have
- to eat hard, and it cost me but a trifle for my food; but as he began
- with tea, and coffee, and butter, and milk, and beef, he had to work
- hard to pay for them, and when he had worked hard he had to eat hard
- again to repair the waste of his system--and so it was as broad as
- it was long, indeed it was broader than it was long, for he was
- discontented and wasted his life into the bargain; and yet he had rated
- it as a gain in coming to America, that here you could get tea, and
- coffee, and meat every day. But the only true America is that country
- where you are at liberty to pursue such a mode of life as may enable you
- to do without these, and where the state does not endeavor to compel
- you to sustain the slavery and war and other superfluous expenses
- which directly or indirectly result from the use of such things. For I
- purposely talked to him as if he were a philosopher, or desired to be
- one. I should be glad if all the meadows on the earth were left in a
- wild state, if that were the consequence of men's beginning to redeem
- themselves. A man will not need to study history to find out what is
- best for his own culture. But alas! the culture of an Irishman is an
- enterprise to be undertaken with a sort of moral bog hoe. I told him,
- that as he worked so hard at bogging, he required thick boots and stout
- clothing, which yet were soon soiled and worn out, but I wore light
- shoes and thin clothing, which cost not half so much, though he might
- think that I was dressed like a gentleman (which, however, was not the
- case), and in an hour or two, without labor, but as a recreation, I
- could, if I wished, catch as many fish as I should want for two days, or
- earn enough money to support me a week. If he and his family would
- live simply, they might all go a-huckleberrying in the summer for their
- amusement. John heaved a sigh at this, and his wife stared with arms
- a-kimbo, and both appeared to be wondering if they had capital enough to
- begin such a course with, or arithmetic enough to carry it through. It
- was sailing by dead reckoning to them, and they saw not clearly how to
- make their port so; therefore I suppose they still take life bravely,
- after their fashion, face to face, giving it tooth and nail, not having
- skill to split its massive columns with any fine entering wedge, and
- rout it in detail;--thinking to deal with it roughly, as one
- should handle a thistle. But they fight at an overwhelming
- disadvantage--living, John Field, alas! without arithmetic, and failing
- so.
- "Do you ever fish?" I asked. "Oh yes, I catch a mess now and then when
- I am lying by; good perch I catch."--"What's your bait?" "I catch shiners
- with fishworms, and bait the perch with them." "You'd better go now,
- John," said his wife, with glistening and hopeful face; but John
- demurred.
- The shower was now over, and a rainbow above the eastern woods promised
- a fair evening; so I took my departure. When I had got without I asked
- for a drink, hoping to get a sight of the well bottom, to complete my
- survey of the premises; but there, alas! are shallows and quicksands,
- and rope broken withal, and bucket irrecoverable. Meanwhile the right
- culinary vessel was selected, water was seemingly distilled, and after
- consultation and long delay passed out to the thirsty one--not yet
- suffered to cool, not yet to settle. Such gruel sustains life here, I
- thought; so, shutting my eyes, and excluding the motes by a skilfully
- directed undercurrent, I drank to genuine hospitality the heartiest
- draught I could. I am not squeamish in such cases when manners are
- concerned.
- As I was leaving the Irishman's roof after the rain, bending my steps
- again to the pond, my haste to catch pickerel, wading in retired
- meadows, in sloughs and bog-holes, in forlorn and savage places,
- appeared for an instant trivial to me who had been sent to school and
- college; but as I ran down the hill toward the reddening west, with the
- rainbow over my shoulder, and some faint tinkling sounds borne to my ear
- through the cleansed air, from I know not what quarter, my Good Genius
- seemed to say--Go fish and hunt far and wide day by day--farther and
- wider--and rest thee by many brooks and hearth-sides without misgiving.
- Remember thy Creator in the days of thy youth. Rise free from care
- before the dawn, and seek adventures. Let the noon find thee by other
- lakes, and the night overtake thee everywhere at home. There are no
- larger fields than these, no worthier games than may here be played.
- Grow wild according to thy nature, like these sedges and brakes, which
- will never become English hay. Let the thunder rumble; what if it
- threaten ruin to farmers' crops? That is not its errand to thee. Take
- shelter under the cloud, while they flee to carts and sheds. Let not
- to get a living be thy trade, but thy sport. Enjoy the land, but own it
- not. Through want of enterprise and faith men are where they are, buying
- and selling, and spending their lives like serfs.
- O Baker Farm!
- "Landscape where the richest element
- Is a little sunshine innocent."...
- "No one runs to revel
- On thy rail-fenced lea."...
- "Debate with no man hast thou,
- With questions art never perplexed,
- As tame at the first sight as now,
- In thy plain russet gabardine dressed."...
- "Come ye who love,
- And ye who hate,
- Children of the Holy Dove,
- And Guy Faux of the state,
- And hang conspiracies
- From the tough rafters of the trees!"
- Men come tamely home at night only from the next field or street, where
- their household echoes haunt, and their life pines because it breathes
- its own breath over again; their shadows, morning and evening, reach
- farther than their daily steps. We should come home from far, from
- adventures, and perils, and discoveries every day, with new experience
- and character.
- Before I had reached the pond some fresh impulse had brought out John
- Field, with altered mind, letting go "bogging" ere this sunset. But he,
- poor man, disturbed only a couple of fins while I was catching a fair
- string, and he said it was his luck; but when we changed seats in the
- boat luck changed seats too. Poor John Field!--I trust he does not read
- this, unless he will improve by it--thinking to live by some derivative
- old-country mode in this primitive new country--to catch perch with
- shiners. It is good bait sometimes, I allow. With his horizon all
- his own, yet he a poor man, born to be poor, with his inherited Irish
- poverty or poor life, his Adam's grandmother and boggy ways, not to
- rise in this world, he nor his posterity, till their wading webbed
- bog-trotting feet get _talaria_ to their heels.
- Higher Laws
- As I came home through the woods with my string of fish, trailing
- my pole, it being now quite dark, I caught a glimpse of a woodchuck
- stealing across my path, and felt a strange thrill of savage delight,
- and was strongly tempted to seize and devour him raw; not that I was
- hungry then, except for that wildness which he represented. Once or
- twice, however, while I lived at the pond, I found myself ranging the
- woods, like a half-starved hound, with a strange abandonment, seeking
- some kind of venison which I might devour, and no morsel could have been
- too savage for me. The wildest scenes had become unaccountably familiar.
- I found in myself, and still find, an instinct toward a higher, or,
- as it is named, spiritual life, as do most men, and another toward a
- primitive rank and savage one, and I reverence them both. I love the
- wild not less than the good. The wildness and adventure that are in
- fishing still recommended it to me. I like sometimes to take rank hold
- on life and spend my day more as the animals do. Perhaps I have owed
- to this employment and to hunting, when quite young, my closest
- acquaintance with Nature. They early introduce us to and detain us
- in scenery with which otherwise, at that age, we should have little
- acquaintance. Fishermen, hunters, woodchoppers, and others, spending
- their lives in the fields and woods, in a peculiar sense a part of
- Nature themselves, are often in a more favorable mood for observing her,
- in the intervals of their pursuits, than philosophers or poets even, who
- approach her with expectation. She is not afraid to exhibit herself to
- them. The traveller on the prairie is naturally a hunter, on the head
- waters of the Missouri and Columbia a trapper, and at the Falls of
- St. Mary a fisherman. He who is only a traveller learns things at
- second-hand and by the halves, and is poor authority. We are most
- interested when science reports what those men already know practically
- or instinctively, for that alone is a true _humanity_, or account of human
- experience.
- They mistake who assert that the Yankee has few amusements, because he
- has not so many public holidays, and men and boys do not play so many
- games as they do in England, for here the more primitive but solitary
- amusements of hunting, fishing, and the like have not yet given place
- to the former. Almost every New England boy among my contemporaries
- shouldered a fowling-piece between the ages of ten and fourteen; and his
- hunting and fishing grounds were not limited, like the preserves of an
- English nobleman, but were more boundless even than those of a savage.
- No wonder, then, that he did not oftener stay to play on the common. But
- already a change is taking place, owing, not to an increased humanity,
- but to an increased scarcity of game, for perhaps the hunter is the
- greatest friend of the animals hunted, not excepting the Humane Society.
- Moreover, when at the pond, I wished sometimes to add fish to my fare
- for variety. I have actually fished from the same kind of necessity that
- the first fishers did. Whatever humanity I might conjure up against it
- was all factitious, and concerned my philosophy more than my feelings.
- I speak of fishing only now, for I had long felt differently about
- fowling, and sold my gun before I went to the woods. Not that I am less
- humane than others, but I did not perceive that my feelings were much
- affected. I did not pity the fishes nor the worms. This was habit. As
- for fowling, during the last years that I carried a gun my excuse was
- that I was studying ornithology, and sought only new or rare birds. But
- I confess that I am now inclined to think that there is a finer way of
- studying ornithology than this. It requires so much closer attention
- to the habits of the birds, that, if for that reason only, I have been
- willing to omit the gun. Yet notwithstanding the objection on the score
- of humanity, I am compelled to doubt if equally valuable sports are
- ever substituted for these; and when some of my friends have asked me
- anxiously about their boys, whether they should let them hunt, I have
- answered, yes--remembering that it was one of the best parts of my
- education--_make_ them hunters, though sportsmen only at first, if
- possible, mighty hunters at last, so that they shall not find game large
- enough for them in this or any vegetable wilderness--hunters as well as
- fishers of men. Thus far I am of the opinion of Chaucer's nun, who
- "yave not of the text a pulled hen
- That saith that hunters ben not holy men."
- There is a period in the history of the individual, as of the race, when
- the hunters are the "best men," as the Algonquins called them. We cannot
- but pity the boy who has never fired a gun; he is no more humane, while
- his education has been sadly neglected. This was my answer with respect
- to those youths who were bent on this pursuit, trusting that they would
- soon outgrow it. No humane being, past the thoughtless age of boyhood,
- will wantonly murder any creature which holds its life by the same
- tenure that he does. The hare in its extremity cries like a child.
- I warn you, mothers, that my sympathies do not always make the usual
- phil-_anthropic_ distinctions.
- Such is oftenest the young man's introduction to the forest, and the
- most original part of himself. He goes thither at first as a hunter and
- fisher, until at last, if he has the seeds of a better life in him, he
- distinguishes his proper objects, as a poet or naturalist it may be,
- and leaves the gun and fish-pole behind. The mass of men are still and
- always young in this respect. In some countries a hunting parson is no
- uncommon sight. Such a one might make a good shepherd's dog, but is far
- from being the Good Shepherd. I have been surprised to consider that the
- only obvious employment, except wood-chopping, ice-cutting, or the like
- business, which ever to my knowledge detained at Walden Pond for a whole
- half-day any of my fellow-citizens, whether fathers or children of the
- town, with just one exception, was fishing. Commonly they did not think
- that they were lucky, or well paid for their time, unless they got a
- long string of fish, though they had the opportunity of seeing the pond
- all the while. They might go there a thousand times before the sediment
- of fishing would sink to the bottom and leave their purpose pure; but
- no doubt such a clarifying process would be going on all the while.
- The Governor and his Council faintly remember the pond, for they went
- a-fishing there when they were boys; but now they are too old and
- dignified to go a-fishing, and so they know it no more forever. Yet even
- they expect to go to heaven at last. If the legislature regards it, it
- is chiefly to regulate the number of hooks to be used there; but they
- know nothing about the hook of hooks with which to angle for the pond
- itself, impaling the legislature for a bait. Thus, even in civilized
- communities, the embryo man passes through the hunter stage of
- development.
- I have found repeatedly, of late years, that I cannot fish without
- falling a little in self-respect. I have tried it again and again. I
- have skill at it, and, like many of my fellows, a certain instinct for
- it, which revives from time to time, but always when I have done I feel
- that it would have been better if I had not fished. I think that I do
- not mistake. It is a faint intimation, yet so are the first streaks of
- morning. There is unquestionably this instinct in me which belongs to
- the lower orders of creation; yet with every year I am less a fisherman,
- though without more humanity or even wisdom; at present I am no
- fisherman at all. But I see that if I were to live in a wilderness
- I should again be tempted to become a fisher and hunter in earnest.
- Beside, there is something essentially unclean about this diet and all
- flesh, and I began to see where housework commences, and whence the
- endeavor, which costs so much, to wear a tidy and respectable appearance
- each day, to keep the house sweet and free from all ill odors and
- sights. Having been my own butcher and scullion and cook, as well as
- the gentleman for whom the dishes were served up, I can speak from an
- unusually complete experience. The practical objection to animal food in
- my case was its uncleanness; and besides, when I had caught and
- cleaned and cooked and eaten my fish, they seemed not to have fed me
- essentially. It was insignificant and unnecessary, and cost more than it
- came to. A little bread or a few potatoes would have done as well, with
- less trouble and filth. Like many of my contemporaries, I had rarely
- for many years used animal food, or tea, or coffee, etc.; not so much
- because of any ill effects which I had traced to them, as because they
- were not agreeable to my imagination. The repugnance to animal food
- is not the effect of experience, but is an instinct. It appeared more
- beautiful to live low and fare hard in many respects; and though I never
- did so, I went far enough to please my imagination. I believe that every
- man who has ever been earnest to preserve his higher or poetic faculties
- in the best condition has been particularly inclined to abstain from
- animal food, and from much food of any kind. It is a significant fact,
- stated by entomologists--I find it in Kirby and Spence--that "some
- insects in their perfect state, though furnished with organs of feeding,
- make no use of them"; and they lay it down as "a general rule, that
- almost all insects in this state eat much less than in that of larvæ.
- The voracious caterpillar when transformed into a butterfly... and the
- gluttonous maggot when become a fly" content themselves with a drop or
- two of honey or some other sweet liquid. The abdomen under the wings
- of the butterfly still represents the larva. This is the tidbit which
- tempts his insectivorous fate. The gross feeder is a man in the larva
- state; and there are whole nations in that condition, nations without
- fancy or imagination, whose vast abdomens betray them.
- It is hard to provide and cook so simple and clean a diet as will not
- offend the imagination; but this, I think, is to be fed when we feed the
- body; they should both sit down at the same table. Yet perhaps this may
- be done. The fruits eaten temperately need not make us ashamed of
- our appetites, nor interrupt the worthiest pursuits. But put an extra
- condiment into your dish, and it will poison you. It is not worth the
- while to live by rich cookery. Most men would feel shame if caught
- preparing with their own hands precisely such a dinner, whether of
- animal or vegetable food, as is every day prepared for them by others.
- Yet till this is otherwise we are not civilized, and, if gentlemen and
- ladies, are not true men and women. This certainly suggests what change
- is to be made. It may be vain to ask why the imagination will not be
- reconciled to flesh and fat. I am satisfied that it is not. Is it not a
- reproach that man is a carnivorous animal? True, he can and does live,
- in a great measure, by preying on other animals; but this is a miserable
- way--as any one who will go to snaring rabbits, or slaughtering lambs,
- may learn--and he will be regarded as a benefactor of his race who shall
- teach man to confine himself to a more innocent and wholesome diet.
- Whatever my own practice may be, I have no doubt that it is a part of
- the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off
- eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each
- other when they came in contact with the more civilized.
- If one listens to the faintest but constant suggestions of his genius,
- which are certainly true, he sees not to what extremes, or even
- insanity, it may lead him; and yet that way, as he grows more resolute
- and faithful, his road lies. The faintest assured objection which one
- healthy man feels will at length prevail over the arguments and customs
- of mankind. No man ever followed his genius till it misled him. Though
- the result were bodily weakness, yet perhaps no one can say that the
- consequences were to be regretted, for these were a life in conformity
- to higher principles. If the day and the night are such that you greet
- them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented
- herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal--that is your
- success. All nature is your congratulation, and you have cause
- momentarily to bless yourself. The greatest gains and values are
- farthest from being appreciated. We easily come to doubt if they exist.
- We soon forget them. They are the highest reality. Perhaps the facts
- most astounding and most real are never communicated by man to man.
- The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and
- indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little
- star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched.
- Yet, for my part, I was never unusually squeamish; I could sometimes eat
- a fried rat with a good relish, if it were necessary. I am glad to have
- drunk water so long, for the same reason that I prefer the natural sky
- to an opium-eater's heaven. I would fain keep sober always; and there
- are infinite degrees of drunkenness. I believe that water is the only
- drink for a wise man; wine is not so noble a liquor; and think of
- dashing the hopes of a morning with a cup of warm coffee, or of an
- evening with a dish of tea! Ah, how low I fall when I am tempted by
- them! Even music may be intoxicating. Such apparently slight causes
- destroyed Greece and Rome, and will destroy England and America. Of all
- ebriosity, who does not prefer to be intoxicated by the air he breathes?
- I have found it to be the most serious objection to coarse labors long
- continued, that they compelled me to eat and drink coarsely also. But
- to tell the truth, I find myself at present somewhat less particular in
- these respects. I carry less religion to the table, ask no blessing; not
- because I am wiser than I was, but, I am obliged to confess, because,
- however much it is to be regretted, with years I have grown more coarse
- and indifferent. Perhaps these questions are entertained only in youth,
- as most believe of poetry. My practice is "nowhere," my opinion is here.
- Nevertheless I am far from regarding myself as one of those privileged
- ones to whom the Ved refers when it says, that "he who has true faith in
- the Omnipresent Supreme Being may eat all that exists," that is, is not
- bound to inquire what is his food, or who prepares it; and even in their
- case it is to be observed, as a Hindoo commentator has remarked, that
- the Vedant limits this privilege to "the time of distress."
- Who has not sometimes derived an inexpressible satisfaction from his
- food in which appetite had no share? I have been thrilled to think that
- I owed a mental perception to the commonly gross sense of taste, that
- I have been inspired through the palate, that some berries which I had
- eaten on a hillside had fed my genius. "The soul not being mistress
- of herself," says Thseng-tseu, "one looks, and one does not see; one
- listens, and one does not hear; one eats, and one does not know the
- savor of food." He who distinguishes the true savor of his food can
- never be a glutton; he who does not cannot be otherwise. A puritan
- may go to his brown-bread crust with as gross an appetite as ever an
- alderman to his turtle. Not that food which entereth into the mouth
- defileth a man, but the appetite with which it is eaten. It is neither
- the quality nor the quantity, but the devotion to sensual savors; when
- that which is eaten is not a viand to sustain our animal, or inspire our
- spiritual life, but food for the worms that possess us. If the hunter
- has a taste for mud-turtles, muskrats, and other such savage tidbits,
- the fine lady indulges a taste for jelly made of a calf's foot, or for
- sardines from over the sea, and they are even. He goes to the mill-pond,
- she to her preserve-pot. The wonder is how they, how you and I, can live
- this slimy, beastly life, eating and drinking.
- Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant's truce
- between virtue and vice. Goodness is the only investment that never
- fails. In the music of the harp which trembles round the world it is the
- insisting on this which thrills us. The harp is the travelling patterer
- for the Universe's Insurance Company, recommending its laws, and our
- little goodness is all the assessment that we pay. Though the youth at
- last grows indifferent, the laws of the universe are not indifferent,
- but are forever on the side of the most sensitive. Listen to every
- zephyr for some reproof, for it is surely there, and he is unfortunate
- who does not hear it. We cannot touch a string or move a stop but the
- charming moral transfixes us. Many an irksome noise, go a long way off,
- is heard as music, a proud, sweet satire on the meanness of our lives.
- We are conscious of an animal in us, which awakens in proportion as our
- higher nature slumbers. It is reptile and sensual, and perhaps cannot be
- wholly expelled; like the worms which, even in life and health, occupy
- our bodies. Possibly we may withdraw from it, but never change its
- nature. I fear that it may enjoy a certain health of its own; that we
- may be well, yet not pure. The other day I picked up the lower jaw of
- a hog, with white and sound teeth and tusks, which suggested that
- there was an animal health and vigor distinct from the spiritual. This
- creature succeeded by other means than temperance and purity. "That
- in which men differ from brute beasts," says Mencius, "is a thing very
- inconsiderable; the common herd lose it very soon; superior men preserve
- it carefully." Who knows what sort of life would result if we had
- attained to purity? If I knew so wise a man as could teach me purity I
- would go to seek him forthwith. "A command over our passions, and over
- the external senses of the body, and good acts, are declared by the Ved
- to be indispensable in the mind's approximation to God." Yet the spirit
- can for the time pervade and control every member and function of the
- body, and transmute what in form is the grossest sensuality into
- purity and devotion. The generative energy, which, when we are loose,
- dissipates and makes us unclean, when we are continent invigorates
- and inspires us. Chastity is the flowering of man; and what are called
- Genius, Heroism, Holiness, and the like, are but various fruits which
- succeed it. Man flows at once to God when the channel of purity is
- open. By turns our purity inspires and our impurity casts us down. He is
- blessed who is assured that the animal is dying out in him day by day,
- and the divine being established. Perhaps there is none but has cause
- for shame on account of the inferior and brutish nature to which he
- is allied. I fear that we are such gods or demigods only as fauns and
- satyrs, the divine allied to beasts, the creatures of appetite, and
- that, to some extent, our very life is our disgrace.--
- "How happy's he who hath due place assigned
- To his beasts and disafforested his mind!
- . . . . . . .
- Can use this horse, goat, wolf, and ev'ry beast,
- And is not ass himself to all the rest!
- Else man not only is the herd of swine,
- But he's those devils too which did incline
- Them to a headlong rage, and made them worse."
- All sensuality is one, though it takes many forms; all purity is one. It
- is the same whether a man eat, or drink, or cohabit, or sleep sensually.
- They are but one appetite, and we only need to see a person do any one
- of these things to know how great a sensualist he is. The impure can
- neither stand nor sit with purity. When the reptile is attacked at
- one mouth of his burrow, he shows himself at another. If you would be
- chaste, you must be temperate. What is chastity? How shall a man know if
- he is chaste? He shall not know it. We have heard of this virtue, but
- we know not what it is. We speak conformably to the rumor which we have
- heard. From exertion come wisdom and purity; from sloth ignorance and
- sensuality. In the student sensuality is a sluggish habit of mind. An
- unclean person is universally a slothful one, one who sits by a stove,
- whom the sun shines on prostrate, who reposes without being fatigued. If
- you would avoid uncleanness, and all the sins, work earnestly, though it
- be at cleaning a stable. Nature is hard to be overcome, but she must be
- overcome. What avails it that you are Christian, if you are not purer
- than the heathen, if you deny yourself no more, if you are not more
- religious? I know of many systems of religion esteemed heathenish whose
- precepts fill the reader with shame, and provoke him to new endeavors,
- though it be to the performance of rites merely.
- I hesitate to say these things, but it is not because of the subject--I
- care not how obscene my _words_ are--but because I cannot speak of them
- without betraying my impurity. We discourse freely without shame of one
- form of sensuality, and are silent about another. We are so degraded
- that we cannot speak simply of the necessary functions of human nature.
- In earlier ages, in some countries, every function was reverently
- spoken of and regulated by law. Nothing was too trivial for the Hindoo
- lawgiver, however offensive it may be to modern taste. He teaches how to
- eat, drink, cohabit, void excrement and urine, and the like, elevating
- what is mean, and does not falsely excuse himself by calling these
- things trifles.
- Every man is the builder of a temple, called his body, to the god he
- worships, after a style purely his own, nor can he get off by hammering
- marble instead. We are all sculptors and painters, and our material
- is our own flesh and blood and bones. Any nobleness begins at once to
- refine a man's features, any meanness or sensuality to imbrute them.
- John Farmer sat at his door one September evening, after a hard day's
- work, his mind still running on his labor more or less. Having bathed,
- he sat down to re-create his intellectual man. It was a rather cool
- evening, and some of his neighbors were apprehending a frost. He had
- not attended to the train of his thoughts long when he heard some one
- playing on a flute, and that sound harmonized with his mood. Still he
- thought of his work; but the burden of his thought was, that though this
- kept running in his head, and he found himself planning and contriving
- it against his will, yet it concerned him very little. It was no more
- than the scurf of his skin, which was constantly shuffled off. But the
- notes of the flute came home to his ears out of a different sphere
- from that he worked in, and suggested work for certain faculties which
- slumbered in him. They gently did away with the street, and the village,
- and the state in which he lived. A voice said to him--Why do you stay
- here and live this mean moiling life, when a glorious existence is
- possible for you? Those same stars twinkle over other fields than
- these.--But how to come out of this condition and actually migrate
- thither? All that he could think of was to practise some new austerity,
- to let his mind descend into his body and redeem it, and treat himself
- with ever increasing respect.
- Brute Neighbors
- Sometimes I had a companion in my fishing, who came through the village
- to my house from the other side of the town, and the catching of the
- dinner was as much a social exercise as the eating of it.
- _Hermit._ I wonder what the world is doing now. I have not heard so much
- as a locust over the sweet-fern these three hours. The pigeons are all
- asleep upon their roosts--no flutter from them. Was that a farmer's noon
- horn which sounded from beyond the woods just now? The hands are coming
- in to boiled salt beef and cider and Indian bread. Why will men worry
- themselves so? He that does not eat need not work. I wonder how much
- they have reaped. Who would live there where a body can never think
- for the barking of Bose? And oh, the housekeeping! to keep bright the
- devil's door-knobs, and scour his tubs this bright day! Better not
- keep a house. Say, some hollow tree; and then for morning calls and
- dinner-parties! Only a woodpecker tapping. Oh, they swarm; the sun is
- too warm there; they are born too far into life for me. I have water
- from the spring, and a loaf of brown bread on the shelf.--Hark! I hear a
- rustling of the leaves. Is it some ill-fed village hound yielding to
- the instinct of the chase? or the lost pig which is said to be in these
- woods, whose tracks I saw after the rain? It comes on apace; my sumachs
- and sweetbriers tremble.--Eh, Mr. Poet, is it you? How do you like the
- world to-day?
- _Poet._ See those clouds; how they hang! That's the greatest thing I have
- seen to-day. There's nothing like it in old paintings, nothing like it
- in foreign lands--unless when we were off the coast of Spain. That's a
- true Mediterranean sky. I thought, as I have my living to get, and have
- not eaten to-day, that I might go a-fishing. That's the true industry
- for poets. It is the only trade I have learned. Come, let's along.
- _Hermit._ I cannot resist. My brown bread will soon be gone. I will go
- with you gladly soon, but I am just concluding a serious meditation. I
- think that I am near the end of it. Leave me alone, then, for a while.
- But that we may not be delayed, you shall be digging the bait meanwhile.
- Angleworms are rarely to be met with in these parts, where the soil was
- never fattened with manure; the race is nearly extinct. The sport of
- digging the bait is nearly equal to that of catching the fish, when
- one's appetite is not too keen; and this you may have all to yourself
- today. I would advise you to set in the spade down yonder among the
- ground-nuts, where you see the johnswort waving. I think that I may
- warrant you one worm to every three sods you turn up, if you look well
- in among the roots of the grass, as if you were weeding. Or, if you
- choose to go farther, it will not be unwise, for I have found the
- increase of fair bait to be very nearly as the squares of the distances.
- _Hermit alone._ Let me see; where was I? Methinks I was nearly in this
- frame of mind; the world lay about at this angle. Shall I go to heaven
- or a-fishing? If I should soon bring this meditation to an end, would
- another so sweet occasion be likely to offer? I was as near being
- resolved into the essence of things as ever I was in my life. I fear
- my thoughts will not come back to me. If it would do any good, I would
- whistle for them. When they make us an offer, is it wise to say, We will
- think of it? My thoughts have left no track, and I cannot find the path
- again. What was it that I was thinking of? It was a very hazy day. I
- will just try these three sentences of Confut-see; they may fetch that
- state about again. I know not whether it was the dumps or a budding
- ecstasy. Mem. There never is but one opportunity of a kind.
