8.2: Henry David Thoreau, “Walden,” 1854 (2024)

EconomyWhen I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I livedalone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I hadbuilt myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts,and earned my living by the labor of my hands only. I lived there twoyears and two months. At present I am a sojourner in civilized lifeagain.I should not obtrude my affairs so much on the notice of my readers ifvery particular inquiries had not been made by my townsmen concerningmy mode of life, which some would call impertinent, though they do notappear to me at all impertinent, but, considering the circ*mstances,very natural and pertinent. Some have asked what I got to eat; if I didnot feel lonesome; if I was not afraid; and the like. Others have beencurious to learn what portion of my income I devoted to charitablepurposes; and some, who have large families, how many poor childrenI maintained. I will therefore ask those of my readers who feel noparticular interest in me to pardon me if I undertake to answer some ofthese questions in this book. In most books, the _I_, or first person, isomitted; in this it will be retained; that, in respect to egotism, isthe main difference. We commonly do not remember that it is, after all,always the first person that is speaking. I should not talk somuch about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of myexperience. Moreover, I, on my side, require of every writer, first orlast, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely whathe has heard of other men's lives; some such account as he would send tohis kindred from a distant land; for if he has lived sincerely, itmust have been in a distant land to me. Perhaps these pages are moreparticularly addressed to poor students. As for the rest of my readers,they will accept such portions as apply to them. I trust that none willstretch the seams in putting on the coat, for it may do good service tohim whom it fits.I would fain say something, not so much concerning the Chinese andSandwich Islanders as you who read these pages, who are said to livein New England; something about your condition, especially your outwardcondition or circ*mstances in this world, in this town, what it is,whether it is necessary that it be as bad as it is, whether it cannotbe improved as well as not. I have travelled a good deal in Concord;and everywhere, in shops, and offices, and fields, the inhabitants haveappeared to me to be doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways. WhatI have heard of Bramins sitting exposed to four fires and looking in theface of the sun; or hanging suspended, with their heads downward, overflames; or looking at the heavens over their shoulders "until it becomesimpossible for them to resume their natural position, while from thetwist of the neck nothing but liquids can pass into the stomach"; ordwelling, chained for life, at the foot of a tree; or measuring withtheir bodies, like caterpillars, the breadth of vast empires; orstanding on one leg on the tops of pillars--even these forms ofconscious penance are hardly more incredible and astonishing thanthe scenes which I daily witness. The twelve labors of Hercules weretrifling in comparison with those which my neighbors have undertaken;for they were only twelve, and had an end; but I could never see thatthese men slew or captured any monster or finished any labor. They haveno 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 inheritedfarms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are moreeasily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born in theopen pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen withclearer eyes what field they were called to labor in. Who made themserfs of the soil? Why should they eat their sixty acres, when man iscondemned to eat only his peck of dirt? Why should they begin diggingtheir graves as soon as they are born? They have got to live a man'slife, pushing all these things before them, and get on as well as theycan. How many a poor immortal soul have I met well-nigh crushed andsmothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing beforeit 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 inheritedencumbrances, find it labor enough to subdue and cultivate a few cubicfeet of flesh.But men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon plowedinto the soil for compost. By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity,they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures whichmoth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It isa fool's life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if notbefore. It is said that Deucalion and Pyrrha created men by throwingstones 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 thestones over their heads behind them, and not seeing where they fell.Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mereignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares andsuperfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot beplucked by them. Their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy andtremble too much for that. Actually, the laboring man has not leisurefor a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain themanliest 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 wellhis ignorance--which his growth requires--who has so often to use hisknowledge? We should feed and clothe him gratuitously sometimes, andrecruit him with our cordials, before we judge of him. The finestqualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved onlyby the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat ourselves nor oneanother 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 whor*ad this book are unable to pay for all the dinners which you haveactually eaten, or for the coats and shoes which are fast wearing or arealready worn out, and have come to this page to spend borrowed or stolentime, robbing your creditors of an hour. It is very evident what meanand sneaking lives many of you live, for my sight has been whetted byexperience; always on the limits, trying to get into business and tryingto get out of debt, a very ancient slough, called by the Latins _aesalienum_, another's brass, for some of their coins were made of brass;still living, and dying, and buried by this other's brass; alwayspromising 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, contractingyourselves into a nutshell of civility or dilating into an atmosphere ofthin and vaporous generosity, that you may persuade your neighbor to letyou make his shoes, or his hat, or his coat, or his carriage, or importhis groceries for him; making yourselves sick, that you may lay upsomething against a sick day, something to be tucked away in an oldchest, or in a stocking behind the plastering, or, more safely, in thebrick 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 toattend to the gross but somewhat foreign form of servitude called NegroSlavery, there are so many keen and subtle masters that enslave bothNorth and South. It is hard to have a Southern overseer; it is worse tohave a Northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driverof yourself. Talk of a divinity in man! Look at the teamster on thehighway, wending to market by day or night; does any divinity stirwithin him? His highest duty to fodder and water his horses! What is hisdestiny to him compared with the shipping interests? Does not he drivefor Squire Make-a-stir? How godlike, how immortal, is he? See how hecowers and sneaks, how vaguely all the day he fears, not being immortalnor divine, but the slave and prisoner of his own opinion of himself, afame won by his own deeds. Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared withour own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is whichdetermines, or rather indicates, his fate. Self-emancipation even in theWest Indian provinces of the fancy and imagination--what Wilberforceis there to bring that about? Think, also, of the ladies of the landweaving toilet cushions against the last day, not to betray too greenan interest in their fates! As if you could kill time without injuringeternity.The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is calledresignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city yougo into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with thebravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despairis concealed even under what are called the games and amusem*nts ofmankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it isa characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.When we consider what, to use the words of the catechism, is the chiefend of man, and what are the true necessaries and means of life, itappears as if men had deliberately chosen the common mode of livingbecause they preferred it to any other. Yet they honestly think there isno choice left. But alert and healthy natures remember that the sunrose clear. It is never too late to give up our prejudices. No way ofthinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof. Whateverybody echoes or in silence passes by as true to-day may turn out tobe falsehood to-morrow, mere smoke of opinion, which some had trustedfor a cloud that would sprinkle fertilizing rain on their fields. Whatold people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can. Old deedsfor old people, and new deeds for new. Old people did not know enoughonce, perchance, to fetch fresh fuel to keep the fire a-going; newpeople put a little dry wood under a pot, and are whirled round theglobe with the speed of birds, in a way to kill old people, as thephrase is. Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructoras youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost. One mayalmost doubt if the wisest man has learned anything of absolute value byliving. Practically, the old have no very important advice to give theyoung, their own experience has been so partial, and their lives havebeen such miserable failures, for private reasons, as they mustbelieve; and it may be that they have some faith left which belies thatexperience, and they are only less young than they were. I have livedsome thirty years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the firstsyllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors. They havetold 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 doesnot avail me that they have tried it. If I have any experience which Ithink valuable, I am sure to reflect that this my Mentors said nothingabout.One farmer says to me, "You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for itfurnishes nothing to make bones with"; and so he religiously devotes apart of his day to supplying his system with the raw material ofbones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, withvegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spiteof every obstacle. Some things are really necessaries of life in somecircles, the most helpless and diseased, which in others are luxuriesmerely, and in others still are entirely unknown.The whole ground of human life seems to some to have been gone over bytheir predecessors, both the heights and the valleys, and all things tohave been cared for. According to Evelyn, "the wise Solomon prescribedordinances for the very distances of trees; and the Roman prætors havedecided how often you may go into your neighbor's land to gather theacorns which fall on it without trespass, and what share belongs to thatneighbor." Hippocrates has even left directions how we should cut ournails; that is, even with the ends of the fingers, neither shorter norlonger. Undoubtedly the very tedium and ennui which presume to haveexhausted the variety and the joys of life are as old as Adam. But man'scapacities have never been measured; nor are we to judge of what he cando by any precedents, so little has been tried. Whatever have been thyfailures hitherto, "be not afflicted, my child, for who shall assign tothee 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 ofearths like ours. If I had remembered this it would have prevented somemistakes. This was not the light in which I hoed them. The stars are theapexes of what wonderful triangles! What distant and different beings inthe various mansions of the universe are contemplating the same one atthe same moment! Nature and human life are as various as our severalconstitutions. Who shall say what prospect life offers to another? Coulda greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other'seyes for an instant? We should live in all the ages of the world in anhour; ay, in all the worlds of the ages. History, Poetry, Mythology!--Iknow of no reading of another's experience so startling and informing asthis would be.The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soulto be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my goodbehavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well? You may saythe wisest thing you can, old man--you who have lived seventy years, notwithout honor of a kind--I hear an irresistible voice which invites meaway from all that. One generation abandons the enterprises of anotherlike stranded vessels.I think that we may safely trust a good deal more than we do. We maywaive just so much care of ourselves as we honestly bestow elsewhere.Nature is as well adapted to our weakness as to our strength. Theincessant anxiety and strain of some is a well-nigh incurable form ofdisease. 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 prayersand commit ourselves to uncertainties. So thoroughly and sincerely arewe compelled to live, reverencing our life, and denying the possibilityof change. This is the only way, we say; but there are as many ways asthere can be drawn radii from one centre. All change is a miracle tocontemplate; 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 notknow what we do not know, that is true knowledge." When one man hasreduced a fact of the imagination to be a fact to his understanding, Iforesee that all men at length establish their lives on that basis.Let us consider for a moment what most of the trouble and anxiety whichI have referred to is about, and how much it is necessary that we betroubled, or at least careful. It would be some advantage to livea primitive and frontier life, though in the midst of an outwardcivilization, if only to learn what are the gross necessaries of lifeand what methods have been taken to obtain them; or even to look overthe old day-books of the merchants, to see what it was that men mostcommonly bought at the stores, what they stored, that is, what are thegrossest groceries. For the improvements of ages have had but littleinfluence 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 manobtains by his own exertions, has been from the first, or from long usehas become, so important to human life that few, if any, whether fromsavageness, or poverty, or philosophy, ever attempt to do without it. Tomany 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 themountain's shadow. None of the brute creation requires more than Foodand 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 arewe prepared to entertain the true problems of life with freedom and aprospect of success. Man has invented, not only houses, but clothes andcooked food; and possibly from the accidental discovery of the warmth offire, and the consequent use of it, at first a luxury, arose the presentnecessity to sit by it. We observe cats and dogs acquiring the samesecond nature. By proper Shelter and Clothing we legitimately retainour own internal heat; but with an excess of these, or of Fuel, thatis, with an external heat greater than our own internal, may notcookery properly be said to begin? Darwin, the naturalist, says of theinhabitants of Tierra del Fuego, that while his own party, who were wellclothed and sitting close to a fire, were far from too warm, these nakedsavages, who were farther off, were observed, to his great surprise, "tobe streaming with perspiration at undergoing such a roasting." So, weare told, the New Hollander goes naked with impunity, while the Europeanshivers in his clothes. Is it impossible to combine the hardiness ofthese savages with the intellectualness of the civilized man? Accordingto Liebig, man's body is a stove, and food the fuel which keeps up theinternal combustion in the lungs. In cold weather we eat more, in warmless. The animal heat is the result of a slow combustion, and diseaseand death take place when this is too rapid; or for want of fuel, orfrom some defect in the draught, the fire goes out. Of course the vitalheat is not to be confounded with fire; but so much for analogy. Itappears, therefore, from the above list, that the expression, _animallife_, is nearly synonymous with the expression, _animal heat_; for whileFood may be regarded as the Fuel which keeps up the fire within us--andFuel serves only to prepare that Food or to increase the warmth of ourbodies by addition from without--Shelter and Clothing also serve only toretain the heat thus generated and absorbed.The grand necessity, then, for our bodies, is to keep warm, to keepthe vital heat in us. What pains we accordingly take, not only withour Food, and Clothing, and Shelter, but with our beds, which are ournight-clothes, robbing the nests and breasts of birds to prepare thisshelter within a shelter, as the mole has its bed of grass and leaves atthe end of its burrow! The poor man is wont to complain that this is acold world; and to cold, no less physical than social, we refer directlya great part of our ails. The summer, in some climates, makes possibleto man a sort of Elysian life. Fuel, except to cook his Food, isthen unnecessary; the sun is his fire, and many of the fruits aresufficiently cooked by its rays; while Food generally is more various,and more easily obtained, and Clothing and Shelter are wholly or halfunnecessary. At the present day, and in this country, as I find bymy own experience, a few implements, a knife, an axe, a spade, awheelbarrow, etc., and for the studious, lamplight, stationery, andaccess to a few books, rank next to necessaries, and can all be obtainedat a trifling cost. Yet some, not wise, go to the other side of theglobe, to barbarous and unhealthy regions, and devote themselves totrade for ten or twenty years, in order that they may live--that is,keep comfortably warm--and die in New England at last. The luxuriouslyrich are not simply kept comfortably warm, but unnaturally hot; as Iimplied before, they are cooked, of course _à la mode_.Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, arenot only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevationof mankind. With respect to luxuries and comforts, the wisest haveever lived a more simple and meagre life than the poor. The ancientphilosophers, Chinese, Hindoo, Persian, and Greek, were a class thanwhich none has been poorer in outward riches, none so rich in inward. Weknow not much about them. It is remarkable that we know so much of themas we do. The same is true of the more modern reformers and benefactorsof their race. None can be an impartial or wise observer of human lifebut from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary poverty.Of a life of luxury the fruit is luxury, whether in agriculture, orcommerce, or literature, or art. There are nowadays professors ofphilosophy, but not philosophers. Yet it is admirable to profess becauseit was once admirable to live. To be a philosopher is not merely to havesubtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom asto live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence,magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, notonly theoretically, but practically. The success of great scholars andthinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly.They make shift to live merely by conformity, practically as theirfathers 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 thenature of the luxury which enervates and destroys nations? Are we surethat there is none of it in our own lives? The philosopher is inadvance 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 aphilosopher and not maintain his vital heat by better methods than othermen?When a man is warmed by the several modes which I have described, whatdoes he want next? Surely not more warmth of the same kind, as more andricher food, larger and more splendid houses, finer and more abundantclothing, more numerous, incessant, and hotter fires, and the like.When he has obtained those things which are necessary to life, there isanother alternative than to obtain the superfluities; and that is, toadventure on life now, his vacation from humbler toil having commenced.The soil, it appears, is suited to the seed, for it has sent its radicledownward, and it may now send its shoot upward also with confidence. Whyhas man rooted himself thus firmly in the earth, but that he may rise inthe same proportion into the heavens above?--for the nobler plants arevalued for the fruit they bear at last in the air and light, far fromthe ground, and are not treated like the humbler esculents, which,though they may be biennials, are cultivated only till they haveperfected their root, and often cut down at top for this purpose, sothat most would not know them in their flowering season.I do not mean to prescribe rules to strong and valiant natures, who willmind their own affairs whether in heaven or hell, and perchance buildmore magnificently and spend more lavishly than the richest, withoutever impoverishing themselves, not knowing how they live--if, indeed,there are any such, as has been dreamed; nor to those who find theirencouragement and inspiration in precisely the present condition ofthings, 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 thosewho are well employed, in whatever circ*mstances, and they know whetherthey are well employed or not;--but mainly to the mass of men who arediscontented, and idly complaining of the hardness of their lot or ofthe times, when they might improve them. There are some who complainmost energetically and inconsolably of any, because they are, as theysay, 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 theirown golden or silver fetters. * * * * *If I should attempt to tell how I have desired to spend my life in yearspast, it would probably surprise those of my readers who are somewhatacquainted with its actual history; it would certainly astonish thosewho know nothing about it. I will only hint at some of the enterpriseswhich I have cherished.In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious toimprove the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on themeeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely thepresent 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 notvoluntarily kept, but inseparable from its very nature. I would gladlytell all that I know about it, and never paint "No Admittance" on mygate.I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle dove, and am stillon their trail. Many are the travellers I have spoken concerning them,describing their tracks and what calls they answered to. I have met oneor two who had heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and evenseen the dove disappear behind a cloud, and they seemed as anxious torecover 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 anyneighbor was stirring about his business, have I been about mine! Nodoubt, many of my townsmen have met me returning from this enterprise,farmers starting for Boston in the twilight, or woodchoppers goingto their work. It is true, I never assisted the sun materially in hisrising, but, doubt not, it was of the last importance only to be presentat it.So many autumn, ay, and winter days, spent outside the town, trying tohear what was in the wind, to hear and carry it express! I well-nighsunk 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 politicalparties, depend upon it, it would have appeared in the Gazette with theearliest intelligence. At other times watching from the observatory ofsome cliff or tree, to telegraph any new arrival; or waiting at eveningon the hill-tops for the sky to fall, that I might catch something,though I never caught much, and that, manna-wise, would dissolve againin the sun.For a long time I was reporter to a journal, of no very widecirculation, whose editor has never yet seen fit to print the bulk of mycontributions, and, as is too common with writers, I got only my laborfor my pains. However, in this case my pains were their own reward.For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snow-storms andrain-storms, and did my duty faithfully; surveyor, if not of highways,then of forest paths and all across-lot routes, keeping them open, andravines bridged and passable at all seasons, where the public heel hadtestified to their utility.I have looked after the wild stock of the town, which give a faithfulherdsman a good deal of trouble by leaping fences; and I have had aneye to the unfrequented nooks and corners of the farm; though I didnot always know whether Jonas or Solomon worked in a particularfield to-day; that was none of my business. I have watered the redhuckleberry, the sand cherry and the nettle-tree, the red pine andthe black ash, the white grape and the yellow violet, which might havewithered else in dry seasons.In short, I went on thus for a long time (I may say it withoutboasting), faithfully minding my business, till it became more and moreevident that my townsmen would not after all admit me into the list oftown 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 houseof a well-known lawyer in my neighborhood. "Do you wish to buy anybaskets?" 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 starveus?" Having seen his industrious white neighbors so well off--thatthe lawyer had only to weave arguments, and, by some magic, wealth andstanding followed--he had said to himself: I will go into business; Iwill weave baskets; it is a thing which I can do. Thinking that when hehad made the baskets he would have done his part, and then it would bethe white man's to buy them. He had not discovered that it was necessaryfor him to make it worth the other's while to buy them, or at least makehim think that it was so, or to make something else which it would beworth his while to buy. I too had woven a kind of basket of a delicatetexture, but I had not made it worth any one's while to buy them. Yetnot 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 mybaskets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them.The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind. Whyshould we exaggerate any one kind at the expense of the others?Finding that my fellow-citizens were not likely to offer me any room inthe court house, or any curacy or living anywhere else, but I must shiftfor 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, andnot wait to acquire the usual capital, using such slender means as I hadalready got. My purpose in going to Walden Pond was not to live cheaplynor to live dearly there, but to transact some private business with thefewest obstacles; to be hindered from accomplishing which for want of alittle common sense, a little enterprise and business talent, appearednot so sad as foolish.I have always endeavored to acquire strict business habits; they areindispensable to every man. If your trade is with the Celestial Empire,then some small counting house on the coast, in some Salem harbor, willbe 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 allthe details yourself in person; to be at once pilot and captain, andowner and underwriter; to buy and sell and keep the accounts; toread every letter received, and write or read every letter sent; tosuperintend the discharge of imports night and day; to be upon manyparts of the coast almost at the same time--often the richest freightwill be discharged upon a Jersey shore;--to be your own telegraph,unweariedly sweeping the horizon, speaking all passing vessels boundcoastwise; to keep up a steady despatch of commodities, for the supplyof such a distant and exorbitant market; to keep yourself informed ofthe state of the markets, prospects of war and peace everywhere, andanticipate the tendencies of trade and civilization--taking advantageof the results of all exploring expeditions, using new passages and allimprovements in navigation;--charts to be studied, the position of reefsand new lights and buoys to be ascertained, and ever, and ever, thelogarithmic tables to be corrected, for by the error of some calculatorthe vessel often splits upon a rock that should have reached a friendlypier--there is the untold fate of La Prouse;--universal science tobe kept pace with, studying the lives of all great discoverers andnavigators, great adventurers and merchants, from Hanno and thePhoenicians down to our day; in fine, account of stock to be taken fromtime to time, to know how you stand. It is a labor to task the facultiesof a man--such problems of profit and loss, of interest, of tare andtret, 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 offersadvantages which it may not be good policy to divulge; it is a good portand a good foundation. No Neva marshes to be filled; though you musteverywhere build on piles of your own driving. It is said that aflood-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, itmay not be easy to conjecture where those means, that will still beindispensable to every such undertaking, were to be obtained. As forClothing, to come at once to the practical part of the question, perhapswe are led oftener by the love of novelty and a regard for the opinionsof men, in procuring it, than by a true utility. Let him who has work todo recollect that the object of clothing is, first, to retain the vitalheat, and secondly, in this state of society, to cover nakedness, andhe may judge how much of any necessary or important work may beaccomplished without adding to his wardrobe. Kings and queens who weara suit but once, though made by some tailor or dressmaker to theirmajesties, cannot know the comfort of wearing a suit that fits. They areno better than wooden horses to hang the clean clothes on. Every day ourgarments become more assimilated to ourselves, receiving the impress ofthe wearer's character, until we hesitate to lay them aside without suchdelay 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 hisclothes; yet I am sure that there is greater anxiety, commonly, to havefashionable, or at least clean and unpatched clothes, than to have asound conscience. But even if the rent is not mended, perhaps the worstvice betrayed is improvidence. I sometimes try my acquaintances by suchtests as this--Who could wear a patch, or two extra seams only, overthe knee? Most behave as if they believed that their prospects for lifewould be ruined if they should do it. It would be easier for them tohobble to town with a broken leg than with a broken pantaloon. Often ifan accident happens to a gentleman's legs, they can be mended; but if asimilar accident happens to the legs of his pantaloons, there is no helpfor it; for he considers, not what is truly respectable, but what isrespected. We know but few men, a great many coats and breeches. Dressa scarecrow in your last shift, you standing shiftless by, who would notsoonest salute the scarecrow? Passing a cornfield the other day, closeby a hat and coat on a stake, I recognized the owner of the farm. He wasonly a little more weather-beaten than when I saw him last. I haveheard of a dog that barked at every stranger who approached his master'spremises with clothes on, but was easily quieted by a naked thief. It isan interesting question how far men would retain their relative rankif they were divested of their clothes. Could you, in such a case,tell surely of any company of civilized men which belonged to the mostrespected class? When Madam Pfeiffer, in her adventurous travels roundthe 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 travellingdress, when she went to meet the authorities, for she "was now in acivilized country, where... people are judged of by their clothes." Evenin our democratic New England towns the accidental possession of wealth,and its manifestation in dress and equipage alone, obtain for thepossessor almost universal respect. But they yield such respect,numerous as they are, are so far heathen, and need to have a missionarysent to them. Beside, clothes introduced sewing, a kind of work whichyou 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 newsuit to do it in; for him the old will do, that has lain dusty in thegarret for an indeterminate period. Old shoes will serve a hero longerthan they have served his valet--if a hero ever has a valet--bare feetare older than shoes, and he can make them do. Only they who go tosoirées and legislative balls must have new coats, coats to change asoften as the man changes in them. But if my jacket and trousers, my hatand shoes, are fit to worship God in, they will do; will they not? Whoever saw his old clothes--his old coat, actually worn out, resolved intoits primitive elements, so that it was not a deed of charity to bestowit on some poor boy, by him perchance to be bestowed on some poorerstill, or shall we say richer, who could do with less? I say, beware ofall enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer ofclothes. If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made tofit? 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 rathersomething to _be_. Perhaps we should never procure a new suit, howeverragged or dirty the old, until we have so conducted, so enterprised orsailed in some way, that we feel like new men in the old, and that toretain it would be like keeping new wine in old bottles. Our moultingseason, like that of the fowls, must be a crisis in our lives. The loonretires to solitary ponds to spend it. Thus also the snake casts itsslough, and the caterpillar its wormy coat, by an internal industryand expansion; for clothes are but our outmost cuticle and mortalcoil. Otherwise we shall be found sailing under false colors, and beinevitably cashiered at last by our own opinion, as well as that ofmankind.We don garment after garment, as if we grew like exogenous plants byaddition without. Our outside and often thin and fanciful clothes areour epidermis, or false skin, which partakes not of our life, and may bestripped off here and there without fatal injury; our thicker garments,constantly worn, are our cellular integument, or cortex; but our shirtsare our liber, or true bark, which cannot be removed without girdlingand so destroying the man. I believe that all races at some seasons wearsomething equivalent to the shirt. It is desirable that a man be cladso simply that he can lay his hands on himself in the dark, and that helive in all respects so compactly and preparedly that, if an enemytake the town, he can, like the old philosopher, walk out the gateempty-handed without anxiety. While one thick garment is, for mostpurposes, as good as three thin ones, and cheap clothing can be obtainedat prices really to suit customers; while a thick coat can be bought forfive dollars, which will last as many years, thick pantaloons for twodollars, cowhide boots for a dollar and a half a pair, a summer hat fora 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 wisem*n to do him reverence?When I ask for a garment of a particular form, my tailoress tells megravely, "They do not make them so now," not emphasizing the "They" atall, as if she quoted an authority as impersonal as the Fates, and Ifind it difficult to get made what I want, simply because she cannotbelieve that I mean what I say, that I am so rash. When I hear thisoracular sentence, I am for a moment absorbed in thought, emphasizing tomyself each word separately that I may come at the meaning of it, that Imay find out by what degree of consanguinity _They_ are related to _me_,and what authority they may have in an affair which affects me sonearly; and, finally, I am inclined to answer her with equal mystery,and without any more emphasis of the "they"--"It is true, they did notmake them so recently, but they do now." Of what use this measuring ofme if she does not measure my character, but only the breadth of myshoulders, as it were a peg to hang the coat on? We worship not theGraces, nor the Parcae, but Fashion. She spins and weaves and cuts withfull authority. The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveller's cap, andall the monkeys in America do the same. I sometimes despair of gettinganything 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 squeezetheir old notions out of them, so that they would not soon get upontheir legs again; and then there would be some one in the company with amaggot in his head, hatched from an egg deposited there nobody knowswhen, for not even fire kills these things, and you would have lost yourlabor. Nevertheless, we will not forget that some Egyptian wheat washanded down to us by a mummy.On the whole, I think that it cannot be maintained that dressing has inthis or any country risen to the dignity of an art. At present men makeshift to wear what they can get. Like shipwrecked sailors, they put onwhat they can find on the beach, and at a little distance, whether ofspace or time, laugh at each other's masquerade. Every generation laughsat the old fashions, but follows religiously the new. We are amused atbeholding the costume of Henry VIII, or Queen Elizabeth, as much as ifit was that of the King and Queen of the Cannibal Islands. All costumeoff a man is pitiful or grotesque. It is only the serious eye peeringfrom and the sincere life passed within it which restrain laughter andconsecrate the costume of any people. Let Harlequin be taken with a fitof the colic and his trappings will have to serve that mood too. Whenthe soldier is hit by a cannonball, rags are as becoming as purple.The childish and savage taste of men and women for new patterns keepshow many shaking and squinting through kaleidoscopes that they maydiscover the particular figure which this generation requires today. Themanufacturers have learned that this taste is merely whimsical. Of twopatterns which differ only by a few threads more or less of a particularcolor, the one will be sold readily, the other lie on the shelf, thoughit frequently happens that after the lapse of a season the latterbecomes the most fashionable. Comparatively, tattooing is not thehideous custom which it is called. It is not barbarous merely becausethe printing is skin-deep and unalterable.I cannot believe that our factory system is the best mode by which menmay get clothing. The condition of the operatives is becoming every daymore like that of the English; and it cannot be wondered at, since,as far as I have heard or observed, the principal object is, notthat mankind may be well and honestly clad, but, unquestionably, thatcorporations may be enriched. In the long run men hit only what they aimat. Therefore, though they should fail immediately, they had better aimat something high.As for a Shelter, I will not deny that this is now a necessary oflife, though there are instances of men having done without it forlong periods in colder countries than this. Samuel Laing says that "theLaplander in his skin dress, and in a skin bag which he puts over hishead and shoulders, will sleep night after night on the snow... in adegree of cold which would extinguish the life of one exposed to it inany woollen clothing." He had seen them asleep thus. Yet he adds, "Theyare not hardier than other people." But, probably, man did not live longon the earth without discovering the convenience which there is in ahouse, the domestic comforts, which phrase may have originally signifiedthe satisfactions of the house more than of the family; though thesemust be extremely partial and occasional in those climates where thehouse is associated in our thoughts with winter or the rainy seasonchiefly, and two thirds of the year, except for a parasol, isunnecessary. In our climate, in the summer, it was formerly almostsolely a covering at night. In the Indian gazettes a wigwam was thesymbol of a day's march, and a row of them cut or painted on the bark ofa tree signified that so many times they had camped. Man was not madeso large limbed and robust but that he must seek to narrow his worldand wall in a space such as fitted him. He was at first bare and out ofdoors; but though this was pleasant enough in serene and warm weather,by daylight, the rainy season and the winter, to say nothing of thetorrid sun, would perhaps have nipped his race in the bud if he had notmade haste to clothe himself with the shelter of a house. Adam and Eve,according to the fable, wore the bower before other clothes. Man wanteda home, a place of warmth, or comfort, first of warmth, then the warmthof the affections.We may imagine a time when, in the infancy of the human race, someenterprising mortal crept into a hollow in a rock for shelter. Everychild begins the world again, to some extent, and loves to stayoutdoors, even in wet and cold. It plays house, as well as horse, havingan instinct for it. Who does not remember the interest with which, whenyoung, he looked at shelving rocks, or any approach to a cave? It wasthe natural yearning of that portion, any portion of our most primitiveancestor which still survived in us. From the cave we have advanced toroofs of palm leaves, of bark and boughs, of linen woven and stretched,of grass and straw, of boards and shingles, of stones and tiles. Atlast, we know not what it is to live in the open air, and our lives aredomestic in more senses than we think. From the hearth the field is agreat distance. It would be well, perhaps, if we were to spend more ofour days and nights without any obstruction between us and the celestialbodies, if the poet did not speak so much from under a roof, or thesaint dwell there so long. Birds do not sing in caves, nor do dovescherish their innocence in dovecots.However, if one designs to construct a dwelling-house, it behooves himto exercise a little Yankee shrewdness, lest after all he find himselfin a workhouse, a labyrinth without a clue, a museum, an almshouse, aprison, or a splendid mausoleum instead. Consider first how slight ashelter is absolutely necessary. I have seen Penobscot Indians, in thistown, living in tents of thin cotton cloth, while the snow was nearly afoot deep around them, and I thought that they would be glad to haveit deeper to keep out the wind. Formerly, when how to get my livinghonestly, with freedom left for my proper pursuits, was a questionwhich vexed me even more than it does now, for unfortunately I am becomesomewhat callous, I used to see a large box by the railroad, six feetlong by three wide, in which the laborers locked up their tools atnight; and it suggested to me that every man who was hard pushed mightget 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, andhook down the lid, and so have freedom in his love, and in his soulbe free. This did not appear the worst, nor by any means a despicablealternative. You could sit up as late as you pleased, and, whenever yougot up, go abroad without any landlord or house-lord dogging you forrent. Many a man is harassed to death to pay the rent of a larger andmore luxurious box who would not have frozen to death in such a box asthis. I am far from jesting. Economy is a subject which admits of beingtreated with levity, but it cannot so be disposed of. A comfortablehouse for a rude and hardy race, that lived mostly out of doors, wasonce made here almost entirely of such materials as Nature furnishedready to their hands. Gookin, who was superintendent of the Indianssubject to the Massachusetts Colony, writing in 1674, says, "The bestof their houses are covered very neatly, tight and warm, with barks oftrees, slipped from their bodies at those seasons when the sap is up,and made into great flakes, with pressure of weighty timber, when theyare green.... The meaner sort are covered with mats which they make ofa kind of bulrush, and are also indifferently tight and warm, but notso good as the former.... Some I have seen, sixty or a hundred feetlong and thirty feet broad.... I have often lodged in their wigwams, andfound them as warm as the best English houses." He adds that they werecommonly carpeted and lined within with well-wrought embroidered mats,and were furnished with various utensils. The Indians had advanced sofar as to regulate the effect of the wind by a mat suspended over thehole in the roof and moved by a string. Such a lodge was in the firstinstance constructed in a day or two at most, and taken down and put upin 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, andsufficient for its coarser and simpler wants; but I think that I speakwithin bounds when I say that, though the birds of the air have theirnests, and the foxes their holes, and the savages their wigwams, inmodern civilized society not more than one half the families own ashelter. In the large towns and cities, where civilization especiallyprevails, the number of those who own a shelter is a very small fractionof the whole. The rest pay an annual tax for this outside garment ofall, become indispensable summer and winter, which would buy a villageof 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 withowning, but it is evident that the savage owns his shelter because itcosts so little, while the civilized man hires his commonly because hecannot afford to own it; nor can he, in the long run, any better affordto hire. But, answers one, by merely paying this tax, the poor civilizedman secures an abode which is a palace compared with the savage's. Anannual rent of from twenty-five to a hundred dollars (these are thecountry rates) entitles him to the benefit of the improvementsof centuries, spacious apartments, clean paint and paper, Rumfordfire-place, back plastering, Venetian blinds, copper pump, spring lock,a commodious cellar, and many other things. But how happens it that hewho is said to enjoy these things is so commonly a poor civilizedman, while the savage, who has them not, is rich as a savage? If itis asserted that civilization is a real advance in the conditionof man--and I think that it is, though only the wise improve theiradvantages--it must be shown that it has produced better dwellingswithout making them more costly; and the cost of a thing is the amountof what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it,immediately or in the long run. An average house in this neighborhoodcosts perhaps eight hundred dollars, and to lay up this sum will takefrom ten to fifteen years of the laborer's life, even if he is notencumbered with a family--estimating the pecuniary value of every man'slabor at one dollar a day, for if some receive more, others receiveless;--so that he must have spent more than half his life commonlybefore his wigwam will be earned. If we suppose him to pay a rentinstead, this is but a doubtful choice of evils. Would the savage havebeen wise to exchange his wigwam for a palace on these terms?It may be guessed that I reduce almost the whole advantage of holdingthis superfluous property as a fund in store against the future, sofar as the individual is concerned, mainly to the defraying offuneral expenses. But perhaps a man is not required to bury himself.Nevertheless this points to an important distinction between thecivilized man and the savage; and, no doubt, they have designs on us forour benefit, in making the life of a civilized people an _institution_, inwhich the life of the individual is to a great extent absorbed, in orderto preserve and perfect that of the race. But I wish to show at what asacrifice this advantage is at present obtained, and to suggest that wemay possibly so live as to secure all the advantage without sufferingany of the disadvantage. What mean ye by saying that the poor ye havealways with you, or that the fathers have eaten sour grapes, and thechildren's teeth are set on edge?"As I live, saith the Lord God, ye shall not have occasion any more touse this proverb in Israel."Behold all souls are mine; as the soul of the father, so also the soulof the son is mine: the soul that sinneth, it shall die."When I consider my neighbors, the farmers of Concord, who are at leastas well off as the other classes, I find that for the most part theyhave been toiling twenty, thirty, or forty years, that they may becomethe real owners of their farms, which commonly they have inherited withencumbrances, or else bought with hired money--and we may regard onethird of that toil as the cost of their houses--but commonly they havenot paid for them yet. It is true, the encumbrances sometimes outweighthe value of the farm, so that the farm itself becomes one greatencumbrance, and still a man is found to inherit it, being wellacquainted with it, as he says. On applying to the assessors, I amsurprised to learn that they cannot at once name a dozen in the town whoown their farms free and clear. If you would know the history of thesehomesteads, inquire at the bank where they are mortgaged. The man whohas actually paid for his farm with labor on it is so rare that everyneighbor can point to him. I doubt if there are three such men inConcord. What has been said of the merchants, that a very largemajority, even ninety-seven in a hundred, are sure to fail, is equallytrue of the farmers. With regard to the merchants, however, one of themsays pertinently that a great part of their failures are not genuinepecuniary failures, but merely failures to fulfil their engagements,because it is inconvenient; that is, it is the moral character thatbreaks down. But this puts an infinitely worse face on the matter, andsuggests, beside, that probably not even the other three succeed insaving their souls, but are perchance bankrupt in a worse sense thanthey who fail honestly. Bankruptcy and repudiation are the springboardsfrom which much of our civilization vaults and turns its somersets, butthe savage stands on the unelastic plank of famine. Yet the MiddlesexCattle Show goes off here with _éclat_ annually, as if all the joints ofthe agricultural machine were suent.The farmer is endeavoring to solve the problem of a livelihood by aformula more complicated than the problem itself. To get his shoestringshe speculates in herds of cattle. With consummate skill he has set histrap with a hair spring to catch comfort and independence, and then, ashe 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 savagecomforts, 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 thepoorer for it, and it be the house that has got him. As I understandit, that was a valid objection urged by Momus against the house whichMinerva made, that she "had not made it movable, by which means a badneighborhood might be avoided"; and it may still be urged, for ourhouses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned ratherthan housed in them; and the bad neighborhood to be avoided is our ownscurvy selves. I know one or two families, at least, in this town, who,for nearly a generation, have been wishing to sell their houses inthe outskirts and move into the village, but have not been able toaccomplish it, and only death will set them free.Granted that the majority are able at last either to own or hire themodern house with all its improvements. While civilization has beenimproving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are toinhabit them. It has created palaces, but it was not so easy to createnoblemen and kings. And _if the civilized man's pursuits are no worthierthan the savage's, if he is employed the greater part of his life inobtaining gross necessaries and comforts merely, why should he have abetter dwelling than the former?_But how do the poor minority fare? Perhaps it will be found that just inproportion as some have been placed in outward circ*mstances above thesavage, others have been degraded below him. The luxury of one classis counterbalanced by the indigence of another. On the one side is thepalace, on the other are the almshouse and "silent poor." The myriadswho built the pyramids to be the tombs of the Pharaohs were fed ongarlic, and it may be were not decently buried themselves. The mason whofinishes the cornice of the palace returns at night perchance to a hutnot so good as a wigwam. It is a mistake to suppose that, in a countrywhere the usual evidences of civilization exist, the condition of a verylarge 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 thisI should not need to look farther than to the shanties which everywhereborder our railroads, that last improvement in civilization; where I seein my daily walks human beings living in sties, and all winter with anopen door, for the sake of light, without any visible, often imaginable,wood-pile, and the forms of both old and young are permanentlycontracted by the long habit of shrinking from cold and misery, and thedevelopment of all their limbs and faculties is checked. It certainlyis fair to look at that class by whose labor the works which distinguishthis 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 toIreland, which is marked as one of the white or enlightened spots on themap. Contrast the physical condition of the Irish with that of the NorthAmerican Indian, or the South Sea Islander, or any other savage racebefore it was degraded by contact with the civilized man. Yet I have nodoubt that that people's rulers are as wise as the average of civilizedrulers. Their condition only proves what squalidness may consist withcivilization. I hardly need refer now to the laborers in our SouthernStates who produce the staple exports of this country, and arethemselves a staple production of the South. But to confine myself tothose who are said to be in _moderate_ circ*mstances.Most men appear never to have considered what a house is, and areactually though needlessly poor all their lives because they think thatthey must have such a one as their neighbors have. As if one wereto 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, complainof hard times because he could not afford to buy him a crown! It ispossible to invent a house still more convenient and luxurious than wehave, 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 sometimesto be content with less? Shall the respectable citizen thus gravelyteach, by precept and example, the necessity of the young man'sproviding a certain number of superfluous glow-shoes, and umbrellas, andempty guest chambers for empty guests, before he dies? Why should notour furniture be as simple as the Arab's or the Indian's? When I thinkof the benefactors of the race, whom we have apotheosized as messengersfrom heaven, bearers of divine gifts to man, I do not see in my mind anyretinue at their heels, any carload of fashionable furniture. Or whatif I were to allow--would it not be a singular allowance?--that ourfurniture should be more complex than the Arab's, in proportion as weare morally and intellectually his superiors! At present our houses arecluttered and defiled with it, and a good housewife would sweep outthe greater part into the dust hole, and not leave her morning's workundone. 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 oflimestone on my desk, but I was terrified to find that they required tobe 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 afurnished house? I would rather sit in the open air, for no dust gatherson the grass, unless where man has broken ground.It is the luxurious and dissipated who set the fashions which the herdso diligently follow. The traveller who stops at the best houses, socalled, soon discovers this, for the publicans presume him to be aSardanapalus, and if he resigned himself to their tender mercies hewould soon be completely emasculated. I think that in the railroad carwe are inclined to spend more on luxury than on safety and convenience,and it threatens without attaining these to become no better than amodern 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 theCelestial Empire, which Jonathan should be ashamed to know the namesof. I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself than becrowded on a velvet cushion. I would rather ride on earth in an oxcart, with a free circulation, than go to heaven in the fancy car of anexcursion train and breathe a _malaria_ all the way.The very simplicity and nakedness of man's life in the primitive agesimply this advantage, at least, that they left him still but a sojournerin nature. When he was refreshed with food and sleep, he contemplatedhis journey again. He dwelt, as it were, in a tent in this world, andwas either threading the valleys, or crossing the plains, or climbingthe mountain-tops. But lo! men have become the tools of their tools. Theman who independently plucked the fruits when he was hungry is become afarmer; and he who stood under a tree for shelter, a housekeeper. Wenow no longer camp as for a night, but have settled down on earth andforgotten heaven. We have adopted Christianity merely as an improvedmethod 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 expressionof man's struggle to free himself from this condition, but the effectof our art is merely to make this low state comfortable and that higherstate to be forgotten. There is actually no place in this village for awork 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 nota nail to hang a picture on, nor a shelf to receive the bust of a heroor a saint. When I consider how our houses are built and paid for, ornot paid for, and their internal economy managed and sustained, I wonderthat the floor does not give way under the visitor while he is admiringthe gewgaws upon the mantelpiece, and let him through into the cellar,to some solid and honest though earthy foundation. I cannot but perceivethat this so-called rich and refined life is a thing jumped at, and Ido not get on in the enjoyment of the fine arts which adorn it, myattention being wholly occupied with the jump; for I remember that thegreatest genuine leap, due to human muscles alone, on record, is that ofcertain wandering Arabs, who are said to have cleared twenty-five feeton level ground. Without factitious support, man is sure to come toearth again beyond that distance. The first question which I am temptedto put to the proprietor of such great impropriety is, Who bolstersyou? 