- _Poet._ How now, Hermit, is it too soon? I have got just thirteen whole
- ones, beside several which are imperfect or undersized; but they will
- do for the smaller fry; they do not cover up the hook so much. Those
- village worms are quite too large; a shiner may make a meal off one
- without finding the skewer.
- _Hermit._ Well, then, let's be off. Shall we to the Concord? There's good
- sport there if the water be not too high.
- * * * * *
- Why do precisely these objects which we behold make a world? Why has
- man just these species of animals for his neighbors; as if nothing but
- a mouse could have filled this crevice? I suspect that Pilpay & Co. have
- put animals to their best use, for they are all beasts of burden, in a
- sense, made to carry some portion of our thoughts.
- The mice which haunted my house were not the common ones, which are said
- to have been introduced into the country, but a wild native kind not
- found in the village. I sent one to a distinguished naturalist, and
- it interested him much. When I was building, one of these had its nest
- underneath the house, and before I had laid the second floor, and swept
- out the shavings, would come out regularly at lunch time and pick up the
- crumbs at my feet. It probably had never seen a man before; and it soon
- became quite familiar, and would run over my shoes and up my clothes.
- It could readily ascend the sides of the room by short impulses, like a
- squirrel, which it resembled in its motions. At length, as I leaned
- with my elbow on the bench one day, it ran up my clothes, and along my
- sleeve, and round and round the paper which held my dinner, while I kept
- the latter close, and dodged and played at bopeep with it; and when at
- last I held still a piece of cheese between my thumb and finger, it came
- and nibbled it, sitting in my hand, and afterward cleaned its face and
- paws, like a fly, and walked away.
- A phœbe soon built in my shed, and a robin for protection in a pine
- which grew against the house. In June the partridge (_Tetrao umbellus_),
- which is so shy a bird, led her brood past my windows, from the woods in
- the rear to the front of my house, clucking and calling to them like a
- hen, and in all her behavior proving herself the hen of the woods. The
- young suddenly disperse on your approach, at a signal from the mother,
- as if a whirlwind had swept them away, and they so exactly resemble the
- dried leaves and twigs that many a traveler has placed his foot in the
- midst of a brood, and heard the whir of the old bird as she flew off,
- and her anxious calls and mewing, or seen her trail her wings to attract
- his attention, without suspecting their neighborhood. The parent will
- sometimes roll and spin round before you in such a dishabille, that you
- cannot, for a few moments, detect what kind of creature it is. The young
- squat still and flat, often running their heads under a leaf, and mind
- only their mother's directions given from a distance, nor will your
- approach make them run again and betray themselves. You may even tread
- on them, or have your eyes on them for a minute, without discovering
- them. I have held them in my open hand at such a time, and still their
- only care, obedient to their mother and their instinct, was to squat
- there without fear or trembling. So perfect is this instinct, that once,
- when I had laid them on the leaves again, and one accidentally fell on
- its side, it was found with the rest in exactly the same position ten
- minutes afterward. They are not callow like the young of most birds,
- but more perfectly developed and precocious even than chickens. The
- remarkably adult yet innocent expression of their open and serene
- eyes is very memorable. All intelligence seems reflected in them. They
- suggest not merely the purity of infancy, but a wisdom clarified by
- experience. Such an eye was not born when the bird was, but is coeval
- with the sky it reflects. The woods do not yield another such a gem. The
- traveller does not often look into such a limpid well. The ignorant or
- reckless sportsman often shoots the parent at such a time, and leaves
- these innocents to fall a prey to some prowling beast or bird, or
- gradually mingle with the decaying leaves which they so much resemble.
- It is said that when hatched by a hen they will directly disperse on
- some alarm, and so are lost, for they never hear the mother's call which
- gathers them again. These were my hens and chickens.
- It is remarkable how many creatures live wild and free though secret in
- the woods, and still sustain themselves in the neighborhood of towns,
- suspected by hunters only. How retired the otter manages to live here!
- He grows to be four feet long, as big as a small boy, perhaps without
- any human being getting a glimpse of him. I formerly saw the raccoon in
- the woods behind where my house is built, and probably still heard their
- whinnering at night. Commonly I rested an hour or two in the shade at
- noon, after planting, and ate my lunch, and read a little by a spring
- which was the source of a swamp and of a brook, oozing from under
- Brister's Hill, half a mile from my field. The approach to this was
- through a succession of descending grassy hollows, full of young pitch
- pines, into a larger wood about the swamp. There, in a very secluded and
- shaded spot, under a spreading white pine, there was yet a clean, firm
- sward to sit on. I had dug out the spring and made a well of clear gray
- water, where I could dip up a pailful without roiling it, and thither I
- went for this purpose almost every day in midsummer, when the pond was
- warmest. Thither, too, the woodcock led her brood, to probe the mud for
- worms, flying but a foot above them down the bank, while they ran in
- a troop beneath; but at last, spying me, she would leave her young and
- circle round and round me, nearer and nearer till within four or five
- feet, pretending broken wings and legs, to attract my attention, and get
- off her young, who would already have taken up their march, with faint,
- wiry peep, single file through the swamp, as she directed. Or I heard
- the peep of the young when I could not see the parent bird. There too
- the turtle doves sat over the spring, or fluttered from bough to bough
- of the soft white pines over my head; or the red squirrel, coursing down
- the nearest bough, was particularly familiar and inquisitive. You only
- need sit still long enough in some attractive spot in the woods that all
- its inhabitants may exhibit themselves to you by turns.
- I was witness to events of a less peaceful character. One day when I
- went out to my wood-pile, or rather my pile of stumps, I observed two
- large ants, the one red, the other much larger, nearly half an inch
- long, and black, fiercely contending with one another. Having once got
- hold they never let go, but struggled and wrestled and rolled on the
- chips incessantly. Looking farther, I was surprised to find that the
- chips were covered with such combatants, that it was not a _duellum_, but
- a _bellum_, a war between two races of ants, the red always pitted against
- the black, and frequently two red ones to one black. The legions of
- these Myrmidons covered all the hills and vales in my wood-yard, and the
- ground was already strewn with the dead and dying, both red and
- black. It was the only battle which I have ever witnessed, the only
- battle-field I ever trod while the battle was raging; internecine war;
- the red republicans on the one hand, and the black imperialists on the
- other. On every side they were engaged in deadly combat, yet without any
- noise that I could hear, and human soldiers never fought so resolutely.
- I watched a couple that were fast locked in each other's embraces, in
- a little sunny valley amid the chips, now at noonday prepared to fight
- till the sun went down, or life went out. The smaller red champion had
- fastened himself like a vice to his adversary's front, and through all
- the tumblings on that field never for an instant ceased to gnaw at one
- of his feelers near the root, having already caused the other to go by
- the board; while the stronger black one dashed him from side to side,
- and, as I saw on looking nearer, had already divested him of several of
- his members. They fought with more pertinacity than bulldogs. Neither
- manifested the least disposition to retreat. It was evident that their
- battle-cry was "Conquer or die." In the meanwhile there came along
- a single red ant on the hillside of this valley, evidently full of
- excitement, who either had despatched his foe, or had not yet taken part
- in the battle; probably the latter, for he had lost none of his limbs;
- whose mother had charged him to return with his shield or upon it. Or
- perchance he was some Achilles, who had nourished his wrath apart, and
- had now come to avenge or rescue his Patroclus. He saw this unequal
- combat from afar--for the blacks were nearly twice the size of the
- red--he drew near with rapid pace till he stood on his guard within half
- an inch of the combatants; then, watching his opportunity, he sprang
- upon the black warrior, and commenced his operations near the root of
- his right fore leg, leaving the foe to select among his own members; and
- so there were three united for life, as if a new kind of attraction had
- been invented which put all other locks and cements to shame. I should
- not have wondered by this time to find that they had their respective
- musical bands stationed on some eminent chip, and playing their national
- airs the while, to excite the slow and cheer the dying combatants. I was
- myself excited somewhat even as if they had been men. The more you think
- of it, the less the difference. And certainly there is not the fight
- recorded in Concord history, at least, if in the history of America,
- that will bear a moment's comparison with this, whether for the numbers
- engaged in it, or for the patriotism and heroism displayed. For numbers
- and for carnage it was an Austerlitz or Dresden. Concord Fight! Two
- killed on the patriots' side, and Luther Blanchard wounded! Why here
- every ant was a Buttrick--"Fire! for God's sake fire!"--and thousands
- shared the fate of Davis and Hosmer. There was not one hireling there.
- I have no doubt that it was a principle they fought for, as much as
- our ancestors, and not to avoid a three-penny tax on their tea; and the
- results of this battle will be as important and memorable to those whom
- it concerns as those of the battle of Bunker Hill, at least.
- I took up the chip on which the three I have particularly described were
- struggling, carried it into my house, and placed it under a tumbler on
- my window-sill, in order to see the issue. Holding a microscope to the
- first-mentioned red ant, I saw that, though he was assiduously gnawing
- at the near fore leg of his enemy, having severed his remaining feeler,
- his own breast was all torn away, exposing what vitals he had there
- to the jaws of the black warrior, whose breastplate was apparently too
- thick for him to pierce; and the dark carbuncles of the sufferer's eyes
- shone with ferocity such as war only could excite. They struggled half
- an hour longer under the tumbler, and when I looked again the black
- soldier had severed the heads of his foes from their bodies, and the
- still living heads were hanging on either side of him like ghastly
- trophies at his saddle-bow, still apparently as firmly fastened as ever,
- and he was endeavoring with feeble struggles, being without feelers and
- with only the remnant of a leg, and I know not how many other wounds,
- to divest himself of them; which at length, after half an hour more, he
- accomplished. I raised the glass, and he went off over the window-sill
- in that crippled state. Whether he finally survived that combat, and
- spent the remainder of his days in some Hotel des Invalides, I do
- not know; but I thought that his industry would not be worth much
- thereafter. I never learned which party was victorious, nor the cause of
- the war; but I felt for the rest of that day as if I had had my feelings
- excited and harrowed by witnessing the struggle, the ferocity and
- carnage, of a human battle before my door.
- Kirby and Spence tell us that the battles of ants have long been
- celebrated and the date of them recorded, though they say that Huber
- is the only modern author who appears to have witnessed them. "Æneas
- Sylvius," say they, "after giving a very circumstantial account of one
- contested with great obstinacy by a great and small species on the trunk
- of a pear tree," adds that "this action was fought in the pontificate
- of Eugenius the Fourth, in the presence of Nicholas Pistoriensis, an
- eminent lawyer, who related the whole history of the battle with the
- greatest fidelity." A similar engagement between great and small ants is
- recorded by Olaus Magnus, in which the small ones, being victorious, are
- said to have buried the bodies of their own soldiers, but left those of
- their giant enemies a prey to the birds. This event happened previous
- to the expulsion of the tyrant Christiern the Second from Sweden. The
- battle which I witnessed took place in the Presidency of Polk, five
- years before the passage of Webster's Fugitive-Slave Bill.
- Many a village Bose, fit only to course a mud-turtle in a victualling
- cellar, sported his heavy quarters in the woods, without the knowledge
- of his master, and ineffectually smelled at old fox burrows and
- woodchucks' holes; led perchance by some slight cur which nimbly
- threaded the wood, and might still inspire a natural terror in its
- denizens;--now far behind his guide, barking like a canine bull toward
- some small squirrel which had treed itself for scrutiny, then, cantering
- off, bending the bushes with his weight, imagining that he is on the
- track of some stray member of the jerbilla family. Once I was surprised
- to see a cat walking along the stony shore of the pond, for they rarely
- wander so far from home. The surprise was mutual. Nevertheless the most
- domestic cat, which has lain on a rug all her days, appears quite at
- home in the woods, and, by her sly and stealthy behavior, proves herself
- more native there than the regular inhabitants. Once, when berrying,
- I met with a cat with young kittens in the woods, quite wild, and they
- all, like their mother, had their backs up and were fiercely spitting at
- me. A few years before I lived in the woods there was what was called a
- "winged cat" in one of the farm-houses in Lincoln nearest the pond, Mr.
- Gilian Baker's. When I called to see her in June, 1842, she was gone
- a-hunting in the woods, as was her wont (I am not sure whether it was
- a male or female, and so use the more common pronoun), but her mistress
- told me that she came into the neighborhood a little more than a year
- before, in April, and was finally taken into their house; that she was
- of a dark brownish-gray color, with a white spot on her throat, and
- white feet, and had a large bushy tail like a fox; that in the winter
- the fur grew thick and flatted out along her sides, forming stripes ten
- or twelve inches long by two and a half wide, and under her chin like
- a muff, the upper side loose, the under matted like felt, and in the
- spring these appendages dropped off. They gave me a pair of her "wings,"
- which I keep still. There is no appearance of a membrane about them.
- Some thought it was part flying squirrel or some other wild animal,
- which is not impossible, for, according to naturalists, prolific hybrids
- have been produced by the union of the marten and domestic cat. This
- would have been the right kind of cat for me to keep, if I had kept any;
- for why should not a poet's cat be winged as well as his horse?
- In the fall the loon (_Colymbus glacialis_) came, as usual, to moult and
- bathe in the pond, making the woods ring with his wild laughter before I
- had risen. At rumor of his arrival all the Mill-dam sportsmen are on the
- alert, in gigs and on foot, two by two and three by three, with patent
- rifles and conical balls and spy-glasses. They come rustling through
- the woods like autumn leaves, at least ten men to one loon. Some station
- themselves on this side of the pond, some on that, for the poor bird
- cannot be omnipresent; if he dive here he must come up there. But
- now the kind October wind rises, rustling the leaves and rippling the
- surface of the water, so that no loon can be heard or seen, though his
- foes sweep the pond with spy-glasses, and make the woods resound with
- their discharges. The waves generously rise and dash angrily, taking
- sides with all water-fowl, and our sportsmen must beat a retreat to town
- and shop and unfinished jobs. But they were too often successful. When
- I went to get a pail of water early in the morning I frequently saw this
- stately bird sailing out of my cove within a few rods. If I endeavored
- to overtake him in a boat, in order to see how he would manoeuvre, he
- would dive and be completely lost, so that I did not discover him again,
- sometimes, till the latter part of the day. But I was more than a match
- for him on the surface. He commonly went off in a rain.
- As I was paddling along the north shore one very calm October afternoon,
- for such days especially they settle on to the lakes, like the milkweed
- down, having looked in vain over the pond for a loon, suddenly one,
- sailing out from the shore toward the middle a few rods in front of me,
- set up his wild laugh and betrayed himself. I pursued with a paddle and
- he dived, but when he came up I was nearer than before. He dived again,
- but I miscalculated the direction he would take, and we were fifty rods
- apart when he came to the surface this time, for I had helped to widen
- the interval; and again he laughed long and loud, and with more reason
- than before. He manoeuvred so cunningly that I could not get within half
- a dozen rods of him. Each time, when he came to the surface, turning his
- head this way and that, he cooly surveyed the water and the land, and
- apparently chose his course so that he might come up where there was the
- widest expanse of water and at the greatest distance from the boat. It
- was surprising how quickly he made up his mind and put his resolve into
- execution. He led me at once to the widest part of the pond, and could
- not be driven from it. While he was thinking one thing in his brain,
- I was endeavoring to divine his thought in mine. It was a pretty game,
- played on the smooth surface of the pond, a man against a loon. Suddenly
- your adversary's checker disappears beneath the board, and the problem
- is to place yours nearest to where his will appear again. Sometimes he
- would come up unexpectedly on the opposite side of me, having
- apparently passed directly under the boat. So long-winded was he and so
- unweariable, that when he had swum farthest he would immediately plunge
- again, nevertheless; and then no wit could divine where in the deep
- pond, beneath the smooth surface, he might be speeding his way like a
- fish, for he had time and ability to visit the bottom of the pond in
- its deepest part. It is said that loons have been caught in the New York
- lakes eighty feet beneath the surface, with hooks set for trout--though
- Walden is deeper than that. How surprised must the fishes be to see
- this ungainly visitor from another sphere speeding his way amid their
- schools! Yet he appeared to know his course as surely under water as on
- the surface, and swam much faster there. Once or twice I saw a ripple
- where he approached the surface, just put his head out to reconnoitre,
- and instantly dived again. I found that it was as well for me to rest
- on my oars and wait his reappearing as to endeavor to calculate where he
- would rise; for again and again, when I was straining my eyes over the
- surface one way, I would suddenly be startled by his unearthly laugh
- behind me. But why, after displaying so much cunning, did he invariably
- betray himself the moment he came up by that loud laugh? Did not his
- white breast enough betray him? He was indeed a silly loon, I thought. I
- could commonly hear the splash of the water when he came up, and so also
- detected him. But after an hour he seemed as fresh as ever, dived as
- willingly, and swam yet farther than at first. It was surprising to see
- how serenely he sailed off with unruffled breast when he came to the
- surface, doing all the work with his webbed feet beneath. His usual note
- was this demoniac laughter, yet somewhat like that of a water-fowl; but
- occasionally, when he had balked me most successfully and come up a long
- way off, he uttered a long-drawn unearthly howl, probably more like that
- of a wolf than any bird; as when a beast puts his muzzle to the ground
- and deliberately howls. This was his looning--perhaps the wildest sound
- that is ever heard here, making the woods ring far and wide. I concluded
- that he laughed in derision of my efforts, confident of his own
- resources. Though the sky was by this time overcast, the pond was so
- smooth that I could see where he broke the surface when I did not hear
- him. His white breast, the stillness of the air, and the smoothness of
- the water were all against him. At length having come up fifty rods off,
- he uttered one of those prolonged howls, as if calling on the god of
- loons to aid him, and immediately there came a wind from the east and
- rippled the surface, and filled the whole air with misty rain, and I was
- impressed as if it were the prayer of the loon answered, and his god was
- angry with me; and so I left him disappearing far away on the tumultuous
- surface.
- For hours, in fall days, I watched the ducks cunningly tack and veer and
- hold the middle of the pond, far from the sportsman; tricks which they
- will have less need to practise in Louisiana bayous. When compelled to
- rise they would sometimes circle round and round and over the pond at a
- considerable height, from which they could easily see to other ponds
- and the river, like black motes in the sky; and, when I thought they had
- gone off thither long since, they would settle down by a slanting flight
- of a quarter of a mile on to a distant part which was left free; but
- what beside safety they got by sailing in the middle of Walden I do not
- know, unless they love its water for the same reason that I do.
- House-Warming
- In October I went a-graping to the river meadows, and loaded myself with
- clusters more precious for their beauty and fragrance than for food.
- There, too, I admired, though I did not gather, the cranberries, small
- waxen gems, pendants of the meadow grass, pearly and red, which the
- farmer plucks with an ugly rake, leaving the smooth meadow in a snarl,
- heedlessly measuring them by the bushel and the dollar only, and sells
- the spoils of the meads to Boston and New York; destined to be _jammed_,
- to satisfy the tastes of lovers of Nature there. So butchers rake the
- tongues of bison out of the prairie grass, regardless of the torn and
- drooping plant. The barberry's brilliant fruit was likewise food for my
- eyes merely; but I collected a small store of wild apples for coddling,
- which the proprietor and travellers had overlooked. When chestnuts were
- ripe I laid up half a bushel for winter. It was very exciting at that
- season to roam the then boundless chestnut woods of Lincoln--they now
- sleep their long sleep under the railroad--with a bag on my shoulder,
- and a stick to open burs with in my hand, for I did not always wait for
- the frost, amid the rustling of leaves and the loud reproofs of the red
- squirrels and the jays, whose half-consumed nuts I sometimes stole,
- for the burs which they had selected were sure to contain sound ones.
- Occasionally I climbed and shook the trees. They grew also behind my
- house, and one large tree, which almost overshadowed it, was, when
- in flower, a bouquet which scented the whole neighborhood, but the
- squirrels and the jays got most of its fruit; the last coming in flocks
- early in the morning and picking the nuts out of the burs before they
- fell, I relinquished these trees to them and visited the more distant
- woods composed wholly of chestnut. These nuts, as far as they went, were
- a good substitute for bread. Many other substitutes might, perhaps, be
- found. Digging one day for fishworms, I discovered the ground-nut
- (_Apios tuberosa_) on its string, the potato of the aborigines, a sort of
- fabulous fruit, which I had begun to doubt if I had ever dug and eaten
- in childhood, as I had told, and had not dreamed it. I had often since
- seen its crumpled red velvety blossom supported by the stems of other
- plants without knowing it to be the same. Cultivation has well-nigh
- exterminated it. It has a sweetish taste, much like that of a
- frost-bitten potato, and I found it better boiled than roasted. This
- tuber seemed like a faint promise of Nature to rear her own children
- and feed them simply here at some future period. In these days of fatted
- cattle and waving grain-fields this humble root, which was once the
- _totem_ of an Indian tribe, is quite forgotten, or known only by its
- flowering vine; but let wild Nature reign here once more, and the tender
- and luxurious English grains will probably disappear before a myriad of
- foes, and without the care of man the crow may carry back even the
- last seed of corn to the great cornfield of the Indian's God in the
- southwest, whence he is said to have brought it; but the now almost
- exterminated ground-nut will perhaps revive and flourish in spite of
- frosts and wildness, prove itself indigenous, and resume its ancient
- importance and dignity as the diet of the hunter tribe. Some Indian
- Ceres or Minerva must have been the inventor and bestower of it; and
- when the reign of poetry commences here, its leaves and string of nuts
- may be represented on our works of art.
- Already, by the first of September, I had seen two or three small maples
- turned scarlet across the pond, beneath where the white stems of three
- aspens diverged, at the point of a promontory, next the water. Ah, many
- a tale their color told! And gradually from week to week the character
- of each tree came out, and it admired itself reflected in the smooth
- mirror of the lake. Each morning the manager of this gallery substituted
- some new picture, distinguished by more brilliant or harmonious
- coloring, for the old upon the walls.
- The wasps came by thousands to my lodge in October, as to winter
- quarters, and settled on my windows within and on the walls overhead,
- sometimes deterring visitors from entering. Each morning, when they were
- numbed with cold, I swept some of them out, but I did not trouble myself
- much to get rid of them; I even felt complimented by their regarding my
- house as a desirable shelter. They never molested me seriously, though
- they bedded with me; and they gradually disappeared, into what crevices
- I do not know, avoiding winter and unspeakable cold.
- Like the wasps, before I finally went into winter quarters in November,
- I used to resort to the northeast side of Walden, which the sun,
- reflected from the pitch pine woods and the stony shore, made the
- fireside of the pond; it is so much pleasanter and wholesomer to be
- warmed by the sun while you can be, than by an artificial fire. I thus
- warmed myself by the still glowing embers which the summer, like a
- departed hunter, had left.
- * * * * *
- When I came to build my chimney I studied masonry. My bricks, being
- second-hand ones, required to be cleaned with a trowel, so that I
- learned more than usual of the qualities of bricks and trowels. The
- mortar on them was fifty years old, and was said to be still growing
- harder; but this is one of those sayings which men love to repeat
- whether they are true or not. Such sayings themselves grow harder and
- adhere more firmly with age, and it would take many blows with a trowel
- to clean an old wiseacre of them. Many of the villages of Mesopotamia
- are built of second-hand bricks of a very good quality, obtained from
- the ruins of Babylon, and the cement on them is older and probably
- harder still. However that may be, I was struck by the peculiar
- toughness of the steel which bore so many violent blows without being
- worn out. As my bricks had been in a chimney before, though I did not
- read the name of Nebuchadnezzar on them, I picked out as many fireplace
- bricks as I could find, to save work and waste, and I filled the spaces
- between the bricks about the fireplace with stones from the pond shore,
- and also made my mortar with the white sand from the same place. I
- lingered most about the fireplace, as the most vital part of the house.
- Indeed, I worked so deliberately, that though I commenced at the ground
- in the morning, a course of bricks raised a few inches above the floor
- served for my pillow at night; yet I did not get a stiff neck for it
- that I remember; my stiff neck is of older date. I took a poet to board
- for a fortnight about those times, which caused me to be put to it for
- room. He brought his own knife, though I had two, and we used to scour
- them by thrusting them into the earth. He shared with me the labors
- of cooking. I was pleased to see my work rising so square and solid by
- degrees, and reflected, that, if it proceeded slowly, it was calculated
- to endure a long time. The chimney is to some extent an independent
- structure, standing on the ground, and rising through the house to the
- heavens; even after the house is burned it still stands sometimes, and
- its importance and independence are apparent. This was toward the end of
- summer. It was now November.
- * * * * *
- The north wind had already begun to cool the pond, though it took many
- weeks of steady blowing to accomplish it, it is so deep. When I began to
- have a fire at evening, before I plastered my house, the chimney carried
- smoke particularly well, because of the numerous chinks between the
- boards. Yet I passed some cheerful evenings in that cool and airy
- apartment, surrounded by the rough brown boards full of knots, and
- rafters with the bark on high overhead. My house never pleased my eye so
- much after it was plastered, though I was obliged to confess that it
- was more comfortable. Should not every apartment in which man dwells be
- lofty enough to create some obscurity overhead, where flickering shadows
- may play at evening about the rafters? These forms are more agreeable
- to the fancy and imagination than fresco paintings or other the most
- expensive furniture. I now first began to inhabit my house, I may say,
- when I began to use it for warmth as well as shelter. I had got a couple
- of old fire-dogs to keep the wood from the hearth, and it did me good
- to see the soot form on the back of the chimney which I had built, and
- I poked the fire with more right and more satisfaction than usual. My
- dwelling was small, and I could hardly entertain an echo in it; but it
- seemed larger for being a single apartment and remote from neighbors.
- All the attractions of a house were concentrated in one room; it was
- kitchen, chamber, parlor, and keeping-room; and whatever satisfaction
- parent or child, master or servant, derive from living in a house, I
- enjoyed it all. Cato says, the master of a family (_patremfamilias_) must
- have in his rustic villa "cellam oleariam, vinariam, dolia multa, uti
- lubeat caritatem expectare, et rei, et virtuti, et gloriae erit," that
- is, "an oil and wine cellar, many casks, so that it may be pleasant to
- expect hard times; it will be for his advantage, and virtue, and glory."
- I had in my cellar a firkin of potatoes, about two quarts of peas with
- the weevil in them, and on my shelf a little rice, a jug of molasses,
- and of rye and Indian meal a peck each.
- I sometimes dream of a larger and more populous house, standing in a
- golden age, of enduring materials, and without gingerbread work,
- which shall still consist of only one room, a vast, rude, substantial,
- primitive hall, without ceiling or plastering, with bare rafters and
- purlins supporting a sort of lower heaven over one's head--useful to
- keep off rain and snow, where the king and queen posts stand out to
- receive your homage, when you have done reverence to the prostrate
- Saturn of an older dynasty on stepping over the sill; a cavernous house,
- wherein you must reach up a torch upon a pole to see the roof; where
- some may live in the fireplace, some in the recess of a window, and some
- on settles, some at one end of the hall, some at another, and some aloft
- on rafters with the spiders, if they choose; a house which you have got
- into when you have opened the outside door, and the ceremony is over;
- where the weary traveller may wash, and eat, and converse, and sleep,
- without further journey; such a shelter as you would be glad to reach
- in a tempestuous night, containing all the essentials of a house, and
- nothing for house-keeping; where you can see all the treasures of the
- house at one view, and everything hangs upon its peg, that a man should
- use; at once kitchen, pantry, parlor, chamber, storehouse, and garret;
- where you can see so necessary a thing, as a barrel or a ladder, so
- convenient a thing as a cupboard, and hear the pot boil, and pay your
- respects to the fire that cooks your dinner, and the oven that bakes
- your bread, and the necessary furniture and utensils are the chief
- ornaments; where the washing is not put out, nor the fire, nor the
- mistress, and perhaps you are sometimes requested to move from off the
- trap-door, when the cook would descend into the cellar, and so learn
- whether the ground is solid or hollow beneath you without stamping. A
- house whose inside is as open and manifest as a bird's nest, and you
- cannot go in at the front door and out at the back without seeing some
- of its inhabitants; where to be a guest is to be presented with the
- freedom of the house, and not to be carefully excluded from seven
- eighths of it, shut up in a particular cell, and told to make yourself
- at home there--in solitary confinement. Nowadays the host does not
- admit you to _his_ hearth, but has got the mason to build one for yourself
- somewhere in his alley, and hospitality is the art of _keeping_ you at the
- greatest distance. There is as much secrecy about the cooking as if he
- had a design to poison you. I am aware that I have been on many a man's
- premises, and might have been legally ordered off, but I am not aware
- that I have been in many men's houses. I might visit in my old clothes a
- king and queen who lived simply in such a house as I have described, if
- I were going their way; but backing out of a modern palace will be all
- that I shall desire to learn, if ever I am caught in one.
- It would seem as if the very language of our parlors would lose all
- its nerve and degenerate into _palaver_ wholly, our lives pass at
- such remoteness from its symbols, and its metaphors and tropes are
- necessarily so far fetched, through slides and dumb-waiters, as it were;
- in other words, the parlor is so far from the kitchen and workshop. The
- dinner even is only the parable of a dinner, commonly. As if only the
- savage dwelt near enough to Nature and Truth to borrow a trope from
- them. How can the scholar, who dwells away in the North West Territory
- or the Isle of Man, tell what is parliamentary in the kitchen?
- However, only one or two of my guests were ever bold enough to stay and
- eat a hasty-pudding with me; but when they saw that crisis approaching
- they beat a hasty retreat rather, as if it would shake the house to its
- foundations. Nevertheless, it stood through a great many hasty-puddings.
- I did not plaster till it was freezing weather. I brought over some
- whiter and cleaner sand for this purpose from the opposite shore of the
- pond in a boat, a sort of conveyance which would have tempted me to go
- much farther if necessary. My house had in the meanwhile been shingled
- down to the ground on every side. In lathing I was pleased to be able
- to send home each nail with a single blow of the hammer, and it was my
- ambition to transfer the plaster from the board to the wall neatly and
- rapidly. I remembered the story of a conceited fellow, who, in fine
- clothes, was wont to lounge about the village once, giving advice to
- workmen. Venturing one day to substitute deeds for words, he turned
- up his cuffs, seized a plasterer's board, and having loaded his trowel
- without mishap, with a complacent look toward the lathing overhead,
- made a bold gesture thitherward; and straightway, to his complete
- discomfiture, received the whole contents in his ruffled bosom. I
- admired anew the economy and convenience of plastering, which so
- effectually shuts out the cold and takes a handsome finish, and I
- learned the various casualties to which the plasterer is liable. I was
- surprised to see how thirsty the bricks were which drank up all the
- moisture in my plaster before I had smoothed it, and how many pailfuls
- of water it takes to christen a new hearth. I had the previous winter
- made a small quantity of lime by burning the shells of the _Unio
- fluviatilis_, which our river affords, for the sake of the experiment;
- so that I knew where my materials came from. I might have got good
- limestone within a mile or two and burned it myself, if I had cared to
- do so.
- * * * * *
- The pond had in the meanwhile skimmed over in the shadiest and
- shallowest coves, some days or even weeks before the general freezing.
- The first ice is especially interesting and perfect, being hard, dark,
- and transparent, and affords the best opportunity that ever offers for
- examining the bottom where it is shallow; for you can lie at your length
- on ice only an inch thick, like a skater insect on the surface of the
- water, and study the bottom at your leisure, only two or three inches
- distant, like a picture behind a glass, and the water is necessarily
- always smooth then. There are many furrows in the sand where some
- creature has travelled about and doubled on its tracks; and, for wrecks,
- it is strewn with the cases of caddis-worms made of minute grains of
- white quartz. Perhaps these have creased it, for you find some of their
- cases in the furrows, though they are deep and broad for them to make.
- But the ice itself is the object of most interest, though you must
- improve the earliest opportunity to study it. If you examine it closely
- the morning after it freezes, you find that the greater part of the
- bubbles, which at first appeared to be within it, are against its under
- surface, and that more are continually rising from the bottom; while the
- ice is as yet comparatively solid and dark, that is, you see the water
- through it. These bubbles are from an eightieth to an eighth of an inch
- in diameter, very clear and beautiful, and you see your face reflected
- in them through the ice. There may be thirty or forty of them to
- a square inch. There are also already within the ice narrow oblong
- perpendicular bubbles about half an inch long, sharp cones with the apex
- upward; or oftener, if the ice is quite fresh, minute spherical bubbles
- one directly above another, like a string of beads. But these within the
- ice are not so numerous nor obvious as those beneath. I sometimes used
- to cast on stones to try the strength of the ice, and those which
- broke through carried in air with them, which formed very large and
- conspicuous white bubbles beneath. One day when I came to the same place
- forty-eight hours afterward, I found that those large bubbles were
- still perfect, though an inch more of ice had formed, as I could see
- distinctly by the seam in the edge of a cake. But as the last two
- days had been very warm, like an Indian summer, the ice was not now
- transparent, showing the dark green color of the water, and the bottom,
- but opaque and whitish or gray, and though twice as thick was hardly
- stronger than before, for the air bubbles had greatly expanded under
- this heat and run together, and lost their regularity; they were no
- longer one directly over another, but often like silvery coins poured
- from a bag, one overlapping another, or in thin flakes, as if occupying
- slight cleavages. The beauty of the ice was gone, and it was too late to
- study the bottom. Being curious to know what position my great bubbles
- occupied with regard to the new ice, I broke out a cake containing a
- middling sized one, and turned it bottom upward. The new ice had formed
- around and under the bubble, so that it was included between the two
- ices. It was wholly in the lower ice, but close against the upper, and
- was flattish, or perhaps slightly lenticular, with a rounded edge, a
- quarter of an inch deep by four inches in diameter; and I was surprised
- to find that directly under the bubble the ice was melted with great
- regularity in the form of a saucer reversed, to the height of five
- eighths of an inch in the middle, leaving a thin partition there between
- the water and the bubble, hardly an eighth of an inch thick; and in many
- places the small bubbles in this partition had burst out downward, and
- probably there was no ice at all under the largest bubbles, which were a
- foot in diameter. I inferred that the infinite number of minute bubbles
- which I had first seen against the under surface of the ice were now
- frozen in likewise, and that each, in its degree, had operated like
- a burning-glass on the ice beneath to melt and rot it. These are the
- little air-guns which contribute to make the ice crack and whoop.
- * * * * *
- At length the winter set in good earnest, just as I had finished
- plastering, and the wind began to howl around the house as if it had
- not had permission to do so till then. Night after night the geese came
- lumbering in the dark with a clangor and a whistling of wings, even
- after the ground was covered with snow, some to alight in Walden, and
- some flying low over the woods toward Fair Haven, bound for Mexico.
- Several times, when returning from the village at ten or eleven o'clock
- at night, I heard the tread of a flock of geese, or else ducks, on the
- dry leaves in the woods by a pond-hole behind my dwelling, where they
- had come up to feed, and the faint honk or quack of their leader as they
- hurried off. In 1845 Walden froze entirely over for the first time on
- the night of the 22d of December, Flint's and other shallower ponds and
- the river having been frozen ten days or more; in '46, the 16th; in '49,
- about the 31st; and in '50, about the 27th of December; in '52, the 5th
- of January; in '53, the 31st of December. The snow had already covered
- the ground since the 25th of November, and surrounded me suddenly
- with the scenery of winter. I withdrew yet farther into my shell, and
- endeavored to keep a bright fire both within my house and within my
- breast. My employment out of doors now was to collect the dead wood in
- the forest, bringing it in my hands or on my shoulders, or sometimes
- trailing a dead pine tree under each arm to my shed. An old forest fence
- which had seen its best days was a great haul for me. I sacrificed it
- to Vulcan, for it was past serving the god Terminus. How much more
- interesting an event is that man's supper who has just been forth in the
- snow to hunt, nay, you might say, steal, the fuel to cook it with! His
- bread and meat are sweet. There are enough fagots and waste wood of all
- kinds in the forests of most of our towns to support many fires, but
- which at present warm none, and, some think, hinder the growth of the
- young wood. There was also the driftwood of the pond. In the course of
- the summer I had discovered a raft of pitch pine logs with the bark on,
- pinned together by the Irish when the railroad was built. This I hauled
- up partly on the shore. After soaking two years and then lying high six
- months it was perfectly sound, though waterlogged past drying. I amused
- myself one winter day with sliding this piecemeal across the pond,
- nearly half a mile, skating behind with one end of a log fifteen feet
- long on my shoulder, and the other on the ice; or I tied several logs
- together with a birch withe, and then, with a longer birch or alder
- which had a hook at the end, dragged them across. Though completely
- waterlogged and almost as heavy as lead, they not only burned long, but
- made a very hot fire; nay, I thought that they burned better for the
- soaking, as if the pitch, being confined by the water, burned longer, as
- in a lamp.
- Gilpin, in his account of the forest borderers of England, says that
- "the encroachments of trespassers, and the houses and fences thus raised
- on the borders of the forest," were "considered as great nuisances
- by the old forest law, and were severely punished under the name of
- _purprestures_, as tending _ad terrorem ferarum--ad nocumentum forestae_,
- etc.," to the frightening of the game and the detriment of the forest.
- But I was interested in the preservation of the venison and the vert
- more than the hunters or woodchoppers, and as much as though I had been
- the Lord Warden himself; and if any part was burned, though I burned it
- myself by accident, I grieved with a grief that lasted longer and was
- more inconsolable than that of the proprietors; nay, I grieved when it
- was cut down by the proprietors themselves. I would that our farmers
- when they cut down a forest felt some of that awe which the old Romans
- did when they came to thin, or let in the light to, a consecrated grove
- (_lucum conlucare_), that is, would believe that it is sacred to some
- god. The Roman made an expiatory offering, and prayed, Whatever god or
- goddess thou art to whom this grove is sacred, be propitious to me, my
- family, and children, etc.
- It is remarkable what a value is still put upon wood even in this age
- and in this new country, a value more permanent and universal than that
- of gold. After all our discoveries and inventions no man will go by a
- pile of wood. It is as precious to us as it was to our Saxon and Norman
- ancestors. If they made their bows of it, we make our gun-stocks of it.
- Michaux, more than thirty years ago, says that the price of wood for
- fuel in New York and Philadelphia "nearly equals, and sometimes exceeds,
- that of the best wood in Paris, though this immense capital annually
- requires more than three hundred thousand cords, and is surrounded to
- the distance of three hundred miles by cultivated plains." In this town
- the price of wood rises almost steadily, and the only question is, how
- much higher it is to be this year than it was the last. Mechanics and
- tradesmen who come in person to the forest on no other errand, are sure
- to attend the wood auction, and even pay a high price for the privilege
- of gleaning after the woodchopper. It is now many years that men have
- resorted to the forest for fuel and the materials of the arts: the New
- Englander and the New Hollander, the Parisian and the Celt, the farmer
- and Robin Hood, Goody Blake and Harry Gill; in most parts of the world
- the prince and the peasant, the scholar and the savage, equally require
- still a few sticks from the forest to warm them and cook their food.
- Neither could I do without them.
- Every man looks at his wood-pile with a kind of affection. I love to
- have mine before my window, and the more chips the better to remind me
- of my pleasing work. I had an old axe which nobody claimed, with which
- by spells in winter days, on the sunny side of the house, I played about
- the stumps which I had got out of my bean-field. As my driver prophesied
- when I was plowing, they warmed me twice--once while I was splitting
- them, and again when they were on the fire, so that no fuel could
- give out more heat. As for the axe, I was advised to get the village
- blacksmith to "jump" it; but I jumped him, and, putting a hickory helve
- from the woods into it, made it do. If it was dull, it was at least hung
- true.
- A few pieces of fat pine were a great treasure. It is interesting to
- remember how much of this food for fire is still concealed in the bowels
- of the earth. In previous years I had often gone prospecting over some
- bare hillside, where a pitch pine wood had formerly stood, and got out
- the fat pine roots. They are almost indestructible. Stumps thirty or
- forty years old, at least, will still be sound at the core, though the
- sapwood has all become vegetable mould, as appears by the scales of
- the thick bark forming a ring level with the earth four or five inches
- distant from the heart. With axe and shovel you explore this mine, and
- follow the marrowy store, yellow as beef tallow, or as if you had struck
- on a vein of gold, deep into the earth. But commonly I kindled my fire
- with the dry leaves of the forest, which I had stored up in my shed
- before the snow came. Green hickory finely split makes the woodchopper's
- kindlings, when he has a camp in the woods. Once in a while I got a
- little of this. When the villagers were lighting their fires beyond the
- horizon, I too gave notice to the various wild inhabitants of Walden
- vale, by a smoky streamer from my chimney, that I was awake.--
- Light-winged Smoke, Icarian bird,
- Melting thy pinions in thy upward flight,
- Lark without song, and messenger of dawn,
- Circling above the hamlets as thy nest;
- Or else, departing dream, and shadowy form
- Of midnight vision, gathering up thy skirts;
- By night star-veiling, and by day
- Darkening the light and blotting out the sun;
- Go thou my incense upward from this hearth,
- And ask the gods to pardon this clear flame.
- Hard green wood just cut, though I used but little of that, answered my
- purpose better than any other. I sometimes left a good fire when I went
- to take a walk in a winter afternoon; and when I returned, three or four
- hours afterward, it would be still alive and glowing. My house was not
- empty though I was gone. It was as if I had left a cheerful housekeeper
- behind. It was I and Fire that lived there; and commonly my housekeeper
- proved trustworthy. One day, however, as I was splitting wood, I thought
- that I would just look in at the window and see if the house was not on
- fire; it was the only time I remember to have been particularly anxious
- on this score; so I looked and saw that a spark had caught my bed, and
- I went in and extinguished it when it had burned a place as big as my
- hand. But my house occupied so sunny and sheltered a position, and
- its roof was so low, that I could afford to let the fire go out in the
- middle of almost any winter day.
- The moles nested in my cellar, nibbling every third potato, and making
- a snug bed even there of some hair left after plastering and of brown
- paper; for even the wildest animals love comfort and warmth as well as
- man, and they survive the winter only because they are so careful to
- secure them. Some of my friends spoke as if I was coming to the woods on
- purpose to freeze myself. The animal merely makes a bed, which he warms
- with his body, in a sheltered place; but man, having discovered fire,
- boxes up some air in a spacious apartment, and warms that, instead of
- robbing himself, makes that his bed, in which he can move about divested
- of more cumbrous clothing, maintain a kind of summer in the midst of
- winter, and by means of windows even admit the light, and with a lamp
- lengthen out the day. Thus he goes a step or two beyond instinct, and
- saves a little time for the fine arts. Though, when I had been exposed
- to the rudest blasts a long time, my whole body began to grow torpid,
- when I reached the genial atmosphere of my house I soon recovered my
- faculties and prolonged my life. But the most luxuriously housed has
- little to boast of in this respect, nor need we trouble ourselves to
- speculate how the human race may be at last destroyed. It would be
- easy to cut their threads any time with a little sharper blast from the
- north. We go on dating from Cold Fridays and Great Snows; but a little
- colder Friday, or greater snow would put a period to man's existence on
- the globe.
- The next winter I used a small cooking-stove for economy, since I
- did not own the forest; but it did not keep fire so well as the open
- fireplace. Cooking was then, for the most part, no longer a poetic, but
- merely a chemic process. It will soon be forgotten, in these days of
- stoves, that we used to roast potatoes in the ashes, after the Indian
- fashion. The stove not only took up room and scented the house, but it
- concealed the fire, and I felt as if I had lost a companion. You can
- always see a face in the fire. The laborer, looking into it at evening,
- purifies his thoughts of the dross and earthiness which they have
- accumulated during the day. But I could no longer sit and look into
- the fire, and the pertinent words of a poet recurred to me with new
- force.--
- "Never, bright flame, may be denied to me
- Thy dear, life imaging, close sympathy.
- What but my hopes shot upward e'er so bright?
- What but my fortunes sunk so low in night?
- Why art thou banished from our hearth and hall,
- Thou who art welcomed and beloved by all?
- Was thy existence then too fanciful
- For our life's common light, who are so dull?
- Did thy bright gleam mysterious converse hold
- With our congenial souls? secrets too bold?
- Well, we are safe and strong, for now we sit
- Beside a hearth where no dim shadows flit,
- Where nothing cheers nor saddens, but a fire
- Warms feet and hands--nor does to more aspire;
- By whose compact utilitarian heap
- The present may sit down and go to sleep,
- Nor fear the ghosts who from the dim past walked,
- And with us by the unequal light of the old wood fire talked."
- Former Inhabitants and Winter Visitors
- I weathered some merry snow-storms, and spent some cheerful winter
- evenings by my fireside, while the snow whirled wildly without, and even
- the hooting of the owl was hushed. For many weeks I met no one in my
- walks but those who came occasionally to cut wood and sled it to the
- village. The elements, however, abetted me in making a path through the
- deepest snow in the woods, for when I had once gone through the wind
- blew the oak leaves into my tracks, where they lodged, and by absorbing
- the rays of the sun melted the snow, and so not only made a my bed
- for my feet, but in the night their dark line was my guide. For human
- society I was obliged to conjure up the former occupants of these woods.
- Within the memory of many of my townsmen the road near which my house
- stands resounded with the laugh and gossip of inhabitants, and the woods
- which border it were notched and dotted here and there with their little
- gardens and dwellings, though it was then much more shut in by the
- forest than now. In some places, within my own remembrance, the pines
- would scrape both sides of a chaise at once, and women and children who
- were compelled to go this way to Lincoln alone and on foot did it with
- fear, and often ran a good part of the distance. Though mainly but a
- humble route to neighboring villages, or for the woodman's team, it once
- amused the traveller more than now by its variety, and lingered longer
- in his memory. Where now firm open fields stretch from the village to
- the woods, it then ran through a maple swamp on a foundation of logs,
- the remnants of which, doubtless, still underlie the present dusty
- highway, from the Stratton, now the Alms-House Farm, to Brister's Hill.
- East of my bean-field, across the road, lived Cato Ingraham, slave of
- Duncan Ingraham, Esquire, gentleman, of Concord village, who built his
- slave a house, and gave him permission to live in Walden Woods;--Cato,
- not Uticensis, but Concordiensis. Some say that he was a Guinea Negro.
- There are a few who remember his little patch among the walnuts, which
- he let grow up till he should be old and need them; but a younger and
- whiter speculator got them at last. He too, however, occupies an equally
- narrow house at present. Cato's half-obliterated cellar-hole still
- remains, though known to few, being concealed from the traveller by a
- fringe of pines. It is now filled with the smooth sumach (_Rhus glabra_),
- and one of the earliest species of goldenrod (_Solidago stricta_) grows
- there luxuriantly.
- Here, by the very corner of my field, still nearer to town, Zilpha,
- a colored woman, had her little house, where she spun linen for the
- townsfolk, making the Walden Woods ring with her shrill singing, for
- she had a loud and notable voice. At length, in the war of 1812, her
- dwelling was set on fire by English soldiers, prisoners on parole, when
- she was away, and her cat and dog and hens were all burned up together.
- She led a hard life, and somewhat inhumane. One old frequenter of these
- woods remembers, that as he passed her house one noon he heard her
- muttering to herself over her gurgling pot--"Ye are all bones, bones!" I
- have seen bricks amid the oak copse there.
- Down the road, on the right hand, on Brister's Hill, lived Brister
- Freeman, "a handy Negro," slave of Squire Cummings once--there where
- grow still the apple trees which Brister planted and tended; large old
- trees now, but their fruit still wild and ciderish to my taste. Not long
- since I read his epitaph in the old Lincoln burying-ground, a little on
- one side, near the unmarked graves of some British grenadiers who fell
- in the retreat from Concord--where he is styled "Sippio Brister"--Scipio
- Africanus he had some title to be called--"a man of color," as if he
- were discolored. It also told me, with staring emphasis, when he died;
- which was but an indirect way of informing me that he ever lived.
- With him dwelt Fenda, his hospitable wife, who told fortunes, yet
- pleasantly--large, round, and black, blacker than any of the children of
- night, such a dusky orb as never rose on Concord before or since.
- Farther down the hill, on the left, on the old road in the woods, are
- marks of some homestead of the Stratton family; whose orchard once
- covered all the slope of Brister's Hill, but was long since killed out
- by pitch pines, excepting a few stumps, whose old roots furnish still
- the wild stocks of many a thrifty village tree.
- Nearer yet to town, you come to Breed's location, on the other side of
- the way, just on the edge of the wood; ground famous for the pranks of
- a demon not distinctly named in old mythology, who has acted a prominent
- and astounding part in our New England life, and deserves, as much as
- any mythological character, to have his biography written one day; who
- first comes in the guise of a friend or hired man, and then robs and
- murders the whole family--New-England Rum. But history must not yet
- tell the tragedies enacted here; let time intervene in some measure to
- assuage and lend an azure tint to them. Here the most indistinct and
- dubious tradition says that once a tavern stood; the well the same,
- which tempered the traveller's beverage and refreshed his steed. Here
- then men saluted one another, and heard and told the news, and went
- their ways again.
- Breed's hut was standing only a dozen years ago, though it had long
- been unoccupied. It was about the size of mine. It was set on fire by
- mischievous boys, one Election night, if I do not mistake. I lived on
- the edge of the village then, and had just lost myself over Davenant's
- "Gondibert," that winter that I labored with a lethargy--which, by the
- way, I never knew whether to regard as a family complaint, having
- an uncle who goes to sleep shaving himself, and is obliged to sprout
- potatoes in a cellar Sundays, in order to keep awake and keep the
- Sabbath, or as the consequence of my attempt to read Chalmers'
- collection of English poetry without skipping. It fairly overcame my
- Nervii. I had just sunk my head on this when the bells rung fire, and in
- hot haste the engines rolled that way, led by a straggling troop of
- men and boys, and I among the foremost, for I had leaped the brook.
- We thought it was far south over the woods--we who had run to fires
- before--barn, shop, or dwelling-house, or all together. "It's Baker's
- barn," cried one. "It is the Codman place," affirmed another. And then
- fresh sparks went up above the wood, as if the roof fell in, and we all
- shouted "Concord to the rescue!" Wagons shot past with furious speed
- and crushing loads, bearing, perchance, among the rest, the agent of the
- Insurance Company, who was bound to go however far; and ever and anon
- the engine bell tinkled behind, more slow and sure; and rearmost of all,
- as it was afterward whispered, came they who set the fire and gave the
- alarm. Thus we kept on like true idealists, rejecting the evidence
- of our senses, until at a turn in the road we heard the crackling and
- actually felt the heat of the fire from over the wall, and realized,
- alas! that we were there. The very nearness of the fire but cooled our
- ardor. At first we thought to throw a frog-pond on to it; but concluded
- to let it burn, it was so far gone and so worthless. So we stood round
- our engine, jostled one another, expressed our sentiments through
- speaking-trumpets, or in lower tone referred to the great conflagrations
- which the world has witnessed, including Bascom's shop, and, between
- ourselves, we thought that, were we there in season with our "tub," and
- a full frog-pond by, we could turn that threatened last and universal
- one into another flood. We finally retreated without doing any
- mischief--returned to sleep and "Gondibert." But as for "Gondibert,"
- I would except that passage in the preface about wit being the soul's
- powder--"but most of mankind are strangers to wit, as Indians are to
- powder."
- It chanced that I walked that way across the fields the following night,
- about the same hour, and hearing a low moaning at this spot, I drew near
- in the dark, and discovered the only survivor of the family that I know,
- the heir of both its virtues and its vices, who alone was interested in
- this burning, lying on his stomach and looking over the cellar wall at
- the still smouldering cinders beneath, muttering to himself, as is his
- wont. He had been working far off in the river meadows all day, and had
- improved the first moments that he could call his own to visit the home
- of his fathers and his youth. He gazed into the cellar from all sides
- and points of view by turns, always lying down to it, as if there was
- some treasure, which he remembered, concealed between the stones, where
- there was absolutely nothing but a heap of bricks and ashes. The house
- being gone, he looked at what there was left. He was soothed by the
- sympathy which my mere presence implied, and showed me, as well as the
- darkness permitted, where the well was covered up; which, thank Heaven,
- could never be burned; and he groped long about the wall to find the
- well-sweep which his father had cut and mounted, feeling for the iron
- hook or staple by which a burden had been fastened to the heavy end--all
- that he could now cling to--to convince me that it was no common
- "rider." I felt it, and still remark it almost daily in my walks, for by
- it hangs the history of a family.
- Once more, on the left, where are seen the well and lilac bushes by the
- wall, in the now open field, lived Nutting and Le Grosse. But to return
- toward Lincoln.
- Farther in the woods than any of these, where the road approaches
- nearest to the pond, Wyman the potter squatted, and furnished his
- townsmen with earthenware, and left descendants to succeed him. Neither
- were they rich in worldly goods, holding the land by sufferance while
- they lived; and there often the sheriff came in vain to collect the
- taxes, and "attached a chip," for form's sake, as I have read in his
- accounts, there being nothing else that he could lay his hands on. One
- day in midsummer, when I was hoeing, a man who was carrying a load
- of pottery to market stopped his horse against my field and inquired
- concerning Wyman the younger. He had long ago bought a potter's wheel
- of him, and wished to know what had become of him. I had read of the
- potter's clay and wheel in Scripture, but it had never occurred to me
- that the pots we use were not such as had come down unbroken from those
- days, or grown on trees like gourds somewhere, and I was pleased to hear
- that so fictile an art was ever practiced in my neighborhood.
- The last inhabitant of these woods before me was an Irishman, Hugh
- Quoil (if I have spelt his name with coil enough), who occupied Wyman's
- tenement--Col. Quoil, he was called. Rumor said that he had been a
- soldier at Waterloo. If he had lived I should have made him fight his
- battles over again. His trade here was that of a ditcher. Napoleon went
- to St. Helena; Quoil came to Walden Woods. All I know of him is tragic.
- He was a man of manners, like one who had seen the world, and was
- capable of more civil speech than you could well attend to. He wore a
- greatcoat in midsummer, being affected with the trembling delirium, and
- his face was the color of carmine. He died in the road at the foot of
- Brister's Hill shortly after I came to the woods, so that I have not
- remembered him as a neighbor. Before his house was pulled down, when his
- comrades avoided it as "an unlucky castle," I visited it. There lay his
- old clothes curled up by use, as if they were himself, upon his raised
- plank bed. His pipe lay broken on the hearth, instead of a bowl broken
- at the fountain. The last could never have been the symbol of his death,
- for he confessed to me that, though he had heard of Brister's Spring,
- he had never seen it; and soiled cards, kings of diamonds, spades,
- and hearts, were scattered over the floor. One black chicken which the
- administrator could not catch, black as night and as silent, not even
- croaking, awaiting Reynard, still went to roost in the next apartment.
- In the rear there was the dim outline of a garden, which had been
- planted but had never received its first hoeing, owing to those terrible
- shaking fits, though it was now harvest time. It was overrun with Roman
- wormwood and beggar-ticks, which last stuck to my clothes for all fruit.
- The skin of a woodchuck was freshly stretched upon the back of the
- house, a trophy of his last Waterloo; but no warm cap or mittens would
- he want more.
- Now only a dent in the earth marks the site of these dwellings, with
- buried cellar stones, and strawberries, raspberries, thimble-berries,
- hazel-bushes, and sumachs growing in the sunny sward there; some
- pitch pine or gnarled oak occupies what was the chimney nook, and a
- sweet-scented black birch, perhaps, waves where the door-stone was.