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 bawblesand find them ornamental. The cart before the horse is neither beautifulnor useful. Before we can adorn our houses with beautiful objects thewalls must be stripped, and our lives must be stripped, and beautifulhousekeeping and beautiful living be laid for a foundation: now, a tastefor the beautiful is most cultivated out of doors, where there is nohouse and no housekeeper.Old Johnson, in his "Wonder-Working Providence," speaking of the firstsettlers of this town, with whom he was contemporary, tells us that"they burrow themselves in the earth for their first shelter under somehillside, and, casting the soil aloft upon timber, they make a smokyfire against the earth, at the highest side." They did not "provide themhouses," says he, "till the earth, by the Lord's blessing, brought forthbread 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." Thesecretary of the Province of New Netherland, writing in Dutch, in 1650,for the information of those who wished to take up land there, statesmore particularly that "those in New Netherland, and especially in NewEngland, who have no means to build farmhouses at first according totheir wishes, dig a square pit in the ground, cellar fashion, six orseven feet deep, as long and as broad as they think proper, case theearth inside with wood all round the wall, and line the wood with thebark 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 greensods, so that they can live dry and warm in these houses with theirentire families for two, three, and four years, it being understood thatpartitions are run through those cellars which are adapted to the sizeof the family. The wealthy and principal men in New England, in thebeginning of the colonies, commenced their first dwelling-houses inthis fashion for two reasons: firstly, in order not to waste time inbuilding, and not to want food the next season; secondly, in order notto discourage poor laboring people whom they brought over in numbersfrom Fatherland. In the course of three or four years, when the countrybecame 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 prudenceat least, as if their principle were to satisfy the more pressing wantsfirst. But are the more pressing wants satisfied now? When I think ofacquiring 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 arestill forced to cut our _spiritual_ bread far thinner than our forefathersdid their wheaten. Not that all architectural ornament is to beneglected even in the rudest periods; but let our houses first belined with beauty, where they come in contact with our lives, like thetenement of the shellfish, and not overlaid with it. But, alas! I havebeen 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 acave or a wigwam or wear skins today, it certainly is better to acceptthe advantages, though so dearly bought, which the invention andindustry of mankind offer. In such a neighborhood as this, boards andshingles, lime and bricks, are cheaper and more easily obtained thansuitable caves, or whole logs, or bark in sufficient quantities, oreven well-tempered clay or flat stones. I speak understandingly on thissubject, for I have made myself acquainted with it both theoreticallyand practically. With a little more wit we might use these materials soas to become richer than the richest now are, and make our civilizationa 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 thewoods by Walden Pond, nearest to where I intended to build my house, andbegan to cut down some tall, arrowy white pines, still in their youth,for timber. It is difficult to begin without borrowing, but perhaps itis the most generous course thus to permit your fellow-men to have aninterest in your enterprise. The owner of the axe, as he released hishold on it, said that it was the apple of his eye; but I returned itsharper 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 asmall open field in the woods where pines and hickories were springingup. The ice in the pond was not yet dissolved, though there were someopen spaces, and it was all dark-colored and saturated with water. Therewere 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 myway home, its yellow sand heap stretched away gleaming in the hazyatmosphere, and the rails shone in the spring sun, and I heard the larkand pewee and other birds already come to commence another year with us.They were pleasant spring days, in which the winter of man's discontentwas thawing as well as the earth, and the life that had lain torpidbegan to stretch itself. One day, when my axe had come off and I had cuta green hickory for a wedge, driving it with a stone, and had placed thewhole to soak in a pond-hole in order to swell the wood, I saw a stripedsnake run into the water, and he lay on the bottom, apparently withoutinconvenience, as long as I stayed there, or more than a quarter ofan hour; perhaps because he had not yet fairly come out of the torpidstate. It appeared to me that for a like reason men remain in theirpresent low and primitive condition; but if they should feel theinfluence of the spring of springs arousing them, they would ofnecessity rise to a higher and more ethereal life. I had previously seenthe snakes in frosty mornings in my path with portions of their bodiesstill numb and inflexible, waiting for the sun to thaw them. On the 1stof 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 pondand cackling as if lost, or like the spirit of the fog.So I went on for some days cutting and hewing timber, and also studsand rafters, all with my narrow axe, not having many communicable orscholar-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 twosides only, and the rafters and floor timbers on one side, leavingthe rest of the bark on, so that they were just as straight and muchstronger than sawed ones. Each stick was carefully mortised or tenonedby its stump, for I had borrowed other tools by this time. My days inthe woods were not very long ones; yet I usually carried my dinner ofbread and butter, and read the newspaper in which it was wrapped, atnoon, sitting amid the green pine boughs which I had cut off, and to mybread was imparted some of their fragrance, for my hands were coveredwith a thick coat of pitch. Before I had done I was more the friend thanthe foe of the pine tree, though I had cut down some of them, havingbecome better acquainted with it. Sometimes a rambler in the wood wasattracted by the sound of my axe, and we chatted pleasantly over thechips which I had made.By the middle of April, for I made no haste in my work, but rather madethe most of it, my house was framed and ready for the raising. I hadalready bought the shanty of James Collins, an Irishman who worked onthe Fitchburg Railroad, for boards. James Collins' shanty was consideredan uncommonly fine one. When I called to see it he was not at home. Iwalked about the outside, at first unobserved from within, the windowwas so deep and high. It was of small dimensions, with a peaked cottageroof, and not much else to be seen, the dirt being raised five feet allaround 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 therewas 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. Thehens were driven in by my approach. It was dark, and had a dirt floorfor the most part, dank, clammy, and aguish, only here a board and therea board which would not bear removal. She lighted a lamp to show me theinside of the roof and the walls, and also that the board floor extendedunder the bed, warning me not to step into the cellar, a sort of dusthole two feet deep. In her own words, they were "good boards overhead,good boards all around, and a good window"--of two whole squaresoriginally, only the cat had passed out that way lately. There was astove, a bed, and a place to sit, an infant in the house where itwas born, a silk parasol, gilt-framed looking-glass, and a patent newcoffee-mill nailed to an oak sapling, all told. The bargain was soonconcluded, for James had in the meanwhile returned. I to pay fourdollars and twenty-five cents tonight, he to vacate at five tomorrowmorning, selling to nobody else meanwhile: I to take possession atsix. It were well, he said, to be there early, and anticipate certainindistinct but wholly unjust claims on the score of ground rent andfuel. This he assured me was the only encumbrance. At six I passedhim 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 woodsand became a wild cat, and, as I learned afterward, trod in a trap setfor woodchucks, and so became a dead cat at last.I took down this dwelling the same morning, drawing the nails, andremoved it to the pond-side by small cartloads, spreading the boardson the grass there to bleach and warp back again in the sun. One earlythrush gave me a note or two as I drove along the woodland path. Iwas informed treacherously by a young Patrick that neighbor Seeley,an Irishman, in the intervals of the carting, transferred the stilltolerable, straight, and drivable nails, staples, and spikes to hispocket, and then stood when I came back to pass the time of day, andlook freshly up, unconcerned, with spring thoughts, at the devastation;there being a dearth of work, as he said. He was there to representspectatordom, and help make this seemingly insignificant event one withthe removal of the gods of Troy.I dug my cellar in the side of a hill sloping to the south, wherea woodchuck had formerly dug his burrow, down through sumach andblackberry roots, and the lowest stain of vegetation, six feet squareby seven deep, to a fine sand where potatoes would not freeze in anywinter. The sides were left shelving, and not stoned; but the sun havingnever shone on them, the sand still keeps its place. It was but twohours' work. I took particular pleasure in this breaking of ground,for in almost all latitudes men dig into the earth for an equabletemperature. Under the most splendid house in the city is still to befound the cellar where they store their roots as of old, and long afterthe superstructure has disappeared posterity remark its dent in theearth. The house is still but a sort of porch at the entrance of aburrow.At length, in the beginning of May, with the help of some of myacquaintances, rather to improve so good an occasion for neighborlinessthan from any necessity, I set up the frame of my house. No man was evermore 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 beganto occupy my house on the 4th of July, as soon as it was boarded androofed, for the boards were carefully feather-edged and lapped, so thatit was perfectly impervious to rain, but before boarding I laid thefoundation of a chimney at one end, bringing two cartloads of stones upthe hill from the pond in my arms. I built the chimney after my hoeingin the fall, before a fire became necessary for warmth, doing my cookingin the meanwhile out of doors on the ground, early in the morning: whichmode I still think is in some respects more convenient and agreeablethan the usual one. When it stormed before my bread was baked, I fixeda few boards over the fire, and sat under them to watch my loaf, andpassed some pleasant hours in that way. In those days, when my handswere much employed, I read but little, but the least scraps of paperwhich lay on the ground, my holder, or tablecloth, afforded me as muchentertainment, 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 anysuperstructure until we found a better reason for it than our temporalnecessities even. There is some of the same fitness in a man's buildinghis own house that there is in a bird's building its own nest. Whoknows but if men constructed their dwellings with their own hands, andprovided food for themselves and families simply and honestly enough,the poetic faculty would be universally developed, as birds universallysing when they are so engaged? But alas! we do like cowbirds andcuckoos, which lay their eggs in nests which other birds have built, andcheer no traveller with their chattering and unmusical notes. Shall weforever resign the pleasure of construction to the carpenter? What doesarchitecture amount to in the experience of the mass of men? I neverin all my walks came across a man engaged in so simple and natural anoccupation as building his house. We belong to the community. It isnot the tailor alone who is the ninth part of a man; it is as much thepreacher, and the merchant, and the farmer. Where is this division oflabor 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 shoulddo so to the exclusion of my thinking for myself.True, there are architects so called in this country, and I haveheard of one at least possessed with the idea of making architecturalornaments have a core of truth, a necessity, and hence a beauty, as ifit were a revelation to him. All very well perhaps from his pointof view, but only a little better than the common dilettantism. Asentimental reformer in architecture, he began at the cornice, notat the foundation. It was only how to put a core of truth within theornaments, that every sugarplum, in fact, might have an almond orcaraway seed in it--though I hold that almonds are most wholesomewithout the sugar--and not how the inhabitant, the indweller, mightbuild truly within and without, and let the ornaments take care ofthemselves. What reasonable man ever supposed that ornaments weresomething outward and in the skin merely--that the tortoise got hisspotted shell, or the shell-fish its mother-o'-pearl tints, by such acontract as the inhabitants of Broadway their Trinity Church? But a manhas no more to do with the style of architecture of his house than atortoise with that of its shell: nor need the soldier be so idle as totry to paint the precise color of his virtue on his standard. The enemywill find it out. He may turn pale when the trial comes. This man seemedto me to lean over the cornice, and timidly whisper his half truthto the rude occupants who really knew it better than he. What ofarchitectural beauty I now see, I know has gradually grown from withinoutward, out of the necessities and character of the indweller, who isthe only builder--out of some unconscious truthfulness, and nobleness,without ever a thought for the appearance and whatever additional beautyof this kind is destined to be produced will be preceded by a likeunconscious beauty of life. The most interesting dwellings in thiscountry, as the painter knows, are the most unpretending, humblelog huts and cottages of the poor commonly; it is the life of theinhabitants whose shells they are, and not any peculiarity in theirsurfaces merely, which makes them picturesque; and equally interestingwill be the citizen's suburban box, when his life shall be as simple andas agreeable to the imagination, and there is as little straining aftereffect in the style of his dwelling. A great proportion of architecturalornaments are literally hollow, and a September gale would strip themoff, like borrowed plumes, without injury to the substantials. They cando without architecture who have no olives nor wines in the cellar. Whatif an equal ado were made about the ornaments of style in literature,and the architects of our bibles spent as much time about their cornicesas the architects of our churches do? So are made the _belles-lettres_ andthe _beaux-arts_ and their professors. Much it concerns a man, forsooth,how a few sticks are slanted over him or under him, and what colorsare daubed upon his box. It would signify somewhat, if, in any earnestsense, he slanted them and daubed it; but the spirit having departed outof the tenant, it is of a piece with constructing his own coffin--thearchitecture 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 thatcolor. Is he thinking of his last and narrow house? Toss up a copper forit as well. What an abundance of leisure he must have! Why do you takeup a handful of dirt? Better paint your house your own complexion; letit turn pale or blush for you. An enterprise to improve the style ofcottage architecture! When you have got my ornaments ready, I will wearthem.Before winter I built a chimney, and shingled the sides of my house,which were already impervious to rain, with imperfect and sappy shinglesmade of the first slice of the log, whose edges I was obliged tostraighten with a plane.I have thus a tight shingled and plastered house, ten feet wide byfifteen long, and eight-feet posts, with a garret and a closet, a largewindow on each side, two trap doors, one door at the end, and a brickfireplace opposite. The exact cost of my house, paying the usual pricefor such materials as I used, but not counting the work, all of whichwas done by myself, was as follows; and I give the details because veryfew are able to tell exactly what their houses cost, and fewer still, ifany, 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...................... $28.12-1/2These are all the materials, excepting the timber, stones, and sand,which I claimed by squatter's right. I have also a small woodshedadjoining, made chiefly of the stuff which was left after building thehouse.I intend to build me a house which will surpass any on the main streetin Concord in grandeur and luxury, as soon as it pleases me as much andwill cost me no more than my present one.I thus found that the student who wishes for a shelter can obtain onefor a lifetime at an expense not greater than the rent which he now paysannually. If I seem to boast more than is becoming, my excuse is thatI brag for humanity rather than for myself; and my shortcomings andinconsistencies do not affect the truth of my statement. Notwithstandingmuch cant and hypocrisy--chaff which I find it difficult to separatefrom my wheat, but for which I am as sorry as any man--I will breathefreely and stretch myself in this respect, it is such a relief to boththe moral and physical system; and I am resolved that I will not throughhumility become the devil's attorney. I will endeavor to speak a goodword for the truth. At Cambridge College the mere rent of a student'sroom, which is only a little larger than my own, is thirty dollars eachyear, though the corporation had the advantage of building thirty-twoside by side and under one roof, and the occupant suffers theinconvenience of many and noisy neighbors, and perhaps a residence inthe fourth story. I cannot but think that if we had more true wisdomin these respects, not only less education would be needed, because,forsooth, more would already have been acquired, but the pecuniaryexpense of getting an education would in a great measure vanish. Thoseconveniences which the student requires at Cambridge or elsewhere costhim or somebody else ten times as great a sacrifice of life as theywould with proper management on both sides. Those things for whichthe most money is demanded are never the things which the student mostwants. Tuition, for instance, is an important item in the term bill,while for the far more valuable education which he gets by associatingwith the most cultivated of his contemporaries no charge is made. Themode of founding a college is, commonly, to get up a subscription ofdollars and cents, and then, following blindly the principles of adivision of labor to its extreme--a principle which should never befollowed but with circ*mspection--to call in a contractor who makes thisa subject of speculation, and he employs Irishmen or other operativesactually to lay the foundations, while the students that are to beare said to be fitting themselves for it; and for these oversightssuccessive generations have to pay. I think that it would be better _thanthis_, for the students, or those who desire to be benefited by it, evento lay the foundation themselves. The student who secures his covetedleisure and retirement by systematically shirking any labor necessary toman obtains but an ignoble and unprofitable leisure, defrauding himselfof the experience which alone can make leisure fruitful. "But," saysone, "you do not mean that the students should go to work with theirhands instead of their heads?" I do not mean that exactly, but I meansomething which he might think a good deal like that; I mean that theyshould not _play_ life, or _study_ it merely, while the community supportsthem at this expensive game, but earnestly live it from beginning toend. How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying theexperiment of living? Methinks this would exercise their minds as muchas mathematics. If I wished a boy to know something about the arts andsciences, for instance, I would not pursue the common course, whichis merely to send him into the neighborhood of some professor, whereanything is professed and practised but the art of life;--to survey theworld through a telescope or a microscope, and never with his naturaleye; to study chemistry, and not learn how his bread is made, ormechanics, and not learn how it is earned; to discover new satellites toNeptune, and not detect the motes in his eyes, or to what vagabond heis a satellite himself; or to be devoured by the monsters that swarm allaround him, while contemplating the monsters in a drop of vinegar. Whichwould have advanced the most at the end of a month--the boy who had madehis own jackknife from the ore which he had dug and smelted, readingas much as would be necessary for this--or the boy who had attendedthe lectures on metallurgy at the Institute in the meanwhile, and hadreceived a Rodgers' penknife from his father? Which would be most likelyto cut his fingers?... To my astonishment I was informed on leavingcollege that I had studied navigation!--why, if I had taken one turndown the harbor I should have known more about it. Even the poor studentstudies and is taught only _political_ economy, while that economyof living which is synonymous with philosophy is not even sincerelyprofessed in our colleges. The consequence is, that while he is readingAdam Smith, Ricardo, and Say, he runs his father in debt irretrievably.As with our colleges, so with a hundred "modern improvements"; thereis an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance. Thedevil goes on exacting compound interest to the last for his early shareand numerous succeeding investments in them. Our inventions are wont tobe pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. Theyare but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was alreadybut too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York.We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maineto Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important tocommunicate. Either is in such a predicament as the man who wasearnest to be introduced to a distinguished deaf woman, but when he waspresented, and one end of her ear trumpet was put into his hand, hadnothing to say. As if the main object were to talk fast and not to talksensibly. We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the OldWorld some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first news thatwill leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that thePrincess Adelaide has the whooping cough. After all, the man whose horsetrots 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 wildhoney. 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 totravel; you might take the cars and go to Fitchburg today and see thecountry." But I am wiser than that. I have learned that the swiftesttraveller is he that goes afoot. I say to my friend, Suppose we trywho will get there first. The distance is thirty miles; the fare ninetycents. That is almost a day's wages. I remember when wages were sixtycents 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 weektogether. You will in the meanwhile have earned your fare, and arrivethere some time tomorrow, or possibly this evening, if you are luckyenough to get a job in season. Instead of going to Fitchburg, you willbe working here the greater part of the day. And so, if the railroadreached round the world, I think that I should keep ahead of you; andas for seeing the country and getting experience of that kind, I shouldhave to cut your acquaintance altogether.Such is the universal law, which no man can ever outwit, and with regardto the railroad even we may say it is as broad as it is long. To makea railroad round the world available to all mankind is equivalent tograding the whole surface of the planet. Men have an indistinct notionthat if they keep up this activity of joint stocks and spades longenough all will at length ride somewhere, in next to no time, and fornothing; but though a crowd rushes to the depot, and the conductorshouts "All aboard!" when the smoke is blown away and the vaporcondensed, it will be perceived that a few are riding, but the rest arerun 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, thatis, if they survive so long, but they will probably have lost theirelasticity and desire to travel by that time. This spending of thebest part of one's life earning money in order to enjoy a questionableliberty during the least valuable part of it reminds me of theEnglishman who went to India to make a fortune first, in order that hemight return to England and live the life of a poet. He should have goneup garret at once. "What!" exclaim a million Irishmen starting up fromall the shanties in the land, "is not this railroad which we have builta good thing?" Yes, I answer, comparatively good, that is, you mighthave done worse; but I wish, as you are brothers of mine, that you couldhave spent your time better than digging in this dirt. * * * * *Before I finished my house, wishing to earn ten or twelve dollars bysome 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 itchiefly with beans, but also a small part with potatoes, corn, peas, andturnips. The whole lot contains eleven acres, mostly growing up to pinesand hickories, and was sold the preceding season for eight dollars andeight cents an acre. One farmer said that it was "good for nothing butto raise cheeping squirrels on." I put no manure whatever on thisland, not being the owner, but merely a squatter, and not expecting tocultivate so much again, and I did not quite hoe it all once. I got outseveral cords of stumps in plowing, which supplied me with fuel fora long time, and left small circles of virgin mould, easilydistinguishable through the summer by the greater luxuriance of thebeans there. The dead and for the most part unmerchantable wood behindmy house, and the driftwood from the pond, have supplied the remainderof 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 seasonwere, for implements, seed, work, etc., $14.72-1/2. The seed corn was givenme. This never costs anything to speak of, unless you plant more thanenough. I got twelve bushels of beans, and eighteen bushels of potatoes,beside some peas and sweet corn. The yellow corn and turnips were toolate to come to anything. My whole income from the farm was $ 23.44 Deducting the outgoes............ 14.72-1/2 -------- There are left.................. $ 8.71-1/2beside produce consumed and on hand at the time this estimate was madeof the value of $4.50--the amount on hand much more than balancing alittle grass which I did not raise. All things considered, that is,considering the importance of a man's soul and of today, notwithstandingthe short time occupied by my experiment, nay, partly even because ofits transient character, I believe that that was doing better than anyfarmer in Concord did that year.The next year I did better still, for I spaded up all the land which Irequired, about a third of an acre, and I learned from the experienceof both years, not being in the least awed by many celebrated works onhusbandry, Arthur Young among the rest, that if one would live simplyand 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 andexpensive 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 plowit, 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 lefthand 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 impartiallyon this point, and as one not interested in the success or failure ofthe present economical and social arrangements. I was more independentthan 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 hadbeen burned or my crops had failed, I should have been nearly as welloff as before.I am wont to think that men are not so much the keepers of herds asherds are the keepers of men, the former are so much the freer. Men andoxen exchange work; but if we consider necessary work only, the oxenwill be seen to have greatly the advantage, their farm is so much thelarger. Man does some of his part of the exchange work in his six weeksof haying, and it is no boy's play. Certainly no nation that livedsimply in all respects, that is, no nation of philosophers, would commitso great a blunder as to use the labor of animals. True, there never wasand is not likely soon to be a nation of philosophers, nor am I certainit is desirable that there should be. However, _I_ should never havebroken a horse or bull and taken him to board for any work he might dofor me, for fear I should become a horseman or a herdsman merely; and ifsociety seems to be the gainer by so doing, are we certain that what isone man's gain is not another's loss, and that the stable-boy has equalcause with his master to be satisfied? Granted that some public workswould not have been constructed without this aid, and let man share theglory of such with the ox and horse; does it follow that he could nothave accomplished works yet more worthy of himself in that case? Whenmen begin to do, not merely unnecessary or artistic, but luxurious andidle work, with their assistance, it is inevitable that a few do all theexchange work with the oxen, or, in other words, become the slaves ofthe 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 wehave many substantial houses of brick or stone, the prosperity of thefarmer is still measured by the degree to which the barn overshadows thehouse. This town is said to have the largest houses for oxen, cows, andhorses hereabouts, and it is not behindhand in its public buildings; butthere 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 powerof abstract thought, that nations should seek to commemorate themselves?How much more admirable the Bhagvat-Geeta than all the ruins of theEast! Towers and temples are the luxury of princes. A simple andindependent mind does not toil at the bidding of any prince. Genius isnot a retainer to any emperor, nor is its material silver, or gold, ormarble, except to a trifling extent. To what end, pray, is so much stonehammered? In Arcadia, when I was there, I did not see any hammeringstone. Nations are possessed with an insane ambition to perpetuate thememory of themselves by the amount of hammered stone they leave. What ifequal pains were taken to smooth and polish their manners? One piece ofgood 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 avulgar grandeur. More sensible is a rod of stone wall that bounds anhonest man's field than a hundred-gated Thebes that has wandered fartherfrom the true end of life. The religion and civilization which arebarbaric and heathenish build splendid temples; but what you might callChristianity does not. Most of the stone a nation hammers goes towardits tomb only. It buries itself alive. As for the Pyramids, there isnothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men couldbe found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb forsome ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier tohave drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs. I mightpossibly 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 sameall the world over, whether the building be an Egyptian temple or theUnited States Bank. It costs more than it comes to. The mainspring isvanity, 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 throughto China, and he got so far that, as he said, he heard the Chinese potsand kettles rattle; but I think that I shall not go out of my way toadmire the hole which he made. Many are concerned about the monumentsof the West and the East--to know who built them. For my part, I shouldlike to know who in those days did not build them--who were above suchtrifling. But to proceed with my statistics.By surveying, carpentry, and day-labor of various other kinds in thevillage in the meanwhile, for I have as many trades as fingers, I hadearned $13.34. The expense of food for eight months, namely, from July4th to March 1st, the time when these estimates were made, though Ilived there more than two years--not counting potatoes, a little greencorn, and some peas, which I had raised, nor considering the value ofwhat 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..................... 0.03Yes, I did eat $8.74, all told; but I should not thus unblushinglypublish my guilt, if I did not know that most of my readers were equallyguilty 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, andonce I went so far as to slaughter a woodchuck which ravaged mybean-field--effect his transmigration, as a Tartar would say--and devourhim, partly for experiment's sake; but though it afforded me a momentaryenjoyment, notwithstanding a musky flavor, I saw that the longest usewould not make that a good practice, however it might seem to have yourwoodchucks ready dressed by the village butcher.Clothing and some incidental expenses within the same dates, thoughlittle can be inferred from this item, amounted to $8.40-3/4 Oil and some household utensils........ 2.00So that all the pecuniary outgoes, excepting for washing and mending,which for the most part were done out of the house, and their bills havenot yet been received--and these are all and more than all the ways bywhich 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............................ $ 61.99-3/4I 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 $25.21-3/4on the one side--this being very nearly the means with which Istarted, and the measure of expenses to be incurred--and on theother, beside the leisure and independence and health thus secured, acomfortable house for me as long as I choose to occupy it.These statistics, however accidental and therefore uninstructive theymay appear, as they have a certain completeness, have a certain valuealso. 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 moneyabout twenty-seven cents a week. It was, for nearly two years afterthis, rye and Indian meal without yeast, potatoes, rice, a very littlesalt pork, molasses, and salt; and my drink, water. It was fit that Ishould live on rice, mainly, who love so well the philosophy of India.To meet the objections of some inveterate cavillers, I may as wellstate, that if I dined out occasionally, as I always had done, and Itrust shall have opportunities to do again, it was frequently to thedetriment of my domestic arrangements. But the dining out, being, asI have stated, a constant element, does not in the least affect acomparative statement like this.I learned from my two years' experience that it would cost incrediblylittle 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 retainhealth and strength. I have made a satisfactory dinner, satisfactoryon several accounts, simply off a dish of purslane (_Portulaca oleracea_)which I gathered in my cornfield, boiled and salted. I give the Latin onaccount of the savoriness of the trivial name. And pray what more cana reasonable man desire, in peaceful times, in ordinary noons, than asufficient number of ears of green sweet corn boiled, with the additionof salt? Even the little variety which I used was a yielding to thedemands of appetite, and not of health. Yet men have come to such a passthat they frequently starve, not for want of necessaries, but for wantof luxuries; and I know a good woman who thinks that her son lost hislife because he took to drinking water only.The reader will perceive that I am treating the subject rather from aneconomic than a dietetic point of view, and he will not venture to putmy 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 astick of timber sawed off in building my house; but it was wont to getsmoked and to have a piny flavor. I tried flour also; but have at lastfound a mixture of rye and Indian meal most convenient and agreeable. Incold weather it was no little amusem*nt to bake several small loaves ofthis in succession, tending and turning them as carefully as an Egyptianhis hatching eggs. They were a real cereal fruit which I ripened, andthey had to my senses a fragrance like that of other noble fruits, whichI kept in as long as possible by wrapping them in cloths. I made a studyof the ancient and indispensable art of bread-making, consulting suchauthorities as offered, going back to the primitive days and firstinvention of the unleavened kind, when from the wildness of nuts andmeats men first reached the mildness and refinement of this diet, andtravelling gradually down in my studies through that accidental souringof the dough which, it is supposed, taught the leavening process, andthrough the various fermentations thereafter, till I came to "good,sweet, wholesome bread," the staff of life. Leaven, which some deem thesoul of bread, the _spiritus_ which fills its cellular tissue, which isreligiously preserved like the vestal fire--some precious bottleful,I suppose, first brought over in the Mayflower, did the business forAmerica, and its influence is still rising, swelling, spreading, incerealian billows over the land--this seed I regularly and faithfullyprocured from the village, till at length one morning I forgot therules, and scalded my yeast; by which accident I discovered that eventhis was not indispensable--for my discoveries were not by the syntheticbut analytic process--and I have gladly omitted it since, though mosthousewives earnestly assured me that safe and wholesome bread withoutyeast might not be, and elderly people prophesied a speedy decay of thevital forces. Yet I find it not to be an essential ingredient, and aftergoing without it for a year am still in the land of the living; and Iam 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 whom*ore than any other can adapt himself to all climates and circ*mstances.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 MarcusPorcius Cato gave about two centuries before Christ. "Panem depsticiumsic facito. Manus mortariumque bene lavato. Farinam in mortariumindito, aquae paulatim addito, subigitoque pulchre. Ubi bene subegeris,defingito, coquitoque sub testu." Which I take to mean,--"Make kneadedbread thus. Wash your hands and trough well. Put the meal into thetrough, add water gradually, and knead it thoroughly. When you havekneaded it well, mould it, and bake it under a cover," that is, in abaking kettle. Not a word about leaven. But I did not always use thisstaff of life. At one time, owing to the emptiness of my purse, I sawnone of it for more than a month.Every New Englander might easily raise all his own breadstuffs in thisland of rye and Indian corn, and not depend on distant and fluctuatingmarkets for them. Yet so far are we from simplicity and independencethat, in Concord, fresh and sweet meal is rarely sold in the shops, andhominy and corn in a still coarser form are hardly used by any. For themost part the farmer gives to his cattle and hogs the grain of his ownproducing, and buys flour, which is at least no more wholesome, at agreater cost, at the store. I saw that I could easily raise my bushelor two of rye and Indian corn, for the former will grow on the poorestland, and the latter does not require the best, and grind them in ahand-mill, and so do without rice and pork; and if I must have someconcentrated sweet, I found by experiment that I could make a very goodmolasses either of pumpkins or beets, and I knew that I needed only toset out a few maples to obtain it more easily still, and while thesewere growing I could use various substitutes beside those which I havenamed. "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 mightbe a fit occasion for a visit to the seashore, or, if I did without italtogether, I should probably drink the less water. I do not learn thatthe Indians ever troubled themselves to go after it.Thus I could avoid all trade and barter, so far as my food wasconcerned, and having a shelter already, it would only remain to getclothing and fuel. The pantaloons which I now wear were woven in afarmer's family--thank Heaven there is so much virtue still in man; forI think the fall from the farmer to the operative as great and memorableas that from the man to the farmer;--and in a new country, fuel is anencumbrance. 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 Icultivated was sold--namely, eight dollars and eight cents. But as itwas, I considered that I enhanced the value of the land by squatting onit.There is a certain class of unbelievers who sometimes ask me suchquestions as, if I think that I can live on vegetable food alone; andto strike at the root of the matter at once--for the root is faith--Iam accustomed to answer such, that I can live on board nails. If theycannot 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 onthe ear, using his teeth for all mortar. The squirrel tribe tried thesame and succeeded. The human race is interested in these experiments,though a few old women who are incapacitated for them, or who own theirthirds in mills, may be alarmed. * * * * *My furniture, part of which I made myself--and the rest cost me nothingof which I have not rendered an account--consisted of a bed, a table, adesk, three chairs, a looking-glass three inches in diameter, a pair oftongs and andirons, a kettle, a skillet, and a frying-pan, a dipper, awash-bowl, two knives and forks, three plates, one cup, one spoon, a jugfor oil, a jug for molasses, and a japanned lamp. None is so poor thathe need sit on a pumpkin. That is shiftlessness. There is a plenty ofsuch chairs as I like best in the village garrets to be had for takingthem away. Furniture! Thank God, I can sit and I can stand without theaid of a furniture warehouse. What man but a philosopher would notbe ashamed to see his furniture packed in a cart and going up countryexposed to the light of heaven and the eyes of men, a beggarly accountof empty boxes? That is Spaulding's furniture. I could never tell frominspecting such a load whether it belonged to a so-called rich man or apoor one; the owner always seemed poverty-stricken. Indeed, the moreyou have of such things the poorer you are. Each load looks as if itcontained 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 toget rid of our furniture, our _exuviæ_: at last to go from this world toanother newly furnished, and leave this to be burned? It is the same asif all these traps were buckled to a man's belt, and he could notmove over the rough country where our lines are cast without draggingthem--dragging his trap. He was a lucky fox that left his tail in thetrap. The muskrat will gnaw his third leg off to be free. No wonder manhas lost his elasticity. How often he is at a dead set! "Sir, if I maybe so bold, what do you mean by a dead set?" If you are a seer, wheneveryou meet a man you will see all that he owns, ay, and much that hepretends to disown, behind him, even to his kitchen furniture and allthe trumpery which he saves and will not burn, and he will appear to beharnessed to it and making what headway he can. I think that the manis at a dead set who has got through a knot-hole or gateway where hissledge load of furniture cannot follow him. I cannot but feel compassionwhen I hear some trig, compact-looking man, seemingly free, all girdedand ready, speak of his "furniture," as whether it is insured or not."But what shall I do with my furniture?"--My gay butterfly is entangledin a spider's web then. Even those who seem for a long while not tohave any, if you inquire more narrowly you will find have some storedin somebody's barn. I look upon England today as an old gentleman who istravelling with a great deal of baggage, trumpery which has accumulatedfrom long housekeeping, which he has not the courage to burn; greattrunk, little trunk, bandbox, and bundle. Throw away the first three atleast. It would surpass the powers of a well man nowadays to take up hisbed and walk, and I should certainly advise a sick one to lay down hisbed and run. When I have met an immigrant tottering under a bundle whichcontained his all--looking like an enormous wen which had grown out ofthe 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, Iwill 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, forI have no gazers to shut out but the sun and moon, and I am willing thatthey 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 issometimes too warm a friend, I find it still better economy to retreatbehind some curtain which nature has provided, than to add a single itemto the details of housekeeping. A lady once offered me a mat, but asI had no room to spare within the house, nor time to spare within orwithout to shake it, I declined it, preferring to wipe my feet on thesod 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, forhis life had not been ineffectual:-- "The evil that men do lives after them."As usual, a great proportion was trumpery which had begun to accumulatein his father's day. Among the rest was a dried tapeworm. And now, afterlying half a century in his garret and other dust holes, these thingswere not burned; instead of a _bonfire_, or purifying destruction ofthem, there was an _auction_, or increasing of them. The neighbors eagerlycollected to view them, bought them all, and carefully transported themto their garrets and dust holes, to lie there till their estates aresettled, when they will start again. When a man dies he kicks the dust.The customs of some savage nations might, perchance, be profitablyimitated by us, for they at least go through the semblance of castingtheir slough annually; they have the idea of the thing, whether theyhave the reality or not. Would it not be well if we were to celebratesuch a "busk," or "feast of first fruits," as Bartram describes to havebeen the custom of the Mucclasse Indians? "When a town celebrates thebusk," says he, "having previously provided themselves with new clothes,new pots, pans, and other household utensils and furniture, they collectall their worn out clothes and other despicable things, sweep andcleanse their houses, squares, and the whole town of their filth, whichwith all the remaining grain and other old provisions they cast togetherinto one common heap, and consume it with fire. After having takenmedicine, and fasted for three days, all the fire in the town isextinguished. During this fast they abstain from the gratification ofevery 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 inthe town is supplied with the new and pure flame."They then feast on the new corn and fruits, and dance and sing for threedays, "and the four following days they receive visits and rejoice withtheir friends from neighboring towns who have in like manner purifiedand prepared themselves."The Mexicans also practised a similar purification at the end of everyfifty-two years, in the belief that it was time for the world to come toan end.I have scarcely heard of a truer sacrament, that is, as the dictionarydefines it, "outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace,"than this, and I have no doubt that they were originally inspireddirectly from Heaven to do thus, though they have no Biblical record ofthe revelation. * * * * *For more than five years I maintained myself thus solely by the laborof my hands, and I found that, by working about six weeks in a year, Icould meet all the expenses of living. The whole of my winters, as wellas most of my summers, I had free and clear for study. I have thoroughlytried school-keeping, and found that my expenses were in proportion, orrather out of proportion, to my income, for I was obliged to dress andtrain, not to say think and believe, accordingly, and I lost my timeinto the bargain. As I did not teach for the good of my fellow-men, butsimply for a livelihood, this was a failure. I have tried trade but Ifound that it would take ten years to get under way in that, and thatthen I should probably be on my way to the devil. I was actually afraidthat I might by that time be doing what is called a good business. Whenformerly I was looking about to see what I could do for a living, somesad experience in conforming to the wishes of friends being fresh inmy mind to tax my ingenuity, I thought often and seriously of pickinghuckleberries; that surely I could do, and its small profits mightsuffice--for my greatest skill has been to want but little--so littlecapital it required, so little distraction from my wonted moods, Ifoolishly thought. While my acquaintances went unhesitatingly into tradeor 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 ofAdmetus. I also dreamed that I might gather the wild herbs, or carryevergreens to such villagers as loved to be reminded of the woods, evento the city, by hay-cart loads. But I have since learned that tradecurses everything it handles; and though you trade in messages fromheaven, 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 spendmy time in earning rich carpets or other fine furniture, or delicatecookery, or a house in the Grecian or the Gothic style just yet. Ifthere 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 thepursuit. Some are "industrious," and appear to love labor for its ownsake, or perhaps because it keeps them out of worse mischief; to such Ihave at present nothing to say. Those who would not know what to do withmore leisure than they now enjoy, I might advise to work twice ashard as they do--work till they pay for themselves, and get their freepapers. For myself I found that the occupation of a day-laborer was themost independent of any, especially as it required only thirty or fortydays in a year to support one. The laborer's day ends with the goingdown of the sun, and he is then free to devote himself to his chosenpursuit, independent of his labor; but his employer, who speculates frommonth 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 maintainone's self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime, if we willlive simply and wisely; as the pursuits of the simpler nations are stillthe sports of the more artificial. It is not necessary that a man shouldearn his living by the sweat of his brow, unless he sweats easier than Ido.One young man of my acquaintance, who has inherited some acres, told methat he thought he should live as I did, _if he had the means_. I wouldnot have any one adopt _my_ mode of living on any account; for, besidethat before he has fairly learned it I may have found out another formyself, I desire that there may be as many different persons in theworld as possible; but I would have each one be very careful to findout and pursue _his own_ way, and not his father's or his mother's or hisneighbor's instead. The youth may build or plant or sail, only let himnot 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 orthe fugitive slave keeps the polestar in his eye; but that is sufficientguidance for all our life. We may not arrive at our port within acalculable period, but we would preserve the true course.Undoubtedly, in this case, what is true for one is truer still for athousand, as a large house is not proportionally more expensive than asmall one, since one roof may cover, one cellar underlie, and one wallseparate several apartments. But for my part, I preferred the solitarydwelling. Moreover, it will commonly be cheaper to build the wholeyourself 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 alsonot keep his side in repair. The only co-operation which is commonlypossible is exceedingly partial and superficial; and what little trueco-operation there is, is as if it were not, being a harmony inaudibleto men. If a man has faith, he will co-operate with equal faitheverywhere; if he has not faith, he will continue to live like the restof the world, whatever company he is joined to. To co-operate in thehighest as well as the lowest sense, means _to get our living together_. Iheard it proposed lately that two young men should travel together overthe world, the one without money, earning his means as he went, beforethe mast and behind the plow, the other carrying a bill of exchange inhis pocket. It was easy to see that they could not long be companions orco-operate, since one would not _operate_ at all. They would part atthe first interesting crisis in their adventures. Above all, as I haveimplied, the man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels withanother must wait till that other is ready, and it may be a long timebefore 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 philanthropicenterprises. I have made some sacrifices to a sense of duty, and amongothers have sacrificed this pleasure also. There are those who haveused all their arts to persuade me to undertake the support of somepoor family in the town; and if I had nothing to do--for the devil findsemployment for the idle--I might try my hand at some such pastime asthat. However, when I have thought to indulge myself in this respect,and lay their Heaven under an obligation by maintaining certain poorpersons in all respects as comfortably as I maintain myself, and haveeven ventured so far as to make them the offer, they have one and allunhesitatingly preferred to remain poor. While my townsmen and women aredevoted in so many ways to the good of their fellows, I trust that oneat least may be spared to other and less humane pursuits. You must havea 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 itfairly, and, strange as it may seem, am satisfied that it does not agreewith my constitution. Probably I should not consciously and deliberatelyforsake my particular calling to do the good which society demands ofme, to save the universe from annihilation; and I believe that a likebut infinitely greater steadfastness elsewhere is all that now preservesit. But I would not stand between any man and his genius; and to him whodoes 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 ismost likely they will.I am far from supposing that my case is a peculiar one; no doubt many ofmy readers would make a similar defence. At doing something--I will notengage that my neighbors shall pronounce it good--I do not hesitate tosay that I should be a capital fellow to hire; but what that is, it isfor my employer to find out. What _good_ I do, in the common sense ofthat word, must be aside from my main path, and for the most part whollyunintended. Men say, practically, Begin where you are and such as youare, without aiming mainly to become of more worth, and with kindnessaforethought go about doing good. If I were to preach at all in thisstrain, I should say rather, Set about being good. As if the sun shouldstop when he had kindled his fires up to the splendor of a moon ora star of the sixth magnitude, and go about like a Robin Goodfellow,peeping in at every cottage window, inspiring lunatics, and taintingmeats, and making darkness visible, instead of steadily increasing hisgenial heat and beneficence till he is of such brightness that no mortalcan look him in the face, and then, and in the meanwhile too, goingabout the world in his own orbit, doing it good, or rather, as a truerphilosophy has discovered, the world going about him getting good. WhenPhaeton, wishing to prove his heavenly birth by his beneficence, had thesun's chariot but one day, and drove out of the beaten track, he burnedseveral blocks of houses in the lower streets of heaven, and scorchedthe surface of the earth, and dried up every spring, and made the greatdesert of Sahara, till at length Jupiter hurled him headlong to theearth with a thunderbolt, and the sun, through grief at his death, didnot shine for a year.There is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness tainted. Itis human, it is divine, carrion. If I knew for a certainty that a manwas 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 theAfrican deserts called the simoom, which fills the mouth and nose andears and eyes with dust till you are suffocated, for fear that I shouldget some of his good done to me--some of its virus mingled with myblood. 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 bestarving, or warm me if I should be freezing, or pull me out of a ditchif I should ever fall into one. I can find you a Newfoundland dog thatwill do as much. Philanthropy is not love for one's fellow-man in thebroadest sense. Howard was no doubt an exceedingly kind and worthy manin his way, and has his reward; but, comparatively speaking, what are ahundred Howards to _us_, if their philanthropy do not help us in ourbest estate, when we are most worthy to be helped? I never heard of aphilanthropic meeting in which it was sincerely proposed to do any goodto me, or the like of me.The Jesuits were quite balked by those Indians who, being burned atthe stake, suggested new modes of torture to their tormentors. Beingsuperior to physical suffering, it sometimes chanced that they weresuperior to any consolation which the missionaries could offer; and thelaw to do as you would be done by fell with less persuasiveness on theears 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 freelyforgiving them all they did.Be sure that you give the poor the aid they most need, though it be yourexample which leaves them far behind. If you give money, spend yourselfwith it, and do not merely abandon it to them. We make curious mistakessometimes. Often the poor man is not so cold and hungry as he isdirty and ragged and gross. It is partly his taste, and not merely hismisfortune. If you give him money, he will perhaps buy more rags withit. I was wont to pity the clumsy Irish laborers who cut ice on thepond, in such mean and ragged clothes, while I shivered in my more tidyand somewhat more fashionable garments, till, one bitter cold day, onewho had slipped into the water came to my house to warm him, and I sawhim strip off three pairs of pants and two pairs of stockings ere he gotdown 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 offeredhim, he had so many _intra_ ones. This ducking was the very thing heneeded. Then I began to pity myself, and I saw that it would be agreater charity to bestow on me a flannel shirt than a whole slop-shopon him. There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one whois striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largestamount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode oflife to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve. It isthe pious slave-breeder devoting the proceeds of every tenth slave tobuy a Sunday's liberty for the rest. Some show their kindness to thepoor by employing them in their kitchens. Would they not be kinder ifthey employed themselves there? You boast of spending a tenth part ofyour income in charity; maybe you should spend the nine tenths so, anddone 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 appreciatedby mankind. Nay, it is greatly overrated; and it is our selfishnesswhich 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 thepoor; meaning himself. The kind uncles and aunts of the race are moreesteemed than its true spiritual fathers and mothers. I once heard areverend 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 ofher 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 thegreat. They were Penn, Howard, and Mrs. Fry. Every one must feel thefalsehood and cant of this. The last were not England's best men andwomen; only, perhaps, her best philanthropists.I would not subtract anything from the praise that is due tophilanthropy, but merely demand justice for all who by their livesand works are a blessing to mankind. I do not value chiefly a man'suprightness and benevolence, which are, as it were, his stem and leaves.Those plants of whose greenness withered we make herb tea for the sickserve but a humble use, and are most employed by quacks. I want theflower and fruit of a man; that some fragrance be wafted over from himto me, and some ripeness flavor our intercourse. His goodness must notbe a partial and transitory act, but a constant superfluity, which costshim nothing and of which he is unconscious. This is a charity that hidesa multitude of sins. The philanthropist too often surrounds mankind withthe remembrance of his own castoff griefs as an atmosphere, and calls itsympathy. We should impart our courage, and not our despair, our healthand ease, and not our disease, and take care that this does not spreadby contagion. From what southern plains comes up the voice of wailing?Under what latitudes reside the heathen to whom we would send light? Whois that intemperate and brutal man whom we would redeem? If anything aila man, so that he does not perform his functions, if he have a pain inhis bowels even--for that is the seat of sympathy--he forthwith setsabout reforming--the world. Being a microcosm himself, he discovers--andit is a true discovery, and he is the man to make it--that the world hasbeen eating green apples; to his eyes, in fact, the globe itself isa great green apple, which there is danger awful to think of that thechildren of men will nibble before it is ripe; and straightway hisdrastic philanthropy seeks out the Esquimau and the Patagonian, andembraces the populous Indian and Chinese villages; and thus, by a fewyears of philanthropic activity, the powers in the meanwhile using himfor their own ends, no doubt, he cures himself of his dyspepsia, theglobe acquires a faint blush on one or both of its cheeks, as if it werebeginning to be ripe, and life loses its crudity and is once more sweetand wholesome to live. I never dreamed of any enormity greater than Ihave committed. I never knew, and never shall know, a worse man thanmyself.I believe that what so saddens the reformer is not his sympathy with hisfellows in distress, but, though he be the holiest son of God, ishis private ail. Let this be righted, let the spring come to him, themorning rise over his couch, and he will forsake his generous companionswithout apology. My excuse for not lecturing against the use oftobacco is, that I never chewed it, that is a penalty which reformedtobacco-chewers have to pay; though there are things enough I havechewed which I could lecture against. If you should ever be betrayedinto any of these philanthropies, do not let your left hand know whatyour right hand does, for it is not worth knowing. Rescue the drowningand tie your shoestrings. Take your time, and set about some free labor.Our manners have been corrupted by communication with the saints. Ourhymn-books resound with a melodious cursing of God and enduring Himforever. One would say that even the prophets and redeemers had ratherconsoled the fears than confirmed the hopes of man. There is nowhererecorded a simple and irrepressible satisfaction with the gift oflife, any memorable praise of God. All health and success does me good,however far off and withdrawn it may appear; all disease and failurehelps to make me sad and does me evil, however much sympathy it may havewith me or I with it. If, then, we would indeed restore mankind by trulyIndian, botanic, magnetic, or natural means, let us first be as simpleand well as Nature ourselves, dispel the clouds which hang over our ownbrows, and take up a little life into our pores. Do not stay to be anoverseer of the poor, but endeavor to become one of the worthies of theworld.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 theMost High God has created lofty and umbrageous, they call none azad, orfree, excepting the cypress, which bears no fruit; what mystery is therein this? He replied, Each has its appropriate produce, and appointedseason, during the continuance of which it is fresh and blooming, andduring their absence dry and withered; to neither of which states is thecypress exposed, being always flourishing; and of this nature are theazads, or religious independents.--Fix not thy heart on that which istransitory; for the Dijlah, or Tigris, will continue to flow throughBagdad after the race of caliphs is extinct: if thy hand has plenty, beliberal as the date tree; but if it affords nothing to give away, be anazad, 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. CAREWWhere I Lived, and What I Lived ForAt a certain season of our life we are accustomed to consider every spotas the possible site of a house. I have thus surveyed the country onevery side within a dozen miles of where I live. In imagination I havebought all the farms in succession, for all were to be bought, and Iknew their price. I walked over each farmer's premises, tasted his wildapples, discoursed on husbandry with him, took his farm at his price, atany price, mortgaging it to him in my mind; even put a higher price onit--took everything but a deed of it--took his word for his deed, for Idearly 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 iton. This experience entitled me to be regarded as a sort of real-estatebroker by my friends. Wherever I sat, there I might live, and thelandscape radiated from me accordingly. What is a house but a _sedes_, aseat?