- Sometimes the well dent is visible, where once a spring oozed; now dry
- and tearless grass; or it was covered deep--not to be discovered till
- some late day--with a flat stone under the sod, when the last of the
- race departed. What a sorrowful act must that be--the covering up of
- wells! coincident with the opening of wells of tears. These cellar
- dents, like deserted fox burrows, old holes, are all that is left where
- once were the stir and bustle of human life, and "fate, free will,
- foreknowledge absolute," in some form and dialect or other were by turns
- discussed. But all I can learn of their conclusions amounts to just
- this, that "Cato and Brister pulled wool"; which is about as edifying as
- the history of more famous schools of philosophy.
- Still grows the vivacious lilac a generation after the door and lintel
- and the sill are gone, unfolding its sweet-scented flowers each spring,
- to be plucked by the musing traveller; planted and tended once by
- children's hands, in front-yard plots--now standing by wallsides in
- retired pastures, and giving place to new-rising forests;--the last of
- that stirp, sole survivor of that family. Little did the dusky children
- think that the puny slip with its two eyes only, which they stuck in the
- ground in the shadow of the house and daily watered, would root itself
- so, and outlive them, and house itself in the rear that shaded it, and
- grown man's garden and orchard, and tell their story faintly to the lone
- wanderer a half-century after they had grown up and died--blossoming as
- fair, and smelling as sweet, as in that first spring. I mark its still
- tender, civil, cheerful lilac colors.
- But this small village, germ of something more, why did it fail while
- Concord keeps its ground? Were there no natural advantages--no water
- privileges, forsooth? Ay, the deep Walden Pond and cool Brister's
- Spring--privilege to drink long and healthy draughts at these, all
- unimproved by these men but to dilute their glass. They were universally
- a thirsty race. Might not the basket, stable-broom, mat-making,
- corn-parching, linen-spinning, and pottery business have thrived here,
- making the wilderness to blossom like the rose, and a numerous posterity
- have inherited the land of their fathers? The sterile soil would at
- least have been proof against a low-land degeneracy. Alas! how little
- does the memory of these human inhabitants enhance the beauty of the
- landscape! Again, perhaps, Nature will try, with me for a first settler,
- and my house raised last spring to be the oldest in the hamlet.
- I am not aware that any man has ever built on the spot which I occupy.
- Deliver me from a city built on the site of a more ancient city, whose
- materials are ruins, whose gardens cemeteries. The soil is blanched and
- accursed there, and before that becomes necessary the earth itself will
- be destroyed. With such reminiscences I repeopled the woods and lulled
- myself asleep.
- * * * * *
- At this season I seldom had a visitor. When the snow lay deepest no
- wanderer ventured near my house for a week or fortnight at a time, but
- there I lived as snug as a meadow mouse, or as cattle and poultry which
- are said to have survived for a long time buried in drifts, even without
- food; or like that early settler's family in the town of Sutton, in this
- State, whose cottage was completely covered by the great snow of 1717
- when he was absent, and an Indian found it only by the hole which the
- chimney's breath made in the drift, and so relieved the family. But
- no friendly Indian concerned himself about me; nor needed he, for the
- master of the house was at home. The Great Snow! How cheerful it is to
- hear of! When the farmers could not get to the woods and swamps with
- their teams, and were obliged to cut down the shade trees before their
- houses, and, when the crust was harder, cut off the trees in the swamps,
- ten feet from the ground, as it appeared the next spring.
- In the deepest snows, the path which I used from the highway to
- my house, about half a mile long, might have been represented by a
- meandering dotted line, with wide intervals between the dots. For a week
- of even weather I took exactly the same number of steps, and of the same
- length, coming and going, stepping deliberately and with the precision
- of a pair of dividers in my own deep tracks--to such routine the winter
- reduces us--yet often they were filled with heaven's own blue. But no
- weather interfered fatally with my walks, or rather my going abroad, for
- I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to
- keep an appointment with a beech tree, or a yellow birch, or an old
- acquaintance among the pines; when the ice and snow causing their limbs
- to droop, and so sharpening their tops, had changed the pines into fir
- trees; wading to the tops of the highest hills when the snow was nearly
- two feet deep on a level, and shaking down another snow-storm on my head
- at every step; or sometimes creeping and floundering thither on my hands
- and knees, when the hunters had gone into winter quarters. One afternoon
- I amused myself by watching a barred owl (_Strix nebulosa_) sitting on one
- of the lower dead limbs of a white pine, close to the trunk, in broad
- daylight, I standing within a rod of him. He could hear me when I moved
- and cronched the snow with my feet, but could not plainly see me. When
- I made most noise he would stretch out his neck, and erect his neck
- feathers, and open his eyes wide; but their lids soon fell again, and he
- began to nod. I too felt a slumberous influence after watching him half
- an hour, as he sat thus with his eyes half open, like a cat, winged
- brother of the cat. There was only a narrow slit left between their
- lids, by which he preserved a peninsular relation to me; thus, with
- half-shut eyes, looking out from the land of dreams, and endeavoring
- to realize me, vague object or mote that interrupted his visions. At
- length, on some louder noise or my nearer approach, he would grow uneasy
- and sluggishly turn about on his perch, as if impatient at having his
- dreams disturbed; and when he launched himself off and flapped through
- the pines, spreading his wings to unexpected breadth, I could not hear
- the slightest sound from them. Thus, guided amid the pine boughs rather
- by a delicate sense of their neighborhood than by sight, feeling his
- twilight way, as it were, with his sensitive pinions, he found a new
- perch, where he might in peace await the dawning of his day.
- As I walked over the long causeway made for the railroad through the
- meadows, I encountered many a blustering and nipping wind, for nowhere
- has it freer play; and when the frost had smitten me on one cheek,
- heathen as I was, I turned to it the other also. Nor was it much better
- by the carriage road from Brister's Hill. For I came to town still, like
- a friendly Indian, when the contents of the broad open fields were all
- piled up between the walls of the Walden road, and half an hour sufficed
- to obliterate the tracks of the last traveller. And when I returned new
- drifts would have formed, through which I floundered, where the busy
- northwest wind had been depositing the powdery snow round a sharp angle
- in the road, and not a rabbit's track, nor even the fine print, the
- small type, of a meadow mouse was to be seen. Yet I rarely failed to
- find, even in midwinter, some warm and springly swamp where the grass
- and the skunk-cabbage still put forth with perennial verdure, and some
- hardier bird occasionally awaited the return of spring.
- Sometimes, notwithstanding the snow, when I returned from my walk at
- evening I crossed the deep tracks of a woodchopper leading from my door,
- and found his pile of whittlings on the hearth, and my house filled with
- the odor of his pipe. Or on a Sunday afternoon, if I chanced to be
- at home, I heard the cronching of the snow made by the step of a
- long-headed farmer, who from far through the woods sought my house, to
- have a social "crack"; one of the few of his vocation who are "men on
- their farms"; who donned a frock instead of a professor's gown, and is
- as ready to extract the moral out of church or state as to haul a load
- of manure from his barn-yard. We talked of rude and simple times, when
- men sat about large fires in cold, bracing weather, with clear heads;
- and when other dessert failed, we tried our teeth on many a nut which
- wise squirrels have long since abandoned, for those which have the
- thickest shells are commonly empty.
- The one who came from farthest to my lodge, through deepest snows and
- most dismal tempests, was a poet. A farmer, a hunter, a soldier, a
- reporter, even a philosopher, may be daunted; but nothing can deter a
- poet, for he is actuated by pure love. Who can predict his comings
- and goings? His business calls him out at all hours, even when doctors
- sleep. We made that small house ring with boisterous mirth and resound
- with the murmur of much sober talk, making amends then to Walden vale
- for the long silences. Broadway was still and deserted in comparison. At
- suitable intervals there were regular salutes of laughter, which might
- have been referred indifferently to the last-uttered or the forth-coming
- jest. We made many a "bran new" theory of life over a thin dish
- of gruel, which combined the advantages of conviviality with the
- clear-headedness which philosophy requires.
- I should not forget that during my last winter at the pond there was
- another welcome visitor, who at one time came through the village,
- through snow and rain and darkness, till he saw my lamp through the
- trees, and shared with me some long winter evenings. One of the last of
- the philosophers--Connecticut gave him to the world--he peddled first
- her wares, afterwards, as he declares, his brains. These he peddles
- still, prompting God and disgracing man, bearing for fruit his brain
- only, like the nut its kernel. I think that he must be the man of the
- most faith of any alive. His words and attitude always suppose a better
- state of things than other men are acquainted with, and he will be the
- last man to be disappointed as the ages revolve. He has no venture in
- the present. But though comparatively disregarded now, when his day
- comes, laws unsuspected by most will take effect, and masters of
- families and rulers will come to him for advice.
- "How blind that cannot see serenity!"
- A true friend of man; almost the only friend of human progress. An Old
- Mortality, say rather an Immortality, with unwearied patience and faith
- making plain the image engraven in men's bodies, the God of whom they
- are but defaced and leaning monuments. With his hospitable intellect
- he embraces children, beggars, insane, and scholars, and entertains the
- thought of all, adding to it commonly some breadth and elegance. I
- think that he should keep a caravansary on the world's highway, where
- philosophers of all nations might put up, and on his sign should be
- printed, "Entertainment for man, but not for his beast. Enter ye that
- have leisure and a quiet mind, who earnestly seek the right road." He is
- perhaps the sanest man and has the fewest crotchets of any I chance
- to know; the same yesterday and tomorrow. Of yore we had sauntered and
- talked, and effectually put the world behind us; for he was pledged to
- no institution in it, freeborn, _ingenuus_. Whichever way we turned,
- it seemed that the heavens and the earth had met together, since he
- enhanced the beauty of the landscape. A blue-robed man, whose fittest
- roof is the overarching sky which reflects his serenity. I do not see
- how he can ever die; Nature cannot spare him.
- Having each some shingles of thought well dried, we sat and whittled
- them, trying our knives, and admiring the clear yellowish grain of the
- pumpkin pine. We waded so gently and reverently, or we pulled together
- so smoothly, that the fishes of thought were not scared from the stream,
- nor feared any angler on the bank, but came and went grandly, like the
- clouds which float through the western sky, and the mother-o'-pearl
- flocks which sometimes form and dissolve there. There we worked,
- revising mythology, rounding a fable here and there, and building
- castles in the air for which earth offered no worthy foundation. Great
- Looker! Great Expecter! to converse with whom was a New England Night's
- Entertainment. Ah! such discourse we had, hermit and philosopher, and
- the old settler I have spoken of--we three--it expanded and racked my
- little house; I should not dare to say how many pounds' weight there
- was above the atmospheric pressure on every circular inch; it opened its
- seams so that they had to be calked with much dulness thereafter to stop
- the consequent leak;--but I had enough of that kind of oakum already
- picked.
- There was one other with whom I had "solid seasons," long to be
- remembered, at his house in the village, and who looked in upon me from
- time to time; but I had no more for society there.
- There too, as everywhere, I sometimes expected the Visitor who never
- comes. The Vishnu Purana says, "The house-holder is to remain at
- eventide in his courtyard as long as it takes to milk a cow, or longer
- if he pleases, to await the arrival of a guest." I often performed this
- duty of hospitality, waited long enough to milk a whole herd of cows,
- but did not see the man approaching from the town.
- Winter Animals
- When the ponds were firmly frozen, they afforded not only new and
- shorter routes to many points, but new views from their surfaces of the
- familiar landscape around them. When I crossed Flint's Pond, after it
- was covered with snow, though I had often paddled about and skated over
- it, it was so unexpectedly wide and so strange that I could think of
- nothing but Baffin's Bay. The Lincoln hills rose up around me at the
- extremity of a snowy plain, in which I did not remember to have stood
- before; and the fishermen, at an indeterminable distance over the ice,
- moving slowly about with their wolfish dogs, passed for sealers, or
- Esquimaux, or in misty weather loomed like fabulous creatures, and I did
- not know whether they were giants or pygmies. I took this course when
- I went to lecture in Lincoln in the evening, travelling in no road and
- passing no house between my own hut and the lecture room. In Goose Pond,
- which lay in my way, a colony of muskrats dwelt, and raised their cabins
- high above the ice, though none could be seen abroad when I crossed it.
- Walden, being like the rest usually bare of snow, or with only shallow
- and interrupted drifts on it, was my yard where I could walk freely when
- the snow was nearly two feet deep on a level elsewhere and the villagers
- were confined to their streets. There, far from the village street, and
- except at very long intervals, from the jingle of sleigh-bells, I slid
- and skated, as in a vast moose-yard well trodden, overhung by oak woods
- and solemn pines bent down with snow or bristling with icicles.
- For sounds in winter nights, and often in winter days, I heard the
- forlorn but melodious note of a hooting owl indefinitely far; such
- a sound as the frozen earth would yield if struck with a suitable
- plectrum, the very _lingua vernacula_ of Walden Wood, and quite familiar
- to me at last, though I never saw the bird while it was making it. I
- seldom opened my door in a winter evening without hearing it; _Hoo hoo
- hoo, hoorer, hoo,_ sounded sonorously, and the first three syllables
- accented somewhat like _how der do_; or sometimes _hoo, hoo_ only. One
- night in the beginning of winter, before the pond froze over, about nine
- o'clock, I was startled by the loud honking of a goose, and, stepping to
- the door, heard the sound of their wings like a tempest in the woods
- as they flew low over my house. They passed over the pond toward Fair
- Haven, seemingly deterred from settling by my light, their commodore
- honking all the while with a regular beat. Suddenly an unmistakable
- cat-owl from very near me, with the most harsh and tremendous voice
- I ever heard from any inhabitant of the woods, responded at regular
- intervals to the goose, as if determined to expose and disgrace this
- intruder from Hudson's Bay by exhibiting a greater compass and volume of
- voice in a native, and _boo-hoo_ him out of Concord horizon. What do you
- mean by alarming the citadel at this time of night consecrated to me? Do
- you think I am ever caught napping at such an hour, and that I have not
- got lungs and a larynx as well as yourself? _Boo-hoo, boo-hoo, boo-hoo!_
- It was one of the most thrilling discords I ever heard. And yet, if you
- had a discriminating ear, there were in it the elements of a concord
- such as these plains never saw nor heard.
- I also heard the whooping of the ice in the pond, my great bed-fellow in
- that part of Concord, as if it were restless in its bed and would fain
- turn over, were troubled with flatulency and had dreams; or I was waked
- by the cracking of the ground by the frost, as if some one had driven a
- team against my door, and in the morning would find a crack in the earth
- a quarter of a mile long and a third of an inch wide.
- Sometimes I heard the foxes as they ranged over the snow-crust, in
- moonlight nights, in search of a partridge or other game, barking
- raggedly and demoniacally like forest dogs, as if laboring with some
- anxiety, or seeking expression, struggling for light and to be dogs
- outright and run freely in the streets; for if we take the ages into our
- account, may there not be a civilization going on among brutes as
- well as men? They seemed to me to be rudimental, burrowing men, still
- standing on their defence, awaiting their transformation. Sometimes one
- came near to my window, attracted by my light, barked a vulpine curse at
- me, and then retreated.
- Usually the red squirrel (_Sciurus Hudsonius_) waked me in the dawn,
- coursing over the roof and up and down the sides of the house, as if
- sent out of the woods for this purpose. In the course of the winter I
- threw out half a bushel of ears of sweet corn, which had not got ripe,
- on to the snow-crust by my door, and was amused by watching the motions
- of the various animals which were baited by it. In the twilight and the
- night the rabbits came regularly and made a hearty meal. All day long
- the red squirrels came and went, and afforded me much entertainment by
- their manoeuvres. One would approach at first warily through the shrub
- oaks, running over the snow-crust by fits and starts like a leaf blown
- by the wind, now a few paces this way, with wonderful speed and waste
- of energy, making inconceivable haste with his "trotters," as if it were
- for a wager, and now as many paces that way, but never getting on more
- than half a rod at a time; and then suddenly pausing with a ludicrous
- expression and a gratuitous somerset, as if all the eyes in the universe
- were eyed on him--for all the motions of a squirrel, even in the most
- solitary recesses of the forest, imply spectators as much as those of a
- dancing girl--wasting more time in delay and circumspection than would
- have sufficed to walk the whole distance--I never saw one walk--and then
- suddenly, before you could say Jack Robinson, he would be in the top
- of a young pitch pine, winding up his clock and chiding all imaginary
- spectators, soliloquizing and talking to all the universe at the same
- time--for no reason that I could ever detect, or he himself was aware
- of, I suspect. At length he would reach the corn, and selecting a
- suitable ear, frisk about in the same uncertain trigonometrical way to
- the topmost stick of my wood-pile, before my window, where he looked me
- in the face, and there sit for hours, supplying himself with a new
- ear from time to time, nibbling at first voraciously and throwing the
- half-naked cobs about; till at length he grew more dainty still and
- played with his food, tasting only the inside of the kernel, and the
- ear, which was held balanced over the stick by one paw, slipped from
- his careless grasp and fell to the ground, when he would look over at it
- with a ludicrous expression of uncertainty, as if suspecting that it had
- life, with a mind not made up whether to get it again, or a new one,
- or be off; now thinking of corn, then listening to hear what was in
- the wind. So the little impudent fellow would waste many an ear in
- a forenoon; till at last, seizing some longer and plumper one,
- considerably bigger than himself, and skilfully balancing it, he would
- set out with it to the woods, like a tiger with a buffalo, by the same
- zig-zag course and frequent pauses, scratching along with it as if it
- were too heavy for him and falling all the while, making its fall a
- diagonal between a perpendicular and horizontal, being determined to
- put it through at any rate;--a singularly frivolous and whimsical
- fellow;--and so he would get off with it to where he lived, perhaps
- carry it to the top of a pine tree forty or fifty rods distant, and
- I would afterwards find the cobs strewn about the woods in various
- directions.
- At length the jays arrive, whose discordant screams were heard long
- before, as they were warily making their approach an eighth of a mile
- off, and in a stealthy and sneaking manner they flit from tree to tree,
- nearer and nearer, and pick up the kernels which the squirrels have
- dropped. Then, sitting on a pitch pine bough, they attempt to swallow in
- their haste a kernel which is too big for their throats and chokes
- them; and after great labor they disgorge it, and spend an hour in
- the endeavor to crack it by repeated blows with their bills. They
- were manifestly thieves, and I had not much respect for them; but the
- squirrels, though at first shy, went to work as if they were taking what
- was their own.
- Meanwhile also came the chickadees in flocks, which, picking up the
- crumbs the squirrels had dropped, flew to the nearest twig and, placing
- them under their claws, hammered away at them with their little bills,
- as if it were an insect in the bark, till they were sufficiently reduced
- for their slender throats. A little flock of these titmice came daily to
- pick a dinner out of my woodpile, or the crumbs at my door, with faint
- flitting lisping notes, like the tinkling of icicles in the grass, or
- else with sprightly _day day day_, or more rarely, in spring-like days,
- a wiry summery _phe-be_ from the woodside. They were so familiar that at
- length one alighted on an armful of wood which I was carrying in, and
- pecked at the sticks without fear. I once had a sparrow alight upon my
- shoulder for a moment while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I felt
- that I was more distinguished by that circumstance than I should have
- been by any epaulet I could have worn. The squirrels also grew at last
- to be quite familiar, and occasionally stepped upon my shoe, when that
- was the nearest way.
- When the ground was not yet quite covered, and again near the end of
- winter, when the snow was melted on my south hillside and about my
- wood-pile, the partridges came out of the woods morning and evening to
- feed there. Whichever side you walk in the woods the partridge bursts
- away on whirring wings, jarring the snow from the dry leaves and twigs
- on high, which comes sifting down in the sunbeams like golden dust, for
- this brave bird is not to be scared by winter. It is frequently covered
- up by drifts, and, it is said, "sometimes plunges from on wing into the
- soft snow, where it remains concealed for a day or two." I used to start
- them in the open land also, where they had come out of the woods at
- sunset to "bud" the wild apple trees. They will come regularly every
- evening to particular trees, where the cunning sportsman lies in wait
- for them, and the distant orchards next the woods suffer thus not
- a little. I am glad that the partridge gets fed, at any rate. It is
- Nature's own bird which lives on buds and diet drink.
- In dark winter mornings, or in short winter afternoons, I sometimes
- heard a pack of hounds threading all the woods with hounding cry and
- yelp, unable to resist the instinct of the chase, and the note of the
- hunting-horn at intervals, proving that man was in the rear. The woods
- ring again, and yet no fox bursts forth on to the open level of the
- pond, nor following pack pursuing their Actæon. And perhaps at evening
- I see the hunters returning with a single brush trailing from their
- sleigh for a trophy, seeking their inn. They tell me that if the fox
- would remain in the bosom of the frozen earth he would be safe, or if he
- would run in a straight line away no foxhound could overtake him; but,
- having left his pursuers far behind, he stops to rest and listen till
- they come up, and when he runs he circles round to his old haunts, where
- the hunters await him. Sometimes, however, he will run upon a wall many
- rods, and then leap off far to one side, and he appears to know that
- water will not retain his scent. A hunter told me that he once saw a fox
- pursued by hounds burst out on to Walden when the ice was covered with
- shallow puddles, run part way across, and then return to the same shore.
- Ere long the hounds arrived, but here they lost the scent. Sometimes
- a pack hunting by themselves would pass my door, and circle round my
- house, and yelp and hound without regarding me, as if afflicted by a
- species of madness, so that nothing could divert them from the pursuit.
- Thus they circle until they fall upon the recent trail of a fox, for a
- wise hound will forsake everything else for this. One day a man came
- to my hut from Lexington to inquire after his hound that made a large
- track, and had been hunting for a week by himself. But I fear that he
- was not the wiser for all I told him, for every time I attempted to
- answer his questions he interrupted me by asking, "What do you do here?"
- He had lost a dog, but found a man.
- One old hunter who has a dry tongue, who used to come to bathe in Walden
- once every year when the water was warmest, and at such times looked in
- upon me, told me that many years ago he took his gun one afternoon and
- went out for a cruise in Walden Wood; and as he walked the Wayland road
- he heard the cry of hounds approaching, and ere long a fox leaped the
- wall into the road, and as quick as thought leaped the other wall out of
- the road, and his swift bullet had not touched him. Some way behind came
- an old hound and her three pups in full pursuit, hunting on their own
- account, and disappeared again in the woods. Late in the afternoon, as
- he was resting in the thick woods south of Walden, he heard the voice
- of the hounds far over toward Fair Haven still pursuing the fox; and
- on they came, their hounding cry which made all the woods ring sounding
- nearer and nearer, now from Well Meadow, now from the Baker Farm. For
- a long time he stood still and listened to their music, so sweet to
- a hunter's ear, when suddenly the fox appeared, threading the solemn
- aisles with an easy coursing pace, whose sound was concealed by a
- sympathetic rustle of the leaves, swift and still, keeping the round,
- leaving his pursuers far behind; and, leaping upon a rock amid the
- woods, he sat erect and listening, with his back to the hunter. For
- a moment compassion restrained the latter's arm; but that was a
- short-lived mood, and as quick as thought can follow thought his piece
- was levelled, and _whang!_--the fox, rolling over the rock, lay dead on
- the ground. The hunter still kept his place and listened to the hounds.
- Still on they came, and now the near woods resounded through all their
- aisles with their demoniac cry. At length the old hound burst into view
- with muzzle to the ground, and snapping the air as if possessed, and ran
- directly to the rock; but, spying the dead fox, she suddenly ceased her
- hounding as if struck dumb with amazement, and walked round and round
- him in silence; and one by one her pups arrived, and, like their mother,
- were sobered into silence by the mystery. Then the hunter came forward
- and stood in their midst, and the mystery was solved. They waited in
- silence while he skinned the fox, then followed the brush a while, and
- at length turned off into the woods again. That evening a Weston squire
- came to the Concord hunter's cottage to inquire for his hounds, and told
- how for a week they had been hunting on their own account from Weston
- woods. The Concord hunter told him what he knew and offered him the
- skin; but the other declined it and departed. He did not find his hounds
- that night, but the next day learned that they had crossed the river and
- put up at a farmhouse for the night, whence, having been well fed, they
- took their departure early in the morning.
- The hunter who told me this could remember one Sam Nutting, who used
- to hunt bears on Fair Haven Ledges, and exchange their skins for rum
- in Concord village; who told him, even, that he had seen a moose
- there. Nutting had a famous foxhound named Burgoyne--he pronounced it
- Bugine--which my informant used to borrow. In the "Wast Book" of an
- old trader of this town, who was also a captain, town-clerk, and
- representative, I find the following entry. Jan. 18th, 1742-3, "John
- Melven Cr. by 1 Grey Fox 0--2--3"; they are not now found here; and in
- his ledger, Feb, 7th, 1743, Hezekiah Stratton has credit "by 1/2 a Catt
- skin 0--1--4-1/2"; of course, a wild-cat, for Stratton was a sergeant in
- the old French war, and would not have got credit for hunting less noble
- game. Credit is given for deerskins also, and they were daily sold. One
- man still preserves the horns of the last deer that was killed in this
- vicinity, and another has told me the particulars of the hunt in which
- his uncle was engaged. The hunters were formerly a numerous and merry
- crew here. I remember well one gaunt Nimrod who would catch up a leaf
- by the roadside and play a strain on it wilder and more melodious, if my
- memory serves me, than any hunting-horn.
- At midnight, when there was a moon, I sometimes met with hounds in my
- path prowling about the woods, which would skulk out of my way, as if
- afraid, and stand silent amid the bushes till I had passed.
- Squirrels and wild mice disputed for my store of nuts. There were scores
- of pitch pines around my house, from one to four inches in diameter,
- which had been gnawed by mice the previous winter--a Norwegian winter
- for them, for the snow lay long and deep, and they were obliged to mix
- a large proportion of pine bark with their other diet. These trees were
- alive and apparently flourishing at midsummer, and many of them had
- grown a foot, though completely girdled; but after another winter such
- were without exception dead. It is remarkable that a single mouse should
- thus be allowed a whole pine tree for its dinner, gnawing round instead
- of up and down it; but perhaps it is necessary in order to thin these
- trees, which are wont to grow up densely.
- The hares (_Lepus Americanus_) were very familiar. One had her form under
- my house all winter, separated from me only by the flooring, and
- she startled me each morning by her hasty departure when I began to
- stir--thump, thump, thump, striking her head against the floor timbers
- in her hurry. They used to come round my door at dusk to nibble the
- potato parings which I had thrown out, and were so nearly the color of
- the ground that they could hardly be distinguished when still. Sometimes
- in the twilight I alternately lost and recovered sight of one sitting
- motionless under my window. When I opened my door in the evening, off
- they would go with a squeak and a bounce. Near at hand they only excited
- my pity. One evening one sat by my door two paces from me, at first
- trembling with fear, yet unwilling to move; a poor wee thing, lean and
- bony, with ragged ears and sharp nose, scant tail and slender paws. It
- looked as if Nature no longer contained the breed of nobler bloods, but
- stood on her last toes. Its large eyes appeared young and unhealthy,
- almost dropsical. I took a step, and lo, away it scud with an elastic
- spring over the snow-crust, straightening its body and its limbs into
- graceful length, and soon put the forest between me and itself--the wild
- free venison, asserting its vigor and the dignity of Nature. Not without
- reason was its slenderness. Such then was its nature. (_Lepus_, _levipes_,
- light-foot, some think.)
- What is a country without rabbits and partridges? They are among the
- most simple and indigenous animal products; ancient and venerable
- families known to antiquity as to modern times; of the very hue and
- substance of Nature, nearest allied to leaves and to the ground--and to
- one another; it is either winged or it is legged. It is hardly as if you
- had seen a wild creature when a rabbit or a partridge bursts away, only
- a natural one, as much to be expected as rustling leaves. The partridge
- and the rabbit are still sure to thrive, like true natives of the soil,
- whatever revolutions occur. If the forest is cut off, the sprouts and
- bushes which spring up afford them concealment, and they become more
- numerous than ever. That must be a poor country indeed that does not
- support a hare. Our woods teem with them both, and around every swamp
- may be seen the partridge or rabbit walk, beset with twiggy fences and
- horse-hair snares, which some cow-boy tends.