--better if a country seat. I discovered many a site for a housenot likely to be soon improved, which some might have thought too farfrom 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 summerand a winter life; saw how I could let the years run off, buffet thewinter through, and see the spring come in. The future inhabitants ofthis region, wherever they may place their houses, may be sure that theyhave been anticipated. An afternoon sufficed to lay out the land intoorchard, wood-lot, and pasture, and to decide what fine oaks or pinesshould be left to stand before the door, and whence each blasted treecould 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 whichhe can afford to let alone.My imagination carried me so far that I even had the refusal of severalfarms--the refusal was all I wanted--but I never got my fingers burnedby actual possession. The nearest that I came to actual possession waswhen I bought the Hollowell place, and had begun to sort my seeds, andcollected materials with which to make a wheelbarrow to carry it on oroff with; but before the owner gave me a deed of it, his wife--every manhas such a wife--changed her mind and wished to keep it, and he offeredme ten dollars to release him. Now, to speak the truth, I had but tencents in the world, and it surpassed my arithmetic to tell, if I wasthat man who had ten cents, or who had a farm, or ten dollars, or alltogether. However, I let him keep the ten dollars and the farm too, forI had carried it far enough; or rather, to be generous, I sold him thefarm for just what I gave for it, and, as he was not a rich man, madehim a present of ten dollars, and still had my ten cents, and seeds, andmaterials for a wheelbarrow left. I found thus that I had been a richman without any damage to my poverty. But I retained the landscape, andI 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 valuablepart of a farm, while the crusty farmer supposed that he had got a fewwild apples only. Why, the owner does not know it for many years whena poet has put his farm in rhyme, the most admirable kind of invisiblefence, has fairly impounded it, milked it, skimmed it, and got all thecream, and left the farmer only the skimmed milk.The real attractions of the Hollowell farm, to me, were: its completeretirement, being, about two miles from the village, half a mile fromthe nearest neighbor, and separated from the highway by a broad field;its bounding on the river, which the owner said protected it by its fogsfrom frosts in the spring, though that was nothing to me; the gray colorand ruinous state of the house and barn, and the dilapidated fences,which put such an interval between me and the last occupant; the hollowand lichen-covered apple trees, gnawed by rabbits, showing what kind ofneighbors I should have; but above all, the recollection I had of itfrom my earliest voyages up the river, when the house was concealedbehind a dense grove of red maples, through which I heard the house-dogbark. I was in haste to buy it, before the proprietor finished gettingout some rocks, cutting down the hollow apple trees, and grubbing upsome young birches which had sprung up in the pasture, or, in short, hadmade any more of his improvements. To enjoy these advantages I was readyto carry it on; like Atlas, to take the world on my shoulders--I neverheard what compensation he received for that--and do all those thingswhich had no other motive or excuse but that I might pay for it andbe unmolested in my possession of it; for I knew all the while that itwould yield the most abundant crop of the kind I wanted, if I could onlyafford 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--Ihave always cultivated a garden--was, that I had had my seeds ready.Many think that seeds improve with age. I have no doubt that timediscriminates between the good and the bad; and when at last I shallplant, I shall be less likely to be disappointed. But I would say to myfellows, once for all, As long as possible live free and uncommitted. Itmakes but little difference whether you are committed to a farm or thecounty jail.Old Cato, whose "De Re Rusticâ" is my "Cultivator," says--and the onlytranslation I have seen makes sheer nonsense of the passage--"When youthink 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 goround it once. The oftener you go there the more it will please you, ifit is good." I think I shall not buy greedily, but go round and round itas long as I live, and be buried in it first, that it may please me themore at last. * * * * *The present was my next experiment of this kind, which I purpose todescribe more at length, for convenience putting the experience of twoyears into one. As I have said, I do not propose to write an odeto 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 mynights as well as days there, which, by accident, was on IndependenceDay, or the Fourth of July, 1845, my house was not finished for winter,but was merely a defence against the rain, without plastering orchimney, the walls being of rough, weather-stained boards, with widechinks, which made it cool at night. The upright white hewn studs andfreshly planed door and window casings gave it a clean and airy look,especially in the morning, when its timbers were saturated with dew, sothat I fancied that by noon some sweet gum would exude from them. To myimagination it retained throughout the day more or less of this auroralcharacter, reminding me of a certain house on a mountain which I hadvisited a year before. This was an airy and unplastered cabin, fitto entertain a travelling god, and where a goddess might trail hergarments. The winds which passed over my dwelling were such as sweepover the ridges of mountains, bearing the broken strains, or celestialparts only, of terrestrial music. The morning wind forever blows, thepoem 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, wasa tent, which I used occasionally when making excursions in the summer,and this is still rolled up in my garret; but the boat, after passingfrom hand to hand, has gone down the stream of time. With this moresubstantial shelter about me, I had made some progress towardsettling in the world. This frame, so slightly clad, was a sort ofcrystallization around me, and reacted on the builder. It was suggestivesomewhat as a picture in outlines. I did not need to go outdoors to takethe air, for the atmosphere within had lost none of its freshness. Itwas not so much within doors as behind a door where I sat, even in therainiest weather. The Harivansa says, "An abode without birds is likea meat without seasoning." Such was not my abode, for I found myselfsuddenly neighbor to the birds; not by having imprisoned one, but havingcaged myself near them. I was not only nearer to some of those whichcommonly frequent the garden and the orchard, but to those smaller andmore thrilling songsters of the forest which never, or rarely, serenadea villager--the wood thrush, the veery, the scarlet tanager, the fieldsparrow, the whip-poor-will, and many others.I was seated by the shore of a small pond, about a mile and a half southof the village of Concord and somewhat higher than it, in the midst ofan extensive wood between that town and Lincoln, and about two milessouth of that our only field known to fame, Concord Battle Ground; butI was so low in the woods that the opposite shore, half a mile off, likethe rest, covered with wood, was my most distant horizon. For the firstweek, whenever I looked out on the pond it impressed me like a tarn highup on the side of a mountain, its bottom far above the surface of otherlakes, and, as the sun arose, I saw it throwing off its nightly clothingof mist, and here and there, by degrees, its soft ripples or its smoothreflecting surface was revealed, while the mists, like ghosts, werestealthily withdrawing in every direction into the woods, as at thebreaking up of some nocturnal conventicle. The very dew seemed tohang upon the trees later into the day than usual, as on the sides ofmountains.This small lake was of most value as a neighbor in the intervals of agentle rain-storm in August, when, both air and water being perfectlystill, but the sky overcast, mid-afternoon had all the serenity ofevening, and the wood thrush sang around, and was heard from shore toshore. A lake like this is never smoother than at such a time; and theclear portion of the air above it being, shallow and darkened by clouds,the water, full of light and reflections, becomes a lower heaven itselfso much the more important. From a hill-top near by, where the wood hadbeen recently cut off, there was a pleasing vista southward acrossthe pond, through a wide indentation in the hills which form the shorethere, where their opposite sides sloping toward each other suggested astream flowing out in that direction through a wooded valley, but streamthere was none. That way I looked between and over the near greenhills to some distant and higher ones in the horizon, tinged with blue.Indeed, by standing on tiptoe I could catch a glimpse of some ofthe peaks of the still bluer and more distant mountain ranges in thenorthwest, those true-blue coins from heaven's own mint, and also ofsome portion of the village. But in other directions, even from thispoint, I could not see over or beyond the woods which surrounded me. Itis well to have some water in your neighborhood, to give buoyancy to andfloat the earth. One value even of the smallest well is, that when youlook into it you see that earth is not continent but insular. This isas important as that it keeps butter cool. When I looked across thepond from this peak toward the Sudbury meadows, which in time of floodI distinguished elevated perhaps by a mirage in their seething valley,like a coin in a basin, all the earth beyond the pond appeared likea thin crust insulated and floated even by this small sheet ofinterverting water, and I was reminded that this on which I dwelt wasbut _dry land_.Though the view from my door was still more contracted, I did notfeel crowded or confined in the least. There was pasture enough for myimagination. The low shrub oak plateau to which the opposite shorearose stretched away toward the prairies of the West and the steppes ofTartary, affording ample room for all the roving families of men."There are none happy in the world but beings who enjoy freely avast horizon"--said Damodara, when his herds required new and largerpastures.Both place and time were changed, and I dwelt nearer to those parts ofthe universe and to those eras in history which had most attractedme. Where I lived was as far off as many a region viewed nightly byastronomers. We are wont to imagine rare and delectable places in someremote and more celestial corner of the system, behind the constellationof Cassiopeia's Chair, far from noise and disturbance. I discovered thatmy house actually had its site in such a withdrawn, but forever new andunprofaned, part of the universe. If it were worth the while to settlein those parts near to the Pleiades or the Hyades, to Aldebaran orAltair, then I was really there, or at an equal remoteness from the lifewhich I had left behind, dwindled and twinkling with as fine a ray tomy nearest neighbor, and to be seen only in moonless nights by him. Suchwas 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 alwayswandered to higher pastures than his thoughts?Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equalsimplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself. I have been assincere a worshipper of Aurora as the Greeks. I got up early and bathedin the pond; that was a religious exercise, and one of the best thingswhich I did. They say that characters were engraven on the bathing tubof King Tchingthang to this effect: "Renew thyself completely eachday; 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 fainthum of a mosquito making its invisible and unimaginable tour throughmy apartment at earliest dawn, when I was sitting with door and windowsopen, as I could be by any trumpet that ever sang of fame. It wasHomer's requiem; itself an Iliad and Odyssey in the air, singing its ownwrath and wanderings. There was something cosmical about it; a standingadvertisem*nt, till forbidden, of the everlasting vigor and fertility ofthe 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 anhour, at least, some part of us awakes which slumbers all the rest ofthe day and night. Little is to be expected of that day, if it can becalled a day, to which we are not awakened by our Genius, but by themechanical nudgings of some servitor, are not awakened by our ownnewly acquired force and aspirations from within, accompanied bythe undulations of celestial music, instead of factory bells, and afragrance 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 daycontains an earlier, more sacred, and auroral hour than he has yetprofaned, has despaired of life, and is pursuing a descending anddarkening way. After a partial cessation of his sensuous life, the soulof man, or its organs rather, are reinvigorated each day, and his Geniustries again what noble life it can make. All memorable events, I shouldsay, transpire in morning time and in a morning atmosphere. The Vedassay, "All intelligences awake with the morning." Poetry and art, andthe fairest and most memorable of the actions of men, date from such anhour. All poets and heroes, like Memnon, are the children of Aurora, andemit their music at sunrise. To him whose elastic and vigorous thoughtkeeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning. It matters notwhat the clocks say or the attitudes and labors of men. Morning is whenI am awake and there is a dawn in me. Moral reform is the effort tothrow off sleep. Why is it that men give so poor an account of their dayif they have not been slumbering? They are not such poor calculators.If they had not been overcome with drowsiness, they would have performedsomething. The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but onlyone in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion,only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awakeis to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. Howcould I have looked him in the face?We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanicalaids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsakeus in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact thanthe unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a consciousendeavor. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, orto carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is farmore glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium throughwhich we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of theday, 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 elevatedand critical hour. If we refused, or rather used up, such paltryinformation as we get, the oracles would distinctly inform us how thismight be done.I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front onlythe essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had toteach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I didnot wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wishto practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted tolive deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily andSpartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broadswath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to itslowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the wholeand genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; orif it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a trueaccount of it in my next excursion. For most men, it appears to me, arein 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 hereto "glorify God and enjoy him forever."Still we live meanly, like ants; though the fable tells us that we werelong ago changed into men; like pygmies we fight with cranes; it iserror upon error, and clout upon clout, and our best virtue has for itsoccasion a superfluous and evitable wretchedness. Our life is fritteredaway by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his tenfingers, 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 orthree, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count halfa dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail. In the midst ofthis chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms andquicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man hasto live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make hisport at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeedwho succeeds. Simplify, simplify. Instead of three meals a day, if itbe necessary eat but one; instead of a hundred dishes, five; and reduceother things in proportion. Our life is like a German Confederacy, madeup of petty states, with its boundary forever fluctuating, so that evena German cannot tell you how it is bounded at any moment. The nationitself, with all its so-called internal improvements, which, by the wayare all external and superficial, is just such an unwieldy and overgrownestablishment, cluttered with furniture and tripped up by its own traps,ruined by luxury and heedless expense, by want of calculation and aworthy aim, as the million households in the land; and the only cure forit, as for them, is in a rigid economy, a stern and more than Spartansimplicity of life and elevation of purpose. It lives too fast. Menthink that it is essential that the _Nation_ have commerce, and exportice, and talk through a telegraph, and ride thirty miles an hour,without a doubt, whether _they_ do or not; but whether we should livelike baboons or like men, is a little uncertain. If we do not get outsleepers, and forge rails, and devote days and nights to the work,but go to tinkering upon our _lives_ to improve _them_, who will buildrailroads? And if railroads are not built, how shall we get to heavenin season? But if we stay at home and mind our business, who will wantrailroads? We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us. Did youever think what those sleepers are that underlie the railroad? Each oneis a man, an Irishman, or a Yankee man. The rails are laid on them, andthey are covered with sand, and the cars run smoothly over them. Theyare sound sleepers, I assure you. And every few years a new lot is laiddown and run over; so that, if some have the pleasure of riding on arail, others have the misfortune to be ridden upon. And when they runover a man that is walking in his sleep, a supernumerary sleeper in thewrong position, and wake him up, they suddenly stop the cars, and makea hue and cry about it, as if this were an exception. I am glad to knowthat it takes a gang of men for every five miles to keep the sleepersdown and level in their beds as it is, for this is a sign that they maysometime get up again.Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? We are determinedto be starved before we are hungry. Men say that a stitch in time savesnine, 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 givea few pulls at the parish bell-rope, as for a fire, that is, withoutsetting the bell, there is hardly a man on his farm in the outskirts ofConcord, notwithstanding that press of engagements which was his excuseso 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 propertyfrom the flames, but, if we will confess the truth, much more to seeit burn, since burn it must, and we, be it known, did not set it onfire--or to see it put out, and have a hand in it, if that is done ashandsomely; yes, even if it were the parish church itself. Hardly a mantakes a half-hour's nap after dinner, but when he wakes he holds up hishead and asks, "What's the news?" as if the rest of mankind had stoodhis sentinels. Some give directions to be waked every half-hour,doubtless for no other purpose; and then, to pay for it, they tell whatthey have dreamed. After a night's sleep the news is as indispensableas the breakfast. "Pray tell me anything new that has happened to a mananywhere on this globe"--and he reads it over his coffee and rolls, thata man has had his eyes gouged out this morning on the Wachito River;never dreaming the while that he lives in the dark unfathomed mammothcave 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 thatthere are very few important communications made through it. To speakcritically, I never received more than one or two letters in my life--Iwrote this some years ago--that were worth the postage. The penny-postis, commonly, an institution through which you seriously offer a manthat 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 weread of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one houseburned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cowrun over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lotof grasshoppers in the winter--we never need read of another. One isenough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care fora myriad instances and applications? To a philosopher all _news_, as itis called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women overtheir tea. Yet not a few are greedy after this gossip. There was sucha rush, as I hear, the other day at one of the offices to learn theforeign news by the last arrival, that several large squares of plateglass belonging to the establishment were broken by the pressure--newswhich I seriously think a ready wit might write a twelve-month, ortwelve years, beforehand with sufficient accuracy. As for Spain, forinstance, 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 rightproportions--they may have changed the names a little since I saw thepapers--and serve up a bull-fight when other entertainments fail, itwill be true to the letter, and give us as good an idea of the exactstate or ruin of things in Spain as the most succinct and lucid reportsunder this head in the newspapers: and as for England, almost the lastsignificant 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 areof a merely pecuniary character. If one may judge who rarely looks intothe newspapers, nothing new does ever happen in foreign parts, a Frenchrevolution not excepted.What news! how much more important to know what that is which was neverold! "Kieou-he-yu (great dignitary of the state of Wei) sent a man toKhoung-tseu to know his news. Khoung-tseu caused the messenger to beseated near him, and questioned him in these terms: What is yourmaster doing? The messenger answered with respect: My master desiresto diminish the number of his faults, but he cannot come to the end ofthem. The messenger being gone, the philosopher remarked: What a worthymessenger! What a worthy messenger!" The preacher, instead of vexing theears of drowsy farmers on their day of rest at the end of the week--forSunday is the fit conclusion of an ill-spent week, and not the freshand brave beginning of a new one--with this one other draggle-tail ofa sermon, should shout with thundering voice, "Pause! Avast! Why soseeming fast, but deadly slow?"Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality isfabulous. If men would steadily observe realities only, and not allowthemselves to be deluded, life, to compare it with such things as weknow, 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 andpoetry would resound along the streets. When we are unhurried and wise,we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent andabsolute existence, that petty fears and petty pleasures are but theshadow of the reality. This is always exhilarating and sublime. Byclosing the eyes and slumbering, and consenting to be deceived byshows, men establish and confirm their daily life of routine andhabit everywhere, which still is built on purely illusory foundations.Children, who play life, discern its true law and relations more clearlythan men, who fail to live it worthily, but who think that they arewiser 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 hisnative city, was brought up by a forester, and, growing up to maturityin that state, imagined himself to belong to the barbarous race withwhich he lived. One of his father's ministers having discovered him,revealed to him what he was, and the misconception of his character wasremoved, and he knew himself to be a prince. So soul," continues theHindoo philosopher, "from the circ*mstances in which it is placed,mistakes its own character, until the truth is revealed to it by someholy teacher, and then it knows itself to be Brahme." I perceive thatwe inhabitants of New England live this mean life that we do because ourvision 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 onlythe reality, where, think you, would the "Mill-dam" go to? If he shouldgive us an account of the realities he beheld there, we should notrecognize the place in his description. Look at a meeting-house, or acourt-house, or a jail, or a shop, or a dwelling-house, and say whatthat thing really is before a true gaze, and they would all go to piecesin your account of them. Men esteem truth remote, in the outskirts ofthe system, behind the farthest star, before Adam and after the lastman. In eternity there is indeed something true and sublime. But allthese times and places and occasions are now and here. God himselfculminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in thelapse of all the ages. And we are enabled to apprehend at all what issublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching ofthe reality that surrounds us. The universe constantly and obedientlyanswers to our conceptions; whether we travel fast or slow, the track islaid for us. Let us spend our lives in conceiving then. The poet orthe artist never yet had so fair and noble a design but some of hisposterity at least could accomplish it.Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown offthe track by every nutshell and mosquito's wing that falls on therails. Let us rise early and fast, or break fast, gently and withoutperturbation; let company come and let company go, let the bells ringand the children cry--determined to make a day of it. Why should weknock under and go with the stream? Let us not be upset and overwhelmedin that terrible rapid and whirlpool called a dinner, situated in themeridian shallows. Weather this danger and you are safe, for the rest ofthe way is down hill. With unrelaxed nerves, with morning vigor, sailby it, looking another way, tied to the mast like Ulysses. If the enginewhistles, let it whistle till it is hoarse for its pains. If the bellrings, why should we run? We will consider what kind of music they arelike. Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downwardthrough the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, anddelusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, throughParis and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, throughChurch and State, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till wecome to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call _reality_, andsay, 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 awall or a state, or set a lamp-post safely, or perhaps a gauge, nota Nilometer, but a Realometer, that future ages might know how deep afreshet of shams and appearances had gathered from time to time. If youstand right fronting and face to face to a fact, you will see the sunglimmer on both its surfaces, as if it were a cimeter, and feel itssweet edge dividing you through the heart and marrow, and so you willhappily conclude your mortal career. Be it life or death, we crave onlyreality. If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throatsand feel cold in the extremities; if we are alive, let us go about ourbusiness.Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while Idrink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thincurrent slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish inthe sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count one. I knownot the first letter of the alphabet. I have always been regretting thatI was not as wise as the day I was born. The intellect is a cleaver; itdiscerns and rifts its way into the secret of things. I do not wish tobe any more busy with my hands than is necessary. My head is hands andfeet. I feel all my best faculties concentrated in it. My instinct tellsme that my head is an organ for burrowing, as some creatures use theirsnout and fore paws, and with it I would mine and burrow my way throughthese hills. I think that the richest vein is somewhere hereabouts;so by the divining-rod and thin rising vapors I judge; and here I willbegin to mine.ReadingWith a little more deliberation in the choice of their pursuits, all menwould perhaps become essentially students and observers, for certainlytheir nature and destiny are interesting to all alike. In accumulatingproperty for ourselves or our posterity, in founding a family or astate, or acquiring fame even, we are mortal; but in dealing withtruth we are immortal, and need fear no change nor accident. The oldestEgyptian or Hindoo philosopher raised a corner of the veil from thestatue of the divinity; and still the trembling robe remains raised, andI gaze upon as fresh a glory as he did, since it was I in him that wasthen so bold, and it is he in me that now reviews the vision. No dusthas settled on that robe; no time has elapsed since that divinity wasrevealed. That time which we really improve, or which is improvable, isneither past, present, nor future.My residence was more favorable, not only to thought, but to seriousreading, than a university; and though I was beyond the range of theordinary circulating library, I had more than ever come within theinfluence of those books which circulate round the world, whosesentences were first written on bark, and are now merely copied fromtime 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 havehad this advantage in books. To be intoxicated by a single glass ofwine; I have experienced this pleasure when I have drunk the liquor ofthe esoteric doctrines." I kept Homer's Iliad on my table through thesummer, though I looked at his page only now and then. Incessant laborwith my hands, at first, for I had my house to finish and my beans tohoe at the same time, made more study impossible. Yet I sustained myselfby the prospect of such reading in future. I read one or two shallowbooks of travel in the intervals of my work, till that employment mademe 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 ofdissipation or luxuriousness, for it implies that he in some measureemulate their heroes, and consecrate morning hours to their pages. Theheroic books, even if printed in the character of our mother tongue,will always be in a language dead to degenerate times; and we mustlaboriously seek the meaning of each word and line, conjecturing alarger sense than common use permits out of what wisdom and valor andgenerosity we have. The modern cheap and fertile press, with all itstranslations, has done little to bring us nearer to the heroic writersof antiquity. They seem as solitary, and the letter in which theyare printed as rare and curious, as ever. It is worth the expense ofyouthful days and costly hours, if you learn only some words of anancient language, which are raised out of the trivialness of the street,to be perpetual suggestions and provocations. It is not in vain that thefarmer remembers and repeats the few Latin words which he has heard. Mensometimes speak as if the study of the classics would at length make wayfor more modern and practical studies; but the adventurous student willalways study classics, in whatever language they may be written andhowever ancient they may be. For what are the classics but the noblestrecorded thoughts of man? They are the only oracles which are notdecayed, and there are such answers to the most modern inquiry in themas Delphi and Dodona never gave. We might as well omit to study Naturebecause she is old. To read well, that is, to read true books in a truespirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more thanany exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a trainingsuch as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the wholelife to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedlyas they were written. It is not enough even to be able to speak thelanguage of that nation by which they are written, for there is amemorable interval between the spoken and the written language, thelanguage heard and the language read. The one is commonly transitory,a sound, a tongue, a dialect merely, almost brutish, and we learnit unconsciously, like the brutes, of our mothers. The other is thematurity and experience of that; if that is our mother tongue, this isour father tongue, a reserved and select expression, too significant tobe heard by the ear, which we must be born again in order to speak. Thecrowds of men who merely spoke the Greek and Latin tongues in the MiddleAges were not entitled by the accident of birth to read the works ofgenius written in those languages; for these were not written inthat Greek or Latin which they knew, but in the select language ofliterature. They had not learned the nobler dialects of Greece and Rome,but the very materials on which they were written were waste paper tothem, and they prized instead a cheap contemporary literature. But whenthe several nations of Europe had acquired distinct though rude writtenlanguages of their own, sufficient for the purposes of their risingliteratures, then first learning revived, and scholars were enabled todiscern from that remoteness the treasures of antiquity. What the Romanand Grecian multitude could not _hear_, after the lapse of ages a fewscholars _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 thefleeting spoken language as the firmament with its stars is behindthe clouds. _There_ are the stars, and they who can may read them.The astronomers forever comment on and observe them. They are notexhalations like our daily colloquies and vaporous breath. What iscalled eloquence in the forum is commonly found to be rhetoric in thestudy. The orator yields to the inspiration of a transient occasion, andspeaks 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 distractedby the event and the crowd which inspire the orator, speaks to theintellect and health of mankind, to all in any age who can _understand_him.No wonder that Alexander carried the Iliad with him on his expeditionsin a precious casket. A written word is the choicest of relics. It issomething at once more intimate with us and more universal than anyother work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself. It maybe translated into every language, and not only be read but actuallybreathed from all human lips;--not be represented on canvas or in marbleonly, but be carved out of the breath of life itself. The symbol ofan ancient man's thought becomes a modern man's speech. Two thousandsummers have imparted to the monuments of Grecian literature, as to hermarbles, only a maturer golden and autumnal tint, for they have carriedtheir own serene and celestial atmosphere into all lands to protect themagainst the corrosion of time. Books are the treasured wealth of theworld and the fit inheritance of generations and nations. Books, theoldest and the best, stand naturally and rightfully on the shelves ofevery cottage. They have no cause of their own to plead, but while theyenlighten and sustain the reader his common sense will not refusethem. Their authors are a natural and irresistible aristocracy inevery society, and, more than kings or emperors, exert an influence onmankind. When the illiterate and perhaps scornful trader has earned byenterprise and industry his coveted leisure and independence, and isadmitted to the circles of wealth and fashion, he turns inevitably atlast to those still higher but yet inaccessible circles of intellect andgenius, and is sensible only of the imperfection of his culture and thevanity and insufficiency of all his riches, and further proves hisgood sense by the pains which he takes to secure for his children thatintellectual culture whose want he so keenly feels; and thus it is thathe becomes the founder of a family.Those who have not learned to read the ancient classics in the languagein which they were written must have a very imperfect knowledge of thehistory of the human race; for it is remarkable that no transcript ofthem has ever been made into any modern tongue, unless our civilizationitself may be regarded as such a transcript. Homer has never yet beenprinted in English, nor Æschylus, nor Virgil even--works as refined, assolidly done, and as beautiful almost as the morning itself; forlater writers, say what we will of their genius, have rarely, if ever,equalled the elaborate beauty and finish and the lifelong and heroicl*terary labors of the ancients. They only talk of forgetting them whonever knew them. It will be soon enough to forget them when we have thelearning and the genius which will enable us to attend to and appreciatethem. That age will be rich indeed when those relics which we callClassics, and the still older and more than classic but even less knownScriptures of the nations, shall have still further accumulated, whenthe Vaticans shall be filled with Vedas and Zendavestas and Bibles, withHomers and Dantes and Shakespeares, and all the centuries to come shallhave successively deposited their trophies in the forum of the world. Bysuch 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 themultitude read the stars, at most astrologically, not astronomically.Most men have learned to read to serve a paltry convenience, as theyhave learned to cipher in order to keep accounts and not be cheated intrade; but of reading as a noble intellectual exercise they know littleor nothing; yet this only is reading, in a high sense, not that whichlulls us as a luxury and suffers the nobler faculties to sleep thewhile, but what we have to stand on tip-toe to read and devote our mostalert and wakeful hours to.I think that having learned our letters we should read the best that isin literature, and not be forever repeating our a-b-abs, and words ofone syllable, in the fourth or fifth classes, sitting on the lowest andforemost form all our lives. Most men are satisfied if they read or hearread, and perchance have been convicted by the wisdom of one good book,the Bible, and for the rest of their lives vegetate and dissipate theirfaculties in what is called easy reading. There is a work in severalvolumes in our Circulating Library entitled "Little Reading," which Ithought referred to a town of that name which I had not been to. Thereare those who, like cormorants and ostriches, can digest all sorts ofthis, even after the fullest dinner of meats and vegetables, for theysuffer nothing to be wasted. If others are the machines to providethis provender, they are the machines to read it. They read the ninethousandth tale about Zebulon and Sophronia, and how they loved as nonehad ever loved before, and neither did the course of their true love runsmooth--at any rate, how it did run and stumble, and get up again andgo on! how some poor unfortunate got up on to a steeple, who had betternever have gone up as far as the belfry; and then, having needlesslygot him up there, the happy novelist rings the bell for all the world tocome 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 ofuniversal noveldom into man weather-co*cks, as they used to put heroesamong the constellations, and let them swing round there till they arerusty, 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 themeeting-house burn down. "The Skip of the Tip-Toe-Hop, a Romance of theMiddle Ages, by the celebrated author of 'Tittle-Tol-Tan,' to appearin monthly parts; a great rush; don't all come together." All thisthey read with saucer eyes, and erect and primitive curiosity, and withunwearied gizzard, whose corrugations even yet need no sharpening, justas some little four-year-old bencher his two-cent gilt-coverededition of Cinderella--without any improvement, that I can see, in thepronunciation, or accent, or emphasis, or any more skill in extractingor inserting the moral. The result is dulness of sight, a stagnation ofthe vital circulations, and a general deliquium and sloughing off of allthe intellectual faculties. This sort of gingerbread is baked daily andmore 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 avery few exceptions, no taste for the best or for very good books evenin English literature, whose words all can read and spell. Even thecollege-bred and so-called liberally educated men here and elsewherehave really little or no acquaintance with the English classics; andas for the recorded wisdom of mankind, the ancient classics and Bibles,which are accessible to all who will know of them, there are thefeeblest efforts anywhere made to become acquainted with them. I know awoodchopper, of middle age, who takes a French paper, not for news as hesays, for he is above that, but to "keep himself in practice," he beinga Canadian by birth; and when I ask him what he considers the best thinghe can do in this world, he says, beside this, to keep up and add tohis English. This is about as much as the college-bred generally do oraspire to do, and they take an English paper for the purpose. One whohas just come from reading perhaps one of the best English books willfind how many with whom he can converse about it? Or suppose he comesfrom reading a Greek or Latin classic in the original, whose praises arefamiliar even to the so-called illiterate; he will find nobody at allto speak to, but must keep silence about it. Indeed, there is hardly theprofessor in our colleges, who, if he has mastered the difficulties ofthe language, has proportionally mastered the difficulties of the witand poetry of a Greek poet, and has any sympathy to impart to thealert and heroic reader; and as for the sacred Scriptures, or Bibles ofmankind, who in this town can tell me even their titles? Most men do notknow that any nation but the Hebrews have had a scripture. A man, anyman, will go considerably out of his way to pick up a silver dollar; buthere are golden words, which the wisest men of antiquity have uttered,and whose worth the wise of every succeeding age have assured usof;--and yet we learn to read only as far as Easy Reading, the primersand class-books, and when we leave school, the "Little Reading," andstory-books, which are for boys and beginners; and our reading, ourconversation and thinking, are all on a very low level, worthy only ofpygmies and manikins.I aspire to be acquainted with wiser men than this our Concord soil hasproduced, whose names are hardly known here. Or shall I hear the name ofPlato and never read his book? As if Plato were my townsman and I neversaw him--my next neighbor and I never heard him speak or attended tothe wisdom of his words. But how actually is it? His Dialogues, whichcontain what was immortal in him, lie on the next shelf, and yet I neverread them. We are underbred and low-lived and illiterate; and in thisrespect I confess I do not make any very broad distinction betweenthe illiterateness of my townsman who cannot read at all and theilliterateness of him who has learned to read only what is forchildren and feeble intellects. We should be as good as the worthies ofantiquity, but partly by first knowing how good they were. We are a raceof tit-men, and soar but little higher in our intellectual flights thanthe columns of the daily paper.It is not all books that are as dull as their readers. There areprobably words addressed to our condition exactly, which, if we couldreally hear and understand, would be more salutary than the morning orthe spring to our lives, and possibly put a new aspect on the face ofthings for us. How many a man has dated a new era in his life from thereading of a book! The book exists for us, perchance, which will explainour miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things wemay find somewhere uttered. These same questions that disturb and puzzleand confound us have in their turn occurred to all the wise men; not onehas been omitted; and each has answered them, according to his ability,by his words and his life. Moreover, with wisdom we shall learnliberality. The solitary hired man on a farm in the outskirts ofConcord, who has had his second birth and peculiar religious experience,and is driven as he believes into the silent gravity and exclusivenessby his faith, may think it is not true; but Zoroaster, thousands ofyears ago, travelled the same road and had the same experience; buthe, being wise, knew it to be universal, and treated his neighborsaccordingly, and is even said to have invented and established worshipamong men. Let him humbly commune with Zoroaster then, and through theliberalizing 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 themost rapid strides of any nation. But consider how little this villagedoes for its own culture. I do not wish to flatter my townsmen, nor tobe flattered by them, for that will not advance either of us. We needto be provoked--goaded like oxen, as we are, into a trot. We have acomparatively decent system of common schools, schools for infants only;but excepting the half-starved Lyceum in the winter, and latterlythe puny beginning of a library suggested by the State, no school forourselves. We spend more on almost any article of bodily aliment orailment than on our mental aliment. It is time that we had uncommonschools, that we did not leave off our education when we begin to be menand women. It is time that villages were universities, and their elderinhabitants 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? Cannotstudents be boarded here and get a liberal education under the skies ofConcord? Can we not hire some Abelard to lecture to us? Alas! what withfoddering the cattle and tending the store, we are kept from school toolong, and our education is sadly neglected. In this country, the villageshould in some respects take the place of the nobleman of Europe. Itshould be the patron of the fine arts. It is rich enough. It wants onlythe magnanimity and refinement. It can spend money enough on such thingsas farmers and traders value, but it is thought Utopian to proposespending money for things which more intelligent men know to be offar more worth. This town has spent seventeen thousand dollars on atown-house, thank fortune or politics, but probably it will not spend somuch on living wit, the true meat to put into that shell, in a hundredyears. The one hundred and twenty-five dollars annually subscribed for aLyceum in the winter is better spent than any other equal sum raised inthe town. If we live in the Nineteenth Century, why should we not enjoythe advantages which the Nineteenth Century offers? Why should our lifebe in any respect provincial? If we will read newspapers, why notskip the gossip of Boston and take the best newspaper in the world atonce?--not be sucking the pap of "neutral family" papers, or browsing"Olive Branches" here in New England. Let the reports of all the learnedsocieties come to us, and we will see if they know anything. Whyshould we leave it to Harper & Brothers and Redding & Co. to selectour reading? As the nobleman of cultivated taste surrounds himselfwith whatever conduces to his culture--genius--learning--wit--books--paintings--statuary--music--philosophical instruments, and the like; solet the village do--not stop short at a pedagogue, a parson, a sexton, aparish library, and three selectmen, because our Pilgrim forefathers gotthrough a cold winter once on a bleak rock with these. To actcollectively is according to the spirit of our institutions; and I amconfident that, as our circ*mstances are more flourishing, our means aregreater than the nobleman's. New England can hire all the wise men inthe world to come and teach her, and board them round the while, and notbe provincial at all. That is the _uncommon_ school we want. Instead ofnoblemen, let us have noble villages of men. If it is necessary, omitone bridge over the river, go round a little there, and throw one archat least over the darker gulf of ignorance which surrounds us.SoundsBut while we are confined to books, though the most select and classic,and read only particular written languages, which are themselves butdialects and provincial, we are in danger of forgetting the languagewhich all things and events speak without metaphor, which alone iscopious and standard. Much is published, but little printed. The rayswhich stream through the shutter will be no longer remembered when theshutter is wholly removed. No method nor discipline can supersede thenecessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history orphilosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society,or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline oflooking always at what is to be seen? Will you be a reader, a studentmerely, or a seer? Read your fate, see what is before you, and walk oninto futurity.I did not read books the first summer; I hoed beans. Nay, I often didbetter than this. There were times when I could not afford to sacrificethe bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head orhands. 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 sunrisetill noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs,in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sing around orflitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in atmy west window, or the noise of some traveller's wagon on the distanthighway, I was reminded of the lapse of time. I grew in those seasonslike corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of thehands would have been. They were not time subtracted from my life, butso much over and above my usual allowance. I realized what the Orientalsmean by contemplation and the forsaking of works. For the most part, Iminded not how the hours went. The day advanced as if to light somework of mine; it was morning, and lo, now it is evening, and nothingmemorable is accomplished. Instead of singing like the birds, I silentlysmiled at my incessant good fortune. As the sparrow had its trill,sitting on the hickory before my door, so had I my chuckle or suppressedwarble which he might hear out of my nest. My days were not days of theweek, bearing the stamp of any heathen deity, nor were they minced intohours and fretted by the ticking of a clock; for I lived like the PuriIndians, of whom it is said that "for yesterday, today, and tomorrowthey have only one word, and they express the variety of meaning bypointing backward for yesterday forward for tomorrow, and overhead forthe passing day." This was sheer idleness to my fellow-townsmen, nodoubt; but if the birds and flowers had tried me by their standard, Ishould not have been found wanting. A man must find his occasions inhimself, it is true. The natural day is very calm, and will hardlyreprove his indolence.I had this advantage, at least, in my mode of life, over those who wereobliged to look abroad for amusem*nt, to society and the theatre, thatmy life itself was become my amusem*nt 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 thelast and best mode we had learned, we should never be troubled withennui. Follow your genius closely enough, and it will not fail to showyou a fresh prospect every hour. Housework was a pleasant pastime. Whenmy floor was dirty, I rose early, and, setting all my furniture out ofdoors on the grass, bed and bedstead making but one budget, dashed wateron the floor, and sprinkled white sand from the pond on it, and thenwith a broom scrubbed it clean and white; and by the time the villagershad broken their fast the morning sun had dried my house sufficiently toallow 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 thepines and hickories. They seemed glad to get out themselves, and as ifunwilling to be brought in. I was sometimes tempted to stretch an awningover them and take my seat there. It was worth the while to see the sunshine on these things, and hear the free wind blow on them; so much moreinteresting most familiar objects look out of doors than in the house. Abird sits on the next bough, life-everlasting grows under the table,and blackberry vines run round its legs; pine cones, chestnut burs, andstrawberry leaves are strewn about. It looked as if this was the waythese 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 ofthe larger wood, in the midst of a young forest of pitch pines andhickories, and half a dozen rods from the pond, to which a narrowfootpath led down the hill. In my front yard grew the strawberry,blackberry, and life-everlasting, johnswort and goldenrod, shrub oaksand sand cherry, blueberry and groundnut. Near the end of May, the sandcherry (_Cerasus pumila_) adorned the sides of the path with its delicateflowers arranged in umbels cylindrically about its short stems, whichlast, in the fall, weighed down with good-sized and handsome cherries,fell over in wreaths like rays on every side. I tasted them out ofcompliment to Nature, though they were scarcely palatable. The sumach(_Rhus glabra_) grew luxuriantly about the house, pushing up through theembankment which I had made, and growing five or six feet the firstseason. Its broad pinnate tropical leaf was pleasant though strange tolook on. The large buds, suddenly pushing out late in the spring fromdry sticks which had seemed to be dead, developed themselves as bymagic into graceful green and tender boughs, an inch in diameter; andsometimes, as I sat at my window, so heedlessly did they grow and taxtheir weak joints, I heard a fresh and tender bough suddenly fall likea fan to the ground, when there was not a breath of air stirring, brokenoff by its own weight. In August, the large masses of berries, which,when in flower, had attracted many wild bees, gradually assumed theirbright velvety crimson hue, and by their weight again bent down andbroke the tender limbs. * * * * *As I sit at my window this summer afternoon, hawks are circling about myclearing; the tantivy of wild pigeons, flying by two and threes athwartmy 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 thepond and brings up a fish; a mink steals out of the marsh before my doorand seizes a frog by the shore; the sedge is bending under the weight ofthe reed-birds flitting hither and thither; and for the last half-hour Ihave heard the rattle of railroad cars, now dying away and then revivinglike the beat of a partridge, conveying travellers from Boston to thecountry. For I did not live so out of the world as that boy who, as Ihear, was put out to a farmer in the east part of the town, but ere longran away and came home again, quite down at the heel and homesick. Hehad never seen such a dull and out-of-the-way place; the folks were allgone off; why, you couldn't even hear the whistle! I doubt if there issuch 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 ofwhere 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 freighttrains, who go over the whole length of the road, bow to me as to an oldacquaintance, they pass me so often, and apparently they take me for anemployee; and so I am. I too would fain be a track-repairer somewhere inthe 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 thecircle of the town, or adventurous country traders from the other side.As they come under one horizon, they shout their warning to get off thetrack to the other, heard sometimes through the circles of two towns.Here come your groceries, country; your rations, countrymen! Nor isthere any man so independent on his farm that he can say them nay. Andhere's your pay for them! screams the countryman's whistle; timber likelong battering-rams going twenty miles an hour against the city's walls,and chairs enough to seat all the weary and heavy-laden that dwellwithin them. With such huge and lumbering civility the country hands achair to the city. All the Indian huckleberry hills are stripped, allthe cranberry meadows are raked into the city. Up comes the cotton, downgoes the woven cloth; up comes the silk, down goes the woollen; up comethe books, but down goes the wit that writes them.When I meet the engine with its train of cars moving off with planetarymotion--or, rather, like a comet, for the beholder knows not if withthat velocity and with that direction it will ever revisit this system,since its orbit does not look like a returning curve--with its steamcloud like a banner streaming behind in golden and silver wreaths, likemany a downy cloud which I have seen, high in the heavens, unfolding itsmasses to the light--as if this traveling demigod, this cloud-compeller,would ere long take the sunset sky for the livery of his train; whenI 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 hisnostrils (what kind of winged horse or fiery dragon they will put intothe new Mythology I don't know), it seems as if the earth had got arace now worthy to inhabit it. If all were as it seems, and men made theelements their servants for noble ends! If the cloud that hangs over theengine were the perspiration of heroic deeds, or as beneficent as thatwhich floats over the farmer's fields, then the elements and Natureherself would cheerfully accompany men on their errands and be theirescort.I watch the passage of the morning cars with the same feeling that Ido the rising of the sun, which is hardly more regular. Their trainof clouds stretching far behind and rising higher and higher, going toheaven while the cars are going to Boston, conceals the sun for a minuteand casts my distant field into the shade, a celestial train besidewhich the petty train of cars which hugs the earth is but the barbof the spear. The stabler of the iron horse was up early this wintermorning by the light of the stars amid the mountains, to fodder andharness his steed. Fire, too, was awakened thus early to put the vitalheat in him and get him off. If the enterprise were as innocent as it isearly! If the snow lies deep, they strap on his snowshoes, and, with thegiant plow, plow a furrow from the mountains to the seaboard, in whichthe cars, like a following drill-barrow, sprinkle all the restless menand floating merchandise in the country for seed. All day the fire-steedflies over the country, stopping only that his master may rest, and I amawakened by his tramp and defiant snort at midnight, when in some remoteglen in the woods he fronts the elements incased in ice and snow; and hewill reach his stall only with the morning star, to start once more onhis travels without rest or slumber. Or perchance, at evening, I hearhim in his stable blowing off the superfluous energy of the day, that hemay calm his nerves and cool his liver and brain for a few hours ofiron slumber. If the enterprise were as heroic and commanding as it isprotracted and unwearied!Far through unfrequented woods on the confines of towns, where once onlythe hunter penetrated by day, in the darkest night dart these brightsaloons without the knowledge of their inhabitants; this moment stoppingat some brilliant station-house in town or city, where a social crowdis gathered, the next in the Dismal Swamp, scaring the owl and fox. Thestartings and arrivals of the cars are now the epochs in the villageday. They go and come with such regularity and precision, and theirwhistle 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 wasinvented? Do they not talk and think faster in the depot than they didin the stage-office? There is something electrifying in the atmosphereof the former place. I have been astonished at the miracles it haswrought; that some of my neighbors, who, I should have prophesied, oncefor all, would never get to Boston by so prompt a conveyance, are onhand when the bell rings. To do things "railroad fashion" is now thebyword; and it is worth the while to be warned so often and so sincerelyby any power to get off its track. There is no stopping to read theriot act, no firing over the heads of the mob, in this case. We haveconstructed a fate, an _Atropos_, that never turns aside. (Let that bethe name of your engine.) Men are advertised that at a certain hour andminute these bolts will be shot toward particular points of the compass;yet it interferes with no man's business, and the children go to schoolon the other track. We live the steadier for it. We are all educatedthus to be sons of Tell. The air is full of invisible bolts. Every pathbut your own is the path of fate. Keep on your own track, then.What recommends commerce to me is its enterprise and bravery. It doesnot clasp its hands and pray to Jupiter. I see these men every day goabout their business with more or less courage and content, doing moreeven than they suspect, and perchance better employed than they couldhave consciously devised. I am less affected by their heroism who stoodup for half an hour in the front line at Buena Vista, than by the steadyand cheerful valor of the men who inhabit the snowplow for their winterquarters; who have not merely the three-o'-clock-in-the-morning courage,which Bonaparte thought was the rarest, but whose courage does not go torest so early, who go to sleep only when the storm sleeps or the sinewsof their iron steed are frozen. On this morning of the Great Snow,perchance, which is still raging and chilling men's blood, I bear themuffled tone of their engine bell from out the fog bank of their chilledbreath, which announces that the cars _are coming_, without long delay,notwithstanding the veto of a New England northeast snow-storm, andI behold the plowmen covered with snow and rime, their heads peering,above the mould-board which is turning down other than daisies and thenests of field mice, like bowlders of the Sierra Nevada, that occupy anoutside place in the universe.Commerce is unexpectedly confident and serene, alert, adventurous, andunwearied. It is very natural in its methods withal, far more so thanmany fantastic enterprises and sentimental experiments, and hence itssingular success. I am refreshed and expanded when the freight trainrattles past me, and I smell the stores which go dispensing their odorsall the way from Long Wharf to Lake Champlain, reminding me of foreignparts, of coral reefs, and Indian oceans, and tropical climes, and theextent of the globe. I feel more like a citizen of the world at thesight of the palm-leaf which will cover so many flaxen New England headsthe next summer, the Manilla hemp and cocoanut husks, the old junk,gunny bags, scrap iron, and rusty nails. This carload of torn sails ismore legible and interesting now than if they should be wrought intopaper and printed books. Who can write so graphically the history ofthe storms they have weathered as these rents have done? They areproof-sheets which need no correction. Here goes lumber from the Mainewoods, which did not go out to sea in the last freshet, risen fourdollars 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, andcaribou. Next rolls Thomaston lime, a prime lot, which will get faramong the hills before it gets slacked. These rags in bales, of all huesand 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 quartersboth of fashion and poverty, going to become paper of one color or afew 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 GrandBanks and the fisheries. Who has not seen a salt fish, thoroughlycured for this world, so that nothing can spoil it, and putting theperseverance of the saints to the blush? with which you may sweep orpave the streets, and split your kindlings, and the teamster shelterhimself and his lading against sun, wind, and rain behind it--and thetrader, as a Concord trader once did, hang it up by his door for a signwhen he commences business, until at last his oldest customer cannottell surely whether it be animal, vegetable, or mineral, and yet itshall 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. NextSpanish hides, with the tails still preserving their twist and the angleof elevation they had when the oxen that wore them were careering overthe pampas of the Spanish Main--a type of all obstinacy, and evincinghow almost hopeless and incurable are all constitutional vices. Iconfess, that practically speaking, when I have learned a man's realdisposition, I have no hopes of changing it for the better or worsein this state of existence. As the Orientals say, "A cur's tail may bewarmed, and pressed, and bound round with ligatures, and after a twelveyears' labor bestowed upon it, still it will retain its natural form."The only effectual cure for such inveteracies as these tails exhibit isto 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 molassesor of brandy directed to John Smith, Cuttingsville, Vermont, sometrader among the Green Mountains, who imports for the farmers near hisclearing, and now perchance stands over his bulkhead and thinks ofthe last arrivals on the coast, how they may affect the price for him,telling his customers this moment, as he has told them twenty timesbefore this morning, that he expects some by the next train of primequality. It is advertised in the Cuttingsville Times.While these things go up other things come down. Warned by the whizzingsound, I look up from my book and see some tall pine, hewn on farnorthern hills, which has winged its way over the Green Mountains andthe Connecticut, shot like an arrow through the township within tenminutes, 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 thousandhills, sheepcots, stables, and cow-yards in the air, drovers with theirsticks, and shepherd boys in the midst of their flocks, all but themountain pastures, whirled along like leaves blown from the mountains bythe September gales. The air is filled with the bleating of calves andsheep, 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 mountainsdo indeed skip like rams and the little hills like lambs. A carloadof drovers, too, in the midst, on a level with their droves now, theirvocation gone, but still clinging to their useless sticks as their badgeof 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 hearthem barking behind the Peterboro' Hills, or panting up the westernslope of the Green Mountains. They will not be in at the death. Theirvocation, too, is gone. Their fidelity and sagacity are below par now.They will slink back to their kennels in disgrace, or perchance run wildand strike a league with the wolf and the fox. So is your pastoral lifewhirled past and away. But the bell rings, and I must get off the trackand 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 eyesput 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, andthe fishes in the pond no longer feel their rumbling, I am more alonethan ever. For the rest of the long afternoon, perhaps, my meditationsare interrupted only by the faint rattle of a carriage or team along thedistant highway.Sometimes, on Sundays, I heard the bells, the Lincoln, Acton, Bedford,or Concord bell, when the wind was favorable, a faint, sweet, and, asit were, natural melody, worth importing into the wilderness. Ata sufficient distance over the woods this sound acquires a certainvibratory hum, as if the pine needles in the horizon were the strings ofa harp which it swept. All sound heard at the greatest possible distanceproduces one and the same effect, a vibration of the universal lyre,just as the intervening atmosphere makes a distant ridge of earthinteresting to our eyes by the azure tint it imparts to it. There cameto me in this case a melody which the air had strained, and which hadconversed with every leaf and needle of the wood, that portion of thesound which the elements had taken up and modulated and echoed from valeto vale. The echo is, to some extent, an original sound, and thereinis the magic and charm of it. It is not merely a repetition of what wasworth repeating in the bell, but partly the voice of the wood; the sametrivial words and notes sung by a wood-nymph.At evening, the distant lowing of some cow in the horizon beyond thewoods sounded sweet and melodious, and at first I would mistake it forthe voices of certain minstrels by whom I was sometimes serenaded, whomight be straying over hill and dale; but soon I was not unpleasantlydisappointed when it was prolonged into the cheap and natural music ofthe cow. I do not mean to be satirical, but to express my appreciationof those youths' singing, when I state that I perceived clearly thatit was akin to the music of the cow, and they were at length onearticulation of Nature.Regularly at half-past seven, in one part of the summer, after theevening train had gone by, the whip-poor-wills chanted their vespers forhalf an hour, sitting on a stump by my door, or upon the ridge-pole ofthe house. They would begin to sing almost with as much precision as aclock, within five minutes of a particular time, referred to the settingof the sun, every evening. I had a rare opportunity to become acquaintedwith their habits. Sometimes I heard four or five at once in differentparts of the wood, by accident one a bar behind another, and so near methat I distinguished not only the cluck after each note, but often thatsingular buzzing sound like a fly in a spider's web, only proportionallylouder. Sometimes one would circle round and round me in the woods a fewfeet distant as if tethered by a string, when probably I was near itseggs. They sang at intervals throughout the night, and were again asmusical as ever just before and about dawn.When other birds are still, the screech owls take up the strain, likemourning women their ancient u-lu-lu. Their dismal scream is truly BenJonsonian. Wise midnight hags! It is no honest and blunt tu-whit tu-whoof the poets, but, without jesting, a most solemn graveyard ditty, themutual consolations of suicide lovers remembering the pangs and thedelights of supernal love in the infernal groves. Yet I love to heartheir wailing, their doleful responses, trilled along the woodside;reminding me sometimes of music and singing birds; as if it were thedark and tearful side of music, the regrets and sighs that would fain besung. They are the spirits, the low spirits and melancholy forebodings,of fallen souls that once in human shape night-walked the earth and didthe deeds of darkness, now expiating their sins with their wailing hymnsor threnodies in the scenery of their transgressions. They give me anew sense of the variety and capacity of that nature which is our commondwelling. _Oh-o-o-o-o that I never had been bor-r-r-r-n!