- The Pond in Winter
- After a still winter night I awoke with the impression that some
- question had been put to me, which I had been endeavoring in vain to
- answer in my sleep, as what--how--when--where? But there was dawning
- Nature, in whom all creatures live, looking in at my broad windows with
- serene and satisfied face, and no question on _her_ lips. I awoke to an
- answered question, to Nature and daylight. The snow lying deep on the
- earth dotted with young pines, and the very slope of the hill on which
- my house is placed, seemed to say, Forward! Nature puts no question
- and answers none which we mortals ask. She has long ago taken her
- resolution. "O Prince, our eyes contemplate with admiration and transmit
- to the soul the wonderful and varied spectacle of this universe. The
- night veils without doubt a part of this glorious creation; but day
- comes to reveal to us this great work, which extends from earth even
- into the plains of the ether."
- Then to my morning work. First I take an axe and pail and go in search
- of water, if that be not a dream. After a cold and snowy night it needed
- a divining-rod to find it. Every winter the liquid and trembling surface
- of the pond, which was so sensitive to every breath, and reflected every
- light and shadow, becomes solid to the depth of a foot or a foot and a
- half, so that it will support the heaviest teams, and perchance the snow
- covers it to an equal depth, and it is not to be distinguished from any
- level field. Like the marmots in the surrounding hills, it closes its
- eyelids and becomes dormant for three months or more. Standing on the
- snow-covered plain, as if in a pasture amid the hills, I cut my way
- first through a foot of snow, and then a foot of ice, and open a window
- under my feet, where, kneeling to drink, I look down into the quiet
- parlor of the fishes, pervaded by a softened light as through a window
- of ground glass, with its bright sanded floor the same as in summer;
- there a perennial waveless serenity reigns as in the amber twilight
- sky, corresponding to the cool and even temperament of the inhabitants.
- Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.
- Early in the morning, while all things are crisp with frost, men come
- with fishing-reels and slender lunch, and let down their fine lines
- through the snowy field to take pickerel and perch; wild men, who
- instinctively follow other fashions and trust other authorities than
- their townsmen, and by their goings and comings stitch towns together in
- parts where else they would be ripped. They sit and eat their luncheon
- in stout fear-naughts on the dry oak leaves on the shore, as wise in
- natural lore as the citizen is in artificial. They never consulted with
- books, and know and can tell much less than they have done. The things
- which they practice are said not yet to be known. Here is one fishing
- for pickerel with grown perch for bait. You look into his pail with
- wonder as into a summer pond, as if he kept summer locked up at home, or
- knew where she had retreated. How, pray, did he get these in midwinter?
- Oh, he got worms out of rotten logs since the ground froze, and so he
- caught them. His life itself passes deeper in nature than the studies
- of the naturalist penetrate; himself a subject for the naturalist.
- The latter raises the moss and bark gently with his knife in search of
- insects; the former lays open logs to their core with his axe, and moss
- and bark fly far and wide. He gets his living by barking trees. Such a
- man has some right to fish, and I love to see nature carried out in him.
- The perch swallows the grub-worm, the pickerel swallows the perch, and
- the fisher-man swallows the pickerel; and so all the chinks in the scale
- of being are filled.
- When I strolled around the pond in misty weather I was sometimes amused
- by the primitive mode which some ruder fisherman had adopted. He would
- perhaps have placed alder branches over the narrow holes in the ice,
- which were four or five rods apart and an equal distance from the shore,
- and having fastened the end of the line to a stick to prevent its being
- pulled through, have passed the slack line over a twig of the alder, a
- foot or more above the ice, and tied a dry oak leaf to it, which, being
- pulled down, would show when he had a bite. These alders loomed through
- the mist at regular intervals as you walked half way round the pond.
- Ah, the pickerel of Walden! when I see them lying on the ice, or in the
- well which the fisherman cuts in the ice, making a little hole to admit
- the water, I am always surprised by their rare beauty, as if they were
- fabulous fishes, they are so foreign to the streets, even to the woods,
- foreign as Arabia to our Concord life. They possess a quite dazzling
- and transcendent beauty which separates them by a wide interval from the
- cadaverous cod and haddock whose fame is trumpeted in our streets. They
- are not green like the pines, nor gray like the stones, nor blue like
- the sky; but they have, to my eyes, if possible, yet rarer colors, like
- flowers and precious stones, as if they were the pearls, the animalized
- nuclei or crystals of the Walden water. They, of course, are Walden
- all over and all through; are themselves small Waldens in the animal
- kingdom, Waldenses. It is surprising that they are caught here--that
- in this deep and capacious spring, far beneath the rattling teams and
- chaises and tinkling sleighs that travel the Walden road, this great
- gold and emerald fish swims. I never chanced to see its kind in any
- market; it would be the cynosure of all eyes there. Easily, with a
- few convulsive quirks, they give up their watery ghosts, like a mortal
- translated before his time to the thin air of heaven.
- * * * * *
- As I was desirous to recover the long lost bottom of Walden Pond, I
- surveyed it carefully, before the ice broke up, early in '46, with
- compass and chain and sounding line. There have been many stories told
- about the bottom, or rather no bottom, of this pond, which certainly had
- no foundation for themselves. It is remarkable how long men will believe
- in the bottomlessness of a pond without taking the trouble to sound
- it. I have visited two such Bottomless Ponds in one walk in this
- neighborhood. Many have believed that Walden reached quite through to
- the other side of the globe. Some who have lain flat on the ice for
- a long time, looking down through the illusive medium, perchance with
- watery eyes into the bargain, and driven to hasty conclusions by the
- fear of catching cold in their breasts, have seen vast holes "into which
- a load of hay might be driven," if there were anybody to drive it, the
- undoubted source of the Styx and entrance to the Infernal Regions from
- these parts. Others have gone down from the village with a "fifty-six"
- and a wagon load of inch rope, but yet have failed to find any bottom;
- for while the "fifty-six" was resting by the way, they were paying out
- the rope in the vain attempt to fathom their truly immeasurable capacity
- for marvellousness. But I can assure my readers that Walden has a
- reasonably tight bottom at a not unreasonable, though at an unusual,
- depth. I fathomed it easily with a cod-line and a stone weighing about
- a pound and a half, and could tell accurately when the stone left the
- bottom, by having to pull so much harder before the water got underneath
- to help me. The greatest depth was exactly one hundred and two feet; to
- which may be added the five feet which it has risen since, making one
- hundred and seven. This is a remarkable depth for so small an area; yet
- not an inch of it can be spared by the imagination. What if all ponds
- were shallow? Would it not react on the minds of men? I am thankful that
- this pond was made deep and pure for a symbol. While men believe in the
- infinite some ponds will be thought to be bottomless.
- A factory-owner, hearing what depth I had found, thought that it could
- not be true, for, judging from his acquaintance with dams, sand would
- not lie at so steep an angle. But the deepest ponds are not so deep in
- proportion to their area as most suppose, and, if drained, would not
- leave very remarkable valleys. They are not like cups between the hills;
- for this one, which is so unusually deep for its area, appears in a
- vertical section through its centre not deeper than a shallow plate.
- Most ponds, emptied, would leave a meadow no more hollow than we
- frequently see. William Gilpin, who is so admirable in all that relates
- to landscapes, and usually so correct, standing at the head of Loch
- Fyne, in Scotland, which he describes as "a bay of salt water, sixty
- or seventy fathoms deep, four miles in breadth," and about fifty miles
- long, surrounded by mountains, observes, "If we could have seen it
- immediately after the diluvian crash, or whatever convulsion of nature
- occasioned it, before the waters gushed in, what a horrid chasm must it
- have appeared!
- "So high as heaved the tumid hills, so low
- Down sunk a hollow bottom broad and deep,
- Capacious bed of waters."
- But if, using the shortest diameter of Loch Fyne, we apply these
- proportions to Walden, which, as we have seen, appears already in a
- vertical section only like a shallow plate, it will appear four times
- as shallow. So much for the increased horrors of the chasm of Loch
- Fyne when emptied. No doubt many a smiling valley with its stretching
- cornfields occupies exactly such a "horrid chasm," from which the waters
- have receded, though it requires the insight and the far sight of the
- geologist to convince the unsuspecting inhabitants of this fact. Often
- an inquisitive eye may detect the shores of a primitive lake in the
- low horizon hills, and no subsequent elevation of the plain have been
- necessary to conceal their history. But it is easiest, as they who work
- on the highways know, to find the hollows by the puddles after a shower.
- The amount of it is, the imagination give it the least license, dives
- deeper and soars higher than Nature goes. So, probably, the depth of the
- ocean will be found to be very inconsiderable compared with its breadth.
- As I sounded through the ice I could determine the shape of the bottom
- with greater accuracy than is possible in surveying harbors which do
- not freeze over, and I was surprised at its general regularity. In the
- deepest part there are several acres more level than almost any field
- which is exposed to the sun, wind, and plow. In one instance, on a line
- arbitrarily chosen, the depth did not vary more than one foot in thirty
- rods; and generally, near the middle, I could calculate the variation
- for each one hundred feet in any direction beforehand within three or
- four inches. Some are accustomed to speak of deep and dangerous holes
- even in quiet sandy ponds like this, but the effect of water under these
- circumstances is to level all inequalities. The regularity of the bottom
- and its conformity to the shores and the range of the neighboring
- hills were so perfect that a distant promontory betrayed itself in the
- soundings quite across the pond, and its direction could be determined
- by observing the opposite shore. Cape becomes bar, and plain shoal, and
- valley and gorge deep water and channel.
- When I had mapped the pond by the scale of ten rods to an inch, and
- put down the soundings, more than a hundred in all, I observed this
- remarkable coincidence. Having noticed that the number indicating the
- greatest depth was apparently in the centre of the map, I laid a rule
- on the map lengthwise, and then breadthwise, and found, to my surprise,
- that the line of greatest length intersected the line of greatest
- breadth _exactly_ at the point of greatest depth, notwithstanding that the
- middle is so nearly level, the outline of the pond far from regular, and
- the extreme length and breadth were got by measuring into the coves; and
- I said to myself, Who knows but this hint would conduct to the deepest
- part of the ocean as well as of a pond or puddle? Is not this the rule
- also for the height of mountains, regarded as the opposite of valleys?
- We know that a hill is not highest at its narrowest part.
- Of five coves, three, or all which had been sounded, were observed to
- have a bar quite across their mouths and deeper water within, so that
- the bay tended to be an expansion of water within the land not only
- horizontally but vertically, and to form a basin or independent pond,
- the direction of the two capes showing the course of the bar. Every
- harbor on the sea-coast, also, has its bar at its entrance. In
- proportion as the mouth of the cove was wider compared with its length,
- the water over the bar was deeper compared with that in the basin.
- Given, then, the length and breadth of the cove, and the character of
- the surrounding shore, and you have almost elements enough to make out a
- formula for all cases.
- In order to see how nearly I could guess, with this experience, at the
- deepest point in a pond, by observing the outlines of a surface and
- the character of its shores alone, I made a plan of White Pond, which
- contains about forty-one acres, and, like this, has no island in it, nor
- any visible inlet or outlet; and as the line of greatest breadth fell
- very near the line of least breadth, where two opposite capes approached
- each other and two opposite bays receded, I ventured to mark a point a
- short distance from the latter line, but still on the line of greatest
- length, as the deepest. The deepest part was found to be within one
- hundred feet of this, still farther in the direction to which I had
- inclined, and was only one foot deeper, namely, sixty feet. Of course, a
- stream running through, or an island in the pond, would make the problem
- much more complicated.
- If we knew all the laws of Nature, we should need only one fact, or
- the description of one actual phenomenon, to infer all the particular
- results at that point. Now we know only a few laws, and our result is
- vitiated, not, of course, by any confusion or irregularity in Nature,
- but by our ignorance of essential elements in the calculation. Our
- notions of law and harmony are commonly confined to those instances
- which we detect; but the harmony which results from a far greater number
- of seemingly conflicting, but really concurring, laws, which we have not
- detected, is still more wonderful. The particular laws are as our points
- of view, as, to the traveller, a mountain outline varies with every
- step, and it has an infinite number of profiles, though absolutely but
- one form. Even when cleft or bored through it is not comprehended in its
- entireness.
- What I have observed of the pond is no less true in ethics. It is the
- law of average. Such a rule of the two diameters not only guides us
- toward the sun in the system and the heart in man, but draws lines
- through the length and breadth of the aggregate of a man's particular
- daily behaviors and waves of life into his coves and inlets, and where
- they intersect will be the height or depth of his character. Perhaps
- we need only to know how his shores trend and his adjacent country
- or circumstances, to infer his depth and concealed bottom. If he is
- surrounded by mountainous circumstances, an Achillean shore, whose peaks
- overshadow and are reflected in his bosom, they suggest a corresponding
- depth in him. But a low and smooth shore proves him shallow on that
- side. In our bodies, a bold projecting brow falls off to and indicates a
- corresponding depth of thought. Also there is a bar across the entrance
- of our every cove, or particular inclination; each is our harbor for
- a season, in which we are detained and partially land-locked. These
- inclinations are not whimsical usually, but their form, size, and
- direction are determined by the promontories of the shore, the ancient
- axes of elevation. When this bar is gradually increased by storms,
- tides, or currents, or there is a subsidence of the waters, so that it
- reaches to the surface, that which was at first but an inclination in
- the shore in which a thought was harbored becomes an individual
- lake, cut off from the ocean, wherein the thought secures its own
- conditions--changes, perhaps, from salt to fresh, becomes a sweet sea,
- dead sea, or a marsh. At the advent of each individual into this life,
- may we not suppose that such a bar has risen to the surface somewhere?
- It is true, we are such poor navigators that our thoughts, for the most
- part, stand off and on upon a harborless coast, are conversant only with
- the bights of the bays of poesy, or steer for the public ports of entry,
- and go into the dry docks of science, where they merely refit for this
- world, and no natural currents concur to individualize them.
- As for the inlet or outlet of Walden, I have not discovered any but rain
- and snow and evaporation, though perhaps, with a thermometer and a line,
- such places may be found, for where the water flows into the pond it
- will probably be coldest in summer and warmest in winter. When the
- ice-men were at work here in '46-7, the cakes sent to the shore were one
- day rejected by those who were stacking them up there, not being
- thick enough to lie side by side with the rest; and the cutters thus
- discovered that the ice over a small space was two or three inches
- thinner than elsewhere, which made them think that there was an inlet
- there. They also showed me in another place what they thought was a
- "leach-hole," through which the pond leaked out under a hill into a
- neighboring meadow, pushing me out on a cake of ice to see it. It was a
- small cavity under ten feet of water; but I think that I can warrant the
- pond not to need soldering till they find a worse leak than that.
- One has suggested, that if such a "leach-hole" should be found, its
- connection with the meadow, if any existed, might be proved by conveying
- some colored powder or sawdust to the mouth of the hole, and then
- putting a strainer over the spring in the meadow, which would catch some
- of the particles carried through by the current.
- While I was surveying, the ice, which was sixteen inches thick,
- undulated under a slight wind like water. It is well known that a
- level cannot be used on ice. At one rod from the shore its greatest
- fluctuation, when observed by means of a level on land directed toward
- a graduated staff on the ice, was three quarters of an inch, though the
- ice appeared firmly attached to the shore. It was probably greater in
- the middle. Who knows but if our instruments were delicate enough we
- might detect an undulation in the crust of the earth? When two legs of
- my level were on the shore and the third on the ice, and the sights
- were directed over the latter, a rise or fall of the ice of an almost
- infinitesimal amount made a difference of several feet on a tree across
- the pond. When I began to cut holes for sounding there were three or
- four inches of water on the ice under a deep snow which had sunk it
- thus far; but the water began immediately to run into these holes, and
- continued to run for two days in deep streams, which wore away the ice
- on every side, and contributed essentially, if not mainly, to dry the
- surface of the pond; for, as the water ran in, it raised and floated the
- ice. This was somewhat like cutting a hole in the bottom of a ship to
- let the water out. When such holes freeze, and a rain succeeds,
- and finally a new freezing forms a fresh smooth ice over all, it is
- beautifully mottled internally by dark figures, shaped somewhat like a
- spider's web, what you may call ice rosettes, produced by the channels
- worn by the water flowing from all sides to a centre. Sometimes, also,
- when the ice was covered with shallow puddles, I saw a double shadow of
- myself, one standing on the head of the other, one on the ice, the other
- on the trees or hillside.
- * * * * *
- While yet it is cold January, and snow and ice are thick and solid, the
- prudent landlord comes from the village to get ice to cool his summer
- drink; impressively, even pathetically, wise, to foresee the heat and
- thirst of July now in January--wearing a thick coat and mittens! when so
- many things are not provided for. It may be that he lays up no treasures
- in this world which will cool his summer drink in the next. He cuts and
- saws the solid pond, unroofs the house of fishes, and carts off their
- very element and air, held fast by chains and stakes like corded wood,
- through the favoring winter air, to wintry cellars, to underlie the
- summer there. It looks like solidified azure, as, far off, it is drawn
- through the streets. These ice-cutters are a merry race, full of jest
- and sport, and when I went among them they were wont to invite me to saw
- pit-fashion with them, I standing underneath.
- In the winter of '46-7 there came a hundred men of Hyperborean
- extraction swoop down on to our pond one morning, with many carloads
- of ungainly-looking farming tools--sleds, plows, drill-barrows,
- turf-knives, spades, saws, rakes, and each man was armed with a
- double-pointed pike-staff, such as is not described in the New-England
- Farmer or the Cultivator. I did not know whether they had come to sow a
- crop of winter rye, or some other kind of grain recently introduced from
- Iceland. As I saw no manure, I judged that they meant to skim the land,
- as I had done, thinking the soil was deep and had lain fallow long
- enough. They said that a gentleman farmer, who was behind the scenes,
- wanted to double his money, which, as I understood, amounted to half
- a million already; but in order to cover each one of his dollars with
- another, he took off the only coat, ay, the skin itself, of Walden
- Pond in the midst of a hard winter. They went to work at once, plowing,
- barrowing, rolling, furrowing, in admirable order, as if they were bent
- on making this a model farm; but when I was looking sharp to see what
- kind of seed they dropped into the furrow, a gang of fellows by my side
- suddenly began to hook up the virgin mould itself, with a peculiar jerk,
- clean down to the sand, or rather the water--for it was a very springy
- soil--indeed all the _terra firma_ there was--and haul it away on sleds,
- and then I guessed that they must be cutting peat in a bog. So they came
- and went every day, with a peculiar shriek from the locomotive, from and
- to some point of the polar regions, as it seemed to me, like a flock
- of arctic snow-birds. But sometimes Squaw Walden had her revenge, and
- a hired man, walking behind his team, slipped through a crack in the
- ground down toward Tartarus, and he who was so brave before suddenly
- became but the ninth part of a man, almost gave up his animal heat, and
- was glad to take refuge in my house, and acknowledged that there was
- some virtue in a stove; or sometimes the frozen soil took a piece of
- steel out of a plowshare, or a plow got set in the furrow and had to be
- cut out.
- To speak literally, a hundred Irishmen, with Yankee overseers, came from
- Cambridge every day to get out the ice. They divided it into cakes by
- methods too well known to require description, and these, being sledded
- to the shore, were rapidly hauled off on to an ice platform, and raised
- by grappling irons and block and tackle, worked by horses, on to a
- stack, as surely as so many barrels of flour, and there placed evenly
- side by side, and row upon row, as if they formed the solid base of an
- obelisk designed to pierce the clouds. They told me that in a good day
- they could get out a thousand tons, which was the yield of about one
- acre. Deep ruts and "cradle-holes" were worn in the ice, as on _terra
- firma_, by the passage of the sleds over the same track, and the horses
- invariably ate their oats out of cakes of ice hollowed out like buckets.
- They stacked up the cakes thus in the open air in a pile thirty-five
- feet high on one side and six or seven rods square, putting hay between
- the outside layers to exclude the air; for when the wind, though never
- so cold, finds a passage through, it will wear large cavities, leaving
- slight supports or studs only here and there, and finally topple it
- down. At first it looked like a vast blue fort or Valhalla; but when
- they began to tuck the coarse meadow hay into the crevices, and this
- became covered with rime and icicles, it looked like a venerable
- moss-grown and hoary ruin, built of azure-tinted marble, the abode of
- Winter, that old man we see in the almanac--his shanty, as if he had
- a design to estivate with us. They calculated that not twenty-five per
- cent of this would reach its destination, and that two or three per cent
- would be wasted in the cars. However, a still greater part of this heap
- had a different destiny from what was intended; for, either because the
- ice was found not to keep so well as was expected, containing more air
- than usual, or for some other reason, it never got to market. This heap,
- made in the winter of '46-7 and estimated to contain ten thousand tons,
- was finally covered with hay and boards; and though it was unroofed the
- following July, and a part of it carried off, the rest remaining exposed
- to the sun, it stood over that summer and the next winter, and was not
- quite melted till September, 1848. Thus the pond recovered the greater
- part.
- Like the water, the Walden ice, seen near at hand, has a green tint, but
- at a distance is beautifully blue, and you can easily tell it from the
- white ice of the river, or the merely greenish ice of some ponds, a
- quarter of a mile off. Sometimes one of those great cakes slips from the
- ice-man's sled into the village street, and lies there for a week like a
- great emerald, an object of interest to all passers. I have noticed that
- a portion of Walden which in the state of water was green will often,
- when frozen, appear from the same point of view blue. So the hollows
- about this pond will, sometimes, in the winter, be filled with a
- greenish water somewhat like its own, but the next day will have frozen
- blue. Perhaps the blue color of water and ice is due to the light and
- air they contain, and the most transparent is the bluest. Ice is an
- interesting subject for contemplation. They told me that they had some
- in the ice-houses at Fresh Pond five years old which was as good as
- ever. Why is it that a bucket of water soon becomes putrid, but frozen
- remains sweet forever? It is commonly said that this is the difference
- between the affections and the intellect.
- Thus for sixteen days I saw from my window a hundred men at work like
- busy husbandmen, with teams and horses and apparently all the implements
- of farming, such a picture as we see on the first page of the almanac;
- and as often as I looked out I was reminded of the fable of the lark and
- the reapers, or the parable of the sower, and the like; and now they are
- all gone, and in thirty days more, probably, I shall look from the same
- window on the pure sea-green Walden water there, reflecting the clouds
- and the trees, and sending up its evaporations in solitude, and no
- traces will appear that a man has ever stood there. Perhaps I shall hear
- a solitary loon laugh as he dives and plumes himself, or shall see a
- lonely fisher in his boat, like a floating leaf, beholding his form
- reflected in the waves, where lately a hundred men securely labored.
- Thus it appears that the sweltering inhabitants of Charleston and New
- Orleans, of Madras and Bombay and Calcutta, drink at my well. In the
- morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy
- of the Bhagvat-Geeta, since whose composition years of the gods
- have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its
- literature seem puny and trivial; and I doubt if that philosophy is
- not to be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its
- sublimity from our conceptions. I lay down the book and go to my well
- for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Bramin, priest of
- Brahma and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges
- reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and
- water jug. I meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and
- our buckets as it were grate together in the same well. The pure Walden
- water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges. With favoring
- winds it is wafted past the site of the fabulous islands of Atlantis and
- the Hesperides, makes the periplus of Hanno, and, floating by Ternate
- and Tidore and the mouth of the Persian Gulf, melts in the tropic gales
- of the Indian seas, and is landed in ports of which Alexander only heard
- the names.
- Spring
- The opening of large tracts by the ice-cutters commonly causes a pond
- to break up earlier; for the water, agitated by the wind, even in cold
- weather, wears away the surrounding ice. But such was not the effect on
- Walden that year, for she had soon got a thick new garment to take the
- place of the old. This pond never breaks up so soon as the others in
- this neighborhood, on account both of its greater depth and its having
- no stream passing through it to melt or wear away the ice. I never knew
- it to open in the course of a winter, not excepting that of '52-3, which
- gave the ponds so severe a trial. It commonly opens about the first
- of April, a week or ten days later than Flint's Pond and Fair Haven,
- beginning to melt on the north side and in the shallower parts where
- it began to freeze. It indicates better than any water hereabouts the
- absolute progress of the season, being least affected by transient
- changes of temperature. A severe cold of a few days' duration in
- March may very much retard the opening of the former ponds, while the
- temperature of Walden increases almost uninterruptedly. A thermometer
- thrust into the middle of Walden on the 6th of March, 1847, stood at
- 32º, or freezing point; near the shore at 33º; in the middle of Flint's
- Pond, the same day, at 32º; at a dozen rods from the shore, in shallow
- water, under ice a foot thick, at 36º. This difference of three and a
- half degrees between the temperature of the deep water and the shallow
- in the latter pond, and the fact that a great proportion of it is
- comparatively shallow, show why it should break up so much sooner than
- Walden. The ice in the shallowest part was at this time several inches
- thinner than in the middle. In midwinter the middle had been the warmest
- and the ice thinnest there. So, also, every one who has waded about the
- shores of the pond in summer must have perceived how much warmer the
- water is close to the shore, where only three or four inches deep, than
- a little distance out, and on the surface where it is deep, than near
- the bottom. In spring the sun not only exerts an influence through the
- increased temperature of the air and earth, but its heat passes through
- ice a foot or more thick, and is reflected from the bottom in shallow
- water, and so also warms the water and melts the under side of the ice,
- at the same time that it is melting it more directly above, making
- it uneven, and causing the air bubbles which it contains to extend
- themselves upward and downward until it is completely honeycombed, and
- at last disappears suddenly in a single spring rain. Ice has its grain
- as well as wood, and when a cake begins to rot or "comb," that is,
- assume the appearance of honeycomb, whatever may be its position, the
- air cells are at right angles with what was the water surface. Where
- there is a rock or a log rising near to the surface the ice over it is
- much thinner, and is frequently quite dissolved by this reflected heat;
- and I have been told that in the experiment at Cambridge to freeze water
- in a shallow wooden pond, though the cold air circulated underneath, and
- so had access to both sides, the reflection of the sun from the bottom
- more than counterbalanced this advantage. When a warm rain in the middle
- of the winter melts off the snow-ice from Walden, and leaves a hard dark
- or transparent ice on the middle, there will be a strip of rotten though
- thicker white ice, a rod or more wide, about the shores, created by this
- reflected heat. Also, as I have said, the bubbles themselves within the
- ice operate as burning-glasses to melt the ice beneath.
- The phenomena of the year take place every day in a pond on a small
- scale. Every morning, generally speaking, the shallow water is being
- warmed more rapidly than the deep, though it may not be made so warm
- after all, and every evening it is being cooled more rapidly until the
- morning. The day is an epitome of the year. The night is the winter, the
- morning and evening are the spring and fall, and the noon is the summer.
- The cracking and booming of the ice indicate a change of temperature.
- One pleasant morning after a cold night, February 24th, 1850, having
- gone to Flint's Pond to spend the day, I noticed with surprise, that
- when I struck the ice with the head of my axe, it resounded like a gong
- for many rods around, or as if I had struck on a tight drum-head.
- The pond began to boom about an hour after sunrise, when it felt the
- influence of the sun's rays slanted upon it from over the hills;
- it stretched itself and yawned like a waking man with a gradually
- increasing tumult, which was kept up three or four hours. It took a
- short siesta at noon, and boomed once more toward night, as the sun
- was withdrawing his influence. In the right stage of the weather a pond
- fires its evening gun with great regularity. But in the middle of the
- day, being full of cracks, and the air also being less elastic, it had
- completely lost its resonance, and probably fishes and muskrats could
- not then have been stunned by a blow on it. The fishermen say that the
- "thundering of the pond" scares the fishes and prevents their biting.
- The pond does not thunder every evening, and I cannot tell surely when
- to expect its thundering; but though I may perceive no difference in
- the weather, it does. Who would have suspected so large and cold and
- thick-skinned a thing to be so sensitive? Yet it has its law to which
- it thunders obedience when it should as surely as the buds expand in the
- spring. The earth is all alive and covered with papillae. The largest
- pond is as sensitive to atmospheric changes as the globule of mercury in
- its tube.
- One attraction in coming to the woods to live was that I should have
- leisure and opportunity to see the Spring come in. The ice in the pond
- at length begins to be honeycombed, and I can set my heel in it as I
- walk. Fogs and rains and warmer suns are gradually melting the snow; the
- days have grown sensibly longer; and I see how I shall get through the
- winter without adding to my wood-pile, for large fires are no longer
- necessary. I am on the alert for the first signs of spring, to hear the
- chance note of some arriving bird, or the striped squirrel's chirp, for
- his stores must be now nearly exhausted, or see the woodchuck venture
- out of his winter quarters. On the 13th of March, after I had heard the
- bluebird, song sparrow, and red-wing, the ice was still nearly a foot
- thick. As the weather grew warmer it was not sensibly worn away by the
- water, nor broken up and floated off as in rivers, but, though it was
- completely melted for half a rod in width about the shore, the middle
- was merely honeycombed and saturated with water, so that you could put
- your foot through it when six inches thick; but by the next day evening,
- perhaps, after a warm rain followed by fog, it would have wholly
- disappeared, all gone off with the fog, spirited away. One year I went
- across the middle only five days before it disappeared entirely. In 1845
- Walden was first completely open on the 1st of April; in '46, the 25th
- of March; in '47, the 8th of April; in '51, the 28th of March; in '52,
- the 18th of April; in '53, the 23d of March; in '54, about the 7th of
- April.
- Every incident connected with the breaking up of the rivers and ponds
- and the settling of the weather is particularly interesting to us who
- live in a climate of so great extremes. When the warmer days come, they
- who dwell near the river hear the ice crack at night with a startling
- whoop as loud as artillery, as if its icy fetters were rent from end to
- end, and within a few days see it rapidly going out. So the alligator
- comes out of the mud with quakings of the earth. One old man, who has
- been a close observer of Nature, and seems as thoroughly wise in regard
- to all her operations as if she had been put upon the stocks when he was
- a boy, and he had helped to lay her keel--who has come to his growth,
- and can hardly acquire more of natural lore if he should live to the age
- of Methuselah--told me--and I was surprised to hear him express wonder
- at any of Nature's operations, for I thought that there were no secrets
- between them--that one spring day he took his gun and boat, and thought
- that he would have a little sport with the ducks. There was ice still on
- the meadows, but it was all gone out of the river, and he dropped down
- without obstruction from Sudbury, where he lived, to Fair Haven Pond,
- which he found, unexpectedly, covered for the most part with a firm
- field of ice. It was a warm day, and he was surprised to see so great
- a body of ice remaining. Not seeing any ducks, he hid his boat on the
- north or back side of an island in the pond, and then concealed himself
- in the bushes on the south side, to await them. The ice was melted for
- three or four rods from the shore, and there was a smooth and warm sheet
- of water, with a muddy bottom, such as the ducks love, within, and he
- thought it likely that some would be along pretty soon. After he had
- lain still there about an hour he heard a low and seemingly very distant
- sound, but singularly grand and impressive, unlike anything he had ever
- heard, gradually swelling and increasing as if it would have a universal
- and memorable ending, a sullen rush and roar, which seemed to him all
- at once like the sound of a vast body of fowl coming in to settle there,
- and, seizing his gun, he started up in haste and excited; but he found,
- to his surprise, that the whole body of the ice had started while he lay
- there, and drifted in to the shore, and the sound he had heard was made
- by its edge grating on the shore--at first gently nibbled and crumbled
- off, but at length heaving up and scattering its wrecks along the island
- to a considerable height before it came to a standstill.
- At length the sun's rays have attained the right angle, and warm winds
- blow up mist and rain and melt the snowbanks, and the sun, dispersing
- the mist, smiles on a checkered landscape of russet and white smoking
- with incense, through which the traveller picks his way from islet to
- islet, cheered by the music of a thousand tinkling rills and rivulets
- whose veins are filled with the blood of winter which they are bearing
- off.
- Few phenomena gave me more delight than to observe the forms which
- thawing sand and clay assume in flowing down the sides of a deep cut
- on the railroad through which I passed on my way to the village, a
- phenomenon not very common on so large a scale, though the number of
- freshly exposed banks of the right material must have been greatly
- multiplied since railroads were invented. The material was sand of every
- degree of fineness and of various rich colors, commonly mixed with
- a little clay. When the frost comes out in the spring, and even in a
- thawing day in the winter, the sand begins to flow down the slopes like
- lava, sometimes bursting out through the snow and overflowing it where
- no sand was to be seen before. Innumerable little streams overlap and
- interlace one with another, exhibiting a sort of hybrid product, which
- obeys half way the law of currents, and half way that of vegetation. As
- it flows it takes the forms of sappy leaves or vines, making heaps of
- pulpy sprays a foot or more in depth, and resembling, as you look
- down on them, the laciniated, lobed, and imbricated thalluses of some
- lichens; or you are reminded of coral, of leopard's paws or birds' feet,
- of brains or lungs or bowels, and excrements of all kinds. It is a truly
- _grotesque_ vegetation, whose forms and color we see imitated in bronze,
- a sort of architectural foliage more ancient and typical than acanthus,
- chiccory, ivy, vine, or any vegetable leaves; destined perhaps, under
- some circumstances, to become a puzzle to future geologists. The whole
- cut impressed me as if it were a cave with its stalactites laid open
- to the light. The various shades of the sand are singularly rich and
- agreeable, embracing the different iron colors, brown, gray, yellowish,
- and reddish. When the flowing mass reaches the drain at the foot of the
- bank it spreads out flatter into _strands_, the separate streams losing
- their semi-cylindrical form and gradually becoming more flat and broad,
- running together as they are more moist, till they form an almost flat
- _sand_, still variously and beautifully shaded, but in which you can trace
- the original forms of vegetation; till at length, in the water itself,
- they are converted into _banks_, like those formed off the mouths of
- rivers, and the forms of vegetation are lost in the ripple marks on the
- bottom.
- The whole bank, which is from twenty to forty feet high, is sometimes
- overlaid with a mass of this kind of foliage, or sandy rupture, for a
- quarter of a mile on one or both sides, the produce of one spring day.
- What makes this sand foliage remarkable is its springing into existence
- thus suddenly. When I see on the one side the inert bank--for the sun
- acts on one side first--and on the other this luxuriant foliage, the
- creation of an hour, I am affected as if in a peculiar sense I stood
- in the laboratory of the Artist who made the world and me--had come to
- where he was still at work, sporting on this bank, and with excess of
- energy strewing his fresh designs about. I feel as if I were nearer to
- the vitals of the globe, for this sandy overflow is something such a
- foliaceous mass as the vitals of the animal body. You find thus in the
- very sands an anticipation of the vegetable leaf. No wonder that the
- earth expresses itself outwardly in leaves, it so labors with the idea
- inwardly. The atoms have already learned this law, and are pregnant by
- it. The overhanging leaf sees here its prototype. _Internally_, whether
- in the globe or animal body, it is a moist thick _lobe_, a word especially
- applicable to the liver and lungs and the leaves of fat
- (γεἱβω, _labor_, _lapsus_, to flow or slip downward, a lapsing; λοβὁς,
- _globus_, lobe, globe; also lap, flap, and many other words); _externally_
- a dry thin _leaf_, even as the _f_ and _v_ are a pressed and dried _b_.
- The radicals of _lobe_ are _lb_, the soft mass of the _b_ (single lobed,
- or B, double lobed), with the liquid _l_ behind it pressing it forward.
- In globe, _glb_, the guttural _g_ adds to the meaning the capacity of
- the throat. The feathers and wings of birds are still drier and thinner
- leaves. Thus, also, you pass from the lumpish grub in the earth to the
- airy and fluttering butterfly. The very globe continually transcends and
- translates itself, and becomes winged in its orbit. Even ice begins with
- delicate crystal leaves, as if it had flowed into moulds which the fronds
- of waterplants have impressed on the watery mirror. The whole tree itself
- is but one leaf, and rivers are still vaster leaves whose pulp is intervening
- earth, and towns and cities are the ova of insects in their axils.
- When the sun withdraws the sand ceases to flow, but in the morning the
- streams will start once more and branch and branch again into a myriad
- of others. You here see perchance how blood-vessels are formed. If
- you look closely you observe that first there pushes forward from the
- thawing mass a stream of softened sand with a drop-like point, like the
- ball of the finger, feeling its way slowly and blindly downward, until
- at last with more heat and moisture, as the sun gets higher, the most
- fluid portion, in its effort to obey the law to which the most inert
- also yields, separates from the latter and forms for itself a meandering
- channel or artery within that, in which is seen a little silvery stream
- glancing like lightning from one stage of pulpy leaves or branches to
- another, and ever and anon swallowed up in the sand. It is wonderful how
- rapidly yet perfectly the sand organizes itself as it flows, using the
- best material its mass affords to form the sharp edges of its channel.
- Such are the sources of rivers. In the silicious matter which the water
- deposits is perhaps the bony system, and in the still finer soil and
- organic matter the fleshy fibre or cellular tissue. What is man but
- a mass of thawing clay? The ball of the human finger is but a drop
- congealed. The fingers and toes flow to their extent from the thawing
- mass of the body. Who knows what the human body would expand and flow
- out to under a more genial heaven? Is not the hand a spreading _palm_
- leaf with its lobes and veins? The ear may be regarded, fancifully, as a
- lichen, _Umbilicaria_, on the side of the head, with its lobe or drop.
- The lip--_labium_, from _labor_ (?)--laps or lapses from the sides of the
- cavernous mouth. The nose is a manifest congealed drop or stalactite.
- The chin is a still larger drop, the confluent dripping of the face. The
- cheeks are a slide from the brows into the valley of the face, opposed
- and diffused by the cheek bones. Each rounded lobe of the vegetable
- leaf, too, is a thick and now loitering drop, larger or smaller; the
- lobes are the fingers of the leaf; and as many lobes as it has, in
- so many directions it tends to flow, and more heat or other genial
- influences would have caused it to flow yet farther.
- Thus it seemed that this one hillside illustrated the principle of all
- the operations of Nature. The Maker of this earth but patented a leaf.
- What Champollion will decipher this hieroglyphic for us, that we may
- turn over a new leaf at last? This phenomenon is more exhilarating to
- me than the luxuriance and fertility of vineyards. True, it is somewhat
- excrementitious in its character, and there is no end to the heaps
- of liver, lights, and bowels, as if the globe were turned wrong side
- outward; but this suggests at least that Nature has some bowels, and
- there again is mother of humanity. This is the frost coming out of the
- ground; this is Spring. It precedes the green and flowery spring, as
- mythology precedes regular poetry. I know of nothing more purgative of
- winter fumes and indigestions. It convinces me that Earth is still in
- her swaddling-clothes, and stretches forth baby fingers on every side.
- Fresh curls spring from the baldest brow. There is nothing inorganic.
- These foliaceous heaps lie along the bank like the slag of a furnace,
- showing that Nature is "in full blast" within. The earth is not a mere
- fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a
- book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living
- poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit--not a
- fossil earth, but a living earth; compared with whose great central life
- all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic. Its throes will heave
- our exuviae from their graves. You may melt your metals and cast them
- into the most beautiful moulds you can; they will never excite me like
- the forms which this molten earth flows out into. And not only it,
- but the institutions upon it are plastic like clay in the hands of the
- potter.
- Ere long, not only on these banks, but on every hill and plain and in
- every hollow, the frost comes out of the ground like a dormant quadruped
- from its burrow, and seeks the sea with music, or migrates to other
- climes in clouds. Thaw with his gentle persuasion is more powerful than
- Thor with his hammer. The one melts, the other but breaks in pieces.
- When the ground was partially bare of snow, and a few warm days had
- dried its surface somewhat, it was pleasant to compare the first tender
- signs of the infant year just peeping forth with the stately
- beauty of the withered vegetation which had withstood the
- winter--life-everlasting, goldenrods, pinweeds, and graceful wild
- grasses, more obvious and interesting frequently than in summer even,
- as if their beauty was not ripe till then; even cotton-grass, cat-tails,
- mulleins, johnswort, hard-hack, meadow-sweet, and other strong-stemmed
- plants, those unexhausted granaries which entertain the earliest
- birds--decent weeds, at least, which widowed Nature wears. I am
- particularly attracted by the arching and sheaf-like top of the
- wool-grass; it brings back the summer to our winter memories, and is
- among the forms which art loves to copy, and which, in the vegetable
- kingdom, have the same relation to types already in the mind of man that
- astronomy has. It is an antique style, older than Greek or Egyptian.
- Many of the phenomena of Winter are suggestive of an inexpressible
- tenderness and fragile delicacy. We are accustomed to hear this king
- described as a rude and boisterous tyrant; but with the gentleness of a
- lover he adorns the tresses of Summer.
- At the approach of spring the red squirrels got under my house, two at
- a time, directly under my feet as I sat reading or writing, and kept up
- the queerest chuckling and chirruping and vocal pirouetting and gurgling
- sounds that ever were heard; and when I stamped they only chirruped the
- louder, as if past all fear and respect in their mad pranks, defying
- humanity to stop them. No, you don't--chickaree--chickaree. They were
- wholly deaf to my arguments, or failed to perceive their force, and fell
- into a strain of invective that was irresistible.
- The first sparrow of spring! The year beginning with younger hope than
- ever! The faint silvery warblings heard over the partially bare and
- moist fields from the bluebird, the song sparrow, and the red-wing, as
- if the last flakes of winter tinkled as they fell! What at such a time
- are histories, chronologies, traditions, and all written revelations?
- The brooks sing carols and glees to the spring. The marsh hawk, sailing
- low over the meadow, is already seeking the first slimy life that
- awakes. The sinking sound of melting snow is heard in all dells, and the
- ice dissolves apace in the ponds. The grass flames up on the hillsides
- like a spring fire--"et primitus oritur herba imbribus primoribus
- evocata"--as if the earth sent forth an inward heat to greet the
- returning sun; not yellow but green is the color of its flame;--the
- symbol of perpetual youth, the grass-blade, like a long green ribbon,
- streams from the sod into the summer, checked indeed by the frost, but
- anon pushing on again, lifting its spear of last year's hay with the
- fresh life below. It grows as steadily as the rill oozes out of the
- ground. It is almost identical with that, for in the growing days of
- June, when the rills are dry, the grass-blades are their channels, and
- from year to year the herds drink at this perennial green stream, and
- the mower draws from it betimes their winter supply. So our human life
- but dies down to its root, and still puts forth its green blade to
- eternity.
- Walden is melting apace. There is a canal two rods wide along the
- northerly and westerly sides, and wider still at the east end. A great
- field of ice has cracked off from the main body. I hear a song sparrow
- singing from the bushes on the shore,--_olit_, _olit_, _olit,_--_chip_,
- _chip_, _chip_, _che char_,--_che wiss_, _wiss_, _wiss_. He too is
- helping to crack it. How handsome the great sweeping curves in the edge
- of the ice, answering somewhat to those of the shore, but more regular!
- It is unusually hard, owing to the recent severe but transient cold, and
- all watered or waved like a palace floor. But the wind slides eastward
- over its opaque surface in vain, till it reaches the living surface
- beyond. It is glorious to behold this ribbon of water sparkling in the
- sun, the bare face of the pond full of glee and youth, as if it spoke
- the joy of the fishes within it, and of the sands on its shore--a
- silvery sheen as from the scales of a leuciscus, as it were all one
- active fish. Such is the contrast between winter and spring. Walden was
- dead and is alive again. But this spring it broke up more steadily, as I
- have said.
- The change from storm and winter to serene and mild weather, from dark
- and sluggish hours to bright and elastic ones, is a memorable crisis
- which all things proclaim. It is seemingly instantaneous at last.
- Suddenly an influx of light filled my house, though the evening was at
- hand, and the clouds of winter still overhung it, and the eaves were
- dripping with sleety rain. I looked out the window, and lo! where
- yesterday was cold gray ice there lay the transparent pond already calm
- and full of hope as in a summer evening, reflecting a summer evening
- sky in its bosom, though none was visible overhead, as if it had
- intelligence with some remote horizon. I heard a robin in the distance,
- the first I had heard for many a thousand years, methought, whose note
- I shall not forget for many a thousand more--the same sweet and powerful
- song as of yore. O the evening robin, at the end of a New England summer
- day! If I could ever find the twig he sits upon! I mean _he_; I mean the
- _twig_. This at least is not the _Turdus migratorius_. The pitch pines and
- shrub oaks about my house, which had so long drooped, suddenly resumed
- their several characters, looked brighter, greener, and more erect and
- alive, as if effectually cleansed and restored by the rain. I knew that
- it would not rain any more. You may tell by looking at any twig of the
- forest, ay, at your very wood-pile, whether its winter is past or not.
- As it grew darker, I was startled by the honking of geese flying low
- over the woods, like weary travellers getting in late from Southern
- lakes, and indulging at last in unrestrained complaint and mutual
- consolation. Standing at my door, I could hear the rush of their wings;
- when, driving toward my house, they suddenly spied my light, and with
- hushed clamor wheeled and settled in the pond. So I came in, and shut
- the door, and passed my first spring night in the woods.
- In the morning I watched the geese from the door through the mist,
- sailing in the middle of the pond, fifty rods off, so large and
- tumultuous that Walden appeared like an artificial pond for their
- amusement. But when I stood on the shore they at once rose up with a
- great flapping of wings at the signal of their commander, and when they
- had got into rank circled about over my head, twenty-nine of them, and
- then steered straight to Canada, with a regular _honk_ from the leader at
- intervals, trusting to break their fast in muddier pools. A "plump" of
- ducks rose at the same time and took the route to the north in the wake
- of their noisier cousins.
- For a week I heard the circling, groping clangor of some solitary goose
- in the foggy mornings, seeking its companion, and still peopling the
- woods with the sound of a larger life than they could sustain. In April
- the pigeons were seen again flying express in small flocks, and in due
- time I heard the martins twittering over my clearing, though it had not
- seemed that the township contained so many that it could afford me any,
- and I fancied that they were peculiarly of the ancient race that dwelt
- in hollow trees ere white men came. In almost all climes the tortoise
- and the frog are among the precursors and heralds of this season, and
- birds fly with song and glancing plumage, and plants spring and bloom,
- and winds blow, to correct this slight oscillation of the poles and
- preserve the equilibrium of nature.
- As every season seems best to us in its turn, so the coming in of spring
- is like the creation of Cosmos out of Chaos and the realization of the
- Golden Age.--
- "Eurus ad Auroram Nabathaeaque regna recessit,
- Persidaque, et radiis juga subdita matutinis."
- "The East-Wind withdrew to Aurora and the Nabathæn kingdom,
- And the Persian, and the ridges placed under the morning rays.
- . . . . . . .
- Man was born. Whether that Artificer of things,
- The origin of a better world, made him from the divine seed;
- Or the earth, being recent and lately sundered from the high
- Ether, retained some seeds of cognate heaven."
- A single gentle rain makes the grass many shades greener. So our
- prospects brighten on the influx of better thoughts. We should be
- blessed if we lived in the present always, and took advantage of every
- accident that befell us, like the grass which confesses the influence
- of the slightest dew that falls on it; and did not spend our time in
- atoning for the neglect of past opportunities, which we call doing our
- duty. We loiter in winter while it is already spring. In a pleasant
- spring morning all men's sins are forgiven. Such a day is a truce to
- vice. While such a sun holds out to burn, the vilest sinner may return.
- Through our own recovered innocence we discern the innocence of our
- neighbors. You may have known your neighbor yesterday for a thief,
- a drunkard, or a sensualist, and merely pitied or despised him, and
- despaired of the world; but the sun shines bright and warm this first
- spring morning, recreating the world, and you meet him at some serene
- work, and see how it is exhausted and debauched veins expand with still
- joy and bless the new day, feel the spring influence with the innocence
- of infancy, and all his faults are forgotten. There is not only an
- atmosphere of good will about him, but even a savor of holiness groping
- for expression, blindly and ineffectually perhaps, like a new-born
- instinct, and for a short hour the south hill-side echoes to no vulgar
- jest. You see some innocent fair shoots preparing to burst from his
- gnarled rind and try another year's life, tender and fresh as the
- youngest plant. Even he has entered into the joy of his Lord. Why the
- jailer does not leave open his prison doors--why the judge does not
- dismis his case--why the preacher does not dismiss his congregation! It
- is because they do not obey the hint which God gives them, nor accept
- the pardon which he freely offers to all.
- "A return to goodness produced each day in the tranquil and beneficent
- breath of the morning, causes that in respect to the love of virtue and
- the hatred of vice, one approaches a little the primitive nature of man,
- as the sprouts of the forest which has been felled. In like manner
- the evil which one does in the interval of a day prevents the germs of
- virtues which began to spring up again from developing themselves and
- destroys them.
- "After the germs of virtue have thus been prevented many times from
- developing themselves, then the beneficent breath of evening does not
- suffice to preserve them. As soon as the breath of evening does not
- suffice longer to preserve them, then the nature of man does not differ
- much from that of the brute. Men seeing the nature of this man like that
- of the brute, think that he has never possessed the innate faculty of
- reason. Are those the true and natural sentiments of man?"
- "The Golden Age was first created, which without any avenger
- Spontaneously without law cherished fidelity and rectitude.
- Punishment and fear were not; nor were threatening words read
- On suspended brass; nor did the suppliant crowd fear
- The words of their judge; but were safe without an avenger.
- Not yet the pine felled on its mountains had descended
- To the liquid waves that it might see a foreign world,
- And mortals knew no shores but their own.
- . . . . . . .
- There was eternal spring, and placid zephyrs with warm
- Blasts soothed the flowers born without seed."
- On the 29th of April, as I was fishing from the bank of the river near
- the Nine-Acre-Corner bridge, standing on the quaking grass and willow
- roots, where the muskrats lurk, I heard a singular rattling sound,
- somewhat like that of the sticks which boys play with their fingers,
- when, looking up, I observed a very slight and graceful hawk, like a
- nighthawk, alternately soaring like a ripple and tumbling a rod or two
- over and over, showing the under side of its wings, which gleamed like
- a satin ribbon in the sun, or like the pearly inside of a shell.
- This sight reminded me of falconry and what nobleness and poetry are
- associated with that sport. The Merlin it seemed to me it might be
- called: but I care not for its name. It was the most ethereal flight I
- had ever witnessed. It did not simply flutter like a butterfly, nor soar
- like the larger hawks, but it sported with proud reliance in the fields
- of air; mounting again and again with its strange chuckle, it repeated
- its free and beautiful fall, turning over and over like a kite, and then
- recovering from its lofty tumbling, as if it had never set its foot on
- _terra firma_. It appeared to have no companion in the universe--sporting
- there alone--and to need none but the morning and the ether with which
- it played. It was not lonely, but made all the earth lonely beneath it.
- Where was the parent which hatched it, its kindred, and its father in
- the heavens? The tenant of the air, it seemed related to the earth but
- by an egg hatched some time in the crevice of a crag;--or was its native
- nest made in the angle of a cloud, woven of the rainbow's trimmings and
- the sunset sky, and lined with some soft midsummer haze caught up from
- earth? Its eyry now some cliffy cloud.
- Beside this I got a rare mess of golden and silver and bright cupreous
- fishes, which looked like a string of jewels. Ah! I have penetrated to
- those meadows on the morning of many a first spring day, jumping from
- hummock to hummock, from willow root to willow root, when the wild river
- valley and the woods were bathed in so pure and bright a light as would
- have waked the dead, if they had been slumbering in their graves, as
- some suppose. There needs no stronger proof of immortality. All things
- must live in such a light. O Death, where was thy sting? O Grave, where
- was thy victory, then?
- Our village life would stagnate if it were not for the unexplored
- forests and meadows which surround it. We need the tonic of wildness--to
- wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and
- hear the booming of the snipe; to smell the whispering sedge where only
- some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls
- with its belly close to the ground. At the same time that we are
- earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things
- be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild,
- unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have
- enough of nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible
- vigor, vast and titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the
- wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder-cloud,
- and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need
- to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely
- where we never wander. We are cheered when we observe the vulture
- feeding on the carrion which disgusts and disheartens us, and deriving
- health and strength from the repast. There was a dead horse in the
- hollow by the path to my house, which compelled me sometimes to go
- out of my way, especially in the night when the air was heavy, but the
- assurance it gave me of the strong appetite and inviolable health of
- Nature was my compensation for this. I love to see that Nature is
- so rife with life that myriads can be afforded to be sacrificed and
- suffered to prey on one another; that tender organizations can be so
- serenely squashed out of existence like pulp--tadpoles which herons
- gobble up, and tortoises and toads run over in the road; and that
- sometimes it has rained flesh and blood! With the liability to accident,
- we must see how little account is to be made of it. The impression made
- on a wise man is that of universal innocence. Poison is not poisonous
- after all, nor are any wounds fatal. Compassion is a very untenable
- ground. It must be expeditious. Its pleadings will not bear to be
- stereotyped.
- Early in May, the oaks, hickories, maples, and other trees, just putting
- out amidst the pine woods around the pond, imparted a brightness like
- sunshine to the landscape, especially in cloudy days, as if the sun were
- breaking through mists and shining faintly on the hillsides here and
- there. On the third or fourth of May I saw a loon in the pond, and
- during the first week of the month I heard the whip-poor-will, the brown
- thrasher, the veery, the wood pewee, the chewink, and other birds. I had
- heard the wood thrush long before. The phœbe had already come once more
- and looked in at my door and window, to see if my house was cavern-like
- enough for her, sustaining herself on humming wings with clinched
- talons, as if she held by the air, while she surveyed the premises.
- The sulphur-like pollen of the pitch pine soon covered the pond and the
- stones and rotten wood along the shore, so that you could have collected
- a barrelful. This is the "sulphur showers" we hear of. Even in Calidas'
- drama of Sacontala, we read of "rills dyed yellow with the golden dust
- of the lotus." And so the seasons went rolling on into summer, as one
- rambles into higher and higher grass.
- Thus was my first year's life in the woods completed; and the second
- year was similar to it. I finally left Walden September 6th, 1847.
- Conclusion
- To the sick the doctors wisely recommend a change of air and scenery.
- Thank Heaven, here is not all the world. The buckeye does not grow in
- New England, and the mockingbird is rarely heard here. The wild goose
- is more of a cosmopolite than we; he breaks his fast in Canada, takes
- a luncheon in the Ohio, and plumes himself for the night in a southern
- bayou. Even the bison, to some extent, keeps pace with the seasons
- cropping the pastures of the Colorado only till a greener and sweeter
- grass awaits him by the Yellowstone. Yet we think that if rail fences
- are pulled down, and stone walls piled up on our farms, bounds are
- henceforth set to our lives and our fates decided. If you are chosen
- town clerk, forsooth, you cannot go to Tierra del Fuego this summer: but
- you may go to the land of infernal fire nevertheless. The universe is
- wider than our views of it.
- Yet we should oftener look over the tafferel of our craft, like curious
- passengers, and not make the voyage like stupid sailors picking oakum.