_ sighs one onthis side of the pond, and circles with the restlessness of despairto some new perch on the gray oaks. Then--_that I never had beenbor-r-r-r-n!_ echoes another on the farther side with tremuloussincerity, and--_bor-r-r-r-n!_ comes faintly from far in the Lincolnwoods.I was also serenaded by a hooting owl. Near at hand you could fancyit the most melancholy sound in Nature, as if she meant by this tostereotype and make permanent in her choir the dying moans of a humanbeing--some poor weak relic of mortality who has left hope behind, andhowls like an animal, yet with human sobs, on entering the dark valley,made more awful by a certain gurgling melodiousness--I find myselfbeginning with the letters _gl_ when I try to imitate it--expressive ofa mind which has reached the gelatinous, mildewy stage in themortification of all healthy and courageous thought. It reminded meof ghouls and idiots and insane howlings. But now one answers from farwoods in a strain made really melodious by distance--_Hoo hoo hoo,hoorer hoo_; and indeed for the most part it suggested only pleasingassociations, whether heard by day or night, summer or winter.I rejoice that there are owls. Let them do the idiotic and maniacalhooting for men. It is a sound admirably suited to swamps and twilightwoods which no day illustrates, suggesting a vast and undeveloped naturewhich men have not recognized. They represent the stark twilight andunsatisfied thoughts which all have. All day the sun has shone on thesurface of some savage swamp, where the single spruce stands hung withusnea lichens, and small hawks circulate above, and the chickadee lispsamid the evergreens, and the partridge and rabbit skulk beneath; but nowa more dismal and fitting day dawns, and a different race of creaturesawakes to express the meaning of Nature there.Late in the evening I heard the distant rumbling of wagons overbridges--a sound heard farther than almost any other at night--thebaying of dogs, and sometimes again the lowing of some disconsolate cowin a distant barn-yard. In the mean-while all the shore rang with thetrump of bullfrogs, the sturdy spirits of ancient wine-bibbers andwassailers, still unrepentant, trying to sing a catch in their Stygianlake--if the Walden nymphs will pardon the comparison, for though thereare almost no weeds, there are frogs there--who would fain keep up thehilarious rules of their old festal tables, though their voices havewaxed hoarse and solemnly grave, mocking at mirth, and the wine has lostit* flavor, and become only liquor to distend their paunches, and sweetintoxication never comes to drown the memory of the past, but meresaturation and waterloggedness and distention. The most aldermanic, withhis chin upon a heart-leaf, which serves for a napkin to his droolingchaps, under this northern shore quaffs a deep draught of theonce scorned water, and passes round the cup with the ejacul*tion_tr-r-r-oonk, tr-r-r--oonk, tr-r-r-oonk!_ and straightway comes over thewater from some distant cove the same password repeated, where thenext in seniority and girth has gulped down to his mark; and when thisobservance has made the circuit of the shores, then ejacul*tes themaster of ceremonies, with satisfaction, _tr-r-r-oonk!_ and each inhis turn repeats the same down to the least distended, leakiest, andflabbiest paunched, that there be no mistake; and then the howl goesround again and again, until the sun disperses the morning mist, andonly 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 co*ck-crowing from myclearing, and I thought that it might be worth the while to keep aco*ckerel for his music merely, as a singing bird. The note of this oncewild Indian pheasant is certainly the most remarkable of any bird's, andif they could be naturalized without being domesticated, it would soonbecome the most famous sound in our woods, surpassing the clangor of thegoose and the hooting of the owl; and then imagine the cackling of thehens to fill the pauses when their lords' clarions rested! No wonderthat man added this bird to his tame stock--to say nothing of the eggsand drumsticks. To walk in a winter morning in a wood where these birdsabounded, their native woods, and hear the wild co*ckerels crow on thetrees, clear and shrill for miles over the resounding earth, drowningthe feebler notes of other birds--think of it! It would put nations onthe alert. Who would not be early to rise, and rise earlier and earlierevery successive day of his life, till he became unspeakably healthy,wealthy, and wise? This foreign bird's note is celebrated by the poetsof all countries along with the notes of their native songsters. Allclimates agree with brave Chanticleer. He is more indigenous even thanthe natives. His health is ever good, his lungs are sound, his spiritsnever flag. Even the sailor on the Atlantic and Pacific is awakened byhis voice; but its shrill sound never roused me from my slumbers. I keptneither dog, cat, cow, pig, nor hens, so that you would have saidthere was a deficiency of domestic sounds; neither the churn, nor thespinning-wheel, nor even the singing of the kettle, nor the hissing ofthe urn, nor children crying, to comfort one. An old-fashioned man wouldhave lost his senses or died of ennui before this. Not even rats in thewall, for they were starved out, or rather were never baited in--onlysquirrels on the roof and under the floor, a whip-poor-will on theridge-pole, a blue jay screaming beneath the window, a hare or woodchuckunder the house, a screech owl or a cat owl behind it, a flock of wildgeese 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 visitedmy clearing. No co*ckerels to crow nor hens to cackle in the yard. Noyard! but unfenced nature reaching up to your very sills. A young forestgrowing up under your meadows, and wild sumachs and blackberry vinesbreaking through into your cellar; sturdy pitch pines rubbing andcreaking against the shingles for want of room, their roots reachingquite under the house. Instead of a scuttle or a blind blown off in thegale--a pine tree snapped off or torn up by the roots behind yourhouse for fuel. Instead of no path to the front-yard gate in the GreatSnow--no gate--no front-yard--and no path to the civilized world.SolitudeThis is a delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense, andimbibes delight through every pore. I go and come with a strange libertyin Nature, a part of herself. As I walk along the stony shore of thepond 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 unusuallycongenial to me. The bullfrogs trump to usher in the night, and the noteof the whip-poor-will is borne on the rippling wind from over the water.Sympathy with the fluttering alder and poplar leaves almost takes awaymy breath; yet, like the lake, my serenity is rippled but not ruffled.These small waves raised by the evening wind are as remote from stormas the smooth reflecting surface. Though it is now dark, the wind stillblows and roars in the wood, the waves still dash, and some creatureslull the rest with their notes. The repose is never complete. Thewildest animals do not repose, but seek their prey now; the fox, andskunk, and rabbit, now roam the fields and woods without fear. They areNature's watchmen--links which connect the days of animated life.When I return to my house I find that visitors have been there and lefttheir cards, either a bunch of flowers, or a wreath of evergreen, or aname in pencil on a yellow walnut leaf or a chip. They who come rarelyto the woods take some little piece of the forest into their handsto play with by the way, which they leave, either intentionally oraccidentally. One has peeled a willow wand, woven it into a ring, anddropped it on my table. I could always tell if visitors had called inmy absence, either by the bended twigs or grass, or the print of theirshoes, and generally of what sex or age or quality they were by someslight trace left, as a flower dropped, or a bunch of grass plucked andthrown away, even as far off as the railroad, half a mile distant, or bythe lingering odor of a cigar or pipe. Nay, I was frequently notified ofthe passage of a traveller along the highway sixty rods off by the scentof his pipe.There is commonly sufficient space about us. Our horizon is never quiteat our elbows. The thick wood is not just at our door, nor the pond, butsomewhat is always clearing, familiar and worn by us, appropriated andfenced in some way, and reclaimed from Nature. For what reason have Ithis vast range and circuit, some square miles of unfrequented forest,for my privacy, abandoned to me by men? My nearest neighbor is a miledistant, and no house is visible from any place but the hill-tops withinhalf 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 onehand, and of the fence which skirts the woodland road on the other. Butfor the most part it is as solitary where I live as on the prairies. Itis as much Asia or Africa as New England. I have, as it were, my own sunand moon and stars, and a little world all to myself. At night there wasnever a traveller passed my house, or knocked at my door, more than ifI were the first or last man; unless it were in the spring, when at longintervals some came from the village to fish for pouts--they plainlyfished much more in the Walden Pond of their own natures, and baitedtheir hooks with darkness--but they soon retreated, usually with lightbaskets, and left "the world to darkness and to me," and the blackkernel of the night was never profaned by any human neighborhood. Ibelieve that men are generally still a little afraid of the dark,though the witches are all hung, and Christianity and candles have beenintroduced.Yet I experienced sometimes that the most sweet and tender, the mostinnocent and encouraging society may be found in any natural object,even for the poor misanthrope and most melancholy man. There can be novery black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of Nature and hashis senses still. There was never yet such a storm but it was Æolianmusic to a healthy and innocent ear. Nothing can rightly compel a simpleand brave man to a vulgar sadness. While I enjoy the friendship of theseasons I trust that nothing can make life a burden to me. The gentlerain which waters my beans and keeps me in the house today is not drearand 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 asto cause the seeds to rot in the ground and destroy the potatoes in thelow 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 Icompare myself with other men, it seems as if I were more favored by thegods than they, beyond any deserts that I am conscious of; as if I hada warrant and surety at their hands which my fellows have not, and wereespecially guided and guarded. I do not flatter myself, but if it bepossible they flatter me. I have never felt lonesome, or in the leastoppressed by a sense of solitude, but once, and that was a few weeksafter I came to the woods, when, for an hour, I doubted if the nearneighborhood of man was not essential to a serene and healthy life. Tobe alone was something unpleasant. But I was at the same time consciousof a slight insanity in my mood, and seemed to foresee my recovery.In the midst of a gentle rain while these thoughts prevailed, I wassuddenly sensible of such sweet and beneficent society in Nature, inthe very pattering of the drops, and in every sound and sight around myhouse, an infinite and unaccountable friendliness all at once likean atmosphere sustaining me, as made the fancied advantages of humanneighborhood insignificant, and I have never thought of them since.Every little pine needle expanded and swelled with sympathy andbefriended me. I was so distinctly made aware of the presence ofsomething kindred to me, even in scenes which we are accustomed to callwild and dreary, and also that the nearest of blood to me and humanestwas not a person nor a villager, that I thought no place could ever bestrange 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 thespring or fall, which confined me to the house for the afternoon as wellas the forenoon, soothed by their ceaseless roar and pelting; when anearly twilight ushered in a long evening in which many thoughts had timeto take root and unfold themselves. In those driving northeast rainswhich tried the village houses so, when the maids stood ready with mopand pail in front entries to keep the deluge out, I sat behind my doorin my little house, which was all entry, and thoroughly enjoyed itsprotection. In one heavy thunder-shower the lightning struck a largepitch pine across the pond, making a very conspicuous and perfectlyregular spiral groove from top to bottom, an inch or more deep, and fouror five inches wide, as you would groove a walking-stick. I passed itagain the other day, and was struck with awe on looking up and beholdingthat mark, now more distinct than ever, where a terrific and resistlessbolt came down out of the harmless sky eight years ago. Men frequentlysay to me, "I should think you would feel lonesome down there, and wantto be nearer to folks, rainy and snowy days and nights especially." Iam tempted to reply to such--This whole earth which we inhabit is buta point in space. How far apart, think you, dwell the two most distantinhabitants of yonder star, the breadth of whose disk cannot beappreciated by our instruments? Why should I feel lonely? is not ourplanet in the Milky Way? This which you put seems to me not to be themost important question. What sort of space is that which separatesa man from his fellows and makes him solitary? I have found that noexertion 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, theschool-house, the grocery, Beacon Hill, or the Five Points, where menmost congregate, but to the perennial source of our life, whence in allour experience we have found that to issue, as the willow stands nearthe water and sends out its roots in that direction. This will vary withdifferent natures, but this is the place where a wise man will dighis cellar.... I one evening overtook one of my townsmen, who hasaccumulated 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 thecomforts of life. I answered that I was very sure I liked it passablywell; I was not joking. And so I went home to my bed, and left himto pick his way through the darkness and the mud to Brighton--orBright-town--which place he would reach some time in the morning.Any prospect of awakening or coming to life to a dead man makesindifferent all times and places. The place where that may occur isalways the same, and indescribably pleasant to all our senses. For themost part we allow only outlying and transient circ*mstances to make ouroccasions. They are, in fact, the cause of our distraction. Nearestto all things is that power which fashions their being. _Next_ to us thegrandest laws are continually being executed. _Next_ to us is not theworkman whom we have hired, with whom we love so well to talk, but theworkman whose work we are."How vast and profound is the influence of the subtile powers of Heavenand 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, theycannot be separated from them.""They cause that in all the universe men purify and sanctify theirhearts, and clothe themselves in their holiday garments to offersacrifices and oblations to their ancestors. It is an ocean of subtileintelligences. 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 interestingto me. Can we not do without the society of our gossips a little whileunder these circ*mstances--have our own thoughts to cheer us? Confuciussays truly, "Virtue does not remain as an abandoned orphan; it must ofnecessity have neighbors."With thinking we may be beside ourselves in a sane sense. By aconscious effort of the mind we can stand aloof from actions and theirconsequences; and all things, good and bad, go by us like a torrent. Weare not wholly involved in Nature. I may be either the driftwood in thestream, or Indra in the sky looking down on it. I _may_ be affected by atheatrical exhibition; on the other hand, I _may not_ be affected by anactual event which appears to concern me much more. I only know myselfas 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 remotefrom myself as from another. However intense my experience, I amconscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as itwere, is not a part of me, but spectator, sharing no experience, buttaking 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. Itwas a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he wasconcerned. This doubleness may easily make us poor neighbors and friendssometimes.I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be incompany, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I loveto be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable assolitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad amongmen than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working isalways alone, let him be where he will. Solitude is not measured by themiles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows. The reallydiligent student in one of the crowded hives of Cambridge College is assolitary as a dervish in the desert. The farmer can work alone in thefield 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 sitdown in a room alone, at the mercy of his thoughts, but must be where hecan "see the folks," and recreate, and, as he thinks, remunerate himselffor his day's solitude; and hence he wonders how the student can sitalone in the house all night and most of the day without ennui and "theblues"; 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 farmerin his, and in turn seeks the same recreation and society that thelatter does, though it may be a more condensed form of it.Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, nothaving had time to acquire any new value for each other. We meet atmeals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of that oldmusty cheese that we are. We have had to agree on a certain set ofrules, called etiquette and politeness, to make this frequent meetingtolerable and that we need not come to open war. We meet at thepost-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 heartycommunications. Consider the girls in a factory--never alone, hardly intheir dreams. It would be better if there were but one inhabitant toa 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 andexhaustion at the foot of a tree, whose loneliness was relieved by thegrotesque visions with which, owing to bodily weakness, his diseasedimagination surrounded him, and which he believed to be real. So also,owing to bodily and mental health and strength, we may be continuallycheered by a like but more normal and natural society, and come to knowthat 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 mayconvey an idea of my situation. I am no more lonely than the loon in thepond that laughs so loud, or than Walden Pond itself. What company hasthat lonely lake, I pray? And yet it has not the blue devils, but theblue 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 oneis 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 thana 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 weatherco*ck, or the north star, or the south wind, or an Aprilshower, or a January thaw, or the first spider in a new house.I have occasional visits in the long winter evenings, when the snowfalls fast and the wind howls in the wood, from an old settler andoriginal proprietor, who is reported to have dug Walden Pond, and stonedit, and fringed it with pine woods; who tells me stories of old timeand of new eternity; and between us we manage to pass a cheerful eveningwith social mirth and pleasant views of things, even without applesor cider--a most wise and humorous friend, whom I love much, who keepshimself more secret than ever did Goffe or Whalley; and though he isthought to be dead, none can show where he is buried. An elderly dame,too, dwells in my neighborhood, invisible to most persons, in whoseodorous herb garden I love to stroll sometimes, gathering simples andlistening to her fables; for she has a genius of unequalled fertility,and her memory runs back farther than mythology, and she can tell me theoriginal of every fable, and on what fact every one is founded, for theincidents occurred when she was young. A ruddy and lusty old dame, whodelights in all weathers and seasons, and is likely to outlive all herchildren yet.The indescribable innocence and beneficence of Nature--of sun and windand rain, of summer and winter--such health, such cheer, they affordforever! and such sympathy have they ever with our race, that all Naturewould be affected, and the sun's brightness fade, and the winds wouldsigh humanely, and the clouds rain tears, and the woods shed theirleaves and put on mourning in midsummer, if any man should ever for ajust cause grieve. Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am Inot partly leaves and vegetable mould myself?What is the pill which will keep us well, serene, contented? Not my orthy great-grandfather's, but our great-grandmother Nature's universal,vegetable, botanic medicines, by which she has kept herself youngalways, outlived so many old Parrs in her day, and fed her health withtheir decaying fatness. For my panacea, instead of one of those quackvials of a mixture dipped from Acheron and the Dead Sea, which come outof those long shallow black-schooner looking wagons which we sometimessee made to carry bottles, let me have a draught of undiluted morningair. Morning air! If men will not drink of this at the fountainheadof the day, why, then, we must even bottle up some and sell it in theshops, for the benefit of those who have lost their subscription ticketto morning time in this world. But remember, it will not keep quite tillnoonday even in the coolest cellar, but drive out the stopples longere that and follow westward the steps of Aurora. I am no worshipper ofHygeia, who was the daughter of that old herb-doctor Æsculapius, andwho is represented on monuments holding a serpent in one hand, and inthe other a cup out of which the serpent sometimes drinks; but ratherof Hebe, cup-bearer to Jupiter, who was the daughter of Juno and wildlettuce, and who had the power of restoring gods and men to the vigor ofyouth. She was probably the only thoroughly sound-conditioned, healthy,and robust young lady that ever walked the globe, and wherever she cameit was spring.VisitorsI think that I love society as much as most, and am ready enough tofasten myself like a bloodsucker for the time to any full-blooded manthat comes in my way. I am naturally no hermit, but might possibly sitout the sturdiest frequenter of the bar-room, if my business called methither.I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship,three for society. When visitors came in larger and unexpectednumbers there was but the third chair for them all, but they generallyeconomized the room by standing up. It is surprising how many great menand women a small house will contain. I have had twenty-five or thirtysouls, with their bodies, at once under my roof, and yet we often partedwithout being aware that we had come very near to one another. Manyof our houses, both public and private, with their almost innumerableapartments, their huge halls and their cellars for the storage of winesand other munitions of peace, appear to be extravagantly large for theirinhabitants. They are so vast and magnificent that the latter seem to beonly vermin which infest them. I am surprised when the herald blows hissummons before some Tremont or Astor or Middlesex House, to see comecreeping 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, thedifficulty of getting to a sufficient distance from my guest when webegan to utter the big thoughts in big words. You want room for yourthoughts to get into sailing trim and run a course or two before theymake their port. The bullet of your thought must have overcome itslateral and ricochet motion and fallen into its last and steady coursebefore it reaches the ear of the hearer, else it may plow out againthrough the side of his head. Also, our sentences wanted room to unfoldand form their columns in the interval. Individuals, like nations, musthave suitable broad and natural boundaries, even a considerable neutralground, between them. I have found it a singular luxury to talk acrossthe pond to a companion on the opposite side. In my house we were sonear that we could not begin to hear--we could not speak low enough tobe heard; as when you throw two stones into calm water so near that theybreak each other's undulations. If we are merely loquacious and loudtalkers, then we can afford to stand very near together, cheek byjowl, and feel each other's breath; but if we speak reservedly andthoughtfully, we want to be farther apart, that all animal heat andmoisture may have a chance to evaporate. If we would enjoy the mostintimate 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 apartbodily that we cannot possibly hear each other's voice in any case.Referred to this standard, speech is for the convenience of those whoare hard of hearing; but there are many fine things which we cannot sayif we have to shout. As the conversation began to assume a loftier andgrander tone, we gradually shoved our chairs farther apart till theytouched the wall in opposite corners, and then commonly there was notroom 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, anda priceless domestic swept the floor and dusted the furniture and keptthe things in order.If one guest came he sometimes partook of my frugal meal, and it was nointerruption to conversation to be stirring a hasty-pudding, orwatching the rising and maturing of a loaf of bread in the ashes, in themeanwhile. But if twenty came and sat in my house there was nothing saidabout dinner, though there might be bread enough for two, more than ifeating were a forsaken habit; but we naturally practised abstinence; andthis was never felt to be an offence against hospitality, but the mostproper and considerate course. The waste and decay of physical life,which so often needs repair, seemed miraculously retarded in such acase, and the vital vigor stood its ground. I could entertain thus athousand as well as twenty; and if any ever went away disappointed orhungry from my house when they found me at home, they may depend uponit that I sympathized with them at least. So easy is it, though manyhousekeepers doubt it, to establish new and better customs in the placeof 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 aman's house, by any kind of Cerberus whatever, as by the parade one madeabout dining me, which I took to be a very polite and roundabout hintnever to trouble him so again. I think I shall never revisit thosescenes. I should be proud to have for the motto of my cabin those linesof Spenser which one of my visitors inscribed on a yellow walnut leaffor 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 acompanion on a visit of ceremony to Massasoit on foot through the woods,and arrived tired and hungry at his lodge, they were well received bythe king, but nothing was said about eating that day. When the nightarrived, to quote their own words--"He laid us on the bed with himselfand his wife, they at the one end and we at the other, it being onlyplanks laid a foot from the ground and a thin mat upon them. Two more ofhis chief men, for want of room, pressed by and upon us; so that we wereworse weary of our lodging than of our journey." At one o'clock the nextday Massasoit "brought two fishes that he had shot," about thrice as bigas a bream. "These being boiled, there were at least forty looked for ashare in them; the most eat of them. This meal only we had in two nightsand a day; and had not one of us bought a partridge, we had taken ourjourney fasting." Fearing that they would be light-headed for want offood and also sleep, owing to "the savages' barbarous singing, (for theyuse to sing themselves asleep,)" and that they might get home while theyhad strength to travel, they departed. As for lodging, it is true theywere but poorly entertained, though what they found an inconvenience wasno doubt intended for an honor; but as far as eating was concerned, I donot see how the Indians could have done better. They had nothing toeat themselves, and they were wiser than to think that apologies couldsupply the place of food to their guests; so they drew their beltstighter and said nothing about it. Another time when Winslow visitedthem, it being a season of plenty with them, there was no deficiency inthis respect.As for men, they will hardly fail one anywhere. I had more visitorswhile I lived in the woods than at any other period in my life; I meanthat I had some. I met several there under more favorable circ*mstancesthan I could anywhere else. But fewer came to see me on trivialbusiness. In this respect, my company was winnowed by my mere distancefrom town. I had withdrawn so far within the great ocean of solitude,into which the rivers of society empty, that for the most part, sofar as my needs were concerned, only the finest sediment was depositedaround me. Beside, there were wafted to me evidences of unexplored anduncultivated continents on the other side.Who should come to my lodge this morning but a true Homeric orPaphlagonian man--he had so suitable and poetic a name that I am sorry Icannot print it here--a Canadian, a woodchopper and post-maker, who canhole fifty posts in a day, who made his last supper on a woodchuck whichhis dog caught. He, too, has heard of Homer, and, "if it were not forbooks," would "not know what to do rainy days," though perhaps he hasnot read one wholly through for many rainy seasons. Some priest whocould pronounce the Greek itself taught him to read his verse in theTestament in his native parish far away; and now I must translate tohim, while he holds the book, Achilles' reproof to Patroclus for his sadcountenance.--"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 underhis arm for a sick man, gathered this Sunday morning. "I suppose there'sno harm in going after such a thing to-day," says he. To him Homer was agreat writer, though what his writing was about he did not know. A moresimple and natural man it would be hard to find. Vice and disease, whichcast such a sombre moral hue over the world, seemed to have hardly anyexistence for him. He was about twenty-eight years old, and had leftCanada and his father's house a dozen years before to work in theStates, and earn money to buy a farm with at last, perhaps in his nativecountry. He was cast in the coarsest mould; a stout but sluggish body,yet gracefully carried, with a thick sunburnt neck, dark bushy hair, anddull sleepy blue eyes, which were occasionally lit up with expression.He wore a flat gray cloth cap, a dingy wool-colored greatcoat, andcowhide boots. He was a great consumer of meat, usually carrying hisdinner to his work a couple of miles past my house--for he chopped allsummer--in a tin pail; cold meats, often cold woodchucks, and coffee ina stone bottle which dangled by a string from his belt; and sometimes heoffered me a drink. He came along early, crossing my bean-field, thoughwithout 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 hisboard. Frequently he would leave his dinner in the bushes, when hisdog had caught a woodchuck by the way, and go back a mile and a half todress it and leave it in the cellar of the house where he boarded, afterdeliberating first for half an hour whether he could not sink it in thepond safely till nightfall--loving to dwell long upon these themes. Hewould say, as he went by in the morning, "How thick the pigeons are! Ifworking every day were not my trade, I could get all the meat I shouldwant by hunting-pigeons, woodchucks, rabbits, partridges--by gosh! Icould get all I should want for a week in one day."He was a skilful chopper, and indulged in some flourishes and ornamentsin his art. He cut his trees level and close to the ground, that thesprouts which came up afterward might be more vigorous and a sled mightslide over the stumps; and instead of leaving a whole tree to supporthis corded wood, he would pare it away to a slender stake or splinterwhich you could break off with your hand at last.He interested me because he was so quiet and solitary and so happywithal; a well of good humor and contentment which overflowed at hiseyes. His mirth was without alloy. Sometimes I saw him at his workin the woods, felling trees, and he would greet me with a laugh ofinexpressible satisfaction, and a salutation in Canadian French, thoughhe spoke English as well. When I approached him he would suspend hiswork, and with half-suppressed mirth lie along the trunk of a pine whichhe had felled, and, peeling off the inner bark, roll it up into a balland chew it while he laughed and talked. Such an exuberance of animalspirits had he that he sometimes tumbled down and rolled on the groundwith laughter at anything which made him think and tickled him. Lookinground upon the trees he would exclaim--"By George! I can enjoy myselfwell enough here chopping; I want no better sport." Sometimes, when atleisure, he amused himself all day in the woods with a pocket pistol,firing salutes to himself at regular intervals as he walked. In thewinter 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 sometimescome 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 andcontentment he was cousin to the pine and the rock. I asked him onceif he was not sometimes tired at night, after working all day; and heanswered, with a sincere and serious look, "Gorrappit, I never was tiredin my life." But the intellectual and what is called spiritual man inhim were slumbering as in an infant. He had been instructed only in thatinnocent and ineffectual way in which the Catholic priests teach theaborigines, by which the pupil is never educated to the degree ofconsciousness, but only to the degree of trust and reverence, and achild is not made a man, but kept a child. When Nature made him, shegave him a strong body and contentment for his portion, and propped himon every side with reverence and reliance, that he might live out histhreescore years and ten a child. He was so genuine and unsophisticatedthat no introduction would serve to introduce him, more than if youintroduced a woodchuck to your neighbor. He had got to find him out asyou did. He would not play any part. Men paid him wages for work, andso helped to feed and clothe him; but he never exchanged opinions withthem. He was so simply and naturally humble--if he can be called humblewho never aspires--that humility was no distinct quality in him, norcould he conceive of it. Wiser men were demigods to him. If you toldhim that such a one was coming, he did as if he thought that anything sogrand would expect nothing of himself, but take all the responsibilityon itself, and let him be forgotten still. He never heard the sound ofpraise. He particularly reverenced the writer and the preacher. Theirperformances were miracles. When I told him that I wrote considerably,he thought for a long time that it was merely the handwriting which Imeant, for he could write a remarkably good hand himself. I sometimesfound the name of his native parish handsomely written in the snow bythe 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 hadread and written letters for those who could not, but he never tried towrite 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 thesame time!I heard that a distinguished wise man and reformer asked him if he didnot want the world to be changed; but he answered with a chuckle ofsurprise in his Canadian accent, not knowing that the question had everbeen entertained before, "No, I like it well enough." It would havesuggested many things to a philosopher to have dealings with him. Toa stranger he appeared to know nothing of things in general; yet Isometimes saw in him a man whom I had not seen before, and I did notknow whether he was as wise as Shakespeare or as simply ignorant asa child, whether to suspect him of a fine poetic consciousness or ofstupidity. A townsman told me that when he met him sauntering throughthe village in his small close-fitting cap, and whistling to himself, hereminded him of a prince in disguise.His only books were an almanac and an arithmetic, in which last he wasconsiderably expert. The former was a sort of cyclopaedia to him, whichhe supposed to contain an abstract of human knowledge, as indeed it doesto a considerable extent. I loved to sound him on the various reformsof the day, and he never failed to look at them in the most simple andpractical light. He had never heard of such things before. Could he dowithout factories? I asked. He had worn the home-made Vermont gray, hesaid, and that was good. Could he dispense with tea and coffee? Did thiscountry afford any beverage beside water? He had soaked hemlock leavesin water and drank it, and thought that was better than water in warmweather. When I asked him if he could do without money, he showed theconvenience of money in such a way as to suggest and coincide with themost philosophical accounts of the origin of this institution, and thevery derivation of the word _pecunia_. If an ox were his property, and hewished to get needles and thread at the store, he thought it would beinconvenient and impossible soon to go on mortgaging some portion ofthe creature each time to that amount. He could defend many institutionsbetter than any philosopher, because, in describing them as theyconcerned him, he gave the true reason for their prevalence, andspeculation had not suggested to him any other. At another time, hearingPlato's definition of a man--a biped without feathers--and that oneexhibited a co*ck plucked and called it Plato's man, he thought itan important difference that the _knees_ bent the wrong way. He wouldsometimes exclaim, "How I love to talk! By George, I could talk allday!" I asked him once, when I had not seen him for many months, if hehad got a new idea this summer. "Good Lord"--said he, "a man that hasto work as I do, if he does not forget the ideas he has had, he will dowell. 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 mefirst on such occasions, if I had made any improvement. One winter day Iasked him if he was always satisfied with himself, wishing to suggest asubstitute within him for the priest without, and some higher motive forliving. "Satisfied!" said he; "some men are satisfied with one thing,and some with another. One man, perhaps, if he has got enough, will besatisfied to sit all day with his back to the fire and his belly to thetable, by George!" Yet I never, by any manoeuvring, could get him totake the spiritual view of things; the highest that he appeared toconceive of was a simple expediency, such as you might expect ananimal to appreciate; and this, practically, is true of most men. IfI suggested any improvement in his mode of life, he merely answered,without expressing any regret, that it was too late. Yet he thoroughlybelieved in honesty and the like virtues.There was a certain positive originality, however slight, to be detectedin him, and I occasionally observed that he was thinking for himself andexpressing his own opinion, a phenomenon so rare that I would any daywalk ten miles to observe it, and it amounted to the re-origination ofmany of the institutions of society. Though he hesitated, and perhapsfailed to express himself distinctly, he always had a presentablethought behind. Yet his thinking was so primitive and immersed in hisanimal life, that, though more promising than a merely learned man's,it rarely ripened to anything which can be reported. He suggested thatthere might be men of genius in the lowest grades of life, howeverpermanently humble and illiterate, who take their own view always, or donot pretend to see at all; who are as bottomless even as Walden Pond wasthought to be, though they may be dark and muddy.Many a traveller came out of his way to see me and the inside of myhouse, and, as an excuse for calling, asked for a glass of water. I toldthem that I drank at the pond, and pointed thither, offering to lendthem a dipper. Far off as I lived, I was not exempted from the annualvisitation which occurs, methinks, about the first of April, wheneverybody is on the move; and I had my share of good luck, though therewere some curious specimens among my visitors. Half-witted men from thealmshouse and elsewhere came to see me; but I endeavored to make themexercise all the wit they had, and make their confessions to me; in suchcases 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 thetables were turned. With respect to wit, I learned that there was notmuch difference between the half and the whole. One day, in particular,an inoffensive, simple-minded pauper, whom with others I had often seenused as fencing stuff, standing or sitting on a bushel in the fields tokeep cattle and himself from straying, visited me, and expressed a wishto 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 Lordhad made him so, yet he supposed the Lord cared as much for him as foranother. "I have always been so," said he, "from my childhood; I neverhad much mind; I was not like other children; I am weak in the head. Itwas the Lord's will, I suppose." And there he was to prove the truthof his words. He was a metaphysical puzzle to me. I have rarely met afellowman on such promising ground--it was so simple and sincere and sotrue all that he said. And, true enough, in proportion as he appearedto humble himself was he exalted. I did not know at first but it was theresult of a wise policy. It seemed that from such a basis of truth andfrankness as the poor weak-headed pauper had laid, our intercourse mightgo forward to something better than the intercourse of sages.I had some guests from those not reckoned commonly among the town'spoor, 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 theinformation that they are resolved, for one thing, never to helpthemselves. I require of a visitor that he be not actually starving,though he may have the very best appetite in the world, however he gotit. Objects of charity are not guests. Men who did not know when theirvisit had terminated, though I went about my business again, answeringthem from greater and greater remoteness. Men of almost every degree ofwit called on me in the migrating season. Some who had more wits thanthey knew what to do with; runaway slaves with plantation manners, wholistened from time to time, like the fox in the fable, as if they heardthe hounds a-baying on their track, and looked at me beseechingly, asmuch as to say,-- "O Christian, will you send me back?One real runaway slave, among the rest, whom I helped to forward towardthe north star. Men of one idea, like a hen with one chicken, and thata duckling; men of a thousand ideas, and unkempt heads, like those henswhich are made to take charge of a hundred chickens, all in pursuitof one bug, a score of them lost in every morning's dew--and becomefrizzled and mangy in consequence; men of ideas instead of legs, a sortof intellectual centipede that made you crawl all over. One man proposeda book in which visitors should write their names, as at the WhiteMountains; but, alas! I have too good a memory to make that necessary.I could not but notice some of the peculiarities of my visitors. Girlsand boys and young women generally seemed glad to be in the woods. Theylooked in the pond and at the flowers, and improved their time. Men ofbusiness, even farmers, thought only of solitude and employment, and ofthe great distance at which I dwelt from something or other; and thoughthey said that they loved a ramble in the woods occasionally, it wasobvious that they did not. Restless committed men, whose time was antaken up in getting a living or keeping it; ministers who spoke of Godas if they enjoyed a monopoly of the subject, who could not bear allkinds of opinions; doctors, lawyers, uneasy housekeepers who priedinto my cupboard and bed when I was out--how came Mrs.--to know that mysheets 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 theprofessions--all these generally said that it was not possible to do somuch good in my position. Ay! there was the rub. The old and infirm andthe timid, of whatever age or sex, thought most of sickness, and suddenaccident and death; to them life seemed full of danger--what danger isthere if you don't think of any?--and they thought that a prudent manwould carefully select the safest position, where Dr. B. might beon 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 theywould not go a-huckleberrying without a medicine chest. The amount ofit 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 isdead-and-alive to begin with. A man sits as many risks as he runs.Finally, there were the self-styled reformers, the greatest bores ofall, 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 fearedthe 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 andhunters, poets and philosophers; in short, all honest pilgrims, who cameout 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-FieldMeanwhile my beans, the length of whose rows, added together, was sevenmiles already planted, were impatient to be hoed, for the earliest hadgrown considerably before the latest were in the ground; indeed theywere not easily to be put off. What was the meaning of this so steadyand self-respecting, this small Herculean labor, I knew not. I came tolove my rows, my beans, though so many more than I wanted. They attachedme to the earth, and so I got strength like Antaeus. But why should Iraise them? Only Heaven knows. This was my curious labor all summer--tomake this portion of the earth's surface, which had yielded onlycinquefoil, blackberries, johnswort, and the like, before, sweet wildfruits and pleasant flowers, produce instead this pulse. What shall Ilearn of beans or beans of me? I cherish them, I hoe them, early andlate I have an eye to them; and this is my day's work. It is a finebroad leaf to look on. My auxiliaries are the dews and rains which waterthis dry soil, and what fertility is in the soil itself, which for themost part is lean and effete. My enemies are worms, cool days, and mostof all woodchucks. The last have nibbled for me a quarter of an acreclean. But what right had I to oust johnswort and the rest, and breakup their ancient herb garden? Soon, however, the remaining beans will betoo tough for them, and go forward to meet new foes.When I was four years old, as I well remember, I was brought from Bostonto this my native town, through these very woods and this field, tothe pond. It is one of the oldest scenes stamped on my memory. And nowto-night my flute has waked the echoes over that very water. The pinesstill stand here older than I; or, if some have fallen, I have cookedmy supper with their stumps, and a new growth is rising all around,preparing another aspect for new infant eyes. Almost the same johnswortsprings from the same perennial root in this pasture, and even I have atlength helped to clothe that fabulous landscape of my infant dreams, andone of the results of my presence and influence is seen in these beanleaves, corn blades, and potato vines.I planted about two acres and a half of upland; and as it was only aboutfifteen years since the land was cleared, and I myself had got outtwo or three cords of stumps, I did not give it any manure; but in thecourse of the summer it appeared by the arrowheads which I turned up inhoeing, that an extinct nation had anciently dwelt here and planted cornand 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 thesun had got above the shrub oaks, while all the dew was on, though thefarmers warned me against it--I would advise you to do all your workif possible while the dew is on--I began to level the ranks of haughtyweeds in my bean-field and throw dust upon their heads. Early in themorning I worked barefooted, dabbling like a plastic artist in the dewyand crumbling sand, but later in the day the sun blistered my feet.There the sun lighted me to hoe beans, pacing slowly backward andforward over that yellow gravelly upland, between the long green rows,fifteen rods, the one end terminating in a shrub oak copse where Icould rest in the shade, the other in a blackberry field where thegreen berries deepened their tints by the time I had made anotherbout. Removing the weeds, putting fresh soil about the bean stems, andencouraging this weed which I had sown, making the yellow soil expressits summer thought in bean leaves and blossoms rather than in wormwoodand piper and millet grass, making the earth say beans instead ofgrass--this was my daily work. As I had little aid from horses orcattle, or hired men or boys, or improved implements of husbandry, I wasmuch 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 andimperishable moral, and to the scholar it yields a classic result. Avery _agricola laboriosus_ was I to travellers bound westward throughLincoln and Wayland to nobody knows where; they sitting at their ease ingigs, with elbows on knees, and reins loosely hanging in festoons; I thehome-staying, laborious native of the soil. But soon my homestead wasout of their sight and thought. It was the only open and cultivatedfield for a great distance on either side of the road, so they made themost 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! peasso late!"--for I continued to plant when others had begun to hoe--theministerial husbandman had not suspected it. "Corn, my boy, for fodder;corn for fodder." "Does he _live_ there?" asks the black bonnet of thegray coat; and the hard-featured farmer reins up his grateful dobbin toinquire what you are doing where he sees no manure in the furrow, andrecommends a little chip dirt, or any little waste stuff, or it may beashes or plaster. But here were two acres and a half of furrows, andonly a hoe for cart and two hands to draw it--there being an aversionto other carts and horses--and chip dirt far away. Fellow-travellers asthey 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 wasone field not in Mr. Coleman's report. And, by the way, who estimatesthe value of the crop which nature yields in the still wilder fieldsunimproved by man? The crop of _English_ hay is carefully weighed, themoisture calculated, the silicates and the potash; but in all dells andpond-holes in the woods and pastures and swamps grows a rich and variouscrop only unreaped by man. Mine was, as it were, the connecting linkbetween wild and cultivated fields; as some states are civilized, andothers half-civilized, and others savage or barbarous, so my field was,though not in a bad sense, a half-cultivated field. They werebeans cheerfully returning to their wild and primitive state that Icultivated, and my hoe played the _Ranz des Vaches_ for them.Near at hand, upon the topmost spray of a birch, sings the brownthrasher--or red mavis, as some love to call him--all the morning, gladof your society, that would find out another farmer's field if yourswere not here. While you are planting the seed, he cries--"Drop it, dropit--cover it up, cover it up--pull it up, pull it up, pull it up." Butthis was not corn, and so it was safe from such enemies as he. You maywonder what his rigmarole, his amateur Paganini performances on onestring or on twenty, have to do with your planting, and yet prefer it toleached ashes or plaster. It was a cheap sort of top dressing in which Ihad entire faith.As I drew a still fresher soil about the rows with my hoe, I disturbedthe ashes of unchronicled nations who in primeval years lived underthese heavens, and their small implements of war and hunting werebrought to the light of this modern day. They lay mingled with othernatural stones, some of which bore the marks of having been burned byIndian fires, and some by the sun, and also bits of pottery and glassbrought hither by the recent cultivators of the soil. When my hoetinkled against the stones, that music echoed to the woods and thesky, and was an accompaniment to my labor which yielded an instant andimmeasurable crop. It was no longer beans that I hoed, nor I that hoedbeans; and I remembered with as much pity as pride, if I remembered atall, my acquaintances who had gone to the city to attend the oratorios.The nighthawk circled overhead in the sunny afternoons--for I sometimesmade a day of it--like a mote in the eye, or in heaven's eye, fallingfrom 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 baresand or rocks on the tops of hills, where few have found them; gracefuland slender like ripples caught up from the pond, as leaves are raisedby 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 elementalunfledged pinions of the sea. Or sometimes I watched a pair ofhen-hawks circling high in the sky, alternately soaring and descending,approaching, and leaving one another, as if they were the embodiment ofmy own thoughts. Or I was attracted by the passage of wild pigeons fromthis wood to that, with a slight quivering winnowing sound and carrierhaste; or from under a rotten stump my hoe turned up a sluggishportentous and outlandish spotted salamander, a trace of Egypt andthe Nile, yet our contemporary. When I paused to lean on my hoe, thesesounds and sights I heard and saw anywhere in the row, a part of theinexhaustible entertainment which the country offers.On gala days the town fires its great guns, which echo like popguns tothese woods, and some waifs of martial music occasionally penetrate thusfar. 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 amilitary turnout of which I was ignorant, I have sometimes had a vaguesense all the day of some sort of itching and disease in the horizon,as if some eruption would break out there soon, either scarlatina orcanker-rash, until at length some more favorable puff of wind, makinghaste over the fields and up the Wayland road, brought me information ofthe "trainers." It seemed by the distant hum as if somebody's bees hadswarmed, and that the neighbors, according to Virgil's advice, by afaint _tintinnabulum_ upon the most sonorous of their domestic utensils,were endeavoring to call them down into the hive again. And when thesound died quite away, and the hum had ceased, and the most favorablebreezes told no tale, I knew that they had got the last drone of themall safely into the Middlesex hive, and that now their minds were benton the honey with which it was smeared.I felt proud to know that the liberties of Massachusetts and of ourfatherland were in such safe keeping; and as I turned to my hoeing againI was filled with an inexpressible confidence, and pursued my laborcheerfully with a calm trust in the future.When there were several bands of musicians, it sounded as if all thevillage was a vast bellows and all the buildings expanded and collapsedalternately with a din. But sometimes it was a really noble andinspiring strain that reached these woods, and the trumpet that singsof fame, and I felt as if I could spit a Mexican with a good relish--forwhy should we always stand for trifles?