- The other side of the globe is but the home of our correspondent. Our
- voyaging is only great-circle sailing, and the doctors prescribe for
- diseases of the skin merely. One hastens to southern Africa to chase the
- giraffe; but surely that is not the game he would be after. How long,
- pray, would a man hunt giraffes if he could? Snipes and woodcocks also
- may afford rare sport; but I trust it would be nobler game to shoot
- one's self.--
- "Direct your eye right inward, and you'll find
- A thousand regions in your mind
- Yet undiscovered. Travel them, and be
- Expert in home-cosmography."
- What does Africa--what does the West stand for? Is not our own interior
- white on the chart? black though it may prove, like the coast,
- when discovered. Is it the source of the Nile, or the Niger, or the
- Mississippi, or a Northwest Passage around this continent, that we would
- find? Are these the problems which most concern mankind? Is Franklin the
- only man who is lost, that his wife should be so earnest to find him?
- Does Mr. Grinnell know where he himself is? Be rather the Mungo Park,
- the Lewis and Clark and Frobisher, of your own streams and oceans;
- explore your own higher latitudes--with shiploads of preserved meats to
- support you, if they be necessary; and pile the empty cans sky-high for
- a sign. Were preserved meats invented to preserve meat merely? Nay, be
- a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new
- channels, not of trade, but of thought. Every man is the lord of a realm
- beside which the earthly empire of the Czar is but a petty state,
- a hummock left by the ice. Yet some can be patriotic who have no
- self-respect, and sacrifice the greater to the less. They love the soil
- which makes their graves, but have no sympathy with the spirit which may
- still animate their clay. Patriotism is a maggot in their heads. What
- was the meaning of that South-Sea Exploring Expedition, with all its
- parade and expense, but an indirect recognition of the fact that there
- are continents and seas in the moral world to which every man is an
- isthmus or an inlet, yet unexplored by him, but that it is easier to
- sail many thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals, in a
- government ship, with five hundred men and boys to assist one, than it
- is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one's
- being alone.
- "Erret, et extremos alter scrutetur Iberos.
- Plus habet hic vitae, plus habet ille viae."
- Let them wander and scrutinize the outlandish Australians.
- I have more of God, they more of the road.
- It is not worth the while to go round the world to count the cats in
- Zanzibar. Yet do this even till you can do better, and you may perhaps
- find some "Symmes' Hole" by which to get at the inside at last. England
- and France, Spain and Portugal, Gold Coast and Slave Coast, all front
- on this private sea; but no bark from them has ventured out of sight of
- land, though it is without doubt the direct way to India. If you would
- learn to speak all tongues and conform to the customs of all nations,
- if you would travel farther than all travellers, be naturalized in all
- climes, and cause the Sphinx to dash her head against a stone, even
- obey the precept of the old philosopher, and Explore thyself. Herein are
- demanded the eye and the nerve. Only the defeated and deserters go to
- the wars, cowards that run away and enlist. Start now on that farthest
- western way, which does not pause at the Mississippi or the Pacific, nor
- conduct toward a worn-out China or Japan, but leads on direct, a tangent
- to this sphere, summer and winter, day and night, sun down, moon down,
- and at last earth down too.
- It is said that Mirabeau took to highway robbery "to ascertain what
- degree of resolution was necessary in order to place one's self in
- formal opposition to the most sacred laws of society." He declared that
- "a soldier who fights in the ranks does not require half so much courage
- as a footpad"--"that honor and religion have never stood in the way of a
- well-considered and a firm resolve." This was manly, as the world goes;
- and yet it was idle, if not desperate. A saner man would have found
- himself often enough "in formal opposition" to what are deemed "the most
- sacred laws of society," through obedience to yet more sacred laws, and
- so have tested his resolution without going out of his way. It is not
- for a man to put himself in such an attitude to society, but to maintain
- himself in whatever attitude he find himself through obedience to the
- laws of his being, which will never be one of opposition to a just
- government, if he should chance to meet with such.
- I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed
- to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any
- more time for that one. It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we
- fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves. I
- had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to
- the pond-side; and though it is five or six years since I trod it, it
- is still quite distinct. It is true, I fear, that others may have fallen
- into it, and so helped to keep it open. The surface of the earth is soft
- and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind
- travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world,
- how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity! I did not wish to take a
- cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the
- world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do
- not wish to go below now.
- I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances
- confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the
- life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in
- common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible
- boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish
- themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and
- interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with
- the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies
- his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and
- solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness
- weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be
- lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.
- It is a ridiculous demand which England and America make, that you shall
- speak so that they can understand you. Neither men nor toadstools grow
- so. As if that were important, and there were not enough to understand
- you without them. As if Nature could support but one order of
- understandings, could not sustain birds as well as quadrupeds, flying as
- well as creeping things, and _hush_ and _whoa_, which Bright can
- understand, were the best English. As if there were safety in stupidity
- alone. I fear chiefly lest my expression may not be _extra-vagant_
- enough, may not wander far enough beyond the narrow limits of my daily
- experience, so as to be adequate to the truth of which I have been
- convinced. _Extra vagance!_ it depends on how you are yarded. The
- migrating buffalo, which seeks new pastures in another latitude, is not
- extravagant like the cow which kicks over the pail, leaps the cowyard
- fence, and runs after her calf, in milking time. I desire to speak
- somewhere _without_ bounds; like a man in a waking moment, to men in
- their waking moments; for I am convinced that I cannot exaggerate enough
- even to lay the foundation of a true expression. Who that has heard a
- strain of music feared then lest he should speak extravagantly any more
- forever? In view of the future or possible, we should live quite laxly
- and undefined in front, our outlines dim and misty on that side; as our
- shadows reveal an insensible perspiration toward the sun. The volatile
- truth of our words should continually betray the inadequacy of the
- residual statement. Their truth is instantly _translated_; its literal
- monument alone remains. The words which express our faith and piety are
- not definite; yet they are significant and fragrant like frankincense to
- superior natures.
- Why level downward to our dullest perception always, and praise that as
- common sense? The commonest sense is the sense of men asleep, which they
- express by snoring. Sometimes we are inclined to class those who are
- once-and-a-half-witted with the half-witted, because we appreciate only
- a third part of their wit. Some would find fault with the morning red,
- if they ever got up early enough. "They pretend," as I hear, "that the
- verses of Kabir have four different senses; illusion, spirit, intellect,
- and the exoteric doctrine of the Vedas"; but in this part of the world
- it is considered a ground for complaint if a man's writings admit
- of more than one interpretation. While England endeavors to cure the
- potato-rot, will not any endeavor to cure the brain-rot, which prevails
- so much more widely and fatally?
- I do not suppose that I have attained to obscurity, but I should be
- proud if no more fatal fault were found with my pages on this score than
- was found with the Walden ice. Southern customers objected to its blue
- color, which is the evidence of its purity, as if it were muddy, and
- preferred the Cambridge ice, which is white, but tastes of weeds. The
- purity men love is like the mists which envelop the earth, and not like
- the azure ether beyond.
- Some are dinning in our ears that we Americans, and moderns generally,
- are intellectual dwarfs compared with the ancients, or even the
- Elizabethan men. But what is that to the purpose? A living dog is better
- than a dead lion. Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to
- the race of pygmies, and not be the biggest pygmy that he can? Let every
- one mind his own business, and endeavor to be what he was made.
- Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such
- desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions,
- perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the
- music which he hears, however measured or far away. It is not important
- that he should mature as soon as an apple tree or an oak. Shall he turn
- his spring into summer? If the condition of things which we were made
- for is not yet, what were any reality which we can substitute? We will
- not be shipwrecked on a vain reality. Shall we with pains erect a heaven
- of blue glass over ourselves, though when it is done we shall be sure to
- gaze still at the true ethereal heaven far above, as if the former were
- not?
- There was an artist in the city of Kouroo who was disposed to strive
- after perfection. One day it came into his mind to make a staff. Having
- considered that in an imperfect work time is an ingredient, but into
- a perfect work time does not enter, he said to himself, It shall be
- perfect in all respects, though I should do nothing else in my life.
- He proceeded instantly to the forest for wood, being resolved that it
- should not be made of unsuitable material; and as he searched for and
- rejected stick after stick, his friends gradually deserted him, for they
- grew old in their works and died, but he grew not older by a moment. His
- singleness of purpose and resolution, and his elevated piety, endowed
- him, without his knowledge, with perennial youth. As he made no
- compromise with Time, Time kept out of his way, and only sighed at a
- distance because he could not overcome him. Before he had found a stock
- in all respects suitable the city of Kouroo was a hoary ruin, and he
- sat on one of its mounds to peel the stick. Before he had given it the
- proper shape the dynasty of the Candahars was at an end, and with the
- point of the stick he wrote the name of the last of that race in
- the sand, and then resumed his work. By the time he had smoothed and
- polished the staff Kalpa was no longer the pole-star; and ere he had
- put on the ferule and the head adorned with precious stones, Brahma
- had awoke and slumbered many times. But why do I stay to mention these
- things? When the finishing stroke was put to his work, it suddenly
- expanded before the eyes of the astonished artist into the fairest of
- all the creations of Brahma. He had made a new system in making a staff,
- a world with full and fair proportions; in which, though the old cities
- and dynasties had passed away, fairer and more glorious ones had taken
- their places. And now he saw by the heap of shavings still fresh at his
- feet, that, for him and his work, the former lapse of time had been
- an illusion, and that no more time had elapsed than is required for a
- single scintillation from the brain of Brahma to fall on and inflame the
- tinder of a mortal brain. The material was pure, and his art was pure;
- how could the result be other than wonderful?
- No face which we can give to a matter will stead us so well at last as
- the truth. This alone wears well. For the most part, we are not where
- we are, but in a false position. Through an infinity of our natures, we
- suppose a case, and put ourselves into it, and hence are in two cases at
- the same time, and it is doubly difficult to get out. In sane moments we
- regard only the facts, the case that is. Say what you have to say, not
- what you ought. Any truth is better than make-believe. Tom Hyde, the
- tinker, standing on the gallows, was asked if he had anything to say.
- "Tell the tailors," said he, "to remember to make a knot in their thread
- before they take the first stitch." His companion's prayer is forgotten.
- However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call
- it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you
- are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love
- your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling,
- glorious hours, even in a poorhouse. The setting sun is reflected from
- the windows of the almshouse as brightly as from the rich man's abode;
- the snow melts before its door as early in the spring. I do not see
- but a quiet mind may live as contentedly there, and have as cheering
- thoughts, as in a palace. The town's poor seem to me often to live the
- most independent lives of any. Maybe they are simply great enough
- to receive without misgiving. Most think that they are above being
- supported by the town; but it oftener happens that they are not
- above supporting themselves by dishonest means, which should be more
- disreputable. Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not
- trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends.
- Turn the old; return to them. Things do not change; we change. Sell
- your clothes and keep your thoughts. God will see that you do not want
- society. If I were confined to a corner of a garret all my days, like a
- spider, the world would be just as large to me while I had my thoughts
- about me. The philosopher said: "From an army of three divisions one
- can take away its general, and put it in disorder; from the man the
- most abject and vulgar one cannot take away his thought." Do not seek so
- anxiously to be developed, to subject yourself to many influences to
- be played on; it is all dissipation. Humility like darkness reveals the
- heavenly lights. The shadows of poverty and meanness gather around us,
- "and lo! creation widens to our view." We are often reminded that if
- there were bestowed on us the wealth of Croesus, our aims must still
- be the same, and our means essentially the same. Moreover, if you
- are restricted in your range by poverty, if you cannot buy books and
- newspapers, for instance, you are but confined to the most significant
- and vital experiences; you are compelled to deal with the material which
- yields the most sugar and the most starch. It is life near the bone
- where it is sweetest. You are defended from being a trifler. No man
- loses ever on a lower level by magnanimity on a higher. Superfluous
- wealth can buy superfluities only. Money is not required to buy one
- necessary of the soul.
- I live in the angle of a leaden wall, into whose composition was poured
- a little alloy of bell-metal. Often, in the repose of my mid-day, there
- reaches my ears a confused tintinnabulum from without. It is the noise
- of my contemporaries. My neighbors tell me of their adventures
- with famous gentlemen and ladies, what notabilities they met at the
- dinner-table; but I am no more interested in such things than in the
- contents of the Daily Times. The interest and the conversation are about
- costume and manners chiefly; but a goose is a goose still, dress it
- as you will. They tell me of California and Texas, of England and the
- Indies, of the Hon. Mr.----of Georgia or of Massachusetts, all transient
- and fleeting phenomena, till I am ready to leap from their court-yard
- like the Mameluke bey. I delight to come to my bearings--not walk in
- procession with pomp and parade, in a conspicuous place, but to walk
- even with the Builder of the universe, if I may--not to live in this
- restless, nervous, bustling, trivial Nineteenth Century, but stand or
- sit thoughtfully while it goes by. What are men celebrating? They are
- all on a committee of arrangements, and hourly expect a speech from
- somebody. God is only the president of the day, and Webster is his
- orator. I love to weigh, to settle, to gravitate toward that which most
- strongly and rightfully attracts me--not hang by the beam of the scale
- and try to weigh less--not suppose a case, but take the case that is; to
- travel the only path I can, and that on which no power can resist me. It
- affords me no satisfaction to commence to spring an arch before I have
- got a solid foundation. Let us not play at kittly-benders. There is a
- solid bottom everywhere. We read that the traveller asked the boy if
- the swamp before him had a hard bottom. The boy replied that it had.
- But presently the traveller's horse sank in up to the girths, and
- he observed to the boy, "I thought you said that this bog had a hard
- bottom." "So it has," answered the latter, "but you have not got half
- way to it yet." So it is with the bogs and quicksands of society; but
- he is an old boy that knows it. Only what is thought, said, or done at
- a certain rare coincidence is good. I would not be one of those who will
- foolishly drive a nail into mere lath and plastering; such a deed would
- keep me awake nights. Give me a hammer, and let me feel for the
- furring. Do not depend on the putty. Drive a nail home and clinch it so
- faithfully that you can wake up in the night and think of your work with
- satisfaction--a work at which you would not be ashamed to invoke the
- Muse. So will help you God, and so only. Every nail driven should be as
- another rivet in the machine of the universe, you carrying on the work.
- Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth. I sat at a table
- where were rich food and wine in abundance, and obsequious attendance,
- but sincerity and truth were not; and I went away hungry from the
- inhospitable board. The hospitality was as cold as the ices. I thought
- that there was no need of ice to freeze them. They talked to me of the
- age of the wine and the fame of the vintage; but I thought of an older,
- a newer, and purer wine, of a more glorious vintage, which they had
- not got, and could not buy. The style, the house and grounds and
- "entertainment" pass for nothing with me. I called on the king, but he
- made me wait in his hall, and conducted like a man incapacitated for
- hospitality. There was a man in my neighborhood who lived in a hollow
- tree. His manners were truly regal. I should have done better had I
- called on him.
- How long shall we sit in our porticoes practising idle and musty
- virtues, which any work would make impertinent? As if one were to begin
- the day with long-suffering, and hire a man to hoe his potatoes; and in
- the afternoon go forth to practise Christian meekness and charity
- with goodness aforethought! Consider the China pride and stagnant
- self-complacency of mankind. This generation inclines a little to
- congratulate itself on being the last of an illustrious line; and in
- Boston and London and Paris and Rome, thinking of its long descent,
- it speaks of its progress in art and science and literature with
- satisfaction. There are the Records of the Philosophical Societies, and
- the public Eulogies of Great Men! It is the good Adam contemplating his
- own virtue. "Yes, we have done great deeds, and sung divine songs, which
- shall never die"--that is, as long as we can remember them. The learned
- societies and great men of Assyria--where are they? What youthful
- philosophers and experimentalists we are! There is not one of my readers
- who has yet lived a whole human life. These may be but the spring months
- in the life of the race. If we have had the seven-years' itch, we have
- not seen the seventeen-year locust yet in Concord. We are acquainted
- with a mere pellicle of the globe on which we live. Most have not delved
- six feet beneath the surface, nor leaped as many above it. We know not
- where we are. Beside, we are sound asleep nearly half our time. Yet we
- esteem ourselves wise, and have an established order on the surface.
- Truly, we are deep thinkers, we are ambitious spirits! As I stand over
- the insect crawling amid the pine needles on the forest floor, and
- endeavoring to conceal itself from my sight, and ask myself why it will
- cherish those humble thoughts, and bide its head from me who might,
- perhaps, be its benefactor, and impart to its race some cheering
- information, I am reminded of the greater Benefactor and Intelligence
- that stands over me the human insect.
- There is an incessant influx of novelty into the world, and yet we
- tolerate incredible dulness. I need only suggest what kind of sermons
- are still listened to in the most enlightened countries. There are such
- words as joy and sorrow, but they are only the burden of a psalm, sung
- with a nasal twang, while we believe in the ordinary and mean. We think
- that we can change our clothes only. It is said that the British
- Empire is very large and respectable, and that the United States are a
- first-rate power. We do not believe that a tide rises and falls behind
- every man which can float the British Empire like a chip, if he should
- ever harbor it in his mind. Who knows what sort of seventeen-year locust
- will next come out of the ground? The government of the world I live in
- was not framed, like that of Britain, in after-dinner conversations over
- the wine.
- 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.
- ON THE DUTY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE
- I heartily accept the motto,--"That government is best which governs
- least"; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and
- systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I
- believe,--"That government is best which governs not at all"; and when
- men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they
- will have. Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments
- are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient. The
- objections which have been brought against a standing army, and they are
- many and weighty, and deserve to prevail, may also at last be brought
- against a standing government. The standing army is only an arm of the
- standing government. The government itself, which is only the mode which
- the people have chosen to execute their will, is equally liable to be
- abused and perverted before the people can act through it. Witness the
- present Mexican war, the work of comparatively a few individuals using
- the standing government as their tool; for, in the outset, the people
- would not have consented to this measure.
- This American government--what is it but a tradition, though a recent
- one, endeavoring to transmit itself unimpaired to posterity, but each
- instant losing some of its integrity? It has not the vitality and force
- of a single living man; for a single man can bend it to his will. It is
- a sort of wooden gun to the people themselves. But it is not the less
- necessary for this; for the people must have some complicated machinery
- or other, and hear its din, to satisfy that idea of government which
- they have. Governments show thus how successfully men can be imposed on,
- even impose on themselves, for their own advantage. It is excellent, we
- must all allow. Yet this government never of itself furthered any
- enterprise, but by the alacrity with which it got out of its way. _It_
- does not keep the country free. _It_ does not settle the West. _It_ does
- not educate. The character inherent in the American people has done all
- that has been accomplished; and it would have done somewhat more, if the
- government had not sometimes got in its way. For government is an
- expedient by which men would fain succeed in letting one another alone;
- and, as has been said, when it is most expedient, the governed are most
- let alone by it. Trade and commerce, if they were not made of India
- rubber, would never manage to bounce over the obstacles which
- legislators are continually putting in their way; and, if one were to
- judge these men wholly by the effects of their actions, and not partly
- by their intentions, they would deserve to be classed and punished with
- those mischievous persons who put obstructions on the railroads.
- But, to speak practically and as a citizen, unlike those who call
- themselves no-government men, I ask for, not at once no government,
- but _at once_ a better government. Let every man make known what kind of
- government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward
- obtaining it.
- After all, the practical reason why, when the power is once in the hands
- of the people, a majority are permitted, and for a long period continue,
- to rule, is not because they are most likely to be in the right,
- nor because this seems fairest to the minority, but because they are
- physically the strongest. But a government in which the majority rule in
- all cases cannot be based on justice, even as far as men understand
- it. Can there not be a government in which majorities do not virtually
- decide right and wrong, but conscience?--in which majorities decide only
- those questions to which the rule of expediency is applicable? Must the
- citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience
- to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then? I think that
- we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable
- to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only
- obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what
- I think right. It is truly enough said that a corporation has no
- conscience; but a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation
- with a conscience. Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of
- their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents
- of injustice. A common and natural result of an undue respect for law
- is, that you may see a file of soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal,
- privates, powder-monkeys, and all, marching in admirable order over
- hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common
- sense and consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed, and
- produces a palpitation of the heart. They have no doubt that it is a
- damnable business in which they are concerned; they are all peaceably
- inclined. Now, what are they? Men at all? or small movable forts and
- magazines, at the service of some unscrupulous man in power? Visit the
- Navy Yard, and behold a marine, such a man as an American government can
- make, or such as it can make a man with its black arts--a mere shadow
- and reminiscence of humanity, a man laid out alive and standing, and
- already, as one may say, buried under arms with funeral accompaniments,
- though it may be,--
- "Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note,
- As his corse to the rampart we hurried;
- Not a soldier discharged his farewell shot
- O'er the grave where our hero we buried."
- The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as
- machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the
- militia, jailers, constables, posse comitatus, etc. In most cases there
- is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense;
- but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and
- wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as
- well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt.
- They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. Yet such
- as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens. Others, as most
- legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders, serve
- the state chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral
- distinctions, they are as likely to serve the devil, without _intending_
- it, as God. A very few, as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the
- great sense, and men, serve the state with their consciences also,
- and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly
- treated as enemies by it. A wise man will only be useful as a man, and
- will not submit to be "clay," and "stop a hole to keep the wind away,"
- but leave that office to his dust at least:--
- "I am too high-born to be propertied,
- To be a secondary at control,
- Or useful serving-man and instrument
- To any sovereign state throughout the world."
- He who gives himself entirely to his fellow-men appears to them useless
- and selfish; but he who gives himself partially to them is pronounced a
- benefactor and philanthropist.
- How does it become a man to behave toward this American government
- to-day? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with
- it. I cannot for an instant recognize that political organization as _my_
- government which is the _slave's_ government also.
- All men recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse
- allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its
- inefficiency are great and unendurable. But almost all say that such is
- not the case now. But such was the case, they think, in the Revolution
- of '75. If one were to tell me that this was a bad government because
- it taxed certain foreign commodities brought to its ports, it is most
- probable that I should not make an ado about it, for I can do without
- them. All machines have their friction; and possibly this does enough
- good to counterbalance the evil. At any rate, it is a great evil to make
- a stir about it. But when the friction comes to have its machine, and
- oppression and robbery are organized, I say, let us not have such a
- machine any longer. In other words, when a sixth of the population of a
- nation which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty are slaves, and
- a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and
- subjected to military law, I think that it is not too soon for honest
- men to rebel and revolutionize. What makes this duty the more urgent
- is the fact that the country so overrun is not our own, but ours is the
- invading army.
- Paley, a common authority with many on moral questions, in his chapter
- on the "Duty of Submission to Civil Government," resolves all civil
- obligation into expediency; and he proceeds to say that "so long as
- the interest of the whole society requires it, that is, so long as the
- established government cannot be resisted or changed without public
- inconveniency, it is the will of God... that the established government
- be obeyed, and no longer.... This principle being admitted, the justice
- of every particular case of resistance is reduced to a computation of
- the quantity of the danger and grievance on the one side, and of the
- probability and expense of redressing it on the other." Of this, he
- says, every man shall judge for himself. But Paley appears never to have
- contemplated those cases to which the rule of expediency does not apply,
- in which a people, as well as an individual, must do justice, cost what
- it may. If I have unjustly wrested a plank from a drowning man, I must
- restore it to him though I drown myself. This, according to Paley, would
- be inconvenient. But he that would save his life, in such a case, shall
- lose it. This people must cease to hold slaves, and to make war on
- Mexico, though it cost them their existence as a people.
- In their practice, nations agree with Paley; but does any one think that
- Massachusetts does exactly what is right at the present crisis?
- "A drab of state, a cloth-o'-silver slut,
- To have her train borne up, and her soul trail in the dirt."
- Practically speaking, the opponents to a reform in Massachusetts are
- not a hundred thousand politicians at the South, but a hundred thousand
- merchants and farmers here, who are more interested in commerce and
- agriculture than they are in humanity, and are not prepared to do
- justice to the slave and to Mexico, _cost what it may_. I quarrel not with
- far-off foes, but with those who, near at home, co-operate with, and
- do the bidding of those far away, and without whom the latter would be
- harmless. We are accustomed to say, that the mass of men are unprepared;
- but improvement is slow, because the few are not materially wiser or
- better than the many. It is not so important that many should be as good
- as you, as that there be some absolute goodness somewhere; for that will
- leaven the whole lump. There are thousands who are _in opinion_ opposed
- to slavery and to the war, who yet in effect do nothing to put an end to
- them; who, esteeming themselves children of Washington and Franklin, sit
- down with their hands in their pockets, and say that they know not what
- to do, and do nothing; who even postpone the question of freedom to the
- question of free-trade, and quietly read the prices-current along with
- the latest advices from Mexico, after dinner, and, it may be, fall
- asleep over them both. What is the price-current of an honest man and
- patriot to-day? They hesitate, and they regret, and sometimes they
- petition; but they do nothing in earnest and with effect. They will
- wait, well disposed, for others to remedy the evil, that they may no
- longer have it to regret. At most, they give only a cheap vote, and a
- feeble countenance and Godspeed, to the right, as it goes by them. There
- are nine hundred and ninety-nine patrons of virtue to one virtuous man;
- but it is easier to deal with the real possessor of a thing than with
- the temporary guardian of it.
- All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a
- slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong, with moral
- questions; and betting naturally accompanies it. The character of the
- voters is not staked. I cast my vote, perchance, as I think right; but I
- am not vitally concerned that that right should prevail. I am willing to
- leave it to the majority. Its obligation, therefore, never exceeds that
- of expediency. Even voting _for the right_ is _doing nothing_ for it. It is
- only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail. A
- wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to
- prevail through the power of the majority. There is but little virtue in
- the action of masses of men. When the majority shall at length vote for
- the abolition of slavery, it will be because they are indifferent to
- slavery, or because there is but little slavery left to be abolished by
- their vote. _They_ will then be the only slaves. Only _his_ vote can hasten
- the abolition of slavery who asserts his own freedom by his vote.
- I hear of a convention to be held at Baltimore, or elsewhere, for the
- selection of a candidate for the Presidency, made up chiefly of editors,
- and men who are politicians by profession; but I think, what is it to
- any independent, intelligent, and respectable man what decision they
- may come to? Shall we not have the advantage of his wisdom and honesty,
- nevertheless? Can we not count upon some independent votes? Are there
- not many individuals in the country who do not attend conventions? But
- no: I find that the respectable man, so called, has immediately drifted
- from his position, and despairs of his country, when his country has
- more reason to despair of him. He forthwith adopts one of the candidates
- thus selected as the only _available_ one, thus proving that he is himself
- _available_ for any purposes of the demagogue. His vote is of no more
- worth than that of any unprincipled foreigner or hireling native, who
- may have been bought. Oh for a man who is a _man_, and, as my neighbor
- says, has a bone in his back which you cannot pass your hand through!
- Our statistics are at fault: the population has been returned too large.
- How many _men_ are there to a square thousand miles in this country?
- Hardly one. Does not America offer any inducement for men to settle
- here? The American has dwindled into an Odd Fellow--one who may be known
- by the development of his organ of gregariousness, and a manifest lack
- of intellect and cheerful self-reliance; whose first and chief concern,
- on coming into the world, is to see that the almshouses are in good
- repair; and, before yet he has lawfully donned the virile garb, to
- collect a fund for the support of the widows and orphans that may be;
- who, in short ventures to live only by the aid of the Mutual Insurance
- company, which has promised to bury him decently.
- It is not a man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the
- eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong; he may still properly
- have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash
- his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give
- it practically his support. If I devote myself to other pursuits and
- contemplations, I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue them
- sitting upon another man's shoulders. I must get off him first, that
- he may pursue his contemplations too. See what gross inconsistency is
- tolerated. I have heard some of my townsmen say, "I should like to have
- them order me out to help put down an insurrection of the slaves, or to
- march to Mexico;--see if I would go"; and yet these very men have each,
- directly by their allegiance, and so indirectly, at least, by their
- money, furnished a substitute. The soldier is applauded who refuses to
- serve in an unjust war by those who do not refuse to sustain the unjust
- government which makes the war; is applauded by those whose own act
- and authority he disregards and sets at naught; as if the state were
- penitent to that degree that it hired one to scourge it while it sinned,
- but not to that degree that it left off sinning for a moment. Thus,
- under the name of Order and Civil Government, we are all made at last to
- pay homage to and support our own meanness. After the first blush of
- sin comes its indifference; and from immoral it becomes, as it were,
- _un_moral, and not quite unnecessary to that life which we have made.
- The broadest and most prevalent error requires the most disinterested
- virtue to sustain it. The slight reproach to which the virtue of
- patriotism is commonly liable, the noble are most likely to incur.
- Those who, while they disapprove of the character and measures of a
- government, yield to it their allegiance and support are undoubtedly
- its most conscientious supporters, and so frequently the most serious
- obstacles to reform. Some are petitioning the State to dissolve the
- Union, to disregard the requisitions of the President. Why do they not
- dissolve it themselves--the union between themselves and the State--and
- refuse to pay their quota into its treasury? Do not they stand in the
- same relation to the State, that the State does to the Union? And have
- not the same reasons prevented the State from resisting the Union, which
- have prevented them from resisting the State?
- How can a man be satisfied to entertain an opinion merely, and enjoy it?
- Is there any enjoyment in _it_, if his opinion is that he is aggrieved? If
- you are cheated out of a single dollar by your neighbor, you do not rest
- satisfied with knowing that you are cheated, or with saying that you are
- cheated, or even with petitioning him to pay you your due; but you take
- effectual steps at once to obtain the full amount, and see that you
- are never cheated again. Action from principle--the perception and the
- performance of right--changes things and relations; it is essentially
- revolutionary, and does not consist wholly with anything which was.
- It not only divides states and churches, it divides families; ay,
- it divides the _individual_, separating the diabolical in him from the
- divine.
- Unjust laws exist; shall we be content to obey them, or shall we
- endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall
- we transgress them at once? Men generally, under such a government
- as this, think that they ought to wait until they have persuaded the
- majority to alter them. They think that, if they should resist,
- the remedy would be worse than the evil. But it is the fault of the
- government itself that the remedy _is_ worse than the evil. _It_ makes it
- worse. Why is it not more apt to anticipate and provide for reform? Why
- does it not cherish its wise minority? Why does it cry and resist before
- it is hurt? Why does it not encourage its citizens to be on the alert to
- point out its faults, and _do_ better than it would have them? Why does
- it always crucify Christ, and excommunicate Copernicus and Luther, and
- pronounce Washington and Franklin rebels?
- One would think, that a deliberate and practical denial of its authority
- was the only offence never contemplated by government; else, why has it
- not assigned its definite, its suitable and proportionate, penalty? If a
- man who has no property refuses but once to earn nine shillings for
- the State, he is put in prison for a period unlimited by any law that
- I know, and determined only by the discretion of those who placed him
- there; but if he should steal ninety times nine shillings from the
- State, he is soon permitted to go at large again.
- If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine
- of government, let it go, let it go; perchance it will wear
- smooth--certainly the machine will wear out. If the injustice has a
- spring, or a pulley, or a rope, or a crank, exclusively for itself, then
- perhaps you may consider whether the remedy will not be worse than the
- evil; but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent
- of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be
- a counter friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at
- any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.
- As for adopting the ways which the State has provided for remedying the
- evil, I know not of such ways. They take too much time, and a man's life
- will be gone. I have other affairs to attend to. I came into this world,
- not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it,
- be it good or bad. A man has not everything to do, but something; and
- because he cannot do _everything_, it is not necessary that he should do
- _something_ wrong. It is not my business to be petitioning the Governor or
- the Legislature any more than it is theirs to petition me; and if they
- should not hear my petition, what should I do then? But in this case the
- State has provided no way; its very Constitution is the evil. This may
- seem to be harsh and stubborn and unconciliatory; but it is to treat
- with the utmost kindness and consideration the only spirit that can
- appreciate or deserves it. So is any change for the better, like birth
- and death which convulse the body.
- I do not hesitate to say, that those who call themselves Abolitionists
- should at once effectually withdraw their support, both in person and
- property, from the government of Massachusetts, and not wait till they
- constitute a majority of one, before they suffer the right to prevail
- through them. I think that it is enough if they have God on their side,
- without waiting for that other one. Moreover, any man more right than
- his neighbors constitutes a majority of one already.
- I meet this American government, or its representative, the State
- government, directly, and face to face, once a year--no more--in
- the person of its tax-gatherer; this is the only mode in which a man
- situated as I am necessarily meets it; and it then says distinctly,
- Recognize me; and the simplest, the most effectual, and, in the present
- posture of affairs, the indispensablest mode of treating with it on this
- head, of expressing your little satisfaction with and love for it, is
- to deny it then. My civil neighbor, the tax-gatherer, is the very man I
- have to deal with--for it is, after all, with men and not with parchment
- that I quarrel--and he has voluntarily chosen to be an agent of the
- government. How shall he ever know well what he is and does as an
- officer of the government, or as a man, until he is obliged to consider
- whether he shall treat me, his neighbor, for whom he has respect, as
- a neighbor and well-disposed man, or as a maniac and disturber of the
- peace, and see if he can get over this obstruction to his neighborliness
- without a ruder and more impetuous thought or speech corresponding with
- his action? I know this well, that if one thousand, if one hundred, if
- ten men whom I could name--if ten _honest_ men only--ay, if _one_ HONEST
- man, in this State of Massachusetts, _ceasing to hold slaves_, were
- actually to withdraw from this copartnership, and be locked up in the
- county jail therefor, it would be the abolition of slavery in America.
- For it matters not how small the beginning may seem to be: what is once
- well done is done forever. But we love better to talk about it: that
- we say is our mission. Reform keeps many scores of newspapers in
- its service, but not one man. If my esteemed neighbor, the State's
- ambassador, who will devote his days to the settlement of the question
- of human rights in the Council Chamber, instead of being threatened with
- the prisons of Carolina, were to sit down the prisoner of Massachusetts,
- that State which is so anxious to foist the sin of slavery upon her
- sister--though at present she can discover only an act of inhospitality
- to be the ground of a quarrel with her--the Legislature would not wholly
- waive the subject the following winter.
- Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a
- just man is also a prison. The proper place to-day, the only place which
- Massachusetts has provided for her freer and less desponding spirits,
- is in her prisons, to be put out and locked out of the State by her own
- act, as they have already put themselves out by their principles. It is
- there that the fugitive slave, and the Mexican prisoner on parole, and
- the Indian come to plead the wrongs of his race, should find them;
- on that separate, but more free and honorable ground, where the State
- places those who are not _with_ her, but _against_ her--the only house in a
- slave State in which a free man can abide with honor. If any think that
- their influence would be lost there, and their voices no longer afflict
- the ear of the State, that they would not be as an enemy within its
- walls, they do not know by how much truth is stronger than error, nor
- how much more eloquently and effectively he can combat injustice who
- has experienced a little in his own person. Cast your whole vote, not a
- strip of paper merely, but your whole influence. A minority is powerless
- while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but
- it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight. If the alternative
- is to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the State
- will not hesitate which to choose. If a thousand men were not to pay
- their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody
- measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit
- violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a
- peaceable revolution, if any such is possible. If the tax-gatherer, or
- any other public officer, asks me, as one has done, "But what shall
- I do?" my answer is, "If you really wish to do anything, resign your
- office." When the subject has refused allegiance, and the officer has
- resigned his office, then the revolution is accomplished. But even
- suppose blood should flow. Is there not a sort of blood shed when the
- conscience is wounded? Through this wound a man's real manhood and
- immortality flow out, and he bleeds to an everlasting death. I see this
- blood flowing now.
- I have contemplated the imprisonment of the offender, rather than the
- seizure of his goods--though both will serve the same purpose--because
- they who assert the purest right, and consequently are most dangerous
- to a corrupt State, commonly have not spent much time in accumulating
- property. To such the State renders comparatively small service, and
- a slight tax is wont to appear exorbitant, particularly if they are
- obliged to earn it by special labor with their hands. If there were
- one who lived wholly without the use of money, the State itself
- would hesitate to demand it of him. But the rich man--not to make any
- invidious comparison--is always sold to the institution which makes him
- rich. Absolutely speaking, the more money, the less virtue; for money
- comes between a man and his objects, and obtains them for him; and
- it was certainly no great virtue to obtain it. It puts to rest many
- questions which he would otherwise be taxed to answer; while the only
- new question which it puts is the hard but superfluous one, how to
- spend it. Thus his moral ground is taken from under his feet. The
- opportunities of living are diminished in proportion as what are called
- the "means" are increased. The best thing a man can do for his culture
- when he is rich is to endeavor to carry out those schemes which he
- entertained when he was poor. Christ answered the Herodians according to
- their condition. "Show me the tribute-money," said he;--and one took a
- penny out of his pocket;--if you use money which has the image of Cæsar
- on it, and which he has made current and valuable, that is, _if you
- are men of the State_, and gladly enjoy the advantages of Cæsar's
- government, then pay him back some of his own when he demands it;
- "Render therefore to Cæsar that which is Cæsar's, and to God those
- things which are God's"--leaving them no wiser than before as to which
- was which; for they did not wish to know.
- When I converse with the freest of my neighbors, I perceive that,
- whatever they may say about the magnitude and seriousness of the
- question, and their regard for the public tranquillity, the long and
- the short of the matter is, that they cannot spare the protection of the
- existing government, and they dread the consequences to their property
- and families of disobedience to it. For my own part, I should not like
- to think that I ever rely on the protection of the State. But, if I deny
- the authority of the State when it presents its tax-bill, it will soon
- take and waste all my property, and so harass me and my children without
- end. This is hard. This makes it impossible for a man to live honestly,
- and at the same time comfortably in outward respects. It will not be
- worth the while to accumulate property; that would be sure to go again.
- You must hire or squat somewhere, and raise but a small crop, and eat
- that soon. You must live within yourself, and depend upon yourself
- always tucked up and ready for a start, and not have many affairs. A
- man may grow rich in Turkey even, if he will be in all respects a
- good subject of the Turkish government. Confucius said, "If a state is
- governed by the principles of reason, poverty and misery are subjects
- of shame; if a state is not governed by the principles of reason, riches
- and honors are the subjects of shame." No: until I want the protection
- of Massachusetts to be extended to me in some distant Southern port,
- where my liberty is endangered, or until I am bent solely on building
- up an estate at home by peaceful enterprise, I can afford to refuse
- allegiance to Massachusetts, and her right to my property and life. It
- costs me less in every sense to incur the penalty of disobedience to the
- State than it would to obey. I should feel as if I were worth less in
- that case.
- Some years ago, the State met me in behalf of the Church, and commanded
- me to pay a certain sum toward the support of a clergyman whose
- preaching my father attended, but never I myself. "Pay," it said, "or be
- locked up in the jail." I declined to pay. But, unfortunately, another
- man saw fit to pay it. I did not see why the schoolmaster should be
- taxed to support the priest, and not the priest the schoolmaster: for
- I was not the State's schoolmaster, but I supported myself by voluntary
- subscription. I did not see why the lyceum should not present its
- tax-bill, and have the State to back its demand, as well as the Church.
- However, at the request of the selectmen, I condescended to make some
- such statement as this in writing:--"Know all men by these presents,
- that I, Henry Thoreau, do not wish to be regarded as a member of any
- incorporated society which I have not joined." This I gave to the town
- clerk; and he has it. The State, having thus learned that I did not wish
- to be regarded as a member of that church, has never made a like
- demand on me since; though it said that it must adhere to its original
- presumption that time. If I had known how to name them, I should then
- have signed off in detail from all the societies which I never signed on
- to; but I did not know where to find a complete list.
- I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on
- this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the walls of
- solid stone, two or three feet thick, the door of wood and iron, a foot
- thick, and the iron grating which strained the light, I could not help
- being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me
- as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up. I wondered
- that it should have concluded at length that this was the best use it
- could put me to, and had never thought to avail itself of my services
- in some way. I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and
- my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break
- through, before they could get to be as free as I was. I did not for a
- moment feel confined, and the walls seemed a great waste of stone and
- mortar. I felt as if I alone of all my townsmen had paid my tax. They
- plainly did not know how to treat me, but behaved like persons who are
- underbred. In every threat and in every compliment there was a blunder;
- for they thought that my chief desire was to stand the other side of
- that stone wall. I could not but smile to see how industriously they
- locked the door on my meditations, which followed them out again without
- let or hindrance, and _they_ were really all that was dangerous. As they
- could not reach me, they had resolved to punish my body; just as boys,
- if they cannot come at some person against whom they have a spite, will
- abuse his dog. I saw that the State was half-witted, that it was timid
- as a lone woman with her silver spoons, and that it did not know its
- friends from its foes, and I lost all my remaining respect for it, and
- pitied it.
- Thus the State never intentionally confronts a man's sense, intellectual
- or moral, but only his body, his senses. It is not armed with superior
- wit or honesty, but with superior physical strength. I was not born to
- be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the
- strongest. What force has a multitude? They only can force me who obey a
- higher law than I. They force me to become like themselves. I do not
- hear of _men_ being _forced_ to have this way or that by masses of men.
- What sort of life were that to live? When I meet a government which says
- to me, "Your money or your life," why should I be in haste to give it my
- money? It may be in a great strait, and not know what to do: I cannot
- help that. It must help itself; do as I do. It is not worth the while to
- snivel about it. I am not responsible for the successful working of the
- machinery of society. I am not the son of the engineer. I perceive that,
- when an acorn and a chestnut fall side by side, the one does not remain
- inert to make way for the other, but both obey their own laws, and
- spring and grow and flourish as best they can, till one, perchance,
- overshadows and destroys the other. If a plant cannot live according to
- its nature, it dies; and so a man.
- The night in prison was novel and interesting enough. The prisoners
- in their shirt-sleeves were enjoying a chat and the evening air in the
- doorway, when I entered. But the jailer said, "Come, boys, it is time
- to lock up"; and so they dispersed, and I heard the sound of their steps
- returning into the hollow apartments. My room-mate was introduced to me
- by the jailer as "a first-rate fellow and a clever man." When the
- door was locked, he showed me where to hang my hat, and how he managed
- matters there. The rooms were whitewashed once a month; and this one, at
- least, was the whitest, most simply furnished, and probably the neatest
- apartment in the town. He naturally wanted to know where I came from,
- and what brought me there; and, when I had told him, I asked him in my
- turn how he came there, presuming him to be an honest man, of course;
- and, as the world goes, I believe he was. "Why," said he, "they accuse
- me of burning a barn; but I never did it." As near as I could discover,
- he had probably gone to bed in a barn when drunk, and smoked his pipe
- there; and so a barn was burnt. He had the reputation of being a clever
- man, had been there some three months waiting for his trial to come on,
- and would have to wait as much longer; but he was quite domesticated and
- contented, since he got his board for nothing, and thought that he was
- well treated.
- He occupied one window, and I the other; and I saw that if one stayed
- there long, his principal business would be to look out the window. I
- had soon read all the tracts that were left there, and examined where
- former prisoners had broken out, and where a grate had been sawed off,
- and heard the history of the various occupants of that room; for I found
- that even here there was a history and a gossip which never circulated
- beyond the walls of the jail. Probably this is the only house in
- the town where verses are composed, which are afterward printed in
- a circular form, but not published. I was shown quite a long list of
- verses which were composed by some young men who had been detected in an
- attempt to escape, who avenged themselves by singing them.
- I pumped my fellow-prisoner as dry as I could, for fear I should never
- see him again; but at length he showed me which was my bed, and left me
- to blow out the lamp.
- It was like travelling into a far country, such as I had never expected
- to behold, to lie there for one night. It seemed to me that I never
- had heard the town-clock strike before, nor the evening sounds of the
- village; for we slept with the windows open, which were inside the
- grating. It was to see my native village in the light of the Middle
- Ages, and our Concord was turned into a Rhine stream, and visions
- of knights and castles passed before me. They were the voices of old
- burghers that I heard in the streets. I was an involuntary spectator
- and auditor of whatever was done and said in the kitchen of the adjacent
- village-inn--a wholly new and rare experience to me. It was a closer
- view of my native town. I was fairly inside of it. I never had seen its
- institutions before. This is one of its peculiar institutions; for it is
- a shire town. I began to comprehend what its inhabitants were about.
- In the morning, our breakfasts were put through the hole in the door,
- in small oblong-square tin pans, made to fit, and holding a pint of
- chocolate, with brown bread, and an iron spoon. When they called for the
- vessels again, I was green enough to return what bread I had left; but
- my comrade seized it, and said that I should lay that up for lunch or
- dinner. Soon after he was let out to work at haying in a neighboring
- field, whither he went every day, and would not be back till noon; so he
- bade me good-day, saying that he doubted if he should see me again.
- When I came out of prison--for some one interfered, and paid that tax--I
- did not perceive that great changes had taken place on the common,
- such as he observed who went in a youth and emerged a tottering
- and gray-headed man; and yet a change had to my eyes come over the
- scene--the town, and State, and country--greater than any that mere time
- could effect. I saw yet more distinctly the State in which I lived. I
- saw to what extent the people among whom I lived could be trusted as
- good neighbors and friends; that their friendship was for summer weather
- only; that they did not greatly propose to do right; that they were
- a distinct race from me by their prejudices and superstitions, as the
- Chinamen and Malays are; that in their sacrifices to humanity, they ran
- no risks, not even to their property; that after all they were not so
- noble but they treated the thief as he had treated them, and hoped, by
- a certain outward observance and a few prayers, and by walking in a
- particular straight though useless path from time to time, to save their
- souls. This may be to judge my neighbors harshly; for I believe that
- many of them are not aware that they have such an institution as the
- jail in their village.
- It was formerly the custom in our village, when a poor debtor came out
- of jail, for his acquaintances to salute him, looking through their
- fingers, which were crossed to represent the grating of a jail window,
- "How do ye do?" My neighbors did not thus salute me, but first looked at
- me, and then at one another, as if I had returned from a long journey. I
- was put into jail as I was going to the shoemaker's to get a shoe which
- was mended. When I was let out the next morning, I proceeded to finish
- my errand, and, having put on my mended shoe, joined a huckleberry
- party, who were impatient to put themselves under my conduct; and in
- half an hour--for the horse was soon tackled--was in the midst of a
- huckleberry field, on one of our highest hills, two miles off, and then
- the State was nowhere to be seen.
- This is the whole history of "My Prisons."
- * * * * *
- I have never declined paying the highway tax, because I am as desirous
- of being a good neighbor as I am of being a bad subject; and as for
- supporting schools, I am doing my part to educate my fellow-countrymen
- now. It is for no particular item in the tax-bill that I refuse to pay
- it. I simply wish to refuse allegiance to the State, to withdraw and
- stand aloof from it effectually. I do not care to trace the course of
- my dollar, if I could, till it buys a man or a musket to shoot one
- with--the dollar is innocent--but I am concerned to trace the effects of
- my allegiance. In fact, I quietly declare war with the State, after my
- fashion, though I will still make what use and get what advantage of her
- I can, as is usual in such cases.
- If others pay the tax which is demanded of me, from a sympathy with the
- State, they do but what they have already done in their own case, or
- rather they abet injustice to a greater extent than the State requires.
- If they pay the tax from a mistaken interest in the individual taxed, to
- save his property, or prevent his going to jail, it is because they have
- not considered wisely how far they let their private feelings interfere
- with the public good.
- This, then, is my position at present. But one cannot be too much on his
- guard in such a case, lest his action be biased by obstinacy or an
- undue regard for the opinions of men. Let him see that he does only what
- belongs to himself and to the hour.
- I think sometimes, Why, this people mean well; they are only ignorant;
- they would do better if they knew how: why give your neighbors this pain
- to treat you as they are not inclined to? But I think, again, This is
- no reason why I should do as they do, or permit others to suffer much
- greater pain of a different kind. Again, I sometimes say to myself, When
- many millions of men, without heat, without ill-will, without personal
- feeling of any kind, demand of you a few shillings only, without the
- possibility, such is their constitution, of retracting or altering their
- present demand, and without the possibility, on your side, of appeal
- to any other millions, why expose yourself to this overwhelming brute
- force? You do not resist cold and hunger, the winds and the waves, thus
- obstinately; you quietly submit to a thousand similar necessities. You
- do not put your head into the fire. But just in proportion as I regard
- this as not wholly a brute force, but partly a human force, and consider
- that I have relations to those millions as to so many millions of
- men, and not of mere brute or inanimate things, I see that appeal is
- possible, first and instantaneously, from them to the Maker of
- them, and, secondly, from them to themselves. But, if I put my head
- deliberately into the fire, there is no appeal to fire or to the Maker
- of fire, and I have only myself to blame. If I could convince myself
- that I have any right to be satisfied with men as they are, and to
- treat them accordingly, and not according, in some respects, to my
- requisitions and expectations of what they and I ought to be, then, like
- a good Mussulman and fatalist, I should endeavor to be satisfied with
- things as they are, and say it is the will of God. And, above all, there
- is this difference between resisting this and a purely brute or natural
- force, that I can resist this with some effect; but I cannot expect,
- like Orpheus, to change the nature of the rocks and trees and beasts.
- I do not wish to quarrel with any man or nation. I do not wish to split
- hairs, to make fine distinctions, or set myself up as better than my
- neighbors. I seek rather, I may say, even an excuse for conforming to
- the laws of the land. I am but too ready to conform to them. Indeed,
- I have reason to suspect myself on this head; and each year, as the
- tax-gatherer comes round, I find myself disposed to review the acts and
- position of the general and State governments, and the spirit of the
- people, to discover a pretext for conformity.
- "We must affect our country as our parents,
- And if at any time we alienate
- Our love or industry from doing it honor,
- We must respect effects and teach the soul
- Matter of conscience and religion,
- And not desire of rule or benefit."
- I believe that the State will soon be able to take all my work of this
- sort out of my hands, and then I shall be no better a patriot than my
- fellow-countrymen. Seen from a lower point of view, the Constitution,
- with all its faults, is very good; the law and the courts are very
- respectable; even this State and this American government are, in many
- respects, very admirable and rare things, to be thankful for, such as a
- great many have described them; but seen from a point of view a little
- higher, they are what I have described them; seen from a higher still,
- and the highest, who shall say what they are, or that they are worth
- looking at or thinking of at all?
- However, the government does not concern me much, and I shall bestow the
- fewest possible thoughts on it. It is not many moments that I live under
- a government, even in this world. If a man is thought-free, fancy-free,
- imagination-free, that which _is not_ never for a long time appearing _to
- be_ to him, unwise rulers or reformers cannot fatally interrupt him.
- I know that most men think differently from myself; but those whose
- lives are by profession devoted to the study of these or kindred
- subjects, content me as little as any. Statesmen and legislators,
- standing so completely within the institution, never distinctly
- and nakedly behold it. They speak of moving society, but have no
- resting-place without it. They may be men of a certain experience and
- discrimination, and have no doubt invented ingenious and even useful
- systems, for which we sincerely thank them; but all their wit and
- usefulness lie within certain not very wide limits. They are wont to
- forget that the world is not governed by policy and expediency. Webster
- never goes behind government, and so cannot speak with authority
- about it. His words are wisdom to those legislators who contemplate no
- essential reform in the existing government; but for thinkers, and those
- who legislate for all time, he never once glances at the subject. I know
- of those whose serene and wise speculations on this theme would soon
- reveal the limits of his mind's range and hospitality. Yet, compared
- with the cheap professions of most reformers, and the still cheaper
- wisdom and eloquence of politicians in general, his are almost the only
- sensible and valuable words, and we thank Heaven for him. Comparatively,
- he is always strong, original, and, above all, practical. Still, his
- quality is not wisdom, but prudence. The lawyer's truth is not truth,
- but consistency or a consistent expediency. Truth is always in harmony
- with herself, and is not concerned chiefly to reveal the justice that
- may consist with wrong-doing. He well deserves to be called, as he has
- been called, the Defender of the Constitution. There are really no
- blows to be given by him but defensive ones. He is not a leader, but a
- follower. His leaders are the men of '87. "I have never made an effort,"
- he says, "and never propose to make an effort; I have never countenanced
- an effort, and never mean to countenance an effort, to disturb the
- arrangement as originally made, by which the various States came into
- the Union." Still thinking of the sanction which the Constitution gives
- to slavery, he says, "Because it was a part of the original compact--let
- it stand." Notwithstanding his special acuteness and ability, he is
- unable to take a fact out of its merely political relations, and behold
- it as it lies absolutely to be disposed of by the intellect--what, for
- instance, it behooves a man to do here in America to-day with regard to
- slavery, but ventures, or is driven, to make some such desperate answer
- as the following, while professing to speak absolutely, and as a private
- man--from which what new and singular code of social duties might be
- inferred? "The manner," says he, "in which the governments of those
- States where slavery exists are to regulate it is for their own
- consideration, under their responsibility to their constituents, to
- the general laws of propriety, humanity, and justice, and to God.
- Associations formed elsewhere, springing from a feeling of humanity, or
- any other cause, have nothing whatever to do with it. They have never
- received any encouragement from me, and they never will."
- They who know of no purer sources of truth, who have traced up its
- stream no higher, stand, and wisely stand, by the Bible and the
- Constitution, and drink at it there with reverence and humility; but
- they who behold where it comes trickling into this lake or that pool,
- gird up their loins once more, and continue their pilgrimage toward its
- fountain-head.
- No man with a genius for legislation has appeared in America. They are
- rare in the history of the world. There are orators, politicians, and
- eloquent men, by the thousand; but the speaker has not yet opened his
- mouth to speak who is capable of settling the much-vexed questions of
- the day. We love eloquence for its own sake, and not for any truth which
- it may utter, or any heroism it may inspire. Our legislators have not
- yet learned the comparative value of free-trade and of freedom, of
- union, and of rectitude, to a nation. They have no genius or talent for
- comparatively humble questions of taxation and finance, commerce and
- manufacturers and agriculture. If we were left solely to the wordy
- wit of legislators in Congress for our guidance, uncorrected by the
- seasonable experience and the effectual complaints of the people,
- America would not long retain her rank among the nations. For eighteen
- hundred years, though perchance I have no right to say it, the New
- Testament has been written; yet where is the legislator who has wisdom
- and practical talent enough to avail himself of the light which it sheds
- on the science of legislation?
- The authority of government, even such as I am willing to submit to--for
- I will cheerfully obey those who know and can do better than I, and in
- many things even those who neither know nor can do so well--is still an
- impure one: to be strictly just, it must have the sanction and consent
- of the governed. It can have no pure right over my person and property
- but what I concede to it. The progress from an absolute to a limited
- monarchy, from a limited monarchy to a democracy, is a progress toward
- a true respect for the individual. Even the Chinese philosopher was
- wise enough to regard the individual as the basis of the empire. Is
- a democracy, such as we know it, the last improvement possible
- in government? Is it not possible to take a step further towards
- recognizing and organizing the rights of man? There will never be a
- really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize
- the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own
- power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly. I please
- myself with imagining a State at least which can afford to be just to
- all men, and to treat the individual with respect as a neighbor; which
- even would not think it inconsistent with its own repose if a few were
- to live aloof from it, not meddling with it, nor embraced by it, who
- fulfilled all the duties of neighbors and fellow-men. A State which bore
- this kind of fruit, and suffered it to drop off as fast as it ripened,
- would prepare the way for a still more perfect and glorious State, which
- also I have imagined, but not yet anywhere seen.
- End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil
- Disobedience, by Henry David Thoreau
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