--and looked round for awoodchuck or a skunk to exercise my chivalry upon. These martial strainsseemed as far away as Palestine, and reminded me of a march of crusadersin the horizon, with a slight tantivy and tremulous motion of the elmtree tops which overhang the village. This was one of the _great_ days;though the sky had from my clearing only the same everlastingly greatlook that it wears daily, and I saw no difference in it.It was a singular experience that long acquaintance which I cultivatedwith beans, what with planting, and hoeing, and harvesting, andthreshing, and picking over and selling them--the last was the hardestof all--I might add eating, for I did taste. I was determined to knowbeans. When they were growing, I used to hoe from five o'clock in themorning till noon, and commonly spent the rest of the day about otheraffairs. Consider the intimate and curious acquaintance one makes withvarious kinds of weeds--it will bear some iteration in the account, forthere was no little iteration in the labor--disturbing their delicateorganizations so ruthlessly, and making such invidious distinctionswith his hoe, levelling whole ranks of one species, and sedulouslycultivating another. That's Roman wormwood--that's pigweed--that'ssorrel--that's piper-grass--have at him, chop him up, turn his rootsupward to the sun, don't let him have a fibre in the shade, if you dohe'll turn himself t' other side up and be as green as a leek in twodays. A long war, not with cranes, but with weeds, those Trojans whohad sun and rain and dews on their side. Daily the beans saw me cometo their rescue armed with a hoe, and thin the ranks of their enemies,filling up the trenches with weedy dead. Many a lusty crest--wavingHector, that towered a whole foot above his crowding comrades, fellbefore my weapon and rolled in the dust.Those summer days which some of my contemporaries devoted to the finearts in Boston or Rome, and others to contemplation in India, and othersto trade in London or New York, I thus, with the other farmers of NewEngland, devoted to husbandry. Not that I wanted beans to eat, for Iam by nature a Pythagorean, so far as beans are concerned, whether theymean porridge or voting, and exchanged them for rice; but, perchance, assome 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 amusem*nt,which, continued too long, might have become a dissipation. Though Igave them no manure, and did not hoe them all once, I hoed them unusuallywell as far as I went, and was paid for it in the end, "there being intruth," as Evelyn says, "no compost or laetation whatsoever comparableto this continual motion, repastination, and turning of the mould withthe spade." "The earth," he adds elsewhere, "especially if fresh, has acertain 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 laborand stir we keep about it, to sustain us; all dungings and other sordidtemperings being but the vicars succedaneous to this improvement."Moreover, this being one of those "worn-out and exhausted lay fieldswhich enjoy their sabbath," had perchance, as Sir Kenelm Digby thinkslikely, attracted "vital spirits" from the air. I harvested twelvebushels of beans.But to be more particular, for it is complained that Mr. Coleman hasreported chiefly the expensive experiments of gentlemen farmers, myoutgoes 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.................................. $14.72-1/2My 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.............. $8.71-1/2This is the result of my experience in raising beans: Plant the commonsmall white bush bean about the first of June, in rows three feet byeighteen inches apart, being careful to select fresh round and unmixedseed. First look out for worms, and supply vacancies by planting anew.Then look out for woodchucks, if it is an exposed place, for they willnibble off the earliest tender leaves almost clean as they go; andagain, when the young tendrils make their appearance, they have noticeof it, and will shear them off with both buds and young pods, sittingerect like a squirrel. But above all harvest as early as possible, ifyou would escape frosts and have a fair and salable crop; you may savemuch loss by this means.This further experience also I gained: I said to myself, I will notplant beans and corn with so much industry another summer, but suchseeds, 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 hasnot been exhausted for these crops. Alas! I said this to myself; but nowanother summer is gone, and another, and another, and I am obliged tosay 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 fatherswere brave, or timid. This generation is very sure to plant corn andbeans each new year precisely as the Indians did centuries ago andtaught the first settlers to do, as if there were a fate in it. I saw anold man the other day, to my astonishment, making the holes with a hoefor 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 layso much stress on his grain, his potato and grass crop, and hisorchards--raise other crops than these? Why concern ourselves so muchabout our beans for seed, and not be concerned at all about a newgeneration of men? We should really be fed and cheered if when we met aman 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 arefor the most part broadcast and floating in the air, had taken rootand grown in him. Here comes such a subtile and ineffable quality,for instance, as truth or justice, though the slightest amount or newvariety of it, along the road. Our ambassadors should be instructed tosend home such seeds as these, and Congress help to distribute them overall the land. We should never stand upon ceremony with sincerity. Weshould never cheat and insult and banish one another by our meanness, ifthere were present the kernel of worth and friendliness. We should notmeet thus in haste. Most men I do not meet at all, for they seem not tohave time; they are busy about their beans. We would not deal with a manthus plodding ever, leaning on a hoe or a spade as a staff between hiswork, not as a mushroom, but partially risen out of the earth, somethingmore 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 eventakes stiffness out of our joints, and makes us supple and buoyant, whenwe 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 oncea sacred art; but it is pursued with irreverent haste and heedlessnessby us, our object being to have large farms and large crops merely.We have no festival, nor procession, nor ceremony, not excepting ourcattle-shows and so-called Thanksgivings, by which the farmer expressesa sense of the sacredness of his calling, or is reminded of its sacredorigin. It is the premium and the feast which tempt him. He sacrificesnot to Ceres and the Terrestrial Jove, but to the infernal Plutusrather. By avarice and selfishness, and a grovelling habit, from whichnone of us is free, of regarding the soil as property, or the meansof acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry isdegraded with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knowsNature but as a robber. Cato says that the profits of agriculture areparticularly pious or just (_maximeque pius quaestus_), and accordingto Varro the old Romans "called the same earth Mother and Ceres, andthought that they who cultivated it led a pious and useful life, andthat they alone were left of the race of King Saturn."We are wont to forget that the sun looks on our cultivated fields andon the prairies and forests without distinction. They all reflect andabsorb his rays alike, and the former make but a small part of theglorious picture which he beholds in his daily course. In his viewthe earth is all equally cultivated like a garden. Therefore we shouldreceive the benefit of his light and heat with a corresponding trust andmagnanimity. What though I value the seed of these beans, and harvestthat in the fall of the year? This broad field which I have looked atso long looks not to me as the principal cultivator, but away from me toinfluences more genial to it, which water and make it green. Thesebeans have results which are not harvested by me. Do they not grow forwoodchucks partly? The ear of wheat (in Latin _spica_, obsoletely _speca_,from _spe_, hope) should not be the only hope of the husbandman; itskernel or grain (_granum_ from _gerendo_, bearing) is not all that itbears. How, then, can our harvest fail? Shall I not rejoice also atthe abundance of the weeds whose seeds are the granary of the birds? Itmatters little comparatively whether the fields fill the farmer's barns.The true husbandman will cease from anxiety, as the squirrels manifestno concern whether the woods will bear chestnuts this year or not, andfinish his labor with every day, relinquishing all claim to the produceof his fields, and sacrificing in his mind not only his first but hislast fruits also.The VillageAfter hoeing, or perhaps reading and writing, in the forenoon, I usuallybathed 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 lastwrinkle 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 gossipwhich is incessantly going on there, circulating either from mouth tomouth, or from newspaper to newspaper, and which, taken in hom*oeopathicdoses, was really as refreshing in its way as the rustle of leaves andthe peeping of frogs. As I walked in the woods to see the birds andsquirrels, so I walked in the village to see the men and boys; insteadof the wind among the pines I heard the carts rattle. In one directionfrom my house there was a colony of muskrats in the river meadows; underthe grove of elms and buttonwoods in the other horizon was a villageof busy men, as curious to me as if they had been prairie-dogs, eachsitting at the mouth of its burrow, or running over to a neighbor's togossip. I went there frequently to observe their habits. The villageappeared to me a great news room; and on one side, to support it, asonce at Redding & Company's on State Street, they kept nuts and raisins,or salt and meal and other groceries. Some have such a vast appetitefor the former commodity, that is, the news, and such sound digestiveorgans, that they can sit forever in public avenues without stirring,and let it simmer and whisper through them like the Etesian winds, oras if inhaling ether, it only producing numbness and insensibility topain--otherwise it would often be painful to bear--without affecting theconsciousness. I hardly ever failed, when I rambled through the village,to see a row of such worthies, either sitting on a ladder sunningthemselves, with their bodies inclined forward and their eyes glancingalong the line this way and that, from time to time, with a voluptuousexpression, or else leaning against a barn with their hands in theirpockets, like caryatides, as if to prop it up. They, being commonly outof 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 isemptied into finer and more delicate hoppers within doors. I observedthat the vitals of the village were the grocery, the bar-room, thepost-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, inlanes and fronting one another, so that every traveller had to run thegauntlet, and every man, woman, and child might get a lick at him. Ofcourse, those who were stationed nearest to the head of the line, wherethey could most see and be seen, and have the first blow at him, paidthe highest prices for their places; and the few straggling inhabitantsin the outskirts, where long gaps in the line began to occur, and thetraveller could get over walls or turn aside into cow-paths, and soescape, paid a very slight ground or window tax. Signs were hung outon all sides to allure him; some to catch him by the appetite, as thetavern and victualling cellar; some by the fancy, as the dry goods storeand 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 stillmore terrible standing invitation to call at every one of these houses,and company expected about these times. For the most part I escapedwonderfully from these dangers, either by proceeding at once boldly andwithout deliberation to the goal, as is recommended to those who run thegauntlet, or by keeping my thoughts on high things, like Orpheus, who,"loudly singing the praises of the gods to his lyre, drowned the voicesof the Sirens, and kept out of danger." Sometimes I bolted suddenly,and nobody could tell my whereabouts, for I did not stand much aboutgracefulness, and never hesitated at a gap in a fence. I was evenaccustomed to make an irruption into some houses, where I was wellentertained, and after learning the kernels and very last sieveful ofnews--what had subsided, the prospects of war and peace, and whether theworld was likely to hold together much longer--I was let out through therear avenues, and so escaped to the woods again.It was very pleasant, when I stayed late in town, to launch myself intothe night, especially if it was dark and tempestuous, and set sail fromsome bright village parlor or lecture room, with a bag of rye or Indianmeal upon my shoulder, for my snug harbor in the woods, having made alltight 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 itwas plain sailing. I had many a genial thought by the cabin fire "as Isailed." I was never cast away nor distressed in any weather, thoughI encountered some severe storms. It is darker in the woods, even incommon nights, than most suppose. I frequently had to look up at theopening 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 trackwhich I had worn, or steer by the known relation of particular treeswhich I felt with my hands, passing between two pines for instance, notmore than eighteen inches apart, in the midst of the woods, invariably,in the darkest night. Sometimes, after coming home thus late in a darkand 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 toraise my hand to lift the latch, I have not been able to recall a singlestep of my walk, and I have thought that perhaps my body would find itsway home if its master should forsake it, as the hand finds its way tothe mouth without assistance. Several times, when a visitor chanced tostay into evening, and it proved a dark night, I was obliged to conducthim to the cart-path in the rear of the house, and then point out to himthe direction he was to pursue, and in keeping which he was to be guidedrather by his feet than his eyes. One very dark night I directed thuson their way two young men who had been fishing in the pond. They livedabout 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 thegreater part of the night, close by their own premises, and did not gethome till toward morning, by which time, as there had been severalheavy showers in the meanwhile, and the leaves were very wet, they weredrenched to their skins. I have heard of many going astray even in thevillage streets, when the darkness was so thick that you could cut itwith a knife, as the saying is. Some who live in the outskirts, havingcome to town a-shopping in their wagons, have been obliged to put up forthe night; and gentlemen and ladies making a call have gone half a mileout of their way, feeling the sidewalk only with their feet, and notknowing when they turned. It is a surprising and memorable, as wellas valuable experience, to be lost in the woods any time. Often in asnow-storm, even by day, one will come out upon a well-known road andyet find it impossible to tell which way leads to the village. Though heknows that he has travelled it a thousand times, he cannot recognizea feature in it, but it is as strange to him as if it were a road inSiberia. 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 ifwe go beyond our usual course we still carry in our minds the bearingof some neighboring cape; and not till we are completely lost, or turnedround--for a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shutin this world to be lost--do we appreciate the vastness and strangenessof nature. Every man has to learn the points of compass again as oftenas he awakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction. Not till we arelost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin tofind ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of ourrelations.One afternoon, near the end of the first summer, when I went to thevillage to get a shoe from the cobbler's, I was seized and put intojail, because, as I have elsewhere related, I did not pay a tax to, orrecognize the authority of, the State which buys and sells men, women,and children, like cattle, at the door of its senate-house. I had gonedown to the woods for other purposes. But, wherever a man goes, menwill pursue and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can,constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society. It istrue, I might have resisted forcibly with more or less effect, mighthave run "amok" against society; but I preferred that society should run"amok" against me, it being the desperate party. However, I was releasedthe next day, obtained my mended shoe, and returned to the woods inseason to get my dinner of huckleberries on Fair Haven Hill. I was nevermolested by any person but those who represented the State. I had nolock nor bolt but for the desk which held my papers, not even a nailto 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 fallI spent a fortnight in the woods of Maine. And yet my house was morerespected than if it had been surrounded by a file of soldiers. Thetired rambler could rest and warm himself by my fire, the literary amusehimself with the few books on my table, or the curious, by opening mycloset door, see what was left of my dinner, and what prospect I had ofa supper. Yet, though many people of every class came this way to thepond, I suffered no serious inconvenience from these sources, and Inever missed anything but one small book, a volume of Homer, whichperhaps was improperly gilded, and this I trust a soldier of our camphas found by this time. I am convinced, that if all men were to live assimply as I then did, thieving and robbery would be unknown. These takeplace only in communities where some have got more than is sufficientwhile others have not enough. The Pope's Homers would soon get properlydistributed. "Nec bella fuerunt, fa*ginus 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 employpunishments? Love virtue, and the people will be virtuous. The virtuesof a superior man are like the wind; the virtues of a common man arelike the grass--the grass, when the wind passes over it, bends."The PondsSometimes, having had a surfeit of human society and gossip, and wornout all my village friends, I rambled still farther westward than Ihabitually dwell, into yet more unfrequented parts of the town, "tofresh woods and pastures new," or, while the sun was setting, made mysupper of huckleberries and blueberries on Fair Haven Hill, and laid upa store for several days. The fruits do not yield their true flavor tothe purchaser of them, nor to him who raises them for the market. Thereis but one way to obtain it, yet few take that way. If you would knowthe flavor of huckleberries, ask the cowboy or the partridge. It is avulgar error to suppose that you have tasted huckleberries who neverplucked them. A huckleberry never reaches Boston; they have not beenknown there since they grew on her three hills. The ambrosial andessential part of the fruit is lost with the bloom which is rubbed offin the market cart, and they become mere provender. As long as EternalJustice reigns, not one innocent huckleberry can be transported thitherfrom the country's hills.Occasionally, after my hoeing was done for the day, I joined someimpatient companion who had been fishing on the pond since morning,as silent and motionless as a duck or a floating leaf, and, afterpractising various kinds of philosophy, had concluded commonly, by thetime I arrived, that he belonged to the ancient sect of Cænobites.There was one older man, an excellent fisher and skilled in all kinds ofwoodcraft, who was pleased to look upon my house as a building erectedfor the convenience of fishermen; and I was equally pleased when he satin my doorway to arrange his lines. Once in a while we sat together onthe pond, he at one end of the boat, and I at the other; but not manywords passed between us, for he had grown deaf in his later years, buthe occasionally hummed a psalm, which harmonized well enough with myphilosophy. 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 usedto raise the echoes by striking with a paddle on the side of my boat,filling the surrounding woods with circling and dilating sound, stirringthem up as the keeper of a menagerie his wild beasts, until I elicited agrowl from every wooded vale and hillside.In warm evenings I frequently sat in the boat playing the flute, andsaw the perch, which I seem to have charmed, hovering around me, andthe moon travelling over the ribbed bottom, which was strewed with thewrecks of the forest. Formerly I had come to this pond adventurously,from time to time, in dark summer nights, with a companion, and, makinga 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 wehad done, far in the night, threw the burning brands high into the airlike skyrockets, which, coming down into the pond, were quenched witha loud hissing, and we were suddenly groping in total darkness. Throughthis, whistling a tune, we took our way to the haunts of men again. Butnow I had made my home by the shore.Sometimes, after staying in a village parlor till the family had allretired, I have returned to the woods, and, partly with a view to thenext day's dinner, spent the hours of midnight fishing from a boat bymoonlight, serenaded by owls and foxes, and hearing, from time to time,the creaking note of some unknown bird close at hand. These experienceswere very memorable and valuable to me--anchored in forty feet ofwater, and twenty or thirty rods from the shore, surrounded sometimesby thousands of small perch and shiners, dimpling the surface with theirtails in the moonlight, and communicating by a long flaxen line withmysterious nocturnal fishes which had their dwelling forty feet below,or sometimes dragging sixty feet of line about the pond as I drifted inthe gentle night breeze, now and then feeling a slight vibration alongit, indicative of some life prowling about its extremity, of dulluncertain blundering purpose there, and slow to make up its mind.At length you slowly raise, pulling hand over hand, some horned poutsqueaking and squirming to the upper air. It was very queer, especiallyin dark nights, when your thoughts had wandered to vast and cosmogonalthemes in other spheres, to feel this faint jerk, which came tointerrupt your dreams and link you to Nature again. It seemed as if Imight next cast my line upward into the air, as well as downward intothis element, which was scarcely more dense. Thus I caught two fishes asit 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 notlong frequented it or lived by its shore; yet this pond is so remarkablefor its depth and purity as to merit a particular description. It isa clear and deep green well, half a mile long and a mile and threequarters in circumference, and contains about sixty-one and a halfacres; a perennial spring in the midst of pine and oak woods, withoutany visible inlet or outlet except by the clouds and evaporation. Thesurrounding hills rise abruptly from the water to the height of forty toeighty feet, though on the southeast and east they attain to about onehundred and one hundred and fifty feet respectively, within a quarterand a third of a mile. They are exclusively woodland. All our Concordwaters have two colors at least; one when viewed at a distance, andanother, more proper, close at hand. The first depends more on thelight, and follows the sky. In clear weather, in summer, they appearblue at a little distance, especially if agitated, and at a greatdistance all appear alike. In stormy weather they are sometimes of adark slate-color. The sea, however, is said to be blue one day and greenanother without any perceptible change in the atmosphere. I have seenour river, when, the landscape being covered with snow, both water andice were almost as green as grass. Some consider blue "to be the colorof pure water, whether liquid or solid." But, looking directly down intoour 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 samepoint of view. Lying between the earth and the heavens, it partakes ofthe color of both. Viewed from a hilltop it reflects the color of thesky; but near at hand it is of a yellowish tint next the shore whereyou can see the sand, then a light green, which gradually deepens to auniform dark green in the body of the pond. In some lights, viewedeven from a hilltop, it is of a vivid green next the shore. Some havereferred this to the reflection of the verdure; but it is equally greenthere against the railroad sandbank, and in the spring, before theleaves are expanded, and it may be simply the result of the prevailingblue 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 warmedby the heat of the sun reflected from the bottom, and also transmittedthrough the earth, melts first and forms a narrow canal about the stillfrozen middle. Like the rest of our waters, when much agitated, in clearweather, so that the surface of the waves may reflect the sky at theright angle, or because there is more light mixed with it, it appearsat a little distance of a darker blue than the sky itself; and at sucha time, being on its surface, and looking with divided vision, so as tosee the reflection, I have discerned a matchless and indescribable lightblue, such as watered or changeable silks and sword blades suggest, morecerulean than the sky itself, alternating with the original dark greenon the opposite sides of the waves, which last appeared but muddy incomparison. It is a vitreous greenish blue, as I remember it, like thosepatches of the winter sky seen through cloud vistas in the west beforesundown. Yet a single glass of its water held up to the light is ascolorless as an equal quantity of air. It is well known that a largeplate 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 abody of Walden water would be required to reflect a green tint I havenever proved. The water of our river is black or a very dark brown toone looking directly down on it, and, like that of most ponds, impartsto the body of one bathing in it a yellowish tinge; but this water isof such crystalline purity that the body of the bather appears of analabaster whiteness, still more unnatural, which, as the limbs aremagnified and distorted withal, produces a monstrous effect, making fitstudies for a Michael Angelo.The water is so transparent that the bottom can easily be discerned atthe 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 theirtransverse bars, and you think that they must be ascetic fish that finda subsistence there. Once, in the winter, many years ago, when I hadbeen cutting holes through the ice in order to catch pickerel, as Istepped ashore I tossed my axe back on to the ice, but, as if some evilgenius had directed it, it slid four or five rods directly into one ofthe 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 axea little on one side, standing on its head, with its helve erect andgently swaying to and fro with the pulse of the pond; and there itmight have stood erect and swaying till in the course of time the handlerotted off, if I had not disturbed it. Making another hole directly overit with an ice chisel which I had, and cutting down the longestbirch which I could find in the neighborhood with my knife, I made aslip-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 thebirch, and so pulled the axe out again.The shore is composed of a belt of smooth rounded white stones likepaving-stones, excepting one or two short sand beaches, and is so steepthat in many places a single leap will carry you into water over yourhead; and were it not for its remarkable transparency, that would be thelast to be seen of its bottom till it rose on the opposite side. Somethink it is bottomless. It is nowhere muddy, and a casual observer wouldsay that there were no weeds at all in it; and of noticeable plants,except in the little meadows recently overflowed, which do not properlybelong 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 andpotamogetons, and perhaps a water-target or two; all which however abather might not perceive; and these plants are clean and bright likethe 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, wherethere is usually a little sediment, probably from the decay of theleaves which have been wafted on to it so many successive falls, and abright 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 withmost of the ponds within a dozen miles of this centre I do not know athird of this pure and well-like character. Successive nations perchancehave drank at, admired, and fathomed it, and passed away, and still itswater is green and pellucid as ever. Not an intermitting spring! Perhapson that spring morning when Adam and Eve were driven out of Eden WaldenPond was already in existence, and even then breaking up in a gentlespring rain accompanied with mist and a southerly wind, and covered withmyriads of ducks and geese, which had not heard of the fall, when stillsuch pure lakes sufficed them. Even then it had commenced to rise andfall, and had clarified its waters and colored them of the hue they nowwear, and obtained a patent of Heaven to be the only Walden Pond inthe world and distiller of celestial dews. Who knows in how manyunremembered nations' literatures this has been the Castalian Fountain?or what nymphs presided over it in the Golden Age? It is a gem of thefirst water which Concord wears in her coronet.Yet perchance the first who came to this well have left some trace oftheir footsteps. I have been surprised to detect encircling the pond,even where a thick wood has just been cut down on the shore, a narrowshelf-like path in the steep hillside, alternately rising and falling,approaching and receding from the water's edge, as old probably as therace of man here, worn by the feet of aboriginal hunters, and still fromtime to time unwittingly trodden by the present occupants of the land.This is particularly distinct to one standing on the middle of the pondin winter, just after a light snow has fallen, appearing as a clearundulating white line, unobscured by weeds and twigs, and very obviousa quarter of a mile off in many places where in summer it is hardlydistinguishable close at hand. The snow reprints it, as it were, inclear white type alto-relievo. The ornamented grounds of villas whichwill one day be built here may still preserve some trace of this.The pond rises and falls, but whether regularly or not, and within whatperiod, nobody knows, though, as usual, many pretend to know. It iscommonly higher in the winter and lower in the summer, though notcorresponding to the general wet and dryness. I can remember when itwas 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 ofchowder, some six rods from the main shore, about the year 1824, whichit has not been possible to do for twenty-five years; and, on the otherhand, my friends used to listen with incredulity when I told them, thata few years later I was accustomed to fish from a boat in a secludedcove in the woods, fifteen rods from the only shore they knew, whichplace was long since converted into a meadow. But the pond has risensteadily for two years, and now, in the summer of '52, is just five feethigher 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 oflevel, at the outside, of six or seven feet; and yet the water shed bythe surrounding hills is insignificant in amount, and this overflow mustbe referred to causes which affect the deep springs. This samesummer the pond has begun to fall again. It is remarkable that thisfluctuation, whether periodical or not, appears thus to require manyyears for its accomplishment. I have observed one rise and a part of twofalls, and I expect that a dozen or fifteen years hence the water willagain 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, andrecently attained their greatest height at the same time with thelatter. 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 itmakes it difficult to walk round it, kills the shrubs and trees whichhave sprung up about its edge since the last rise--pitch pines, birches,alders, aspens, and others--and, falling again, leaves an unobstructedshore; for, unlike many ponds and all waters which are subject to adaily tide, its shore is cleanest when the water is lowest. On the sideof the pond next my house a row of pitch pines, fifteen feet high, hasbeen killed and tipped over as if by a lever, and thus a stop put totheir encroachments; and their size indicates how many years haveelapsed since the last rise to this height. By this fluctuation the pondasserts its title to a shore, and thus the _shore_ is _shorn_, and thetrees cannot hold it by right of possession. These are the lips of thelake, 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 sendforth a mass of fibrous red roots several feet long from all sides oftheir stems in the water, and to the height of three or four feet fromthe ground, in the effort to maintain themselves; and I have known thehigh blueberry bushes about the shore, which commonly produce no fruit,bear an abundant crop under these circ*mstances.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 thatthey heard it in their youth--that anciently the Indians were holdinga pow-wow upon a hill here, which rose as high into the heavens as thepond now sinks deep into the earth, and they used much profanity, asthe story goes, though this vice is one of which the Indians were neverguilty, and while they were thus engaged the hill shook and suddenlysank, and only one old squaw, named Walden, escaped, and from her thepond was named. It has been conjectured that when the hill shook thesestones rolled down its side and became the present shore. It is verycertain, at any rate, that once there was no pond here, and now thereis one; and this Indian fable does not in any respect conflict with theaccount of that ancient settler whom I have mentioned, who remembersso well when he first came here with his divining-rod, saw a thin vaporrising from the sward, and the hazel pointed steadily downward, and heconcluded to dig a well here. As for the stones, many still think thatthey are hardly to be accounted for by the action of the waves on thesehills; but I observe that the surrounding hills are remarkably full ofthe same kind of stones, so that they have been obliged to pile themup 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. Ifthe name was not derived from that of some English locality--SaffronWalden, 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 isas cold as it is pure at all times; and I think that it is then as goodas any, if not the best, in the town. In the winter, all water which isexposed to the air is colder than springs and wells which are protectedfrom it. The temperature of the pond water which had stood in the roomwhere 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 70ºsome of the time, owing partly to the sun on the roof, was 42º, or onedegree colder than the water of one of the coldest wells in the villagejust 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 knowof in summer, when, beside, shallow and stagnant surface water is notmingled with it. Moreover, in summer, Walden never becomes so warm asmost water which is exposed to the sun, on account of its depth. In thewarmest weather I usually placed a pailful in my cellar, where itbecame cool in the night, and remained so during the day; though I alsoresorted to a spring in the neighborhood. It was as good when a week oldas the day it was dipped, and had no taste of the pump. Whoever campsfor a week in summer by the shore of a pond, needs only bury a pail ofwater a few feet deep in the shade of his camp to be independent of theluxury of ice.There have been caught in Walden pickerel, one weighing seven pounds--tosay nothing of another which carried off a reel with great velocity,which the fisherman safely set down at eight pounds because he didnot see him--perch and pouts, some of each weighing over two pounds,shiners, chivins or roach (_Leuciscus pulchellus_), a very few breams, anda couple of eels, one weighing four pounds--I am thus particular becausethe weight of a fish is commonly its only title to fame, and these arethe only eels I have heard of here;--also, I have a faint recollectionof a little fish some five inches long, with silvery sides and agreenish back, somewhat dace-like in its character, which I mention herechiefly to link my facts to fable. Nevertheless, this pond is not veryfertile 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 threedifferent kinds: a long and shallow one, steel-colored, most like thosecaught in the river; a bright golden kind, with greenish reflectionsand remarkably deep, which is the most common here; and another,golden-colored, and shaped like the last, but peppered on the sides withsmall dark brown or black spots, intermixed with a few faint blood-redones, very much like a trout. The specific name _reticulatus_ would notapply to this; it should be _guttatus_ rather. These are all very firmfish, and weigh more than their size promises. The shiners, pouts, andperch also, and indeed all the fishes which inhabit this pond, are muchcleaner, handsomer, and firmer-fleshed than those in the river and mostother ponds, as the water is purer, and they can easily be distinguishedfrom them. Probably many ichthyologists would make new varieties of someof them. There are also a clean race of frogs and tortoises, and afew mussels in it; muskrats and minks leave their traces about it, andoccasionally a travelling mud-turtle visits it. Sometimes, when I pushedoff my boat in the morning, I disturbed a great mud-turtle which hadsecreted himself under the boat in the night. Ducks and geese frequentit in the spring and fall, the white-bellied swallows (_Hirundo bicolor_)skim over it, and the peetweets (_Totanus macularius_) "teeter" along itsstony shores all summer. I have sometimes disturbed a fish hawk sittingon a white pine over the water; but I doubt if it is ever profaned bythe wind of a gull, like Fair Haven. At most, it tolerates one annualloon. 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 partsof the pond, some circular heaps half a dozen feet in diameter by a footin 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 Indianscould have formed them on the ice for any purpose, and so, when the icemelted, they sank to the bottom; but they are too regular and some ofthem plainly too fresh for that. They are similar to those found inrivers; but as there are no suckers nor lampreys here, I know not bywhat 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'seye the western, indented with deep bays, the bolder northern, and thebeautifully scalloped southern shore, where successive capes overlapeach other and suggest unexplored coves between. The forest has neverso good a setting, nor is so distinctly beautiful, as when seen from themiddle of a small lake amid hills which rise from the water's edge; forthe water in which it is reflected not only makes the best foreground insuch a case, but, with its winding shore, the most natural and agreeableboundary 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 sendsforth its most vigorous branch in that direction. There Nature has wovena natural selvage, and the eye rises by just gradations from the lowshrubs of the shore to the highest trees. There are few traces of man'shand to be seen. The water laves the shore as it did a thousand yearsago.A lake is the landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature. It isearth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth ofhis own nature. The fluviatile trees next the shore are the slendereyelashes which fringe it, and the wooded hills and cliffs around areits overhanging brows.Standing on the smooth sandy beach at the east end of the pond, ina calm September afternoon, when a slight haze makes the oppositeshore-line indistinct, I have seen whence came the expression, "theglassy surface of a lake." When you invert your head, it looks likea thread of finest gossamer stretched across the valley, and gleamingagainst the distant pine woods, separating one stratum of the atmospherefrom another. You would think that you could walk dry under it to theopposite hills, and that the swallows which skim over might perch on it.Indeed, they sometimes dive below this line, as it were by mistake, andare undeceived. As you look over the pond westward you are obliged toemploy both your hands to defend your eyes against the reflected as wellas 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 itswhole extent, by their motions in the sun produce the finest imaginablesparkle 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 afish describes an arc of three or four feet in the air, and there is onebright 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 andso 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 inglass. You may often detect a yet smoother and darker water, separatedfrom 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 anypart; for not a pickerel or shiner picks an insect from this smoothsurface but it manifestly disturbs the equilibrium of the whole lake.It is wonderful with what elaborateness this simple fact isadvertised--this piscine murder will out--and from my distant perch Idistinguish the circling undulations when they are half a dozen rodsin diameter. You can even detect a water-bug (_Gyrinus_) ceaselesslyprogressing over the smooth surface a quarter of a mile off; for theyfurrow the water slightly, making a conspicuous ripple bounded by twodiverging lines, but the skaters glide over it without rippling itperceptibly. When the surface is considerably agitated there are noskaters nor water-bugs on it, but apparently, in calm days, they leavetheir havens and adventurously glide forth from the shore by shortimpulses 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 sunis fully appreciated, to sit on a stump on such a height as this,overlooking the pond, and study the dimpling circles which areincessantly inscribed on its otherwise invisible surface amid thereflected skies and trees. Over this great expanse there is nodisturbance but it is thus at once gently smoothed away and assuaged,as, when a vase of water is jarred, the trembling circles seek the shoreand all is smooth again. Not a fish can leap or an insect fall on thepond but it is thus reported in circling dimples, in lines of beauty, asit were the constant welling up of its fountain, the gentle pulsing ofits life, the heaving of its breast. The thrills of joy and thrillsof pain are undistinguishable. How peaceful the phenomena of the lake!Again the works of man shine as in the spring. Ay, every leaf and twigand stone and cobweb sparkles now at mid-afternoon as when covered withdew in a spring morning. Every motion of an oar or an insect produces aflash of light; and if an oar falls, how sweet the echo!In such a day, in September or October, Walden is a perfect forestmirror, set round with stones as precious to my eye as if fewer orrarer. Nothing so fair, so pure, and at the same time so large, as alake, perchance, lies on the surface of the earth. Sky water. It needsno fence. Nations come and go without defiling it. It is a mirror whichno stone can crack, whose quicksilver will never wear off, whose gildingNature continually repairs; no storms, no dust, can dim its surface everfresh;--a mirror in which all impurity presented to it sinks, swept anddusted by the sun's hazy brush--this the light dust-cloth--which retainsno breath that is breathed on it, but sends its own to float as cloudshigh above its surface, and be reflected in its bosom still.A field of water betrays the spirit that is in the air. It iscontinually receiving new life and motion from above. It is intermediatein its nature between land and sky. On land only the grass and treeswave, but the water itself is rippled by the wind. I see where thebreeze dashes across it by the streaks or flakes of light. It isremarkable 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 stillsubtler spirit sweeps over it.The skaters and water-bugs finally disappear in the latter part ofOctober, when the severe frosts have come; and then and in November,usually, in a calm day, there is absolutely nothing to ripple thesurface. One November afternoon, in the calm at the end of a rain-stormof several days' duration, when the sky was still completely overcastand the air was full of mist, I observed that the pond was remarkablysmooth, so that it was difficult to distinguish its surface; though itno longer reflected the bright tints of October, but the sombre Novembercolors of the surrounding hills. Though I passed over it as gently aspossible, the slight undulations produced by my boat extended almostas 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 adistance a faint glimmer, as if some skater insects which had escapedthe frosts might be collected there, or, perchance, the surface, beingso smooth, betrayed where a spring welled up from the bottom. Paddlinggently to one of these places, I was surprised to find myself surroundedby myriads of small perch, about five inches long, of a rich bronzecolor in the green water, sporting there, and constantly rising tothe surface and dimpling it, sometimes leaving bubbles on it. In suchtransparent and seemingly bottomless water, reflecting the clouds,I seemed to be floating through the air as in a balloon, and theirswimming impressed me as a kind of flight or hovering, as if they werea compact flock of birds passing just beneath my level on the right orleft, their fins, like sails, set all around them. There were many suchschools in the pond, apparently improving the short season before winterwould draw an icy shutter over their broad skylight, sometimes givingto the surface an appearance as if a slight breeze struck it, or a fewrain-drops fell there. When I approached carelessly and alarmed them,they made a sudden splash and rippling with their tails, as if one hadstruck the water with a brushy bough, and instantly took refuge in thedepths. At length the wind rose, the mist increased, and the waves beganto 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 onthe surface, and thinking it was going to rain hard immediately, theair being full of mist, I made haste to take my place at the oars and rowhomeward; already the rain seemed rapidly increasing, though I feltnone on my cheek, and I anticipated a thorough soaking. But suddenly thedimples ceased, for they were produced by the perch, which the noiseof my oars had seared into the depths, and I saw their schools dimlydisappearing; so I spent a dry afternoon after all.An old man who used to frequent this pond nearly sixty years ago, whenit was dark with surrounding forests, tells me that in those days hesometimes saw it all alive with ducks and other water-fowl, and thatthere were many eagles about it. He came here a-fishing, and used anold log canoe which he found on the shore. It was made of two white pinelogs 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 becamewater-logged and perhaps sank to the bottom. He did not know whose itwas; it belonged to the pond. He used to make a cable for his anchor ofstrips of hickory bark tied together. An old man, a potter, who livedby the pond before the Revolution, told him once that there was an ironchest at the bottom, and that he had seen it. Sometimes it would comefloating up to the shore; but when you went toward it, it would go backinto deep water and disappear. I was pleased to hear of the old logcanoe, which took the place of an Indian one of the same material butmore graceful construction, which perchance had first been a tree on thebank, and then, as it were, fell into the water, to float there for ageneration, the most proper vessel for the lake. I remember that when Ifirst looked into these depths there were many large trunks to be seenindistinctly lying on the bottom, which had either been blown overformerly, 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 bythick and lofty pine and oak woods, and in some of its coves grape-vineshad run over the trees next the water and formed bowers under which aboat could pass. The hills which form its shores are so steep, and thewoods on them were then so high, that, as you looked down from the westend, it had the appearance of an amphitheatre for some land of sylvanspectacle. I have spent many an hour, when I was younger, floating overits surface as the zephyr willed, having paddled my boat to the middle,and lying on my back across the seats, in a summer forenoon, dreamingawake, until I was aroused by the boat touching the sand, and I arose tosee what shore my fates had impelled me to; days when idleness was themost attractive and productive industry. Many a forenoon have I stolenaway, preferring to spend thus the most valued part of the day; for Iwas rich, if not in money, in sunny hours and summer days, and spentthem lavishly; nor do I regret that I did not waste more of them inthe workshop or the teacher's desk. But since I left those shores thewoodchoppers have still further laid them waste, and now for many ayear there will be no more rambling through the aisles of the wood,with occasional vistas through which you see the water. My Muse may beexcused if she is silent henceforth. How can you expect the birds tosing when their groves are cut down?Now the trunks of trees on the bottom, and the old log canoe, and thedark surrounding woods, are gone, and the villagers, who scarcely knowwhere it lies, instead of going to the pond to bathe or drink, arethinking to bring its water, which should be as sacred as the Gangesat least, to the village in a pipe, to wash their dishes with!--toearn their Walden by the turning of a co*ck or drawing of a plug! Thatdevilish Iron Horse, whose ear-rending neigh is heard throughout thetown, has muddied the Boiling Spring with his foot, and he it is thathas browsed off all the woods on Walden shore, that Trojan horse, with athousand men in his belly, introduced by mercenary Greeks! Where is thecountry's champion, the Moore of Moore Hill, to meet him at the Deep Cutand thrust an avenging lance between the ribs of the bloated pest?Nevertheless, of all the characters I have known, perhaps Walden wearsbest, and best preserves its purity. Many men have been likened to it,but few deserve that honor. Though the woodchoppers have laid bare firstthis 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 haveskimmed it once, it is itself unchanged, the same water which myyouthful eyes fell on; all the change is in me. It has not acquired onepermanent wrinkle after all its ripples. It is perennially young, andI may stand and see a swallow dip apparently to pick an insect from itssurface as of yore. It struck me again tonight, as if I had not seen italmost daily for more than twenty years--Why, here is Walden, the samewoodland lake that I discovered so many years ago; where a forest wascut down last winter another is springing up by its shore as lustily asever; the same thought is welling up to its surface that was then; itis the same liquid joy and happiness to itself and its Maker, ay, and itmay be to me. It is the work of a brave man surely, in whom there was noguile! He rounded this water with his hand, deepened and clarified it inhis thought, and in his will bequeathed it to Concord. I see by its facethat 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 andfiremen and brakemen, and those passengers who have a season ticket andsee it often, are better men for the sight. The engineer does not forgetat night, or his nature does not, that he has beheld this vision ofserenity 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 proposesthat it be called "God's Drop."I have said that Walden has no visible inlet nor outlet, but it is onthe one hand distantly and indirectly related to Flint's Pond, which ismore elevated, by a chain of small ponds coming from that quarter, andon the other directly and manifestly to Concord River, which is lower,by a similar chain of ponds through which in some other geologicalperiod 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 andaustere, like a hermit in the woods, so long, it has acquired suchwonderful purity, who would not regret that the comparatively impurewaters of Flint's Pond should be mingled with it, or itself should evergo 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 tocontain one hundred and ninety-seven acres, and is more fertile in fish;but it is comparatively shallow, and not remarkably pure. A walk throughthe woods thither was often my recreation. It was worth the while, ifonly 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 thefall, on windy days, when the nuts were dropping into the water and werewashed to my feet; and one day, as I crept along its sedgy shore, thefresh spray blowing in my face, I came upon the mouldering wreck of aboat, the sides gone, and hardly more than the impression of its flatbottom left amid the rushes; yet its model was sharply defined, as if itwere a large decayed pad, with its veins. It was as impressive a wreckas one could imagine on the seashore, and had as good a moral. It is bythis time mere vegetable mould and undistinguishable pond shore, throughwhich rushes and flags have pushed up. I used to admire the ripple markson the sandy bottom, at the north end of this pond, made firm and hardto the feet of the wader by the pressure of the water, and the rusheswhich grew in Indian file, in waving lines, corresponding to thesemarks, rank behind rank, as if the waves had planted them. There alsoI have found, in considerable quantities, curious balls, composedapparently of fine grass or roots, of pipewort perhaps, from half aninch to four inches in diameter, and perfectly spherical. These washback and forth in shallow water on a sandy bottom, and are sometimescast on the shore. They are either solid grass, or have a little sand inthe middle. At first you would say that they were formed by the actionof the waves, like a pebble; yet the smallest are made of equally coarsematerials, half an inch long, and they are produced only at one seasonof the year. Moreover, the waves, I suspect, do not so much constructas wear down a material which has already acquired consistency. Theypreserve their form when dry for an indefinite period._Flint's Pond!_ Such is the poverty of our nomenclature. What right hadthe unclean and stupid farmer, whose farm abutted on this sky water,whose shores he has ruthlessly laid bare, to give his name to it? Someskin-flint, who loved better the reflecting surface of a dollar, or abright cent, in which he could see his own brazen face; who regardedeven the wild ducks which settled in it as trespassers; his fingersgrown into crooked and bony talons from the long habit of graspingharpy-like;--so it is not named for me. I go not there to see him nor tohear of him; who never saw it, who never bathed in it, who never lovedit, who never protected it, who never spoke a good word for it, northanked God that He had made it. Rather let it be named from the fishesthat swim in it, the wild fowl or quadrupeds which frequent it, the wildflowers which grow by its shores, or some wild man or child the threadof whose history is interwoven with its own; not from him who could showno title to it but the deed which a like-minded neighbor or legislaturegave him--him who thought only of its money value; whose presenceperchance cursed all the shores; who exhausted the land around it, andwould fain have exhausted the waters within it; who regretted only thatit was not English hay or cranberry meadow--there was nothing to redeemit, forsooth, in his eyes--and would have drained and sold it for themud at its bottom. It did not turn his mill, and it was no _privilege_ tohim to behold it. I respect not his labors, his farm where everythinghas 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_ hisgod as it is; on whose farm nothing grows free, whose fields bear nocrops, whose meadows no flowers, whose trees no fruits, but dollars; wholoves not the beauty of his fruits, whose fruits are not ripe for himtill they are turned to dollars. Give me the poverty that enjoys truewealth. Farmers are respectable and interesting to me in proportion asthey are poor--poor farmers. A model farm! where the house stands like afungus in a muckheap, chambers for men, horses, oxen, and swine, cleansedand uncleansed, all contiguous to one another! Stocked with men! A greatgrease-spot, redolent of manures and buttermilk! Under a high state ofcultivation, being manured with the hearts and brains of men! As if youwere 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 aftermen, let them be the noblest and worthiest men alone. Let our lakesreceive as true names at least as the Icarian Sea, where "still theshore" a "brave attempt resounds." * * * * *Goose Pond, of small extent, is on my way to Flint's; Fair Haven, anexpansion of Concord River, said to contain some seventy acres, is amile southwest; and White Pond, of about forty acres, is a mile and ahalf beyond Fair Haven. This is my lake country. These, with ConcordRiver, 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 profanedWalden, perhaps the most attractive, if not the most beautiful, of allour lakes, the gem of the woods, is White Pond;--a poor name from itscommonness, whether derived from the remarkable purity of its waters orthe color of its sands. In these as in other respects, however, it isa lesser twin of Walden. They are so much alike that you would say theymust be connected under ground. It has the same stony shore, and itswaters 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 deepbut that the reflection from the bottom tinges them, its waters are ofa misty bluish-green or glaucous color. Many years since I used to gothere to collect the sand by cartloads, to make sandpaper with, and Ihave continued to visit it ever since. One who frequents it proposes tocall it Virid Lake. Perhaps it might be called Yellow Pine Lake, fromthe following circ*mstance. About fifteen years ago you could see thetop of a pitch pine, of the kind called yellow pine hereabouts, thoughit is not a distinct species, projecting above the surface in deepwater, many rods from the shore. It was even supposed by some that thepond had sunk, and this was one of the primitive forest that formerlystood there. I find that even so long ago as 1792, in a "TopographicalDescription of the Town of Concord," by one of its citizens, in theCollections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, the author, afterspeaking of Walden and White Ponds, adds, "In the middle of the lattermay be seen, when the water is very low, a tree which appears as if itgrew in the place where it now stands, although the roots are fifty feetbelow the surface of the water; the top of this tree is broken off, andat that place measures fourteen inches in diameter." In the spring of'49 I talked with the man who lives nearest the pond in Sudbury, whotold me that it was he who got out this tree ten or fifteen yearsbefore. As near as he could remember, it stood twelve or fifteen rodsfrom the shore, where the water was thirty or forty feet deep. It wasin the winter, and he had been getting out ice in the forenoon, and hadresolved that in the afternoon, with the aid of his neighbors, he wouldtake out the old yellow pine. He sawed a channel in the ice toward theshore, 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 thatit was wrong end upward, with the stumps of the branches pointing down,and the small end firmly fastened in the sandy bottom. It was abouta foot in diameter at the big end, and he had expected to get a goodsaw-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 ofwoodpeckers on the butt. He thought that it might have been a dead treeon the shore, but was finally blown over into the pond, and after thetop 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 maystill be seen lying on the bottom, where, owing to the undulation of thesurface, they look like huge water snakes in motion.This pond has rarely been profaned by a boat, for there is little in itto tempt a fisherman. Instead of the white lily, which requires mud, orthe common sweet flag, the blue flag (_Iris versicolor_) grows thinly inthe pure water, rising from the stony bottom all around the shore, whereit is visited by hummingbirds in June; and the color both of its bluishblades and its flowers and especially their reflections, is in singularharmony 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 enoughto be clutched, they would, perchance, be carried off by slaves, likeprecious stones, to adorn the heads of emperors; but being liquid, andample, and secured to us and our successors forever, we disregard them,and run after the diamond of Kohinoor. They are too pure to have amarket value; they contain no muck. How much more beautiful than ourlives, how much more transparent than our characters, are they! Wenever learned meanness of them. How much fairer than the pool before thefarmer's door, in which his ducks swim! Hither the clean wild ducks come.Nature has no human inhabitant who appreciates her. The birds with theirplumage and their notes are in harmony with the flowers, but whatyouth or maiden conspires with the wild luxuriant beauty of Nature? Sheflourishes most alone, far from the towns where they reside. Talk ofheaven! ye disgrace earth.Baker FarmSometimes I rambled to pine groves, standing like temples, or likefleets at sea, full-rigged, with wavy boughs, and rippling with light,so soft and green and shady that the Druids would have forsaken theiroaks to worship in them; or to the cedar wood beyond Flint's Pond, wherethe trees, covered with hoary blue berries, spiring higher and higher,are fit to stand before Valhalla, and the creeping juniper covers theground with wreaths full of fruit; or to swamps where the usnea lichenhangs in festoons from the white spruce trees, and toadstools, roundtables of the swamp gods, cover the ground, and more beautiful fungiadorn the stumps, like butterflies or shells, vegetable winkles; wherethe swamp-pink and dogwood grow, the red alderberry glows like eyes ofimps, the waxwork grooves and crushes the hardest woods in its folds,and the wild holly berries make the beholder forget his home with theirbeauty, and he is dazzled and tempted by nameless other wild forbiddenfruits, 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 thisneighborhood, standing far away in the middle of some pasture, or in thedepths of a wood or swamp, or on a hilltop; such as the black birch, ofwhich 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, Iknow but one small grove of sizable trees left in the township, supposedby some to have been planted by the pigeons that were once baited withbeechnuts near by; it is worth the while to see the silver grainsparkle when you split this wood; the bass; the hornbeam; the _Celtisoccidentalis_, or false elm, of which we have but one well-grown; sometaller mast of a pine, a shingle tree, or a more perfect hemlock thanusual, standing like a pagoda in the midst of the woods; and manyothers I could mention. These were the shrines I visited both summer andwinter.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 andleaves 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 livedlike a dolphin. If it had lasted longer it might have tinged myemployments and life. As I walked on the railroad causeway, I usedto wonder at the halo of light around my shadow, and would fain fancymyself one of the elect. One who visited me declared that the shadowsof some Irishmen before him had no halo about them, that it was onlynatives that were so distinguished. Benvenuto Cellini tells us in hismemoirs, that, after a certain terrible dream or vision which he hadduring his confinement in the castle of St. Angelo a resplendent lightappeared over the shadow of his head at morning and evening, whetherhe was in Italy or France, and it was particularly conspicuous when thegrass was moist with dew. This was probably the same phenomenon to whichI have referred, which is especially observed in the morning, but alsoat other times, and even by moonlight. Though a constant one, it isnot commonly noticed, and, in the case of an excitable imagination likeCellini's, it would be basis enough for superstition. Beside, he tellsus that he showed it to very few. But are they not indeed distinguishedwho are conscious that they are regarded at all? * * * * *I set out one afternoon to go a-fishing to Fair Haven, through thewoods, to eke out my scanty fare of vegetables. My way led throughPleasant Meadow, an adjunct of the Baker Farm, that retreat of which apoet 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" theapples, leaped the brook, and scared the musquash and the trout. Itwas 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 cameup 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; andwhen at length I had made one cast over the pickerelweed, standing upto 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 nomore than listen to it. The gods must be proud, thought I, with suchforked flashes to rout a poor unarmed fisherman. So I made haste forshelter to the nearest hut, which stood half a mile from any road, butso 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, anIrishman, and his wife, and several children, from the broad-faced boywho assisted his father at his work, and now came running by hisside 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 palacesof nobles, and looked out from its home in the midst of wet and hungerinquisitively upon the stranger, with the privilege of infancy, notknowing but it was the last of a noble line, and the hope and cynosureof the world, instead of John Field's poor starveling brat. There we sattogether under that part of the roof which leaked the least, while itshowered and thundered without. I had sat there many times of oldbefore 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 ofthat lofty stove; with round greasy face and bare breast, still thinkingto 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 alsotaken shelter here from the rain, stalked about the room like membersof the family, too humanized, methought, to roast well. They stood andlooked in my eye or pecked at my shoe significantly. Meanwhile myhost told me his story, how hard he worked "bogging" for a neighboringfarmer, turning up a meadow with a spade or bog hoe at the rate of tendollars an acre and the use of the land with manure for one year, andhis little broad-faced son worked cheerfully at his father's side thewhile, not knowing how poor a bargain the latter had made. I tried tohelp him with my experience, telling him that he was one of my nearestneighbors, and that I too, who came a-fishing here, and looked like aloafer, was getting my living like himself; that I lived in a tight,light, and clean house, which hardly cost more than the annual rent ofsuch a ruin as his commonly amounts to; and how, if he chose, he mightin a month or two build himself a palace of his own; that I did not usetea, nor coffee, nor butter, nor milk, nor fresh meat, and so did nothave to work to get them; again, as I did not work hard, I did not haveto eat hard, and it cost me but a trifle for my food; but as he beganwith tea, and coffee, and butter, and milk, and beef, he had to workhard to pay for them, and when he had worked hard he had to eat hardagain to repair the waste of his system--and so it was as broad asit was long, indeed it was broader than it was long, for he wasdiscontented and wasted his life into the bargain; and yet he had ratedit as a gain in coming to America, that here you could get tea, andcoffee, and meat every day. But the only true America is that countrywhere you are at liberty to pursue such a mode of life as may enable youto do without these, and where the state does not endeavor to compelyou to sustain the slavery and war and other superfluous expenseswhich directly or indirectly result from the use of such things. For Ipurposely talked to him as if he were a philosopher, or desired to beone. I should be glad if all the meadows on the earth were left in awild state, if that were the consequence of men's beginning to redeemthemselves. A man will not need to study history to find out what isbest for his own culture. But alas! the culture of an Irishman is anenterprise 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 stoutclothing, which yet were soon soiled and worn out, but I wore lightshoes and thin clothing, which cost not half so much, though he mightthink that I was dressed like a gentleman (which, however, was not thecase), and in an hour or two, without labor, but as a recreation, Icould, if I wished, catch as many fish as I should want for two days, orearn enough money to support me a week. If he and his family wouldlive simply, they might all go a-huckleberrying in the summer for theiramusem*nt. John heaved a sigh at this, and his wife stared with armsa-kimbo, and both appeared to be wondering if they had capital enough tobegin such a course with, or arithmetic enough to carry it through. Itwas sailing by dead reckoning to them, and they saw not clearly how tomake their port so; therefore I suppose they still take life bravely,after their fashion, face to face, giving it tooth and nail, not havingskill to split its massive columns with any fine entering wedge, androut it in detail;--thinking to deal with it roughly, as oneshould handle a thistle. But they fight at an overwhelmingdisadvantage--living, John Field, alas! without arithmetic, and failingso."Do you ever fish?" I asked. "Oh yes, I catch a mess now and then whenI am lying by; good perch I catch."--"What's your bait?" "I catch shinerswith fishworms, and bait the perch with them." "You'd better go now,John," said his wife, with glistening and hopeful face; but Johndemurred.The shower was now over, and a rainbow above the eastern woods promiseda fair evening; so I took my departure. When I had got without I askedfor a drink, hoping to get a sight of the well bottom, to complete mysurvey of the premises; but there, alas! are shallows and quicksands,and rope broken withal, and bucket irrecoverable. Meanwhile the rightculinary vessel was selected, water was seemingly distilled, and afterconsultation and long delay passed out to the thirsty one--not yetsuffered to cool, not yet to settle. Such gruel sustains life here, Ithought; so, shutting my eyes, and excluding the motes by a skilfullydirected undercurrent, I drank to genuine hospitality the heartiestdraught I could. I am not squeamish in such cases when manners areconcerned.As I was leaving the Irishman's roof after the rain, bending my stepsagain to the pond, my haste to catch pickerel, wading in retiredmeadows, in sloughs and bog-holes, in forlorn and savage places,appeared for an instant trivial to me who had been sent to school andcollege; but as I ran down the hill toward the reddening west, with therainbow over my shoulder, and some faint tinkling sounds borne to my earthrough the cleansed air, from I know not what quarter, my Good Geniusseemed to say--Go fish and hunt far and wide day by day--farther andwider--and rest thee by many brooks and hearth-sides without misgiving.Remember thy Creator in the days of thy youth. Rise free from carebefore the dawn, and seek adventures. Let the noon find thee by otherlakes, and the night overtake thee everywhere at home. There are nolarger fields than these, no worthier games than may here be played.Grow wild according to thy nature, like these sedges and brakes, whichwill never become English bay. Let the thunder rumble; what if itthreaten ruin to farmers' crops? That is not its errand to thee. Takeshelter under the cloud, while they flee to carts and sheds. Let notto get a living be thy trade, but thy sport. Enjoy the land, but own itnot. Through want of enterprise and faith men are where they are, buyingand 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, wheretheir household echoes haunt, and their life pines because it breathesits own breath over again; their shadows, morning and evening, reachfarther than their daily steps. We should come home from far, fromadventures, and perils, and discoveries every day, with new experienceand character.Before I had reached the pond some fresh impulse had brought out JohnField, with altered mind, letting go "bogging" ere this sunset. But he,poor man, disturbed only a couple of fins while I was catching a fairstring, and he said it was his luck; but when we changed seats in theboat luck changed seats too. Poor John Field!--I trust he does not readthis, unless he will improve by it--thinking to live by some derivativeold-country mode in this primitive new country--to catch perch withshiners. It is good bait sometimes, I allow. With his horizon allhis own, yet he a poor man, born to be poor, with his inherited Irishpoverty or poor life, his Adam's grandmother and boggy ways, not torise in this world, he nor his posterity, till their wading webbedbog-trotting feet get _talaria_ to their heels.Higher LawsAs I came home through the woods with my string of fish, trailingmy pole, it being now quite dark, I caught a glimpse of a woodchuckstealing across my path, and felt a strange thrill of savage delight,and was strongly tempted to seize and devour him raw; not that I washungry then, except for that wildness which he represented. Once ortwice, however, while I lived at the pond, I found myself ranging thewoods, like a half-starved hound, with a strange abandonment, seekingsome kind of venison which I might devour, and no morsel could have beentoo 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 aprimitive rank and savage one, and I reverence them both. I love thewild not less than the good. The wildness and adventure that are infishing still recommended it to me. I like sometimes to take rank holdon life and spend my day more as the animals do. Perhaps I have owedto this employment and to hunting, when quite young, my closestacquaintance with Nature. They early introduce us to and detain usin scenery with which otherwise, at that age, we should have littleacquaintance. Fishermen, hunters, woodchoppers, and others, spendingtheir lives in the fields and woods, in a peculiar sense a part ofNature themselves, are often in a more favorable mood for observing her,in the intervals of their pursuits, than philosophers or poets even, whoapproach her with expectation. She is not afraid to exhibit herself tothem. The traveller on the prairie is naturally a hunter, on the headwaters of the Missouri and Columbia a trapper, and at the Falls ofSt. Mary a fisherman. He who is only a traveller learns things atsecond-hand and by the halves, and is poor authority. We are mostinterested when science reports what those men already know practicallyor instinctively, for that alone is a true _humanity_, or account of humanexperience.They mistake who assert that the Yankee has few amusem*nts, because hehas not so many public holidays, and men and boys do not play so manygames as they do in England, for here the more primitive but solitaryamusem*nts of hunting, fishing, and the like have not yet given placeto the former. Almost every New England boy among my contemporariesshouldered a fowling-piece between the ages of ten and fourteen; and hishunting and fishing grounds were not limited, like the preserves of anEnglish 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. Butalready a change is taking place, owing, not to an increased humanity,but to an increased scarcity of game, for perhaps the hunter is thegreatest friend of the animals hunted, not excepting the Humane Society.Moreover, when at the pond, I wished sometimes to add fish to my farefor variety. I have actually fished from the same kind of necessity thatthe first fishers did. Whatever humanity I might conjure up against itwas all factitious, and concerned my philosophy more than my feelings.I speak of fishing only now, for I had long felt differently aboutfowling, and sold my gun before I went to the woods. Not that I am lesshumane than others, but I did not perceive that my feelings were muchaffected. I did not pity the fishes nor the worms. This was habit. Asfor fowling, during the last years that I carried a gun my excuse wasthat I was studying ornithology, and sought only new or rare birds. ButI confess that I am now inclined to think that there is a finer way ofstudying ornithology than this. It requires so much closer attentionto the habits of the birds, that, if for that reason only, I have beenwilling to omit the gun. Yet notwithstanding the objection on the scoreof humanity, I am compelled to doubt if equally valuable sports areever substituted for these; and when some of my friends have asked meanxiously about their boys, whether they should let them hunt, I haveanswered, yes--remembering that it was one of the best parts of myeducation--_make_ them hunters, though sportsmen only at first, ifpossible, mighty hunters at last, so that they shall not find game largeenough for them in this or any vegetable wilderness--hunters as well asfishers 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, whenthe hunters are the "best men," as the Algonquins called them. We cannotbut pity the boy who has never fired a gun; he is no more humane, whilehis education has been sadly neglected. This was my answer with respectto those youths who were bent on this pursuit, trusting that they wouldsoon outgrow it. No humane being, past the thoughtless age of boyhood,will wantonly murder any creature which holds its life by the sametenure that he does. The hare in its extremity cries like a child.I warn you, mothers, that my sympathies do not always make the usualphil-_anthropic_ distinctions.Such is oftenest the young man's introduction to the forest, and themost original part of himself. He goes thither at first as a hunter andfisher, until at last, if he has the seeds of a better life in him, hedistinguishes 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 andalways young in this respect. In some countries a hunting parson is nouncommon sight. Such a one might make a good shepherd's dog, but is farfrom being the Good Shepherd. I have been surprised to consider that theonly obvious employment, except wood-chopping, ice-cutting, or the likebusiness, which ever to my knowledge detained at Walden Pond for a wholehalf-day any of my fellow-citizens, whether fathers or children of thetown, with just one exception, was fishing. Commonly they did not thinkthat they were lucky, or well paid for their time, unless they got along string of fish, though they had the opportunity of seeing the pondall the while. They might go there a thousand times before the sedimentof fishing would sink to the bottom and leave their purpose pure; butno doubt such a clarifying process would be going on all the while.The Governor and his Council faintly remember the pond, for they wenta-fishing there when they were boys; but now they are too old anddignified to go a-fishing, and so they know it no more forever. Yet eventhey expect to go to heaven at last. If the legislature regards it, itis chiefly to regulate the number of hooks to be used there; but theyknow nothing about the hook of hooks with which to angle for the ponditself, impaling the legislature for a bait. Thus, even in civilizedcommunities, the embryo man passes through the hunter stage ofdevelopment.I have found repeatedly, of late years, that I cannot fish withoutfalling a little in self-respect. I have tried it again and again. Ihave skill at it, and, like many of my fellows, a certain instinct forit, which revives from time to time, but always when I have done I feelthat it would have been better if I had not fished. I think that I donot mistake. It is a faint intimation, yet so are the first streaks ofmorning. There is unquestionably this instinct in me which belongs tothe lower orders of creation; yet with every year I am less a fisherman,though without more humanity or even wisdom; at present I am nofisherman at all. But I see that if I were to live in a wildernessI should again be tempted to become a fisher and hunter in earnest.Beside, there is something essentially unclean about this diet and allflesh, and I began to see where housework commences, and whence theendeavor, which costs so much, to wear a tidy and respectable appearanceeach day, to keep the house sweet and free from all ill odors andsights. Having been my own butcher and scullion and cook, as well asthe gentleman for whom the dishes were served up, I can speak from anunusually complete experience. The practical objection to animal food inmy case was its uncleanness; and besides, when I had caught andcleaned and cooked and eaten my fish, they seemed not to have fed meessentially. It was insignificant and unnecessary, and cost more than itcame to. A little bread or a few potatoes would have done as well, withless trouble and filth. Like many of my contemporaries, I had rarelyfor many years used animal food, or tea, or coffee, etc.; not so muchbecause of any ill effects which I had traced to them, as because theywere not agreeable to my imagination. The repugnance to animal foodis not the effect of experience, but is an instinct. It appeared morebeautiful to live low and fare hard in many respects; and though I neverdid so, I went far enough to please my imagination. I believe that everyman who has ever been earnest to preserve his higher or poetic facultiesin the best condition has been particularly inclined to abstain fromanimal food, and from much food of any kind. It is a significant fact,stated by entomologists--I find it in Kirby and Spence--that "someinsects in their perfect state, though furnished with organs of feeding,make no use of them"; and they lay it down as "a general rule, thatalmost all insects in this state eat much less than in that of larvæ.The voracious caterpillar when transformed into a butterfly... and thegluttonous maggot when become a fly" content themselves with a drop ortwo of honey or some other sweet liquid. The abdomen under the wingsof the butterfly still represents the larva. This is the tidbit whichtempts his insectivorous fate. The gross feeder is a man in the larvastate; and there are whole nations in that condition, nations withoutfancy or imagination, whose vast abdomens betray them.It is hard to provide and cook so simple and clean a diet as will notoffend the imagination; but this, I think, is to be fed when we feed thebody; they should both sit down at the same table. Yet perhaps this maybe done. The fruits eaten temperately need not make us ashamed ofour appetites, nor interrupt the worthiest pursuits. But put an extracondiment into your dish, and it will poison you. It is not worth thewhile to live by rich cookery. Most men would feel shame if caughtpreparing with their own hands precisely such a dinner, whether ofanimal or vegetable food, as is every day prepared for them by others.Yet till this is otherwise we are not civilized, and, if gentlemen andladies, are not true men and women. This certainly suggests what changeis to be made. It may be vain to ask why the imagination will not bereconciled to flesh and fat. I am satisfied that it is not. Is it not areproach 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 miserableway--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 shallteach 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 ofthe destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave offeating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating eachother 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 eveninsanity, it may lead him; and yet that way, as he grows more resoluteand faithful, his road lies. The faintest assured objection which onehealthy man feels will at length prevail over the arguments and customsof mankind. No man ever followed his genius till it misled him. Thoughthe result were bodily weakness, yet perhaps no one can say that theconsequences were to be regretted, for these were a life in conformityto higher principles. If the day and the night are such that you greetthem with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scentedherbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal--that is yoursuccess. All nature is your congratulation, and you have causemomentarily to bless yourself. The greatest gains and values arefarthest from being appreciated. We easily come to doubt if they exist.We soon forget them. They are the highest reality. Perhaps the factsmost astounding and most real are never communicated by man to man.The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible andindescribable as the tints of morning or evening. It is a littlestar-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched.Yet, for my part, I was never unusually squeamish; I could sometimes eata fried rat with a good relish, if it were necessary. I am glad to havedrunk water so long, for the same reason that I prefer the natural skyto an opium-eater's heaven. I would fain keep sober always; and thereare infinite degrees of drunkenness. I believe that water is the onlydrink for a wise man; wine is not so noble a liquor; and think ofdashing the hopes of a morning with a cup of warm coffee, or of anevening with a dish of tea! Ah, how low I fall when I am tempted bythem! Even music may be intoxicating. Such apparently slight causesdestroyed Greece and Rome, and will destroy England and America. Of allebriosity, 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 longcontinued, that they compelled me to eat and drink coarsely also. Butto tell the truth, I find myself at present somewhat less particular inthese respects. I carry less religion to the table, ask no blessing; notbecause 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 coarseand 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 privilegedones to whom the Ved refers when it says, that "he who has true faith inthe Omnipresent Supreme Being may eat all that exists," that is, is notbound to inquire what is his food, or who prepares it; and even in theircase it is to be observed, as a Hindoo commentator has remarked, thatthe Vedant limits this privilege to "the time of distress."Who has not sometimes derived an inexpressible satisfaction from hisfood in which appetite had no share? I have been thrilled to think thatI owed a mental perception to the commonly gross sense of taste, thatI have been inspired through the palate, that some berries which I hadeaten on a hillside had fed my genius. "The soul not being mistressof herself," says Thseng-tseu, "one looks, and one does not see; onelistens, and one does not hear; one eats, and one does not know thesavor of food." He who distinguishes the true savor of his food cannever be a glutton; he who does not cannot be otherwise. A puritanmay go to his brown-bread crust with as gross an appetite as ever analderman to his turtle. Not that food which entereth into the mouthdefileth a man, but the appetite with which it is eaten. It is neitherthe quality nor the quantity, but the devotion to sensual savors; whenthat which is eaten is not a viand to sustain our animal, or inspire ourspiritual life, but food for the worms that possess us. If the hunterhas 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 forsardines 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 livethis slimy, beastly life, eating and drinking.Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant's trucebetween virtue and vice. Goodness is the only investment that neverfails. In the music of the harp which trembles round the world it is theinsisting on this which thrills us. The harp is the travelling pattererfor the Universe's Insurance Company, recommending its laws, and ourlittle goodness is all the assessment that we pay. Though the youth atlast grows indifferent, the laws of the universe are not indifferent,but are forever on the side of the most sensitive. Listen to everyzephyr for some reproof, for it is surely there, and he is unfortunatewho does not hear it. We cannot touch a string or move a stop but thecharming 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 ourhigher nature slumbers. It is reptile and sensual, and perhaps cannot bewholly expelled; like the worms which, even in life and health, occupyour bodies. Possibly we may withdraw from it, but never change itsnature. I fear that it may enjoy a certain health of its own; that wemay be well, yet not pure. The other day I picked up the lower jaw ofa hog, with white and sound teeth and tusks, which suggested thatthere was an animal health and vigor distinct from the spiritual. Thiscreature succeeded by other means than temperance and purity. "Thatin which men differ from brute beasts," says Mencius, "is a thing veryinconsiderable; the common herd lose it very soon; superior men preserveit carefully." Who knows what sort of life would result if we hadattained to purity? If I knew so wise a man as could teach me purity Iwould go to seek him forthwith. "A command over our passions, and overthe external senses of the body, and good acts, are declared by the Vedto be indispensable in the mind's approximation to God." Yet the spiritcan for the time pervade and control every member and function of thebody, and transmute what in form is the grossest sensuality intopurity and devotion. The generative energy, which, when we are loose,dissipates and makes us unclean, when we are continent invigoratesand inspires us. Chastity is the flowering of man; and what are calledGenius, Heroism, Holiness, and the like, are but various fruits whichsucceed it. Man flows at once to God when the channel of purity isopen. By turns our purity inspires and our impurity casts us down. He isblessed 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 causefor shame on account of the inferior and brutish nature to which heis allied. I fear that we are such gods or demigods only as fauns andsatyrs, the divine allied to beasts, the creatures of appetite, andthat, 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. Itis 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 oneof these things to know how great a sensualist he is. The impure canneither stand nor sit with purity. When the reptile is attacked atone mouth of his burrow, he shows himself at another. If you would bechaste, you must be temperate. What is chastity? How shall a man know ifhe is chaste? He shall not know it. We have heard of this virtue, butwe know not what it is. We speak conformably to the rumor which we haveheard. From exertion come wisdom and purity; from sloth ignorance andsensuality. In the student sensuality is a sluggish habit of mind. Anunclean person is universally a slothful one, one who sits by a stove,whom the sun shines on prostrate, who reposes without being fatigued. Ifyou would avoid uncleanness, and all the sins, work earnestly, though itbe at cleaning a stable. Nature is hard to be overcome, but she must beovercome. What avails it that you are Christian, if you are not purerthan the heathen, if you deny yourself no more, if you are not morereligious? I know of many systems of religion esteemed heathenish whoseprecepts 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--Icare not how obscene my _words_ are--but because I cannot speak of themwithout betraying my impurity. We discourse freely without shame of oneform of sensuality, and are silent about another. We are so degradedthat we cannot speak simply of the necessary functions of human nature.In earlier ages, in some countries, every function was reverentlyspoken of and regulated by law. Nothing was too trivial for the Hindoolawgiver, however offensive it may be to modern taste. He teaches how toeat, drink, cohabit, void excrement and urine, and the like, elevatingwhat is mean, and does not falsely excuse himself by calling thesethings trifles.Every man is the builder of a temple, called his body, to the god heworships, after a style purely his own, nor can he get off by hammeringmarble instead. We are all sculptors and painters, and our materialis our own flesh and blood and bones. Any nobleness begins at once torefine a man's features, any meanness or sensuality to imbrute them.John Farmer sat at his door one September evening, after a hard day'swork, 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 coolevening, and some of his neighbors were apprehending a frost. He hadnot attended to the train of his thoughts long when he heard some oneplaying on a flute, and that sound harmonized with his mood. Still hethought of his work; but the burden of his thought was, that though thiskept running in his head, and he found himself planning and contrivingit against his will, yet it concerned him very little. It was no morethan the scurf of his skin, which was constantly shuffled off. But thenotes of the flute came home to his ears out of a different spherefrom that he worked in, and suggested work for certain faculties whichslumbered 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 stayhere and live this mean moiling life, when a glorious existence ispossible for you? Those same stars twinkle over other fields thanthese.--But how to come out of this condition and actually migratethither? 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 himselfwith ever increasing respect.Brute NeighborsSometimes I had a companion in my fishing, who came through the villageto my house from the other side of the town, and the catching of thedinner 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 muchas a locust over the sweet-fern these three hours. The pigeons are allasleep upon their roosts--no flutter from them. Was that a farmer's noonhorn which sounded from beyond the woods just now? The hands are comingin to boiled salt beef and cider and Indian bread. Why will men worrythemselves so? He that does not eat need not work. I wonder how muchthey have reaped. Who would live there where a body can never thinkfor the barking of Bose? And oh, the housekeeping! to keep bright thedevil's door-knobs, and scour his tubs this bright day! Better notkeep a house. Say, some hollow tree; and then for morning calls anddinner-parties! Only a woodpecker tapping. Oh, they swarm; the sun istoo warm there; they are born too far into life for me. I have waterfrom the spring, and a loaf of brown bread on the shelf.--Hark! I hear arustling of the leaves. Is it some ill-fed village hound yielding tothe instinct of the chase? or the lost pig which is said to be in thesewoods, whose tracks I saw after the rain? It comes on apace; my sumachsand sweetbriers tremble.--Eh, Mr. Poet, is it you? How do you like theworld to-day?_Poet._ See those clouds; how they hang! That's the greatest thing I haveseen to-day. There's nothing like it in old paintings, nothing like itin foreign lands--unless when we were off the coast of Spain. That's atrue Mediterranean sky. I thought, as I have my living to get, and havenot eaten to-day, that I might go a-fishing. That's the true industryfor 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 gowith you gladly soon, but I am just concluding a serious meditation. Ithink 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 wasnever fattened with manure; the race is nearly extinct. The sport ofdigging the bait is nearly equal to that of catching the fish, whenone's appetite is not too keen; and this you may have all to yourselftoday. I would advise you to set in the spade down yonder among theground-nuts, where you see the johnswort waving. I think that I maywarrant you one worm to every three sods you turn up, if you look wellin among the roots of the grass, as if you were weeding. Or, if youchoose to go farther, it will not be unwise, for I have found theincrease 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 thisframe of mind; the world lay about at this angle. Shall I go to heavenor a-fishing? If I should soon bring this meditation to an end, wouldanother so sweet occasion be likely to offer? I was as near beingresolved into the essence of things as ever I was in my life. I fearmy thoughts will not come back to me. If it would do any good, I wouldwhistle for them. When they make us an offer, is it wise to say, We willthink of it? My thoughts have left no track, and I cannot find the pathagain. What was it that I was thinking of? It was a very hazy day. Iwill just try these three sentences of Confut-see; they may fetch thatstate about again. I know not whether it was the dumps or a buddingecstasy. Mem. There never is but one opportunity of a kind._Poet._ How now, Hermit, is it too soon? I have got just thirteen wholeones, beside several which are imperfect or undersized; but they willdo for the smaller fry; they do not cover up the hook so much. Thosevillage worms are quite too large; a shiner may make a meal off onewithout finding the skewer._Hermit._ Well, then, let's be off. Shall we to the Concord? There's goodsport there if the water be not too high. * * * * *Why do precisely these objects which we behold make a world? Why hasman just these species of animals for his neighbors; as if nothing buta mouse could have filled this crevice? I suspect that Pilpay & Co. haveput animals to their best use, for they are all beasts of burden, in asense, made to carry some portion of our thoughts.The mice which haunted my house were not the common ones, which are saidto have been introduced into the country, but a wild native kind notfound in the village. I sent one to a distinguished naturalist, andit interested him much. When I was building, one of these had its nestunderneath the house, and before I had laid the second floor, and sweptout the shavings, would come out regularly at lunch time and pick up thecrumbs at my feet. It probably had never seen a man before; and it soonbecame 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 asquirrel, which it resembled in its motions. At length, as I leanedwith my elbow on the bench one day, it ran up my clothes, and along mysleeve, and round and round the paper which held my dinner, while I keptthe latter close, and dodged and played at bopeep with it; and when atlast I held still a piece of cheese between my thumb and finger, it cameand nibbled it, sitting in my hand, and afterward cleaned its face andpaws, like a fly, and walked away.A phœbe soon built in my shed, and a robin for protection in a pinewhich 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 inthe rear to the front of my house, clucking and calling to them like ahen, and in all her behavior proving herself the hen of the woods. Theyoung suddenly disperse on your approach, at a signal from the mother,as if a whirlwind had swept them away, and they so exactly resemble thedried leaves and twigs that many a traveler has placed his foot in themidst 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 attracthis attention, without suspecting their neighborhood. The parent willsometimes roll and spin round before you in such a dishabille, that youcannot, for a few moments, detect what kind of creature it is. The youngsquat still and flat, often running their heads under a leaf, and mindonly their mother's directions given from a distance, nor will yourapproach make them run again and betray themselves. You may even treadon them, or have your eyes on them for a minute, without discoveringthem. I have held them in my open hand at such a time, and still theironly care, obedient to their mother and their instinct, was to squatthere without fear or trembling. So perfect is this instinct, that once,when I had laid them on the leaves again, and one accidentally fell onits side, it was found with the rest in exactly the same position tenminutes afterward. They are not callow like the young of most birds,but more perfectly developed and precocious even than chickens. Theremarkably adult yet innocent expression of their open and sereneeyes is very memorable. All intelligence seems reflected in them. Theysuggest not merely the purity of infancy, but a wisdom clarified byexperience. Such an eye was not born when the bird was, but is coevalwith the sky it reflects. The woods do not yield another such a gem. Thetraveller does not often look into such a limpid well. The ignorant orreckless sportsman often shoots the parent at such a time, and leavesthese innocents to fall a prey to some prowling beast or bird, orgradually mingle with the decaying leaves which they so much resemble.It is said that when hatched by a hen they will directly disperse onsome alarm, and so are lost, for they never hear the mother's call whichgathers them again. These were my hens and chickens.It is remarkable how many creatures live wild and free though secret inthe 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 withoutany human being getting a glimpse of him. I formerly saw the raccoon inthe woods behind where my house is built, and probably still heard theirwhinnering at night. Commonly I rested an hour or two in the shade atnoon, after planting, and ate my lunch, and read a little by a springwhich was the source of a swamp and of a brook, oozing from underBrister's Hill, half a mile from my field. The approach to this wasthrough a succession of descending grassy hollows, full of young pitchpines, into a larger wood about the swamp. There, in a very secluded andshaded spot, under a spreading white pine, there was yet a clean, firmsward to sit on. I had dug out the spring and made a well of clear graywater, where I could dip up a pailful without roiling it, and thither Iwent for this purpose almost every day in midsummer, when the pond waswarmest. Thither, too, the woodco*ck led her brood, to probe the mud forworms, flying but a foot above them down the bank, while they ran ina troop beneath; but at last, spying me, she would leave her young andcircle round and round me, nearer and nearer till within four or fivefeet, pretending broken wings and legs, to attract my attention, and getoff her young, who would already have taken up their march, with faint,wiry peep, single file through the swamp, as she directed. Or I heardthe peep of the young when I could not see the parent bird. There toothe turtle doves sat over the spring, or fluttered from bough to boughof the soft white pines over my head; or the red squirrel, coursing downthe nearest bough, was particularly familiar and inquisitive. You onlyneed sit still long enough in some attractive spot in the woods that allits inhabitants may exhibit themselves to you by turns.I was witness to events of a less peaceful character. One day when Iwent out to my wood-pile, or rather my pile of stumps, I observed twolarge ants, the one red, the other much larger, nearly half an inchlong, and black, fiercely contending with one another. Having once gothold they never let go, but struggled and wrestled and rolled on thechips incessantly. Looking farther, I was surprised to find that thechips were covered with such combatants, that it was not a _duellum_, buta _bellum_, a war between two races of ants, the red always pitted againstthe black, and frequently two red ones to one black. The legions ofthese Myrmidons covered all the hills and vales in my wood-yard, and theground was already strewn with the dead and dying, both red andblack. It was the only battle which I have ever witnessed, the onlybattle-field I ever trod while the battle was raging; internecine war;the red republicans on the one hand, and the black imperialists on theother. On every side they were engaged in deadly combat, yet without anynoise that I could hear, and human soldiers never fought so resolutely.I watched a couple that were fast locked in each other's embraces, ina little sunny valley amid the chips, now at noonday prepared to fighttill the sun went down, or life went out. The smaller red champion hadfastened himself like a vice to his adversary's front, and through allthe tumblings on that field never for an instant ceased to gnaw at oneof his feelers near the root, having already caused the other to go bythe 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 ofhis members. They fought with more pertinacity than bulldogs. Neithermanifested the least disposition to retreat. It was evident that theirbattle-cry was "Conquer or die." In the meanwhile there came alonga single red ant on the hillside of this valley, evidently full ofexcitement, who either had despatched his foe, or had not yet taken partin 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. Orperchance he was some Achilles, who had nourished his wrath apart, andhad now come to avenge or rescue his Patroclus. He saw this unequalcombat from afar--for the blacks were nearly twice the size of thered--he drew near with rapid pace till he stood on his guard within halfan inch of the combatants; then, watching his opportunity, he sprangupon the black warrior, and commenced his operations near the root ofhis right fore leg, leaving the foe to select among his own members; andso there were three united for life, as if a new kind of attraction hadbeen invented which put all other locks and cements to shame. I shouldnot have wondered by this time to find that they had their respectivemusical bands stationed on some eminent chip, and playing their nationalairs the while, to excite the slow and cheer the dying combatants. I wasmyself excited somewhat even as if they had been men. The more you thinkof it, the less the difference. And certainly there is not the fightrecorded in Concord history, at least, if in the history of America,that will bear a moment's comparison with this, whether for the numbersengaged in it, or for the patriotism and heroism displayed. For numbersand for carnage it was an Austerlitz or Dresden. Concord Fight! Twokilled on the patriots' side, and Luther Blanchard wounded! Why hereevery ant was a Buttrick--"Fire! for God's sake fire!"--and thousandsshared 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 asour ancestors, and not to avoid a three-penny tax on their tea; and theresults of this battle will be as important and memorable to those whomit concerns as those of the battle of Bunker Hill, at least.I took up the chip on which the three I have particularly described werestruggling, carried it into my house, and placed it under a tumbler onmy window-sill, in order to see the issue. Holding a microscope to thefirst-mentioned red ant, I saw that, though he was assiduously gnawingat the near fore leg of his enemy, having severed his remaining feeler,his own breast was all torn away, exposing what vitals he had thereto the jaws of the black warrior, whose breastplate was apparently toothick for him to pierce; and the dark carbuncles of the sufferer's eyesshone with ferocity such as war only could excite. They struggled halfan hour longer under the tumbler, and when I looked again the blacksoldier had severed the heads of his foes from their bodies, and thestill living heads were hanging on either side of him like ghastlytrophies at his saddle-bow, still apparently as firmly fastened as ever,and he was endeavoring with feeble struggles, being without feelers andwith 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, heaccomplished. I raised the glass, and he went off over the window-sillin that crippled state. Whether he finally survived that combat, andspent the remainder of his days in some Hotel des Invalides, I donot know; but I thought that his industry would not be worth muchthereafter. I never learned which party was victorious, nor the cause ofthe war; but I felt for the rest of that day as if I had had my feelingsexcited and harrowed by witnessing the struggle, the ferocity andcarnage, of a human battle before my door.Kirby and Spence tell us that the battles of ants have long beencelebrated and the date of them recorded, though they say that Huberis the only modern author who appears to have witnessed them. "ÆneasSylvius," say they, "after giving a very circ*mstantial account of onecontested with great obstinacy by a great and small species on the trunkof a pear tree," adds that "this action was fought in the pontificateof Eugenius the Fourth, in the presence of Nicholas Pistoriensis, aneminent lawyer, who related the whole history of the battle with thegreatest fidelity." A similar engagement between great and small ants isrecorded by Olaus Magnus, in which the small ones, being victorious, aresaid to have buried the bodies of their own soldiers, but left those oftheir giant enemies a prey to the birds. This event happened previousto the expulsion of the tyrant Christiern the Second from Sweden. Thebattle which I witnessed took place in the Presidency of Polk, fiveyears before the passage of Webster's Fugitive-Slave Bill.Many a village Bose, fit only to course a mud-turtle in a victuallingcellar, sported his heavy quarters in the woods, without the knowledgeof his master, and ineffectually smelled at old fox burrows andwoodchucks' holes; led perchance by some slight cur which nimblythreaded the wood, and might still inspire a natural terror in itsdenizens;--now far behind his guide, barking like a canine bull towardsome small squirrel which had treed itself for scrutiny, then, canteringoff, bending the bushes with his weight, imagining that he is on thetrack of some stray member of the jerbilla family. Once I was surprisedto see a cat walking along the stony shore of the pond, for they rarelywander so far from home. The surprise was mutual. Nevertheless the mostdomestic cat, which has lain on a rug all her days, appears quite athome in the woods, and, by her sly and stealthy behavior, proves herselfmore native there than the regular inhabitants. Once, when berrying,I met with a cat with young kittens in the woods, quite wild, and theyall, like their mother, had their backs up and were fiercely spitting atme. 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 gonea-hunting in the woods, as was her wont (I am not sure whether it wasa male or female, and so use the more common pronoun), but her mistresstold me that she came into the neighborhood a little more than a yearbefore, in April, and was finally taken into their house; that she wasof a dark brownish-gray color, with a white spot on her throat, andwhite feet, and had a large bushy tail like a fox; that in the winterthe fur grew thick and flatted out along her sides, forming stripes tenor twelve inches long by two and a half wide, and under her chin likea muff, the upper side loose, the under matted like felt, and in thespring 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 hybridshave been produced by the union of the marten and domestic cat. Thiswould 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 andbathe in the pond, making the woods ring with his wild laughter before Ihad risen. At rumor of his arrival all the Mill-dam sportsmen are on thealert, in gigs and on foot, two by two and three by three, with patentrifles and conical balls and spy-glasses. They come rustling throughthe woods like autumn leaves, at least ten men to one loon. Some stationthemselves on this side of the pond, some on that, for the poor birdcannot be omnipresent; if he dive here he must come up there. Butnow the kind October wind rises, rustling the leaves and rippling thesurface of the water, so that no loon can be heard or seen, though hisfoes sweep the pond with spy-glasses, and make the woods resound withtheir discharges. The waves generously rise and dash angrily, takingsides with all water-fowl, and our sportsmen must beat a retreat to townand shop and unfinished jobs. But they were too often successful. WhenI went to get a pail of water early in the morning I frequently saw thisstately bird sailing out of my cove within a few rods. If I endeavoredto overtake him in a boat, in order to see how he would manoeuvre, hewould 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 matchfor 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 milkweeddown, 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 andhe 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 rodsapart when he came to the surface this time, for I had helped to widenthe interval; and again he laughed long and loud, and with more reasonthan before. He manoeuvred so cunningly that I could not get within halfa dozen rods of him. Each time, when he came to the surface, turning hishead this way and that, he cooly surveyed the water and the land, andapparently chose his course so that he might come up where there was thewidest expanse of water and at the greatest distance from the boat. Itwas surprising how quickly he made up his mind and put his resolve intoexecution. He led me at once to the widest part of the pond, and couldnot 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. Suddenlyyour adversary's checker disappears beneath the board, and the problemis to place yours nearest to where his will appear again. Sometimes hewould come up unexpectedly on the opposite side of me, havingapparently passed directly under the boat. So long-winded was he and sounweariable, that when he had swum farthest he would immediately plungeagain, nevertheless; and then no wit could divine where in the deeppond, beneath the smooth surface, he might be speeding his way like afish, for he had time and ability to visit the bottom of the pond inits deepest part. It is said that loons have been caught in the New Yorklakes eighty feet beneath the surface, with hooks set for trout--thoughWalden is deeper than that. How surprised must the fishes be to seethis ungainly visitor from another sphere speeding his way amid theirschools! Yet he appeared to know his course as surely under water as onthe surface, and swam much faster there. Once or twice I saw a ripplewhere 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 reston my oars and wait his reappearing as to endeavor to calculate where hewould rise; for again and again, when I was straining my eyes over thesurface one way, I would suddenly be startled by his unearthly laughbehind me. But why, after displaying so much cunning, did he invariablybetray himself the moment he came up by that loud laugh? Did not hiswhite breast enough betray him? He was indeed a silly loon, I thought. Icould commonly hear the splash of the water when he came up, and so alsodetected him. But after an hour he seemed as fresh as ever, dived aswillingly, and swam yet farther than at first. It was surprising to seehow serenely he sailed off with unruffled breast when he came to thesurface, doing all the work with his webbed feet beneath. His usual notewas this demoniac laughter, yet somewhat like that of a water-fowl; butoccasionally, when he had balked me most successfully and come up a longway off, he uttered a long-drawn unearthly howl, probably more like thatof a wolf than any bird; as when a beast puts his muzzle to the groundand deliberately howls. This was his looning--perhaps the wildest soundthat is ever heard here, making the woods ring far and wide. I concludedthat he laughed in derision of my efforts, confident of his ownresources. Though the sky was by this time overcast, the pond was sosmooth that I could see where he broke the surface when I did not hearhim. His white breast, the stillness of the air, and the smoothness ofthe 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 ofloons to aid him, and immediately there came a wind from the east andrippled the surface, and filled the whole air with misty rain, and I wasimpressed as if it were the prayer of the loon answered, and his god wasangry with me; and so I left him disappearing far away on the tumultuoussurface.For hours, in fall days, I watched the ducks cunningly tack and veer andhold the middle of the pond, far from the sportsman; tricks which theywill have less need to practise in Louisiana bayous. When compelled torise they would sometimes circle round and round and over the pond at aconsiderable height, from which they could easily see to other pondsand the river, like black motes in the sky; and, when I thought they hadgone off thither long since, they would settle down by a slanting flightof a quarter of a mile on to a distant part which was left free; butwhat beside safety they got by sailing in the middle of Walden I do notknow, unless they love its water for the same reason that I do.House-WarmingIn October I went a-graping to the river meadows, and loaded myself withclusters more precious for their beauty and fragrance than for food.There, too, I admired, though I did not gather, the cranberries, smallwaxen gems, pendants of the meadow grass, pearly and red, which thefarmer plucks with an ugly rake, leaving the smooth meadow in a snarl,heedlessly measuring them by the bushel and the dollar only, and sellsthe 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 thetongues of bison out of the prairie grass, regardless of the torn anddrooping plant. The barberry's brilliant fruit was likewise food for myeyes merely; but I collected a small store of wild apples for coddling,which the proprietor and travellers had overlooked. When chestnuts wereripe I laid up half a bushel for winter. It was very exciting at thatseason to roam the then boundless chestnut woods of Lincoln--they nowsleep 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 forthe frost, amid the rustling of leaves and the loud reproofs of the redsquirrels 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 myhouse, and one large tree, which almost overshadowed it, was, whenin flower, a bouquet which scented the whole neighborhood, but thesquirrels and the jays got most of its fruit; the last coming in flocksearly in the morning and picking the nuts out of the burs before theyfell, I relinquished these trees to them and visited the more distantwoods composed wholly of chestnut. These nuts, as far as they went, werea good substitute for bread. Many other substitutes might, perhaps, befound. Digging one day for fishworms, I discovered the ground-nut(_Apios tuberosa_) on its string, the potato of the aborigines, a sort offabulous fruit, which I had begun to doubt if I had ever dug and eatenin childhood, as I had told, and had not dreamed it. I had often sinceseen its crumpled red velvety blossom supported by the stems of otherplants without knowing it to be the same. Cultivation has well-nighexterminated it. It has a sweetish taste, much like that of afrost-bitten potato, and I found it better boiled than roasted. Thistuber seemed like a faint promise of Nature to rear her own childrenand feed them simply here at some future period. In these days of fattedcattle and waving grain-fields this humble root, which was once the_totem_ of an Indian tribe, is quite forgotten, or known only by itsflowering vine; but let wild Nature reign here once more, and the tenderand luxurious English grains will probably disappear before a myriad offoes, and without the care of man the crow may carry back even thelast seed of corn to the great cornfield of the Indian's God in thesouthwest, whence he is said to have brought it; but the now almostexterminated ground-nut will perhaps revive and flourish in spite offrosts and wildness, prove itself indigenous, and resume its ancientimportance and dignity as the diet of the hunter tribe. Some IndianCeres or Minerva must have been the inventor and bestower of it; andwhen the reign of poetry commences here, its leaves and string of nutsmay be represented on our works of art.Already, by the first of September, I had seen two or three small maplesturned scarlet across the pond, beneath where the white stems of threeaspens diverged, at the point of a promontory, next the water. Ah, manya tale their color told! And gradually from week to week the characterof each tree came out, and it admired itself reflected in the smoothmirror of the lake. Each morning the manager of this gallery substitutedsome new picture, distinguished by more brilliant or harmoniouscoloring, for the old upon the walls.The wasps came by thousands to my lodge in October, as to winterquarters, and settled on my windows within and on the walls overhead,sometimes deterring visitors from entering. Each morning, when they werenumbed with cold, I swept some of them out, but I did not trouble myselfmuch to get rid of them; I even felt complimented by their regarding myhouse as a desirable shelter. They never molested me seriously, thoughthey bedded with me; and they gradually disappeared, into what crevicesI 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 thefireside of the pond; it is so much pleasanter and wholesomer to bewarmed by the sun while you can be, than by an artificial fire. I thuswarmed myself by the still glowing embers which the summer, like adeparted hunter, had left. * * * * *When I came to build my chimney I studied masonry. My bricks, beingsecond-hand ones, required to be cleaned with a trowel, so that Ilearned more than usual of the qualities of bricks and trowels. Themortar on them was fifty years old, and was said to be still growingharder; but this is one of those sayings which men love to repeatwhether they are true or not. Such sayings themselves grow harder andadhere more firmly with age, and it would take many blows with a trowelto clean an old wiseacre of them. Many of the villages of Mesopotamiaare built of second-hand bricks of a very good quality, obtained fromthe ruins of Babylon, and the cement on them is older and probablyharder still. However that may be, I was struck by the peculiartoughness of the steel which bore so many violent blows without beingworn out. As my bricks had been in a chimney before, though I did notread the name of Nebuchadnezzar on them, I picked out as many fireplacebricks as I could find, to save work and waste, and I filled the spacesbetween the bricks about the fireplace with stones from the pond shore,and also made my mortar with the white sand from the same place. Ilingered most about the fireplace, as the most vital part of the house.Indeed, I worked so deliberately, that though I commenced at the groundin the morning, a course of bricks raised a few inches above the floorserved for my pillow at night; yet I did not get a stiff neck for itthat I remember; my stiff neck is of older date. I took a poet to boardfor a fortnight about those times, which caused me to be put to it forroom. He brought his own knife, though I had two, and we used to scourthem by thrusting them into the earth. He shared with me the laborsof cooking. I was pleased to see my work rising so square and solid bydegrees, and reflected, that, if it proceeded slowly, it was calculatedto endure a long time. The chimney is to some extent an independentstructure, standing on the ground, and rising through the house to theheavens; even after the house is burned it still stands sometimes, andits importance and independence are apparent. This was toward the end ofsummer. It was now November. * * * * *The north wind had already begun to cool the pond, though it took manyweeks of steady blowing to accomplish it, it is so deep. When I began tohave a fire at evening, before I plastered my house, the chimney carriedsmoke particularly well, because of the numerous chinks between theboards. Yet I passed some cheerful evenings in that cool and airyapartment, surrounded by the rough brown boards full of knots, andrafters with the bark on high overhead. My house never pleased my eye somuch after it was plastered, though I was obliged to confess that itwas more comfortable. Should not every apartment in which man dwells belofty enough to create some obscurity overhead, where flickering shadowsmay play at evening about the rafters? These forms are more agreeableto the fancy and imagination than fresco paintings or other the mostexpensive 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 coupleof old fire-dogs to keep the wood from the hearth, and it did me goodto see the soot form on the back of the chimney which I had built, andI poked the fire with more right and more satisfaction than usual. Mydwelling was small, and I could hardly entertain an echo in it; but itseemed larger for being a single apartment and remote from neighbors.All the attractions of a house were concentrated in one room; it waskitchen, chamber, parlor, and keeping-room; and whatever satisfactionparent or child, master or servant, derive from living in a house, Ienjoyed it all. Cato says, the master of a family (_patremfamilias_) musthave in his rustic villa "cellam oleariam, vinariam, dolia multa, utilubeat caritatem expectare, et rei, et virtuti, et gloriae erit," thatis, "an oil and wine cellar, many casks, so that it may be pleasant toexpect 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 withthe 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 agolden 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 andpurlins supporting a sort of lower heaven over one's head--useful tokeep off rain and snow, where the king and queen posts stand out toreceive your homage, when you have done reverence to the prostrateSaturn 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; wheresome may live in the fireplace, some in the recess of a window, and someon settles, some at one end of the hall, some at another, and some alofton rafters with the spiders, if they choose; a house which you have gotinto 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 reachin a tempestuous night, containing all the essentials of a house, andnothing for house-keeping; where you can see all the treasures of thehouse at one view, and everything hangs upon its peg, that a man shoulduse; at once kitchen, pantry, parlor, chamber, storehouse, and garret;where you can see so necessary a thing, as a barrel or a ladder, soconvenient a thing as a cupboard, and hear the pot boil, and pay yourrespects to the fire that cooks your dinner, and the oven that bakesyour bread, and the necessary furniture and utensils are the chiefornaments; where the washing is not put out, nor the fire, nor themistress, and perhaps you are sometimes requested to move from off thetrap-door, when the cook would descend into the cellar, and so learnwhether the ground is solid or hollow beneath you without stamping. Ahouse whose inside is as open and manifest as a bird's nest, and youcannot go in at the front door and out at the back without seeing someof its inhabitants; where to be a guest is to be presented with thefreedom of the house, and not to be carefully excluded from seveneighths of it, shut up in a particular cell, and told to make yourselfat home there--in solitary confinement. Nowadays the host does notadmit you to _his_ hearth, but has got the mason to build one for yourselfsomewhere in his alley, and hospitality is the art of _keeping_ you at thegreatest distance. There is as much secrecy about the cooking as if hehad a design to poison you. I am aware that I have been on many a man'spremises, and might have been legally ordered off, but I am not awarethat I have been in many men's houses. I might visit in my old clothes aking and queen who lived simply in such a house as I have described, ifI were going their way; but backing out of a modern palace will be allthat 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 allits nerve and degenerate into _palaver_ wholly, our lives pass atsuch remoteness from its symbols, and its metaphors and tropes arenecessarily so far fetched, through slides and dumb-waiters, as it were;in other words, the parlor is so far from the kitchen and workshop. Thedinner even is only the parable of a dinner, commonly. As if only thesavage dwelt near enough to Nature and Truth to borrow a trope fromthem. How can the scholar, who dwells away in the North West Territoryor 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 andeat a hasty-pudding with me; but when they saw that crisis approachingthey beat a hasty retreat rather, as if it would shake the house to itsfoundations. Nevertheless, it stood through a great many hasty-puddings.I did not plaster till it was freezing weather. I brought over somewhiter and cleaner sand for this purpose from the opposite shore of thepond in a boat, a sort of conveyance which would have tempted me to gomuch farther if necessary. My house had in the meanwhile been shingleddown to the ground on every side. In lathing I was pleased to be ableto send home each nail with a single blow of the hammer, and it was myambition to transfer the plaster from the board to the wall neatly andrapidly. I remembered the story of a conceited fellow, who, in fineclothes, was wont to lounge about the village once, giving advice toworkmen. Venturing one day to substitute deeds for words, he turnedup his cuffs, seized a plasterer's board, and having loaded his trowelwithout mishap, with a complacent look toward the lathing overhead,made a bold gesture thitherward; and straightway, to his completediscomfiture, received the whole contents in his ruffled bosom. Iadmired anew the economy and convenience of plastering, which soeffectually shuts out the cold and takes a handsome finish, and Ilearned the various casualties to which the plasterer is liable. I wassurprised to see how thirsty the bricks were which drank up all themoisture in my plaster before I had smoothed it, and how many pailfulsof water it takes to christen a new hearth. I had the previous wintermade a small quantity of lime by burning the shells of the _Uniofluviatilis_, which our river affords, for the sake of the experiment;so that I knew where my materials came from. I might have got goodlimestone within a mile or two and burned it myself, if I had cared todo so. * * * * *The pond had in the meanwhile skimmed over in the shadiest andshallowest 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 forexamining the bottom where it is shallow; for you can lie at your lengthon ice only an inch thick, like a skater insect on the surface of thewater, and study the bottom at your leisure, only two or three inchesdistant, like a picture behind a glass, and the water is necessarilyalways smooth then. There are many furrows in the sand where somecreature has travelled about and doubled on its tracks; and, for wrecks,it is strewn with the cases of caddis-worms made of minute grains ofwhite quartz. Perhaps these have creased it, for you find some of theircases 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 mustimprove the earliest opportunity to study it. If you examine it closelythe morning after it freezes, you find that the greater part of thebubbles, which at first appeared to be within it, are against its undersurface, and that more are continually rising from the bottom; while theice is as yet comparatively solid and dark, that is, you see the waterthrough it. These bubbles are from an eightieth to an eighth of an inchin diameter, very clear and beautiful, and you see your face reflectedin them through the ice. There may be thirty or forty of them toa square inch. There are also already within the ice narrow oblongperpendicular bubbles about half an inch long, sharp cones with the apexupward; or oftener, if the ice is quite fresh, minute spherical bubblesone directly above another, like a string of beads. But these within theice are not so numerous nor obvious as those beneath. I sometimes usedto cast on stones to try the strength of the ice, and those whichbroke through carried in air with them, which formed very large andconspicuous white bubbles beneath. One day when I came to the same placeforty-eight hours afterward, I found that those large bubbles werestill perfect, though an inch more of ice had formed, as I could seedistinctly by the seam in the edge of a cake. But as the last twodays had been very warm, like an Indian summer, the ice was not nowtransparent, showing the dark green color of the water, and the bottom,but opaque and whitish or gray, and though twice as thick was hardlystronger than before, for the air bubbles had greatly expanded underthis heat and run together, and lost their regularity; they were nolonger one directly over another, but often like silvery coins pouredfrom a bag, one overlapping another, or in thin flakes, as if occupyingslight cleavages. The beauty of the ice was gone, and it was too late tostudy the bottom. Being curious to know what position my great bubblesoccupied with regard to the new ice, I broke out a cake containing amiddling sized one, and turned it bottom upward. The new ice had formedaround and under the bubble, so that it was included between the twoices. It was wholly in the lower ice, but close against the upper, andwas flattish, or perhaps slightly lenticular, with a rounded edge, aquarter of an inch deep by four inches in diameter; and I was surprisedto find that directly under the bubble the ice was melted with greatregularity in the form of a saucer reversed, to the height of fiveeighths of an inch in the middle, leaving a thin partition there betweenthe water and the bubble, hardly an eighth of an inch thick; and in manyplaces the small bubbles in this partition had burst out downward, andprobably there was no ice at all under the largest bubbles, which were afoot in diameter. I inferred that the infinite number of minute bubbleswhich I had first seen against the under surface of the ice were nowfrozen in likewise, and that each, in its degree, had operated likea burning-glass on the ice beneath to melt and rot it. These are thelittle air-guns which contribute to make the ice crack and whoop. * * * * *At length the winter set in good earnest, just as I had finishedplastering, and the wind began to howl around the house as if it hadnot had permission to do so till then. Night after night the geese camelumbering in the dark with a clangor and a whistling of wings, evenafter the ground was covered with snow, some to alight in Walden, andsome flying low over the woods toward Fair Haven, bound for Mexico.Several times, when returning from the village at ten or eleven o'clockat night, I heard the tread of a flock of geese, or else ducks, on thedry leaves in the woods by a pond-hole behind my dwelling, where theyhad come up to feed, and the faint honk or quack of their leader as theyhurried off. In 1845 Walden froze entirely over for the first time onthe night of the 22d of December, Flint's and other shallower ponds andthe 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 5thof January; in '53, the 31st of December. The snow had already coveredthe ground since the 25th of November, and surrounded me suddenlywith the scenery of winter. I withdrew yet farther into my shell, andendeavored to keep a bright fire both within my house and within mybreast. My employment out of doors now was to collect the dead wood inthe forest, bringing it in my hands or on my shoulders, or sometimestrailing a dead pine tree under each arm to my shed. An old forest fencewhich had seen its best days was a great haul for me. I sacrificed itto Vulcan, for it was past serving the god Terminus. How much moreinteresting an event is that man's supper who has just been forth in thesnow to hunt, nay, you might say, steal, the fuel to cook it with! Hisbread and meat are sweet. There are enough fa*gots and waste wood of allkinds in the forests of most of our towns to support many fires, butwhich at present warm none, and, some think, hinder the growth of theyoung wood. There was also the driftwood of the pond. In the course ofthe 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 hauledup partly on the shore. After soaking two years and then lying high sixmonths it was perfectly sound, though waterlogged past drying. I amusedmyself one winter day with sliding this piecemeal across the pond,nearly half a mile, skating behind with one end of a log fifteen feetlong on my shoulder, and the other on the ice; or I tied several logstogether with a birch withe, and then, with a longer birch or alderwhich had a hook at the end, dragged them across. Though completelywaterlogged and almost as heavy as lead, they not only burned long, butmade a very hot fire; nay, I thought that they burned better for thesoaking, as if the pitch, being confined by the water, burned longer, asin a lamp.Gilpin, in his account of the forest borderers of England, says that"the encroachments of trespassers, and the houses and fences thus raisedon the borders of the forest," were "considered as great nuisancesby 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 vertmore than the hunters or woodchoppers, and as much as though I had beenthe Lord Warden himself; and if any part was burned, though I burned itmyself by accident, I grieved with a grief that lasted longer and wasmore inconsolable than that of the proprietors; nay, I grieved when itwas cut down by the proprietors themselves. I would that our farmerswhen they cut down a forest felt some of that awe which the old Romansdid 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 somegod. The Roman made an expiatory offering, and prayed, Whatever god orgoddess thou art to whom this grove is sacred, be propitious to me, myfamily, and children, etc.It is remarkable what a value is still put upon wood even in this ageand in this new country, a value more permanent and universal than thatof gold. After all our discoveries and inventions no man will go by apile of wood. It is as precious to us as it was to our Saxon and Normanancestors. 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 forfuel in New York and Philadelphia "nearly equals, and sometimes exceeds,that of the best wood in Paris, though this immense capital annuallyrequires more than three hundred thousand cords, and is surrounded tothe distance of three hundred miles by cultivated plains." In this townthe price of wood rises almost steadily, and the only question is, howmuch higher it is to be this year than it was the last. Mechanics andtradesmen who come in person to the forest on no other errand, are sureto attend the wood auction, and even pay a high price for the privilegeof gleaning after the woodchopper. It is now many years that men haveresorted to the forest for fuel and the materials of the arts: the NewEnglander and the New Hollander, the Parisian and the Celt, the farmerand Robin Hood, Goody Blake and Harry Gill; in most parts of the worldthe prince and the peasant, the scholar and the savage, equally requirestill 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 tohave mine before my window, and the more chips the better to remind meof my pleasing work. I had an old axe which nobody claimed, with whichby spells in winter days, on the sunny side of the house, I played aboutthe stumps which I had got out of my bean-field. As my driver prophesiedwhen I was plowing, they warmed me twice--once while I was splittingthem, and again when they were on the fire, so that no fuel couldgive out more heat. As for the axe, I was advised to get the villageblacksmith to "jump" it; but I jumped him, and, putting a hickory helvefrom the woods into it, made it do. If it was dull, it was at least hungtrue.A few pieces of fat pine were a great treasure. It is interesting toremember how much of this food for fire is still concealed in the bowelsof the earth. In previous years I had often gone prospecting over somebare hillside, where a pitch pine wood had formerly stood, and got outthe fat pine roots. They are almost indestructible. Stumps thirty orforty years old, at least, will still be sound at the core, though thesapwood has all become vegetable mould, as appears by the scales ofthe thick bark forming a ring level with the earth four or five inchesdistant from the heart. With axe and shovel you explore this mine, andfollow the marrowy store, yellow as beef tallow, or as if you had struckon a vein of gold, deep into the earth. But commonly I kindled my firewith the dry leaves of the forest, which I had stored up in my shedbefore the snow came. Green hickory finely split makes the woodchopper'skindlings, when he has a camp in the woods. Once in a while I got alittle of this. When the villagers were lighting their fires beyond thehorizon, I too gave notice to the various wild inhabitants of Waldenvale, 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 mypurpose better than any other. I sometimes left a good fire when I wentto take a walk in a winter afternoon; and when I returned, three or fourhours afterward, it would be still alive and glowing. My house was notempty though I was gone. It was as if I had left a cheerful housekeeperbehind. It was I and Fire that lived there; and commonly my housekeeperproved trustworthy. One day, however, as I was splitting wood, I thoughtthat I would just look in at the window and see if the house was not onfire; it was the only time I remember to have been particularly anxiouson this score; so I looked and saw that a spark had caught my bed, andI went in and extinguished it when it had burned a place as big as myhand. But my house occupied so sunny and sheltered a position, andits roof was so low, that I could afford to let the fire go out in themiddle of almost any winter day.The moles nested in my cellar, nibbling every third potato, and makinga snug bed even there of some hair left after plastering and of brownpaper; for even the wildest animals love comfort and warmth as well asman, and they survive the winter only because they are so careful tosecure them. Some of my friends spoke as if I was coming to the woods onpurpose to freeze myself. The animal merely makes a bed, which he warmswith his body, in a sheltered place; but man, having discovered fire,boxes up some air in a spacious apartment, and warms that, instead ofrobbing himself, makes that his bed, in which he can move about divestedof more cumbrous clothing, maintain a kind of summer in the midst ofwinter, and by means of windows even admit the light, and with a lamplengthen out the day. Thus he goes a step or two beyond instinct, andsaves a little time for the fine arts. Though, when I had been exposedto 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 myfaculties and prolonged my life. But the most luxuriously housed haslittle to boast of in this respect, nor need we trouble ourselves tospeculate how the human race may be at last destroyed. It would beeasy to cut their threads any time with a little sharper blast from thenorth. We go on dating from Cold Fridays and Great Snows; but a littlecolder Friday, or greater snow would put a period to man's existence onthe globe.The next winter I used a small cooking-stove for economy, since Idid not own the forest; but it did not keep fire so well as the openfireplace. Cooking was then, for the most part, no longer a poetic, butmerely a chemic process. It will soon be forgotten, in these days ofstoves, that we used to roast potatoes in the ashes, after the Indianfashion. The stove not only took up room and scented the house, but itconcealed the fire, and I felt as if I had lost a companion. You canalways see a face in the fire. The laborer, looking into it at evening,purifies his thoughts of the dross and earthiness which they haveaccumulated during the day. But I could no longer sit and look intothe fire, and the pertinent words of a poet recurred to me with newforce.-- "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 VisitorsI weathered some merry snow-storms, and spent some cheerful winterevenings by my fireside, while the snow whirled wildly without, and eventhe hooting of the owl was hushed. For many weeks I met no one in mywalks but those who came occasionally to cut wood and sled it to thevillage. The elements, however, abetted me in making a path through thedeepest snow in the woods, for when I had once gone through the windblew the oak leaves into my tracks, where they lodged, and by absorbingthe rays of the sun melted the snow, and so not only made a my bedfor my feet, but in the night their dark line was my guide. For humansociety 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 housestands resounded with the laugh and gossip of inhabitants, and the woodswhich border it were notched and dotted here and there with their littlegardens and dwellings, though it was then much more shut in by theforest than now. In some places, within my own remembrance, the pineswould scrape both sides of a chaise at once, and women and children whowere compelled to go this way to Lincoln alone and on foot did it withfear, and often ran a good part of the distance. Though mainly but ahumble route to neighboring villages, or for the woodman's team, it onceamused the traveller more than now by its variety, and lingered longerin his memory. Where now firm open fields stretch from the village tothe woods, it then ran through a maple swamp on a foundation of logs,the remnants of which, doubtless, still underlie the present dustyhighway, from the Stratton, now the Alms-House Farm, to Brister's Hill.East of my bean-field, across the road, lived Cato Ingraham, slave ofDuncan Ingraham, Esquire, gentleman, of Concord village, who built hisslave 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, whichhe let grow up till he should be old and need them; but a younger andwhiter speculator got them at last. He too, however, occupies an equallynarrow house at present. Cato's half-obliterated cellar-hole stillremains, though known to few, being concealed from the traveller by afringe of pines. It is now filled with the smooth sumach (_Rhus glabra_),and one of the earliest species of goldenrod (_Solidago stricta_) growsthere 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 thetownsfolk, making the Walden Woods ring with her shrill singing, forshe had a loud and notable voice. At length, in the war of 1812, herdwelling was set on fire by English soldiers, prisoners on parole, whenshe 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 thesewoods remembers, that as he passed her house one noon he heard hermuttering to herself over her gurgling pot--"Ye are all bones, bones!" Ihave seen bricks amid the oak copse there.Down the road, on the right hand, on Brister's Hill, lived BristerFreeman, "a handy Negro," slave of Squire Cummings once--there wheregrow still the apple trees which Brister planted and tended; large oldtrees now, but their fruit still wild and ciderish to my taste. Not longsince I read his epitaph in the old Lincoln burying-ground, a little onone side, near the unmarked graves of some British grenadiers who fellin the retreat from Concord--where he is styled "Sippio Brister"--ScipioAfricanus he had some title to be called--"a man of color," as if hewere 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, yetpleasantly--large, round, and black, blacker than any of the children ofnight, 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, aremarks of some homestead of the Stratton family; whose orchard oncecovered all the slope of Brister's Hill, but was long since killed outby pitch pines, excepting a few stumps, whose old roots furnish stillthe wild stocks of many a thrifty village tree.Nearer yet to town, you come to Breed's location, on the other side ofthe way, just on the edge of the wood; ground famous for the pranks ofa demon not distinctly named in old mythology, who has acted a prominentand astounding part in our New England life, and deserves, as much asany mythological character, to have his biography written one day; whofirst comes in the guise of a friend or hired man, and then robs andmurders the whole family--New-England Rum. But history must not yettell the tragedies enacted here; let time intervene in some measure toassuage and lend an azure tint to them. Here the most indistinct anddubious tradition says that once a tavern stood; the well the same,which tempered the traveller's beverage and refreshed his steed. Herethen men saluted one another, and heard and told the news, and wenttheir ways again.Breed's hut was standing only a dozen years ago, though it had longbeen unoccupied. It was about the size of mine. It was set on fire bymischievous boys, one Election night, if I do not mistake. I lived onthe edge of the village then, and had just lost myself over Davenant's"Gondibert," that winter that I labored with a lethargy--which, by theway, I never knew whether to regard as a family complaint, havingan uncle who goes to sleep shaving himself, and is obliged to sproutpotatoes in a cellar Sundays, in order to keep awake and keep theSabbath, or as the consequence of my attempt to read Chalmers'collection of English poetry without skipping. It fairly overcame myNervii. I had just sunk my head on this when the bells rung fire, and inhot haste the engines rolled that way, led by a straggling troop ofmen 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 firesbefore--barn, shop, or dwelling-house, or all together. "It's Baker'sbarn," cried one. "It is the Codman place," affirmed another. And thenfresh sparks went up above the wood, as if the roof fell in, and we allshouted "Concord to the rescue!" Wagons shot past with furious speedand crushing loads, bearing, perchance, among the rest, the agent of theInsurance Company, who was bound to go however far; and ever and anonthe 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 thealarm. Thus we kept on like true idealists, rejecting the evidenceof our senses, until at a turn in the road we heard the crackling andactually 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 ourardor. At first we thought to throw a frog-pond on to it; but concludedto let it burn, it was so far gone and so worthless. So we stood roundour engine, jostled one another, expressed our sentiments throughspeaking-trumpets, or in lower tone referred to the great conflagrationswhich the world has witnessed, including Bascom's shop, and, betweenourselves, we thought that, were we there in season with our "tub," anda full frog-pond by, we could turn that threatened last and universalone into another flood. We finally retreated without doing anymischief--returned to sleep and "Gondibert." But as for "Gondibert,"I would except that passage in the preface about wit being the soul'spowder--"but most of mankind are strangers to wit, as Indians are topowder."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 nearin 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 inthis burning, lying on his stomach and looking over the cellar wall atthe still smouldering cinders beneath, muttering to himself, as is hiswont. He had been working far off in the river meadows all day, and hadimproved the first moments that he could call his own to visit the homeof his fathers and his youth. He gazed into the cellar from all sidesand points of view by turns, always lying down to it, as if there wassome treasure, which he remembered, concealed between the stones, wherethere was absolutely nothing but a heap of bricks and ashes. The housebeing gone, he looked at what there was left. He was soothed by thesympathy which my mere presence implied, and showed me, as well as thedarkness permitted, where the well was covered up; which, thank Heaven,could never be burned; and he groped long about the wall to find thewell-sweep which his father had cut and mounted, feeling for the ironhook or staple by which a burden had been fastened to the heavy end--allthat 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 byit hangs the history of a family.Once more, on the left, where are seen the well and lilac bushes by thewall, in the now open field, lived Nutting and Le Grosse. But to returntoward Lincoln.Farther in the woods than any of these, where the road approachesnearest to the pond, Wyman the potter squatted, and furnished histownsmen with earthenware, and left descendants to succeed him. Neitherwere they rich in worldly goods, holding the land by sufferance whilethey lived; and there often the sheriff came in vain to collect thetaxes, and "attached a chip," for form's sake, as I have read in hisaccounts, there being nothing else that he could lay his hands on. Oneday in midsummer, when I was hoeing, a man who was carrying a loadof pottery to market stopped his horse against my field and inquiredconcerning Wyman the younger. He had long ago bought a potter's wheelof him, and wished to know what had become of him. I had read of thepotter's clay and wheel in Scripture, but it had never occurred to methat the pots we use were not such as had come down unbroken from thosedays, or grown on trees like gourds somewhere, and I was pleased to hearthat so fictile an art was ever practiced in my neighborhood.The last inhabitant of these woods before me was an Irishman, HughQuoil (if I have spelt his name with coil enough), who occupied Wyman'stenement--Col. Quoil, he was called. Rumor said that he had been asoldier at Waterloo. If he had lived I should have made him fight hisbattles over again. His trade here was that of a ditcher. Napoleon wentto 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 wascapable of more civil speech than you could well attend to. He wore agreatcoat in midsummer, being affected with the trembling delirium, andhis face was the color of carmine. He died in the road at the foot ofBrister's Hill shortly after I came to the woods, so that I have notremembered him as a neighbor. Before his house was pulled down, when hiscomrades avoided it as "an unlucky castle," I visited it. There lay hisold clothes curled up by use, as if they were himself, upon his raisedplank bed. His pipe lay broken on the hearth, instead of a bowl brokenat 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 theadministrator could not catch, black as night and as silent, not evencroaking, awaiting Reynard, still went to roost in the next apartment.In the rear there was the dim outline of a garden, which had beenplanted but had never received its first hoeing, owing to those terribleshaking fits, though it was now harvest time. It was overrun with Romanwormwood and beggar-ticks, which last stuck to my clothes for all fruit.The skin of a woodchuck was freshly stretched upon the back of thehouse, a trophy of his last Waterloo; but no warm cap or mittens wouldhe want more.Now only a dent in the earth marks the site of these dwellings, withburied cellar stones, and strawberries, raspberries, thimble-berries,hazel-bushes, and sumachs growing in the sunny sward there; somepitch pine or gnarled oak occupies what was the chimney nook, and asweet-scented black birch, perhaps, waves where the door-stone was.Sometimes the well dent is visible, where once a spring oozed; now dryand tearless grass; or it was covered deep--not to be discovered tillsome late day--with a flat stone under the sod, when the last of therace departed. What a sorrowful act must that be--the covering up ofwells! coincident with the opening of wells of tears. These cellardents, like deserted fox burrows, old holes, are all that is left whereonce were the stir and bustle of human life, and "fate, free will,foreknowledge absolute," in some form and dialect or other were by turnsdiscussed. But all I can learn of their conclusions amounts to justthis, that "Cato and Brister pulled wool"; which is about as edifying asthe history of more famous schools of philosophy.Still grows the vivacious lilac a generation after the door and linteland the sill are gone, unfolding its sweet-scented flowers each spring,to be plucked by the musing traveller; planted and tended once bychildren's hands, in front-yard plots--now standing by wallsides inretired pastures, and giving place to new-rising forests;--the last ofthat stirp, sole survivor of that family. Little did the dusky childrenthink that the puny slip with its two eyes only, which they stuck in theground in the shadow of the house and daily watered, would root itselfso, and outlive them, and house itself in the rear that shaded it, andgrown man's garden and orchard, and tell their story faintly to the lonewanderer a half-century after they had grown up and died--blossoming asfair, and smelling as sweet, as in that first spring. I mark its stilltender, civil, cheerful lilac colors.But this small village, germ of something more, why did it fail whileConcord keeps its ground? Were there no natural advantages--no waterprivileges, forsooth? Ay, the deep Walden Pond and cool Brister'sSpring--privilege to drink long and healthy draughts at these, allunimproved by these men but to dilute their glass. They were universallya 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 posterityhave inherited the land of their fathers? The sterile soil would atleast have been proof against a low-land degeneracy. Alas! how littledoes the memory of these human inhabitants enhance the beauty of thelandscape! 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, whosematerials are ruins, whose gardens cemeteries. The soil is blanched andaccursed there, and before that becomes necessary the earth itself willbe destroyed. With such reminiscences I repeopled the woods and lulledmyself asleep. * * * * *At this season I seldom had a visitor. When the snow lay deepest nowanderer ventured near my house for a week or fortnight at a time, butthere I lived as snug as a meadow mouse, or as cattle and poultry whichare said to have survived for a long time buried in drifts, even withoutfood; or like that early settler's family in the town of Sutton, in thisState, whose cottage was completely covered by the great snow of 1717when he was absent, and an Indian found it only by the hole which thechimney's breath made in the drift, and so relieved the family. Butno friendly Indian concerned himself about me; nor needed he, for themaster of the house was at home. The Great Snow! How cheerful it is tohear of! When the farmers could not get to the woods and swamps withtheir teams, and were obliged to cut down the shade trees before theirhouses, 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 tomy house, about half a mile long, might have been represented by ameandering dotted line, with wide intervals between the dots. For a weekof even weather I took exactly the same number of steps, and of the samelength, coming and going, stepping deliberately and with the precisionof a pair of dividers in my own deep tracks--to such routine the winterreduces us--yet often they were filled with heaven's own blue. But noweather interfered fatally with my walks, or rather my going abroad, forI frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow tokeep an appointment with a beech tree, or a yellow birch, or an oldacquaintance among the pines; when the ice and snow causing their limbsto droop, and so sharpening their tops, had changed the pines into firtrees; wading to the tops of the highest hills when the show was nearlytwo feet deep on a level, and shaking down another snow-storm on my headat every step; or sometimes creeping and floundering thither on my handsand knees, when the hunters had gone into winter quarters. One afternoonI amused myself by watching a barred owl (_Strix nebulosa_) sitting on oneof the lower dead limbs of a white pine, close to the trunk, in broaddaylight, I standing within a rod of him. He could hear me when I movedand cronched the snow with my feet, but could not plainly see me. WhenI made most noise he would stretch out his neck, and erect his neckfeathers, and open his eyes wide; but their lids soon fell again, and hebegan to nod. I too felt a slumberous influence after watching him halfan hour, as he sat thus with his eyes half open, like a cat, wingedbrother of the cat. There was only a narrow slit left between theirlids, by which he preserved a peninsular relation to me; thus, withhalf-shut eyes, looking out from the land of dreams, and endeavoringto realize me, vague object or mote that interrupted his visions. Atlength, on some louder noise or my nearer approach, he would grow uneasyand sluggishly turn about on his perch, as if impatient at having hisdreams disturbed; and when he launched himself off and flapped throughthe pines, spreading his wings to unexpected breadth, I could not hearthe slightest sound from them. Thus, guided amid the pine boughs ratherby a delicate sense of their neighborhood than by sight, feeling histwilight way, as it were, with his sensitive pinions, he found a newperch, where he might in peace await the dawning of his day.As I walked over the long causeway made for the railroad through themeadows, I encountered many a blustering and nipping wind, for nowherehas 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 betterby the carriage road from Brister's Hill. For I came to town still, likea friendly Indian, when the contents of the broad open fields were allpiled up between the walls of the Walden road, and half an hour sufficedto obliterate the tracks of the last traveller. And when I returned newdrifts would have formed, through which I floundered, where the busynorthwest wind had been depositing the powdery snow round a sharp anglein the road, and not a rabbit's track, nor even the fine print, thesmall type, of a meadow mouse was to be seen. Yet I rarely failed tofind, even in midwinter, some warm and springly swamp where the grassand the skunk-cabbage still put forth with perennial verdure, and somehardier bird occasionally awaited the return of spring.Sometimes, notwithstanding the snow, when I returned from my walk atevening 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 withthe odor of his pipe. Or on a Sunday afternoon, if I chanced to beat home, I heard the cronching of the snow made by the step of along-headed farmer, who from far through the woods sought my house, tohave a social "crack"; one of the few of his vocation who are "men ontheir farms"; who donned a frock instead of a professor's gown, and isas ready to extract the moral out of church or state as to haul a loadof manure from his barn-yard. We talked of rude and simple times, whenmen sat about large fires in cold, bracing weather, with clear heads;and when other dessert failed, we tried our teeth on many a nut whichwise squirrels have long since abandoned, for those which have thethickest shells are commonly empty.The one who came from farthest to my lodge, through deepest snows andmost dismal tempests, was a poet. A farmer, a hunter, a soldier, areporter, even a philosopher, may be daunted; but nothing can deter apoet, for he is actuated by pure love. Who can predict his comingsand goings? His business calls him out at all hours, even when doctorssleep. We made that small house ring with boisterous mirth and resoundwith the murmur of much sober talk, making amends then to Walden valefor the long silences. Broadway was still and deserted in comparison. Atsuitable intervals there were regular salutes of laughter, which mighthave been referred indifferently to the last-uttered or the forth-comingjest. We made many a "bran new" theory of life over a thin dishof gruel, which combined the advantages of conviviality with theclear-headedness which philosophy requires.I should not forget that during my last winter at the pond there wasanother welcome visitor, who at one time came through the village,through snow and rain and darkness, till he saw my lamp through thetrees, and shared with me some long winter evenings. One of the last ofthe philosophers--Connecticut gave him to the world--he peddled firsther wares, afterwards, as he declares, his brains. These he peddlesstill, prompting God and disgracing man, bearing for fruit his brainonly, like the nut its kernel. I think that he must be the man of themost faith of any alive. His words and attitude always suppose a betterstate of things than other men are acquainted with, and he will be thelast man to be disappointed as the ages revolve. He has no venture inthe present. But though comparatively disregarded now, when his daycomes, laws unsuspected by most will take effect, and masters offamilies 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 OldMortality, say rather an Immortality, with unwearied patience and faithmaking plain the image engraven in men's bodies, the God of whom theyare but defaced and leaning monuments. With his hospitable intellecthe embraces children, beggars, insane, and scholars, and entertains thethought of all, adding to it commonly some breadth and elegance. Ithink that he should keep a caravansary on the world's highway, wherephilosophers of all nations might put up, and on his sign should beprinted, "Entertainment for man, but not for his beast. Enter ye thathave leisure and a quiet mind, who earnestly seek the right road." He isperhaps the sanest man and has the fewest crotchets of any I chanceto know; the same yesterday and tomorrow. Of yore we had sauntered andtalked, and effectually put the world behind us; for he was pledged tono institution in it, freeborn, _ingenuus_. Whichever way we turned,it seemed that the heavens and the earth had met together, since heenhanced the beauty of the landscape. A blue-robed man, whose fittestroof is the overarching sky which reflects his serenity. I do not seehow he can ever die; Nature cannot spare him.Having each some shingles of thought well dried, we sat and whittledthem, trying our knives, and admiring the clear yellowish grain of thepumpkin pine. We waded so gently and reverently, or we pulled togetherso 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 theclouds which float through the western sky, and the mother-o'-pearlflocks which sometimes form and dissolve there. There we worked,revising mythology, rounding a fable here and there, and buildingcastles in the air for which earth offered no worthy foundation. GreatLooker! Great Expecter! to converse with whom was a New England Night'sEntertainment. Ah! such discourse we had, hermit and philosopher, andthe old settler I have spoken of--we three--it expanded and racked mylittle house; I should not dare to say how many pounds' weight therewas above the atmospheric pressure on every circular inch; it opened itsseams so that they had to be calked with much dulness thereafter to stopthe consequent leak;--but I had enough of that kind of oakum alreadypicked.There was one other with whom I had "solid seasons," long to beremembered, at his house in the village, and who looked in upon me fromtime to time; but I had no more for society there.There too, as everywhere, I sometimes expected the Visitor who nevercomes. The Vishnu Purana says, "The house-holder is to remain ateventide in his courtyard as long as it takes to milk a cow, or longerif he pleases, to await the arrival of a guest." I often performed thisduty of hospitality, waited long enough to milk a whole herd of cows,but did not see the man approaching from the town.Winter AnimalsWhen the ponds were firmly frozen, they afforded not only new andshorter routes to many points, but new views from their surfaces of thefamiliar landscape around them. When I crossed Flint's Pond, after itwas covered with snow, though I had often paddled about and skated overit, it was so unexpectedly wide and so strange that I could think ofnothing but Baffin's Bay. The Lincoln hills rose up around me at theextremity of a snowy plain, in which I did not remember to have stoodbefore; and the fishermen, at an indeterminable distance over the ice,moving slowly about with their wolfish dogs, passed for sealers, orEsquimaux, or in misty weather loomed like fabulous creatures, and I didnot know whether they were giants or pygmies. I took this course whenI went to lecture in Lincoln in the evening, travelling in no road andpassing 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 cabinshigh 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 shallowand interrupted drifts on it, was my yard where I could walk freely whenthe snow was nearly two feet deep on a level elsewhere and the villagerswere confined to their streets. There, far from the village street, andexcept at very long intervals, from the jingle of sleigh-bells, I slidand skated, as in a vast moose-yard well trodden, overhung by oak woodsand solemn pines bent down with snow or bristling with icicles.For sounds in winter nights, and often in winter days, I heard theforlorn but melodious note of a hooting owl indefinitely far; sucha sound as the frozen earth would yield if struck with a suitableplectrum, the very _lingua vernacula_ of Walden Wood, and quite familiarto me at last, though I never saw the bird while it was making it. Iseldom opened my door in a winter evening without hearing it; _Hoo hoohoo, hoorer, hoo,_ sounded sonorously, and the first three syllablesaccented somewhat like _how der do_; or sometimes _hoo, hoo_ only. Onenight in the beginning of winter, before the pond froze over, about nineo'clock, I was startled by the loud honking of a goose, and, stepping tothe door, heard the sound of their wings like a tempest in the woodsas they flew low over my house. They passed over the pond toward FairHaven, seemingly deterred from settling by my light, their commodorehonking all the while with a regular beat. Suddenly an unmistakablecat-owl from very near me, with the most harsh and tremendous voiceI ever heard from any inhabitant of the woods, responded at regularintervals to the goose, as if determined to expose and disgrace thisintruder from Hudson's Bay by exhibiting a greater compass and volume ofvoice in a native, and _boo-hoo_ him out of Concord horizon. What do youmean by alarming the citadel at this time of night consecrated to me? Doyou think I am ever caught napping at such an hour, and that I have notgot 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 youhad a discriminating ear, there were in it the elements of a concordsuch as these plains never saw nor heard.I also heard the whooping of the ice in the pond, my great bed-fellow inthat part of Concord, as if it were restless in its bed and would fainturn over, were troubled with flatulency and had dreams; or I was wakedby the cracking of the ground by the frost, as if some one had driven ateam against my door, and in the morning would find a crack in the eartha quarter of a mile long and a third of an inch wide.Sometimes I heard the foxes as they ranged over the snow-crust, inmoonlight nights, in search of a partridge or other game, barkingraggedly and demoniacally like forest dogs, as if laboring with someanxiety, or seeking expression, struggling for light and to be dogsoutright and run freely in the streets; for if we take the ages into ouraccount, may there not be a civilization going on among brutes aswell as men? They seemed to me to be rudimental, burrowing men, stillstanding on their defence, awaiting their transformation. Sometimes onecame near to my window, attracted by my light, barked a vulpine curse atme, 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 ifsent out of the woods for this purpose. In the course of the winter Ithrew 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 motionsof the various animals which were baited by it. In the twilight and thenight the rabbits came regularly and made a hearty meal. All day longthe red squirrels came and went, and afforded me much entertainment bytheir manoeuvres. One would approach at first warily through the shruboaks, running over the snow-crust by fits and starts like a leaf blownby the wind, now a few paces this way, with wonderful speed and wasteof energy, making inconceivable haste with his "trotters," as if it werefor a wager, and now as many paces that way, but never getting on morethan half a rod at a time; and then suddenly pausing with a ludicrousexpression and a gratuitous somerset, as if all the eyes in the universewere eyed on him--for all the motions of a squirrel, even in the mostsolitary recesses of the forest, imply spectators as much as those of adancing girl--wasting more time in delay and circ*mspection than wouldhave sufficed to walk the whole distance--I never saw one walk--and thensuddenly, before you could say Jack Robinson, he would be in the topof a young pitch pine, winding up his clock and chiding all imaginaryspectators, soliloquizing and talking to all the universe at the sametime--for no reason that I could ever detect, or he himself was awareof, I suspect. At length he would reach the corn, and selecting asuitable ear, frisk about in the same uncertain trigonometrical way tothe topmost stick of my wood-pile, before my window, where he looked mein the face, and there sit for hours, supplying himself with a newear from time to time, nibbling at first voraciously and throwing thehalf-naked cobs about; till at length he grew more dainty still andplayed with his food, tasting only the inside of the kernel, and theear, which was held balanced over the stick by one paw, slipped fromhis careless grasp and fell to the ground, when he would look over at itwith a ludicrous expression of uncertainty, as if suspecting that it hadlife, 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 inthe wind. So the little impudent fellow would waste many an ear ina forenoon; till at last, seizing some longer and plumper one,considerably bigger than himself, and skilfully balancing it, he wouldset out with it to the woods, like a tiger with a buffalo, by the samezig-zag course and frequent pauses, scratching along with it as if itwere too heavy for him and falling all the while, making its fall adiagonal between a perpendicular and horizontal, being determined toput it through at any rate;--a singularly frivolous and whimsicalfellow;--and so he would get off with it to where he lived, perhapscarry it to the top of a pine tree forty or fifty rods distant, andI would afterwards find the cobs strewn about the woods in variousdirections.At length the jays arrive, whose discordant screams were heard longbefore, as they were warily making their approach an eighth of a mileoff, and in a stealthy and sneaking manner they flit from tree to tree,nearer and nearer, and pick up the kernels which the squirrels havedropped. Then, sitting on a pitch pine bough, they attempt to swallow intheir haste a kernel which is too big for their throats and chokesthem; and after great labor they disgorge it, and spend an hour inthe endeavor to crack it by repeated blows with their bills. Theywere manifestly thieves, and I had not much respect for them; but thesquirrels, though at first shy, went to work as if they were taking whatwas their own.Meanwhile also came the chickadees in flocks, which, picking up thecrumbs the squirrels had dropped, flew to the nearest twig and, placingthem under their claws, hammered away at them with their little bills,as if it were an insect in the bark, till they were sufficiently reducedfor their slender throats. A little flock of these titmice came daily topick a dinner out of my woodpile, or the crumbs at my door, with faintflitting lisping notes, like the tinkling of icicles in the grass, orelse 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 atlength one alighted on an armful of wood which I was carrying in, andpecked at the sticks without fear. I once had a sparrow alight upon myshoulder for a moment while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I feltthat I was more distinguished by that circ*mstance than I should havebeen by any epaulet I could have worn. The squirrels also grew at lastto be quite familiar, and occasionally stepped upon my shoe, when thatwas the nearest way.When the ground was not yet quite covered, and again near the end ofwinter, when the snow was melted on my south hillside and about mywood-pile, the partridges came out of the woods morning and evening tofeed there. Whichever side you walk in the woods the partridge burstsaway on whirring wings, jarring the snow from the dry leaves and twigson high, which comes sifting down in the sunbeams like golden dust, forthis brave bird is not to be scared by winter. It is frequently coveredup by drifts, and, it is said, "sometimes plunges from on wing into thesoft snow, where it remains concealed for a day or two." I used to startthem in the open land also, where they had come out of the woods atsunset to "bud" the wild apple trees. They will come regularly everyevening to particular trees, where the cunning sportsman lies in waitfor them, and the distant orchards next the woods suffer thus nota little. I am glad that the partridge gets fed, at any rate. It isNature's own bird which lives on buds and diet drink.In dark winter mornings, or in short winter afternoons, I sometimesheard a pack of hounds threading all the woods with hounding cry andyelp, unable to resist the instinct of the chase, and the note of thehunting-horn at intervals, proving that man was in the rear. The woodsring again, and yet no fox bursts forth on to the open level of thepond, nor following pack pursuing their Actæon. And perhaps at eveningI see the hunters returning with a single brush trailing from theirsleigh for a trophy, seeking their inn. They tell me that if the foxwould remain in the bosom of the frozen earth he would be safe, or if hewould run in a straight line away no foxhound could overtake him; but,having left his pursuers far behind, he stops to rest and listen tillthey come up, and when he runs he circles round to his old haunts, wherethe hunters await him. Sometimes, however, he will run upon a wall manyrods, and then leap off far to one side, and he appears to know thatwater will not retain his scent. A hunter told me that he once saw a foxpursued by hounds burst out on to Walden when the ice was covered withshallow puddles, run part way across, and then return to the same shore.Ere long the hounds arrived, but here they lost the scent. Sometimesa pack hunting by themselves would pass my door, and circle round myhouse, and yelp and hound without regarding me, as if afflicted by aspecies 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 awise hound will forsake everything else for this. One day a man cameto my hut from Lexington to inquire after his hound that made a largetrack, and had been hunting for a week by himself. But I fear that hewas not the wiser for all I told him, for every time I attempted toanswer 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 Waldenonce every year when the water was warmest, and at such times looked inupon me, told me that many years ago he took his gun one afternoon andwent out for a cruise in Walden Wood; and as he walked the Wayland roadhe heard the cry of hounds approaching, and ere long a fox leaped thewall into the road, and as quick as thought leaped the other wall out ofthe road, and his swift bullet had not touched him. Some way behind camean old hound and her three pups in full pursuit, hunting on their ownaccount, and disappeared again in the woods. Late in the afternoon, ashe was resting in the thick woods south of Walden, he heard the voiceof the hounds far over toward Fair Haven still pursuing the fox; andon they came, their hounding cry which made all the woods ring soundingnearer and nearer, now from Well Meadow, now from the Baker Farm. Fora long time he stood still and listened to their music, so sweet toa hunter's ear, when suddenly the fox appeared, threading the solemnaisles with an easy coursing pace, whose sound was concealed by asympathetic rustle of the leaves, swift and still, keeping the round,leaving his pursuers far behind; and, leaping upon a rock amid thewoods, he sat erect and listening, with his back to the hunter. Fora moment compassion restrained the latter's arm; but that was ashort-lived mood, and as quick as thought can follow thought his piecewas levelled, and _whang!_--the fox, rolling over the rock, lay dead onthe ground. The hunter still kept his place and listened to the hounds.Still on they came, and now the near woods resounded through all theiraisles with their demoniac cry. At length the old hound burst into viewwith muzzle to the ground, and snapping the air as if possessed, and randirectly to the rock; but, spying the dead fox, she suddenly ceased herhounding as if struck dumb with amazement, and walked round and roundhim in silence; and one by one her pups arrived, and, like their mother,were sobered into silence by the mystery. Then the hunter came forwardand stood in their midst, and the mystery was solved. They waited insilence while he skinned the fox, then followed the brush a while, andat length turned off into the woods again. That evening a Weston squirecame to the Concord hunter's cottage to inquire for his hounds, and toldhow for a week they had been hunting on their own account from Westonwoods. The Concord hunter told him what he knew and offered him theskin; but the other declined it and departed. He did not find his houndsthat night, but the next day learned that they had crossed the river andput up at a farmhouse for the night, whence, having been well fed, theytook their departure early in the morning.The hunter who told me this could remember one Sam Nutting, who usedto hunt bears on Fair Haven Ledges, and exchange their skins for rumin Concord village; who told him, even, that he had seen a moosethere. Nutting had a famous foxhound named Burgoyne--he pronounced itBugine--which my informant used to borrow. In the "Wast Book" of anold trader of this town, who was also a captain, town-clerk, andrepresentative, I find the following entry. Jan. 18th, 1742-3, "JohnMelven Cr. by 1 Grey Fox 0--2--3"; they are not now found here; and inhis ledger, Feb, 7th, 1743, Hezekiah Stratton has credit "by 1/2 a Cattskin 0--1--4-1/2"; of course, a wild-cat, for Stratton was a sergeant inthe old French war, and would not have got credit for hunting less noblegame. Credit is given for deerskins also, and they were daily sold. Oneman still preserves the horns of the last deer that was killed in thisvicinity, and another has told me the particulars of the hunt in whichhis uncle was engaged. The hunters were formerly a numerous and merrycrew here. I remember well one gaunt Nimrod who would catch up a leafby the roadside and play a strain on it wilder and more melodious, if mymemory serves me, than any hunting-horn.At midnight, when there was a moon, I sometimes met with hounds in mypath prowling about the woods, which would skulk out of my way, as ifafraid, and stand silent amid the bushes till I had passed.Squirrels and wild mice disputed for my store of nuts. There were scoresof pitch pines around my house, from one to four inches in diameter,which had been gnawed by mice the previous winter--a Norwegian winterfor them, for the snow lay long and deep, and they were obliged to mixa large proportion of pine bark with their other diet. These trees werealive and apparently flourishing at midsummer, and many of them hadgrown a foot, though completely girdled; but after another winter suchwere without exception dead. It is remarkable that a single mouse shouldthus be allowed a whole pine tree for its dinner, gnawing round insteadof up and down it; but perhaps it is necessary in order to thin thesetrees, which are wont to grow up densely.The hares (_Lepus Americanus_) were very familiar. One had her form undermy house all winter, separated from me only by the flooring, andshe startled me each morning by her hasty departure when I began tostir--thump, thump, thump, striking her head against the floor timbersin her hurry. They used to come round my door at dusk to nibble thepotato parings which I had thrown out, and were so nearly the color ofthe ground that they could hardly be distinguished when still. Sometimesin the twilight I alternately lost and recovered sight of one sittingmotionless under my window. When I opened my door in the evening, offthey would go with a squeak and a bounce. Near at hand they only excitedmy pity. One evening one sat by my door two paces from me, at firsttrembling with fear, yet unwilling to move; a poor wee thing, lean andbony, with ragged ears and sharp nose, scant tail and slender paws. Itlooked as if Nature no longer contained the breed of nobler bloods, butstood on her last toes. Its large eyes appeared young and unhealthy,almost dropsical. I took a step, and lo, away it scud with an elasticspring over the snow-crust, straightening its body and its limbs intograceful length, and soon put the forest between me and itself--the wildfree venison, asserting its vigor and the dignity of Nature. Not withoutreason 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 themost simple and indigenous animal products; ancient and venerablefamilies known to antiquity as to modern times; of the very hue andsubstance of Nature, nearest allied to leaves and to the ground--and toone another; it is either winged or it is legged. It is hardly as if youhad seen a wild creature when a rabbit or a partridge bursts away, onlya natural one, as much to be expected as rustling leaves. The partridgeand the rabbit are still sure to thrive, like true natives of the soil,whatever revolutions occur. If the forest is cut off, the sprouts andbushes which spring up afford them concealment, and they become morenumerous than ever. That must be a poor country indeed that does notsupport a hare. Our woods teem with them both, and around every swampmay be seen the partridge or rabbit walk, beset with twiggy fences andhorse-hair snares, which some cow-boy tends.The Pond in WinterAfter a still winter night I awoke with the impression that somequestion had been put to me, which I had been endeavoring in vain toanswer in my sleep, as what--how--when--where? But there was dawningNature, in whom all creatures live, looking in at my broad windows withserene and satisfied face, and no question on _her_ lips. I awoke to ananswered question, to Nature and daylight. The snow lying deep on theearth dotted with young pines, and the very slope of the hill on whichmy house is placed, seemed to say, Forward! Nature puts no questionand answers none which we mortals ask. She has long ago taken herresolution. "O Prince, our eyes contemplate with admiration and transmitto the soul the wonderful and varied spectacle of this universe. Thenight veils without doubt a part of this glorious creation; but daycomes to reveal to us this great work, which extends from earth eveninto the plains of the ether."Then to my morning work. First I take an axe and pail and go in searchof water, if that be not a dream. After a cold and snowy night it neededa divining-rod to find it. Every winter the liquid and trembling surfaceof the pond, which was so sensitive to every breath, and reflected everylight and shadow, becomes solid to the depth of a foot or a foot and ahalf, so that it will support the heaviest teams, and perchance the snowcovers it to an equal depth, and it is not to be distinguished from anylevel field. Like the marmots in the surrounding hills, it closes itseyelids and becomes dormant for three months or more. Standing on thesnow-covered plain, as if in a pasture amid the hills, I cut my wayfirst through a foot of snow, and then a foot of ice, and open a windowunder my feet, where, kneeling to drink, I look down into the quietparlor of the fishes, pervaded by a softened light as through a windowof ground glass, with its bright sanded floor the same as in summer;there a perennial waveless serenity reigns as in the amber twilightsky, corresponding to the cool and even temperament of the inhabitants.Heaven is under our feet is well as over our heads.Early in the morning, while all things are crisp with frost, men comewith fishing-reels and slender lunch, and let down their fine linesthrough the snowy field to take pickerel and perch; wild men, whoinstinctively follow other fashions and trust other authorities thantheir townsmen, and by their goings and comings stitch towns together inparts where else they would be ripped. They sit and eat their luncheonin stout fear-naughts on the dry oak leaves on the shore, as wise innatural lore as the citizen is in artificial. They never consulted withbooks, and know and can tell much less than they have done. The thingswhich they practice are said not yet to be known. Here is one fishingfor pickerel with grown perch for bait. You look into his pail withwonder as into a summer pond, as if he kept summer locked up at home, orknew 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 hecaught them. His life itself passes deeper in nature than the studiesof the naturalist penetrate; himself a subject for the naturalist.The latter raises the moss and bark gently with his knife in search ofinsects; the former lays open logs to their core with his axe, and mossand bark fly far and wide. He gets his living by barking trees. Such aman 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, andthe fisher-man swallows the pickerel; and so all the chinks in the scaleof being are filled.When I strolled around the pond in misty weather I was sometimes amusedby the primitive mode which some ruder fisherman had adopted. He wouldperhaps 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 beingpulled through, have passed the slack line over a twig of the alder, afoot or more above the ice, and tied a dry oak leaf to it, which, beingpulled down, would show when he had a bite. These alders loomed throughthe 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 thewell which the fisherman cuts in the ice, making a little hole to admitthe water, I am always surprised by their rare beauty, as if they werefabulous fishes, they are so foreign to the streets, even to the woods,foreign as Arabia to our Concord life. They possess a quite dazzlingand transcendent beauty which separates them by a wide interval from thecadaverous cod and haddock whose fame is trumpeted in our streets. Theyare not green like the pines, nor gray like the stones, nor blue likethe sky; but they have, to my eyes, if possible, yet rarer colors, likeflowers and precious stones, as if they were the pearls, the animalizednuclei or crystals of the Walden water. They, of course, are Waldenall over and all through; are themselves small Waldens in the animalkingdom, Waldenses. It is surprising that they are caught here--thatin this deep and capacious spring, far beneath the rattling teams andchaises and tinkling sleighs that travel the Walden road, this greatgold and emerald fish swims. I never chanced to see its kind in anymarket; it would be the cynosure of all eyes there. Easily, with afew convulsive quirks, they give up their watery ghosts, like a mortaltranslated before his time to the thin air of heaven. * * * * *As I was desirous to recover the long lost bottom of Walden Pond, Isurveyed it carefully, before the ice broke up, early in '46, withcompass and chain and sounding line. There have been many stories toldabout the bottom, or rather no bottom, of this pond, which certainly hadno foundation for themselves. It is remarkable how long men will believein the bottomlessness of a pond without taking the trouble to soundit. I have visited two such Bottomless Ponds in one walk in thisneighborhood. Many have believed that Walden reached quite through tothe other side of the globe. Some who have lain flat on the ice fora long time, looking down through the illusive medium, perchance withwatery eyes into the bargain, and driven to hasty conclusions by thefear of catching cold in their breasts, have seen vast holes "into whicha load of hay might be driven," if there were anybody to drive it, theundoubted source of the Styx and entrance to the Infernal Regions fromthese 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 outthe rope in the vain attempt to fathom their truly immeasurable capacityfor marvellousness. But I can assure my readers that Walden has areasonably tight bottom at a not unreasonable, though at an unusual,depth. I fathomed it easily with a cod-line and a stone weighing abouta pound and a half, and could tell accurately when the stone left thebottom, by having to pull so much harder before the water got underneathto help me. The greatest depth was exactly one hundred and two feet; towhich may be added the five feet which it has risen since, making onehundred and seven. This is a remarkable depth for so small an area; yetnot an inch of it can be spared by the imagination. What if all pondswere shallow? Would it not react on the minds of men? I am thankful thatthis pond was made deep and pure for a symbol. While men believe in theinfinite some ponds will be thought to be bottomless.A factory-owner, hearing what depth I had found, thought that it couldnot be true, for, judging from his acquaintance with dams, sand wouldnot lie at so steep an angle. But the deepest ponds are not so deep inproportion to their area as most suppose, and, if drained, would notleave very remarkable valleys. They are not like cups between the hills;for this one, which is so unusually deep for its area, appears in avertical section through its centre not deeper than a shallow plate.Most ponds, emptied, would leave a meadow no more hollow than wefrequently see. William Gilpin, who is so admirable in all that relatesto landscapes, and usually so correct, standing at the head of LochFyne, in Scotland, which he describes as "a bay of salt water, sixtyor seventy fathoms deep, four miles in breadth," and about fifty mileslong, surrounded by mountains, observes, "If we could have seen itimmediately after the diluvian crash, or whatever convulsion of natureoccasioned it, before the waters gushed in, what a horrid chasm must ithave 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 theseproportions to Walden, which, as we have seen, appears already in avertical section only like a shallow plate, it will appear four timesas shallow. So much for the increased horrors of the chasm of LochFyne when emptied. No doubt many a smiling valley with its stretchingcornfields occupies exactly such a "horrid chasm," from which the watershave receded, though it requires the insight and the far sight of thegeologist to convince the unsuspecting inhabitants of this fact. Oftenan inquisitive eye may detect the shores of a primitive lake in thelow horizon hills, and no subsequent elevation of the plain have beennecessary to conceal their history. But it is easiest, as they who workon 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, divesdeeper and soars higher than Nature goes. So, probably, the depth of theocean will be found to be very inconsiderable compared with its breadth.As I sounded through the ice I could determine the shape of the bottomwith greater accuracy than is possible in surveying harbors which donot freeze over, and I was surprised at its general regularity. In thedeepest part there are several acres more level than almost any fieldwhich is exposed to the sun, wind, and plow. In one instance, on a linearbitrarily chosen, the depth did not vary more than one foot in thirtyrods; and generally, near the middle, I could calculate the variationfor each one hundred feet in any direction beforehand within three orfour inches. Some are accustomed to speak of deep and dangerous holeseven in quiet sandy ponds like this, but the effect of water under thesecirc*mstances is to level all inequalities. The regularity of the bottomand its conformity to the shores and the range of the neighboringhills were so perfect that a distant promontory betrayed itself in thesoundings quite across the pond, and its direction could be determinedby observing the opposite shore. Cape becomes bar, and plain shoal, andvalley and gorge deep water and channel.When I had mapped the pond by the scale of ten rods to an inch, andput down the soundings, more than a hundred in all, I observed thisremarkable coincidence. Having noticed that the number indicating thegreatest depth was apparently in the centre of the map, I laid a ruleon the map lengthwise, and then breadthwise, and found, to my surprise,that the line of greatest length intersected the line of greatestbreadth _exactly_ at the point of greatest depth, notwithstanding that themiddle is so nearly level, the outline of the pond far from regular, andthe extreme length and breadth were got by measuring into the coves; andI said to myself, Who knows but this hint would conduct to the deepestpart of the ocean as well as of a pond or puddle? Is not this the rulealso 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 tohave a bar quite across their mouths and deeper water within, so thatthe bay tended to be an expansion of water within the land not onlyhorizontally but vertically, and to form a basin or independent pond,the direction of the two capes showing the course of the bar. Everyharbor on the sea-coast, also, has its bar at its entrance. Inproportion 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 ofthe surrounding shore, and you have almost elements enough to make out aformula for all cases.In order to see how nearly I could guess, with this experience, at thedeepest point in a pond, by observing the outlines of a surface andthe character of its shores alone, I made a plan of White Pond, whichcontains about forty-one acres, and, like this, has no island in it, norany visible inlet or outlet; and as the line of greatest breadth fellvery near the line of least breadth, where two opposite capes approachedeach other and two opposite bays receded, I ventured to mark a point ashort distance from the latter line, but still on the line of greatestlength, as the deepest. The deepest part was found to be within onehundred feet of this, still farther in the direction to which I hadinclined, and was only one foot deeper, namely, sixty feet. Of course, astream running through, or an island in the pond, would make the problemmuch more complicated.If we knew all the laws of Nature, we should need only one fact, orthe description of one actual phenomenon, to infer all the particularresults at that point. Now we know only a few laws, and our result isvitiated, not, of course, by any confusion or irregularity in Nature,but by our ignorance of essential elements in the calculation. Ournotions of law and harmony are commonly confined to those instanceswhich we detect; but the harmony which results from a far greater numberof seemingly conflicting, but really concurring, laws, which we have notdetected, is still more wonderful. The particular laws are as our pointsof view, as, to the traveller, a mountain outline varies with everystep, and it has an infinite number of profiles, though absolutely butone form. Even when cleft or bored through it is not comprehended in itsentireness.What I have observed of the pond is no less true in ethics. It is thelaw of average. Such a rule of the two diameters not only guides ustoward the sun in the system and the heart in man, but draws linesthrough the length and breadth of the aggregate of a man's particulardaily behaviors and waves of life into his coves and inlets, and wherethey intersect will be the height or depth of his character. Perhapswe need only to know how his shores trend and his adjacent countryor circ*mstances, to infer his depth and concealed bottom. If he issurrounded by mountainous circ*mstances, an Achillean shore, whose peaksovershadow and are reflected in his bosom, they suggest a correspondingdepth in him. But a low and smooth shore proves him shallow on thatside. In our bodies, a bold projecting brow falls off to and indicates acorresponding depth of thought. Also there is a bar across the entranceof our every cove, or particular inclination; each is our harbor fora season, in which we are detained and partially land-locked. Theseinclinations are not whimsical usually, but their form, size, anddirection are determined by the promontories of the shore, the ancientaxes of elevation. When this bar is gradually increased by storms,tides, or currents, or there is a subsidence of the waters, so that itreaches to the surface, that which was at first but an inclination inthe shore in which a thought was harbored becomes an individuallake, cut off from the ocean, wherein the thought secures its ownconditions--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 mostpart, stand off and on upon a harborless coast, are conversant only withthe 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 thisworld, and no natural currents concur to individualize them.As for the inlet or outlet of Walden, I have not discovered any but rainand snow and evaporation, though perhaps, with a thermometer and a line,such places may be found, for where the water flows into the pond itwill probably be coldest in summer and warmest in winter. When theice-men were at work here in '46-7, the cakes sent to the shore were oneday rejected by those who were stacking them up there, not beingthick enough to lie side by side with the rest; and the cutters thusdiscovered that the ice over a small space was two or three inchesthinner than elsewhere, which made them think that there was an inletthere. They also showed me in another place what they thought was a"leach-hole," through which the pond leaked out under a hill into aneighboring meadow, pushing me out on a cake of ice to see it. It was asmall cavity under ten feet of water; but I think that I can warrant thepond not to need soldering till they find a worse leak than that.One has suggested, that if such a "leach-hole" should be found, itsconnection with the meadow, if any existed, might be proved by conveyingsome colored powder or sawdust to the mouth of the hole, and thenputting a strainer over the spring in the meadow, which would catch someof 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 alevel cannot be used on ice. At one rod from the shore its greatestfluctuation, when observed by means of a level on land directed towarda graduated staff on the ice, was three quarters of an inch, though theice appeared firmly attached to the shore. It was probably greater inthe middle. Who knows but if our instruments were delicate enough wemight detect an undulation in the crust of the earth? When two legs ofmy level were on the shore and the third on the ice, and the sightswere directed over the latter, a rise or fall of the ice of an almostinfinitesimal amount made a difference of several feet on a tree acrossthe pond. When I began to cut holes for sounding there were three orfour inches of water on the ice under a deep snow which had sunk itthus far; but the water began immediately to run into these holes, andcontinued to run for two days in deep streams, which wore away the iceon every side, and contributed essentially, if not mainly, to dry thesurface of the pond; for, as the water ran in, it raised and floated theice. This was somewhat like cutting a hole in the bottom of a ship tolet the water out. When such holes freeze, and a rain succeeds,and finally a new freezing forms a fresh smooth ice over all, it isbeautifully mottled internally by dark figures, shaped somewhat like aspider's web, what you may call ice rosettes, produced by the channelsworn 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 ofmyself, one standing on the head of the other, one on the ice, the otheron the trees or hillside. * * * * *While yet it is cold January, and snow and ice are thick and solid, theprudent landlord comes from the village to get ice to cool his summerdrink; impressively, even pathetically, wise, to foresee the heat andthirst of July now in January--wearing a thick coat and mittens! when somany things are not provided for. It may be that he lays up no treasuresin this world which will cool his summer drink in the next. He cuts andsaws the solid pond, unroofs the house of fishes, and carts off theirvery element and air, held fast by chains and stakes like corded wood,through the favoring winter air, to wintry cellars, to underlie thesummer there. It looks like solidified azure, as, far off, it is drawnthrough the streets. These ice-cutters are a merry race, full of jestand sport, and when I went among them they were wont to invite me to sawpit-fashion with them, I standing underneath.In the winter of '46-7 there came a hundred men of Hyperboreanextraction swoop down on to our pond one morning, with many carloadsof ungainly-looking farming tools--sleds, plows, drill-barrows,turf-knives, spades, saws, rakes, and each man was armed with adouble-pointed pike-staff, such as is not described in the New-EnglandFarmer or the Cultivator. I did not know whether they had come to sow acrop of winter rye, or some other kind of grain recently introduced fromIceland. 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 longenough. They said that a gentleman farmer, who was behind the scenes,wanted to double his money, which, as I understood, amounted to halfa million already; but in order to cover each one of his dollars withanother, he took off the only coat, ay, the skin itself, of WaldenPond in the midst of a hard winter. They went to work at once, plowing,barrowing, rolling, furrowing, in admirable order, as if they were benton making this a model farm; but when I was looking sharp to see whatkind of seed they dropped into the furrow, a gang of fellows by my sidesuddenly 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 springysoil--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 cameand went every day, with a peculiar shriek from the locomotive, from andto some point of the polar regions, as it seemed to me, like a flockof arctic snow-birds. But sometimes Squaw Walden had her revenge, anda hired man, walking behind his team, slipped through a crack in theground down toward Tartarus, and he who was so brave before suddenlybecame but the ninth part of a man, almost gave up his animal heat, andwas glad to take refuge in my house, and acknowledged that there wassome virtue in a stove; or sometimes the frozen soil took a piece ofsteel out of a plowshare, or a plow got set in the furrow and had to becut out.To speak literally, a hundred Irishmen, with Yankee overseers, came fromCambridge every day to get out the ice. They divided it into cakes bymethods too well known to require description, and these, being sleddedto the shore, were rapidly hauled off on to an ice platform, and raisedby grappling irons and block and tackle, worked by horses, on to astack, as surely as so many barrels of flour, and there placed evenlyside by side, and row upon row, as if they formed the solid base of anobelisk designed to pierce the clouds. They told me that in a good daythey could get out a thousand tons, which was the yield of about oneacre. Deep ruts and "cradle-holes" were worn in the ice, as on _terrafirma_, by the passage of the sleds over the same track, and the horsesinvariably 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-fivefeet high on one side and six or seven rods square, putting hay betweenthe outside layers to exclude the air; for when the wind, though neverso cold, finds a passage through, it will wear large cavities, leavingslight supports or studs only here and there, and finally topple itdown. At first it looked like a vast blue fort or Valhalla; but whenthey began to tuck the coarse meadow hay into the crevices, and thisbecame covered with rime and icicles, it looked like a venerablemoss-grown and hoary ruin, built of azure-tinted marble, the abode ofWinter, that old man we see in the almanac--his shanty, as if he hada design to estivate with us. They calculated that not twenty-five percent of this would reach its destination, and that two or three per centwould be wasted in the cars. However, a still greater part of this heaphad a different destiny from what was intended; for, either because theice was found not to keep so well as was expected, containing more airthan 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 thefollowing July, and a part of it carried off, the rest remaining exposedto the sun, it stood over that summer and the next winter, and was notquite melted till September, 1848. Thus the pond recovered the greaterpart.Like the water, the Walden ice, seen near at hand, has a green tint, butat a distance is beautifully blue, and you can easily tell it from thewhite ice of the river, or the merely greenish ice of some ponds, aquarter of a mile off. Sometimes one of those great cakes slips from theice-man's sled into the village street, and lies there for a week like agreat emerald, an object of interest to all passers. I have noticed thata 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 hollowsabout this pond will, sometimes, in the winter, be filled with agreenish water somewhat like its own, but the next day will have frozenblue. Perhaps the blue color of water and ice is due to the light andair they contain, and the most transparent is the bluest. Ice is aninteresting subject for contemplation. They told me that they had somein the ice-houses at Fresh Pond five years old which was as good asever. Why is it that a bucket of water soon becomes putrid, but frozenremains sweet forever? It is commonly said that this is the differencebetween the affections and the intellect.Thus for sixteen days I saw from my window a hundred men at work likebusy husbandmen, with teams and horses and apparently all the implementsof 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 andthe reapers, or the parable of the sower, and the like; and now they areall gone, and in thirty days more, probably, I shall look from the samewindow on the pure sea-green Walden water there, reflecting the cloudsand the trees, and sending up its evaporations in solitude, and notraces will appear that a man has ever stood there. Perhaps I shall heara solitary loon laugh as he dives and plumes himself, or shall see alonely fisher in his boat, like a floating leaf, beholding his formreflected in the waves, where lately a hundred men securely labored.Thus it appears that the sweltering inhabitants of Charleston and NewOrleans, of Madras and Bombay and Calcutta, drink at my well. In themorning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophyof the Bhagvat-Geeta, since whose composition years of the godshave elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and itsliterature seem puny and trivial; and I doubt if that philosophy isnot to be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is itssublimity from our conceptions. I lay down the book and go to my wellfor water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Bramin, priest ofBrahma and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Gangesreading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust andwater jug. I meet his servant come to draw water for his master, andour buckets as it were grate together in the same well. The pure Waldenwater is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges. With favoringwinds it is wafted past the site of the fabulous islands of Atlantis andthe Hesperides, makes the periplus of Hanno, and, floating by Ternateand Tidore and the mouth of the Persian Gulf, melts in the tropic galesof the Indian seas, and is landed in ports of which Alexander only heardthe names.SpringThe opening of large tracts by the ice-cutters commonly causes a pondto break up earlier; for the water, agitated by the wind, even in coldweather, wears away the surrounding ice. But such was not the effect onWalden that year, for she had soon got a thick new garment to take theplace of the old. This pond never breaks up so soon as the others inthis neighborhood, on account both of its greater depth and its havingno stream passing through it to melt or wear away the ice. I never knewit to open in the course of a winter, not excepting that of '52-3, whichgave the ponds so severe a trial. It commonly opens about the firstof 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 whereit began to freeze. It indicates better than any water hereabouts theabsolute progress of the season, being least affected by transientchanges of temperature. A severe cold of a few days' duration inMarch may very much retard the opening of the former ponds, while thetemperature of Walden increases almost uninterruptedly. A thermometerthrust into the middle of Walden on the 6th of March, 1847, stood at32º, or freezing point; near the shore at 33º; in the middle of Flint'sPond, the same day, at 32º; at a dozen rods from the shore, in shallowwater, under ice a foot thick, at 36º. This difference of three and ahalf degrees between the temperature of the deep water and the shallowin the latter pond, and the fact that a great proportion of it iscomparatively shallow, show why it should break up so much sooner thanWalden. The ice in the shallowest part was at this time several inchesthinner than in the middle. In midwinter the middle had been the warmestand the ice thinnest there. So, also, every one who has waded about theshores of the pond in summer must have perceived how much warmer thewater is close to the shore, where only three or four inches deep, thana little distance out, and on the surface where it is deep, than nearthe bottom. In spring the sun not only exerts an influence through theincreased temperature of the air and earth, but its heat passes throughice a foot or more thick, and is reflected from the bottom in shallowwater, 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, makingit uneven, and causing the air bubbles which it contains to extendthemselves upward and downward until it is completely honeycombed, andat last disappears suddenly in a single spring rain. Ice has its grainas well as wood, and when a cake begins to rot or "comb," that is,assume the appearance of honeycomb, whatever may be its position, theair cells are at right angles with what was the water surface. Wherethere is a rock or a log rising near to the surface the ice over it ismuch thinner, and is frequently quite dissolved by this reflected heat;and I have been told that in the experiment at Cambridge to freeze waterin a shallow wooden pond, though the cold air circulated underneath, andso had access to both sides, the reflection of the sun from the bottommore than counterbalanced this advantage. When a warm rain in the middleof the winter melts off the snow-ice from Walden, and leaves a hard darkor transparent ice on the middle, there will be a strip of rotten thoughthicker white ice, a rod or more wide, about the shores, created by thisreflected heat. Also, as I have said, the bubbles themselves within theice operate as burning-glasses to melt the ice beneath.The phenomena of the year take place every day in a pond on a smallscale. Every morning, generally speaking, the shallow water is beingwarmed more rapidly than the deep, though it may not be made so warmafter all, and every evening it is being cooled more rapidly until themorning. The day is an epitome of the year. The night is the winter, themorning 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, havinggone to Flint's Pond to spend the day, I noticed with surprise, thatwhen I struck the ice with the head of my axe, it resounded like a gongfor 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 theinfluence of the sun's rays slanted upon it from over the hills;it stretched itself and yawned like a waking man with a graduallyincreasing tumult, which was kept up three or four hours. It took ashort siesta at noon, and boomed once more toward night, as the sunwas withdrawing his influence. In the right stage of the weather a pondfires its evening gun with great regularity. But in the middle of theday, being full of cracks, and the air also being less elastic, it hadcompletely lost its resonance, and probably fishes and muskrats couldnot 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 whento expect its thundering; but though I may perceive no difference inthe weather, it does. Who would have suspected so large and cold andthick-skinned a thing to be so sensitive? Yet it has its law to whichit thunders obedience when it should as surely as the buds expand in thespring. The earth is all alive and covered with papillae. The largestpond is as sensitive to atmospheric changes as the globule of mercury inits tube.One attraction in coming to the woods to live was that I should haveleisure and opportunity to see the Spring come in. The ice in the pondat length begins to be honeycombed, and I can set my heel in it as Iwalk. Fogs and rains and warmer suns are gradually melting the snow; thedays have grown sensibly longer; and I see how I shall get through thewinter without adding to my wood-pile, for large fires are no longernecessary. I am on the alert for the first signs of spring, to hear thechance note of some arriving bird, or the striped squirrel's chirp, forhis stores must be now nearly exhausted, or see the woodchuck ventureout of his winter quarters. On the 13th of March, after I had heard thebluebird, song sparrow, and red-wing, the ice was still nearly a footthick. As the weather grew warmer it was not sensibly worn away by thewater, nor broken up and floated off as in rivers, but, though it wascompletely melted for half a rod in width about the shore, the middlewas merely honeycombed and saturated with water, so that you could putyour foot through it when six inches thick; but by the next day evening,perhaps, after a warm rain followed by fog, it would have whollydisappeared, all gone off with the fog, spirited away. One year I wentacross the middle only five days before it disappeared entirely. In 1845Walden was first completely open on the 1st of April; in '46, the 25thof 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 ofApril.Every incident connected with the breaking up of the rivers and pondsand the settling of the weather is particularly interesting to us wholive in a climate of so great extremes. When the warmer days come, theywho dwell near the river hear the ice crack at night with a startlingwhoop as loud as artillery, as if its icy fetters were rent from end toend, and within a few days see it rapidly going out. So the alligatorcomes out of the mud with quakings of the earth. One old man, who hasbeen a close observer of Nature, and seems as thoroughly wise in regardto all her operations as if she had been put upon the stocks when he wasa 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 ageof Methuselah--told me--and I was surprised to hear him express wonderat any of Nature's operations, for I thought that there were no secretsbetween them--that one spring day he took his gun and boat, and thoughtthat he would have a little sport with the ducks. There was ice still onthe meadows, but it was all gone out of the river, and he dropped downwithout obstruction from Sudbury, where he lived, to Fair Haven Pond,which he found, unexpectedly, covered for the most part with a firmfield of ice. It was a warm day, and he was surprised to see so greata body of ice remaining. Not seeing any ducks, he hid his boat on thenorth or back side of an island in the pond, and then concealed himselfin the bushes on the south side, to await them. The ice was melted forthree or four rods from the shore, and there was a smooth and warm sheetof water, with a muddy bottom, such as the ducks love, within, and hethought it likely that some would be along pretty soon. After he hadlain still there about an hour he heard a low and seemingly very distantsound, but singularly grand and impressive, unlike anything he had everheard, gradually swelling and increasing as if it would have a universaland memorable ending, a sullen rush and roar, which seemed to him allat 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 laythere, and drifted in to the shore, and the sound he had heard was madeby its edge grating on the shore--at first gently nibbled and crumbledoff, but at length heaving up and scattering its wrecks along the islandto a considerable height before it came to a standstill.At length the sun's rays have attained the right angle, and warm windsblow up mist and rain and melt the snowbanks, and the sun, dispersingthe mist, smiles on a checkered landscape of russet and white smokingwith incense, through which the traveller picks his way from islet toislet, cheered by the music of a thousand tinkling rills and rivuletswhose veins are filled with the blood of winter which they are bearingoff.Few phenomena gave me more delight than to observe the forms whichthawing sand and clay assume in flowing down the sides of a deep cuton the railroad through which I passed on my way to the village, aphenomenon not very common on so large a scale, though the number offreshly exposed banks of the right material must have been greatlymultiplied since railroads were invented. The material was sand of everydegree of fineness and of various rich colors, commonly mixed witha little clay. When the frost comes out in the spring, and even in athawing day in the winter, the sand begins to flow down the slopes likelava, sometimes bursting out through the snow and overflowing it whereno sand was to be seen before. Innumerable little streams overlap andinterlace one with another, exhibiting a sort of hybrid product, whichobeys half way the law of currents, and half way that of vegetation. Asit flows it takes the forms of sappy leaves or vines, making heaps ofpulpy sprays a foot or more in depth, and resembling, as you lookdown on them, the laciniated, lobed, and imbricated thalluses of somelichens; 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, undersome circ*mstances, to become a puzzle to future geologists. The wholecut impressed me as if it were a cave with its stalactites laid opento the light. The various shades of the sand are singularly rich andagreeable, embracing the different iron colors, brown, gray, yellowish,and reddish. When the flowing mass reaches the drain at the foot of thebank it spreads out flatter into _strands_, the separate streams losingtheir 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 tracethe original forms of vegetation; till at length, in the water itself,they are converted into _banks_, like those formed off the mouths ofrivers, and the forms of vegetation are lost in the ripple marks on thebottom.The whole bank, which is from twenty to forty feet high, is sometimesoverlaid with a mass of this kind of foliage, or sandy rupture, for aquarter of a mile on one or both sides, the produce of one spring day.What makes this sand foliage remarkable is its springing into existencethus suddenly. When I see on the one side the inert bank--for the sunacts on one side first--and on the other this luxuriant foliage, thecreation of an hour, I am affected as if in a peculiar sense I stoodin the laboratory of the Artist who made the world and me--had come towhere he was still at work, sporting on this bank, and with excess ofenergy strewing his fresh designs about. I feel as if I were nearer tothe vitals of the globe, for this sandy overflow is something such afoliaceous mass as the vitals of the animal body. You find thus in thevery sands an anticipation of the vegetable leaf. No wonder that theearth expresses itself outwardly in leaves, it so labors with the ideainwardly. The atoms have already learned this law, and are pregnant byit. The overhanging leaf sees here its prototype. _Internally_, whetherin the globe or animal body, it is a moist thick _lobe_, a word especiallyapplicable 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 ofthe throat. The feathers and wings of birds are still drier and thinnerleaves. Thus, also, you pass from the lumpish grub in the earth to theairy and fluttering butterfly. The very globe continually transcends andtranslates itself, and becomes winged in its orbit. Even ice begins withdelicate crystal leaves, as if it had flowed into moulds which the frondsof waterplants have impressed on the watery mirror. The whole tree itselfis but one leaf, and rivers are still vaster leaves whose pulp is interveningearth, 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 thestreams will start once more and branch and branch again into a myriadof others. You here see perchance how blood-vessels are formed. Ifyou look closely you observe that first there pushes forward from thethawing mass a stream of softened sand with a drop-like point, like theball of the finger, feeling its way slowly and blindly downward, untilat last with more heat and moisture, as the sun gets higher, the mostfluid portion, in its effort to obey the law to which the most inertalso yields, separates from the latter and forms for itself a meanderingchannel or artery within that, in which is seen a little silvery streamglancing like lightning from one stage of pulpy leaves or branches toanother, and ever and anon swallowed up in the sand. It is wonderful howrapidly yet perfectly the sand organizes itself as it flows, using thebest material its mass affords to form the sharp edges of its channel.Such are the sources of rivers. In the silicious matter which the waterdeposits is perhaps the bony system, and in the still finer soil andorganic matter the fleshy fibre or cellular tissue. What is man buta mass of thawing clay? The ball of the human finger is but a dropcongealed. The fingers and toes flow to their extent from the thawingmass of the body. Who knows what the human body would expand and flowout 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 alichen, _Umbilicaria_, on the side of the head, with its lobe or drop.The lip--_labium_, from _labor_ (?)--laps or lapses from the sides of thecavernous mouth. The nose is a manifest congealed drop or stalactite.The chin is a still larger drop, the confluent dripping of the face. Thecheeks are a slide from the brows into the valley of the face, opposedand diffused by the cheek bones. Each rounded lobe of the vegetableleaf, too, is a thick and now loitering drop, larger or smaller; thelobes are the fingers of the leaf; and as many lobes as it has, inso many directions it tends to flow, and more heat or other genialinfluences would have caused it to flow yet farther.Thus it seemed that this one hillside illustrated the principle of allthe operations of Nature. The Maker of this earth but patented a leaf.What Champollion will decipher this hieroglyphic for us, that we mayturn over a new leaf at last? This phenomenon is more exhilarating tome than the luxuriance and fertility of vineyards. True, it is somewhatexcrementitious in its character, and there is no end to the heapsof liver, lights, and bowels, as if the globe were turned wrong sideoutward; but this suggests at least that Nature has some bowels, andthere again is mother of humanity. This is the frost coming out of theground; this is Spring. It precedes the green and flowery spring, asmythology precedes regular poetry. I know of nothing more purgative ofwinter fumes and indigestions. It convinces me that Earth is still inher 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 merefragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of abook, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but livingpoetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit--not afossil earth, but a living earth; compared with whose great central lifeall animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic. Its throes will heaveour exuviae from their graves. You may melt your metals and cast theminto the most beautiful moulds you can; they will never excite me likethe 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 thepotter.Ere long, not only on these banks, but on every hill and plain and inevery hollow, the frost comes out of the ground like a dormant quadrupedfrom its burrow, and seeks the sea with music, or migrates to otherclimes in clouds. Thaw with his gentle persuasion is more powerful thanThor 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 haddried its surface somewhat, it was pleasant to compare the first tendersigns of the infant year just peeping forth with the statelybeauty of the withered vegetation which had withstood thewinter--life-everlasting, goldenrods, pinweeds, and graceful wildgrasses, 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-stemmedplants, those unexhausted granaries which entertain the earliestbirds--decent weeds, at least, which widowed Nature wears. I amparticularly attracted by the arching and sheaf-like top of thewool-grass; it brings back the summer to our winter memories, and isamong the forms which art loves to copy, and which, in the vegetablekingdom, have the same relation to types already in the mind of man thatastronomy has. It is an antique style, older than Greek or Egyptian.Many of the phenomena of Winter are suggestive of an inexpressibletenderness and fragile delicacy. We are accustomed to hear this kingdescribed as a rude and boisterous tyrant; but with the gentleness of alover he adorns the tresses of Summer.At the approach of spring the red squirrels got under my house, two ata time, directly under my feet as I sat reading or writing, and kept upthe queerest chuckling and chirruping and vocal pirouetting and gurglingsounds that ever were heard; and when I stamped they only chirruped thelouder, as if past all fear and respect in their mad pranks, defyinghumanity to stop them. No, you don't--chickaree--chickaree. They werewholly deaf to my arguments, or failed to perceive their force, and fellinto a strain of invective that was irresistible.The first sparrow of spring! The year beginning with younger hope thanever! The faint silvery warblings heard over the partially bare andmoist fields from the bluebird, the song sparrow, and the red-wing, asif the last flakes of winter tinkled as they fell! What at such a timeare histories, chronologies, traditions, and all written revelations?The brooks sing carols and glees to the spring. The marsh hawk, sailinglow over the meadow, is already seeking the first slimy life thatawakes. The sinking sound of melting snow is heard in all dells, and theice dissolves apace in the ponds. The grass flames up on the hillsideslike a spring fire--"et primitus oritur herba imbribus primoribusevocata"--as if the earth sent forth an inward heat to greet thereturning sun; not yellow but green is the color of its flame;--thesymbol of perpetual youth, the grass-blade, like a long green ribbon,streams from the sod into the summer, checked indeed by the frost, butanon pushing on again, lifting its spear of last year's hay with thefresh life below. It grows as steadily as the rill oozes out of theground. It is almost identical with that, for in the growing days ofJune, when the rills are dry, the grass-blades are their channels, andfrom year to year the herds drink at this perennial green stream, andthe mower draws from it betimes their winter supply. So our human lifebut dies down to its root, and still puts forth its green blade toeternity.Walden is melting apace. There is a canal two rods wide along thenortherly and westerly sides, and wider still at the east end. A greatfield of ice has cracked off from the main body. I hear a song sparrowsinging from the bushes on the shore,--_olit_, _olit_, _olit,_--_chip_,_chip_, _chip_, _che char_,--_che wiss_, _wiss_, _wiss_. He too ishelping to crack it. How handsome the great sweeping curves in the edgeof the ice, answering somewhat to those of the shore, but more regular!It is unusually hard, owing to the recent severe but transient cold, andall watered or waved like a palace floor. But the wind slides eastwardover its opaque surface in vain, till it reaches the living surfacebeyond. It is glorious to behold this ribbon of water sparkling in thesun, the bare face of the pond full of glee and youth, as if it spokethe joy of the fishes within it, and of the sands on its shore--asilvery sheen as from the scales of a leuciscus, as it were all oneactive fish. Such is the contrast between winter and spring. Walden wasdead and is alive again. But this spring it broke up more steadily, as Ihave said.The change from storm and winter to serene and mild weather, from darkand sluggish hours to bright and elastic ones, is a memorable crisiswhich all things proclaim. It is seemingly instantaneous at last.Suddenly an influx of light filled my house, though the evening was athand, and the clouds of winter still overhung it, and the eaves weredripping with sleety rain. I looked out the window, and lo! whereyesterday was cold gray ice there lay the transparent pond already calmand full of hope as in a summer evening, reflecting a summer eveningsky in its bosom, though none was visible overhead, as if it hadintelligence with some remote horizon. I heard a robin in the distance,the first I had heard for many a thousand years, methought, whose noteI shall not forget for many a thousand more--the same sweet and powerfulsong as of yore. O the evening robin, at the end of a New England summerday! 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 andshrub oaks about my house, which had so long drooped, suddenly resumedtheir several characters, looked brighter, greener, and more erect andalive, as if effectually cleansed and restored by the rain. I knew thatit would not rain any more. You may tell by looking at any twig of theforest, 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 lowover the woods, like weary travellers getting in late from Southernlakes, and indulging at last in unrestrained complaint and mutualconsolation. Standing at my door, I could hear the rush of their wings;when, driving toward my house, they suddenly spied my light, and withhushed clamor wheeled and settled in the pond. So I came in, and shutthe 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 andtumultuous that Walden appeared like an artificial pond for theiramusem*nt. But when I stood on the shore they at once rose up with agreat flapping of wings at the signal of their commander, and when theyhad got into rank circled about over my head, twenty-nine of them, andthen steered straight to Canada, with a regular _honk_ from the leader atintervals, trusting to break their fast in muddier pools. A "plump" ofducks rose at the same time and took the route to the north in the wakeof their noisier cousins.For a week I heard the circling, groping clangor of some solitary goosein the foggy mornings, seeking its companion, and still peopling thewoods with the sound of a larger life than they could sustain. In Aprilthe pigeons were seen again flying express in small flocks, and in duetime I heard the martins twittering over my clearing, though it had notseemed that the township contained so many that it could afford me any,and I fancied that they were peculiarly of the ancient race that dweltin hollow trees ere white men came. In almost all climes the tortoiseand the frog are among the precursors and heralds of this season, andbirds fly with song and glancing plumage, and plants spring and bloom,and winds blow, to correct this slight oscillation of the poles andpreserve the equilibrium of nature.As every season seems best to us in its turn, so the coming in of springis like the creation of Cosmos out of Chaos and the realization of theGolden 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 ourprospects brighten on the influx of better thoughts. We should beblessed if we lived in the present always, and took advantage of everyaccident that befell us, like the grass which confesses the influenceof the slightest dew that falls on it; and did not spend our time inatoning for the neglect of past opportunities, which we call doing ourduty. We loiter in winter while it is already spring. In a pleasantspring morning all men's sins are forgiven. Such a day is a truce tovice. While such a sun holds out to burn, the vilest sinner may return.Through our own recovered innocence we discern the innocence of ourneighbors. You may have known your neighbor yesterday for a thief,a drunkard, or a sensualist, and merely pitied or despised him, anddespaired of the world; but the sun shines bright and warm this firstspring morning, recreating the world, and you meet him at some serenework, and see how it is exhausted and debauched veins expand with stilljoy and bless the new day, feel the spring influence with the innocenceof infancy, and all his faults are forgotten. There is not only anatmosphere of good will about him, but even a savor of holiness gropingfor expression, blindly and ineffectually perhaps, like a new-borninstinct, and for a short hour the south hill-side echoes to no vulgarjest. You see some innocent fair shoots preparing to burst from hisgnarled rind and try another year's life, tender and fresh as theyoungest plant. Even he has entered into the joy of his Lord. Why thejailer does not leave open his prison doors--why the judge does notdismis his case--why the preacher does not dismiss his congregation! Itis because they do not obey the hint which God gives them, nor acceptthe pardon which he freely offers to all."A return to goodness produced each day in the tranquil and beneficentbreath of the morning, causes that in respect to the love of virtue andthe hatred of vice, one approaches a little the primitive nature of man,as the sprouts of the forest which has been felled. In like mannerthe evil which one does in the interval of a day prevents the germs ofvirtues which began to spring up again from developing themselves anddestroys them."After the germs of virtue have thus been prevented many times fromdeveloping themselves, then the beneficent breath of evening does notsuffice to preserve them. As soon as the breath of evening does notsuffice longer to preserve them, then the nature of man does not differmuch from that of the brute. Men seeing the nature of this man like thatof the brute, think that he has never possessed the innate faculty ofreason. 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 nearthe Nine-Acre-Corner bridge, standing on the quaking grass and willowroots, 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 anighthawk, alternately soaring like a ripple and tumbling a rod or twoover and over, showing the under side of its wings, which gleamed likea satin ribbon in the sun, or like the pearly inside of a shell.This sight reminded me of falconry and what nobleness and poetry areassociated with that sport. The Merlin it seemed to me it might becalled: but I care not for its name. It was the most ethereal flight Ihad ever witnessed. It did not simply flutter like a butterfly, nor soarlike the larger hawks, but it sported with proud reliance in the fieldsof air; mounting again and again with its strange chuckle, it repeatedits free and beautiful fall, turning over and over like a kite, and thenrecovering from its lofty tumbling, as if it had never set its foot on_terra firma_. It appeared to have no companion in the universe--sportingthere alone--and to need none but the morning and the ether with whichit 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 inthe heavens? The tenant of the air, it seemed related to the earth butby an egg hatched some time in the crevice of a crag;--or was its nativenest made in the angle of a cloud, woven of the rainbow's trimmings andthe sunset sky, and lined with some soft midsummer haze caught up fromearth? Its eyry now some cliffy cloud.Beside this I got a rare mess of golden and silver and bright cupreousfishes, which looked like a string of jewels. Ah! I have penetrated tothose meadows on the morning of many a first spring day, jumping fromhummock to hummock, from willow root to willow root, when the wild rivervalley and the woods were bathed in so pure and bright a light as wouldhave waked the dead, if they had been slumbering in their graves, assome suppose. There needs no stronger proof of immortality. All thingsmust live in such a light. O Death, where was thy sting? O Grave, wherewas thy victory, then?Our village life would stagnate if it were not for the unexploredforests and meadows which surround it. We need the tonic of wildness--towade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, andhear the booming of the snipe; to smell the whispering sedge where onlysome wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawlswith its belly close to the ground. At the same time that we areearnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all thingsbe mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild,unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never haveenough of nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustiblevigor, vast and titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, thewilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder-cloud,and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We needto witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freelywhere we never wander. We are cheered when we observe the vulturefeeding on the carrion which disgusts and disheartens us, and derivinghealth and strength from the repast. There was a dead horse in thehollow by the path to my house, which compelled me sometimes to goout of my way, especially in the night when the air was heavy, but theassurance it gave me of the strong appetite and inviolable health ofNature was my compensation for this. I love to see that Nature isso rife with life that myriads can be afforded to be sacrificed andsuffered to prey on one another; that tender organizations can be soserenely squashed out of existence like pulp--tadpoles which heronsgobble up, and tortoises and toads run over in the road; and thatsometimes 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 madeon a wise man is that of universal innocence. Poison is not poisonousafter all, nor are any wounds fatal. Compassion is a very untenableground. It must be expeditious. Its pleadings will not bear to bestereotyped.Early in May, the oaks, hickories, maples, and other trees, just puttingout amidst the pine woods around the pond, imparted a brightness likesunshine to the landscape, especially in cloudy days, as if the sun werebreaking through mists and shining faintly on the hillsides here andthere. On the third or fourth of May I saw a loon in the pond, andduring the first week of the month I heard the whip-poor-will, the brownthrasher, the veery, the wood pewee, the chewink, and other birds. I hadheard the wood thrush long before. The phœbe had already come once moreand looked in at my door and window, to see if my house was cavern-likeenough for her, sustaining herself on humming wings with clinchedtalons, 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 thestones and rotten wood along the shore, so that you could have collecteda barrelful. This is the "sulphur showers" we hear of. Even in Calidas'drama of Sacontala, we read of "rills dyed yellow with the golden dustof the lotus." And so the seasons went rolling on into summer, as onerambles into higher and higher grass.Thus was my first year's life in the woods completed; and the secondyear was similar to it. I finally left Walden September 6th, 1847.ConclusionTo 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 inNew England, and the mockingbird is rarely heard here. The wild gooseis more of a cosmopolite than we; he breaks his fast in Canada, takesa luncheon in the Ohio, and plumes himself for the night in a southernbayou. Even the bison, to some extent, keeps pace with the seasonscropping the pastures of the Colorado only till a greener and sweetergrass awaits him by the Yellowstone. Yet we think that if rail fencesare pulled down, and stone walls piled up on our farms, bounds arehenceforth set to our lives and our fates decided. If you are chosentown clerk, forsooth, you cannot go to Tierra del Fuego this summer: butyou may go to the land of infernal fire nevertheless. The universe iswider than our views of it.Yet we should oftener look over the tafferel of our craft, like curiouspassengers, and not make the voyage like stupid sailors picking oakum.The other side of the globe is but the home of our correspondent. Ourvoyaging is only great-circle sailing, and the doctors prescribe fordiseases of the skin merely. One hastens to southern Africa to chase thegiraffe; but surely that is not the game he would be after. How long,pray, would a man hunt giraffes if he could? Snipes and woodco*cks alsomay afford rare sport; but I trust it would be nobler game to shootone'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 interiorwhite on the chart? black though it may prove, like the coast,when discovered. Is it the source of the Nile, or the Niger, or theMississippi, or a Northwest Passage around this continent, that we wouldfind? Are these the problems which most concern mankind? Is Franklin theonly 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 tosupport you, if they be necessary; and pile the empty cans sky-high fora sign. Were preserved meats invented to preserve meat merely? Nay, bea Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening newchannels, not of trade, but of thought. Every man is the lord of a realmbeside 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 noself-respect, and sacrifice the greater to the less. They love the soilwhich makes their graves, but have no sympathy with the spirit which maystill animate their clay. Patriotism is a maggot in their heads. Whatwas the meaning of that South-Sea Exploring Expedition, with all itsparade and expense, but an indirect recognition of the fact that thereare continents and seas in the moral world to which every man is anisthmus or an inlet, yet unexplored by him, but that it is easier tosail many thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals, in agovernment ship, with five hundred men and boys to assist one, than itis to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one'sbeing 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 inZanzibar. Yet do this even till you can do better, and you may perhapsfind some "Symmes' Hole" by which to get at the inside at last. Englandand France, Spain and Portugal, Gold Coast and Slave Coast, all fronton this private sea; but no bark from them has ventured out of sight ofland, though it is without doubt the direct way to India. If you wouldlearn to speak all tongues and conform to the customs of all nations,if you would travel farther than all travellers, be naturalized in allclimes, and cause the Sphinx to dash her head against a stone, evenobey the precept of the old philosopher, and Explore thyself. Herein aredemanded the eye and the nerve. Only the defeated and deserters go tothe wars, cowards that run away and enlist. Start now on that farthestwestern way, which does not pause at the Mississippi or the Pacific, norconduct toward a worn-out China or Japan, but leads on direct, a tangentto 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 whatdegree of resolution was necessary in order to place one's self informal opposition to the most sacred laws of society." He declared that"a soldier who fights in the ranks does not require half so much courageas a footpad"--"that honor and religion have never stood in the way of awell-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 foundhimself often enough "in formal opposition" to what are deemed "the mostsacred laws of society," through obedience to yet more sacred laws, andso have tested his resolution without going out of his way. It is notfor a man to put himself in such an attitude to society, but to maintainhimself in whatever attitude he find himself through obedience to thelaws of his being, which will never be one of opposition to a justgovernment, if he should chance to meet with such.I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemedto me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare anymore time for that one. It is remarkable how easily and insensibly wefall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves. Ihad not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door tothe pond-side; and though it is five or six years since I trod it, itis still quite distinct. It is true, I fear, that others may have falleninto it, and so helped to keep it open. The surface of the earth is softand impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mindtravels. 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 acabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of theworld, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I donot wish to go below now.I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advancesconfidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live thelife which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected incommon hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisibleboundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establishthemselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, andinterpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live withthe license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifieshis life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, andsolitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weaknessweakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not belost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.It is a ridiculous demand which England and America make, that you shallspeak so that they can understand you. Neither men nor toadstools growso. As if that were important, and there were not enough to understandyou without them. As if Nature could support but one order ofunderstandings, could not sustain birds as well as quadrupeds, flying aswell as creeping things, and _hush_ and _whoa_, which Bright canunderstand, were the best English. As if there were safety in stupidityalone. I fear chiefly lest my expression may not be _extra-vagant_enough, may not wander far enough beyond the narrow limits of my dailyexperience, so as to be adequate to the truth of which I have beenconvinced. _Extra vagance!_ it depends on how you are yarded. Themigrating buffalo, which seeks new pastures in another latitude, is notextravagant like the cow which kicks over the pail, leaps the cowyardfence, and runs after her calf, in milking time. I desire to speaksomewhere _without_ bounds; like a man in a waking moment, to men intheir waking moments; for I am convinced that I cannot exaggerate enougheven to lay the foundation of a true expression. Who that has heard astrain of music feared then lest he should speak extravagantly any moreforever? In view of the future or possible, we should live quite laxlyand undefined in front, our outlines dim and misty on that side; as ourshadows reveal an insensible perspiration toward the sun. The volatiletruth of our words should continually betray the inadequacy of theresidual statement. Their truth is instantly _translated_; its literalmonument alone remains. The words which express our faith and piety arenot definite; yet they are significant and fragrant like frankincense tosuperior natures.Why level downward to our dullest perception always, and praise that ascommon sense? The commonest sense is the sense of men asleep, which theyexpress by snoring. Sometimes we are inclined to class those who areonce-and-a-half-witted with the half-witted, because we appreciate onlya 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 theverses of Kabir have four different senses; illusion, spirit, intellect,and the exoteric doctrine of the Vedas"; but in this part of the worldit is considered a ground for complaint if a man's writings admitof more than one interpretation. While England endeavors to cure thepotato-rot, will not any endeavor to cure the brain-rot, which prevailsso much more widely and fatally?I do not suppose that I have attained to obscurity, but I should beproud if no more fatal fault were found with my pages on this score thanwas found with the Walden ice. Southern customers objected to its bluecolor, which is the evidence of its purity, as if it were muddy, andpreferred the Cambridge ice, which is white, but tastes of weeds. Thepurity men love is like the mists which envelop the earth, and not likethe azure ether beyond.Some are dinning in our ears that we Americans, and moderns generally,are intellectual dwarfs compared with the ancients, or even theElizabethan men. But what is that to the purpose? A living dog is betterthan a dead lion. Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs tothe race of pygmies, and not be the biggest pygmy that he can? Let everyone mind his own business, and endeavor to be what he was made.Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in suchdesperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions,perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to themusic which he hears, however measured or far away. It is not importantthat he should mature as soon as an apple tree or an oak. Shall he turnhis spring into summer? If the condition of things which we were madefor is not yet, what were any reality which we can substitute? We willnot be shipwrecked on a vain reality. Shall we with pains erect a heavenof blue glass over ourselves, though when it is done we shall be sure togaze still at the true ethereal heaven far above, as if the former werenot?There was an artist in the city of Kouroo who was disposed to striveafter perfection. One day it came into his mind to make a staff. Havingconsidered that in an imperfect work time is an ingredient, but intoa perfect work time does not enter, he said to himself, It shall beperfect in all respects, though I should do nothing else in my life.He proceeded instantly to the forest for wood, being resolved that itshould not be made of unsuitable material; and as he searched for andrejected stick after stick, his friends gradually deserted him, for theygrew old in their works and died, but he grew not older by a moment. Hissingleness of purpose and resolution, and his elevated piety, endowedhim, without his knowledge, with perennial youth. As he made nocompromise with Time, Time kept out of his way, and only sighed at adistance because he could not overcome him. Before he had found a stockin all respects suitable the city of Kouroo was a hoary ruin, and hesat on one of its mounds to peel the stick. Before he had given it theproper shape the dynasty of the Candahars was at an end, and with thepoint of the stick he wrote the name of the last of that race inthe sand, and then resumed his work. By the time he had smoothed andpolished the staff Kalpa was no longer the pole-star; and ere he hadput on the ferule and the head adorned with precious stones, Brahmahad awoke and slumbered many times. But why do I stay to mention thesethings? When the finishing stroke was put to his work, it suddenlyexpanded before the eyes of the astonished artist into the fairest ofall 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 citiesand dynasties had passed away, fairer and more glorious ones had takentheir places. And now he saw by the heap of shavings still fresh at hisfeet, that, for him and his work, the former lapse of time had beenan illusion, and that no more time had elapsed than is required for asingle scintillation from the brain of Brahma to fall on and inflame thetinder 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 asthe truth. This alone wears well. For the most part, we are not wherewe are, but in a false position. Through an infinity of our natures, wesuppose a case, and put ourselves into it, and hence are in two cases atthe same time, and it is doubly difficult to get out. In sane moments weregard only the facts, the case that is. Say what you have to say, notwhat you ought. Any truth is better than make-believe. Tom Hyde, thetinker, 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 threadbefore 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 callit hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when youare richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Loveyour life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling,glorious hours, even in a poorhouse. The setting sun is reflected fromthe 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 seebut a quiet mind may live as contentedly there, and have as cheeringthoughts, as in a palace. The town's poor seem to me often to live themost independent lives of any. Maybe they are simply great enoughto receive without misgiving. Most think that they are above beingsupported by the town; but it oftener happens that they are notabove supporting themselves by dishonest means, which should be moredisreputable. Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do nottrouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends.Turn the old; return to them. Things do not change; we change. Sellyour clothes and keep your thoughts. God will see that you do not wantsociety. If I were confined to a corner of a garret all my days, like aspider, the world would be just as large to me while I had my thoughtsabout me. The philosopher said: "From an army of three divisions onecan take away its general, and put it in disorder; from the man themost abject and vulgar one cannot take away his thought." Do not seek soanxiously to be developed, to subject yourself to many influences tobe played on; it is all dissipation. Humility like darkness reveals theheavenly lights. The shadows of poverty and meanness gather around us,"and lo! creation widens to our view." We are often reminded that ifthere were bestowed on us the wealth of Croesus, our aims must stillbe the same, and our means essentially the same. Moreover, if youare restricted in your range by poverty, if you cannot buy books andnewspapers, for instance, you are but confined to the most significantand vital experiences; you are compelled to deal with the material whichyields the most sugar and the most starch. It is life near the bonewhere it is sweetest. You are defended from being a trifler. No manloses ever on a lower level by magnanimity on a higher. Superfluouswealth can buy superfluities only. Money is not required to buy onenecessary of the soul.I live in the angle of a leaden wall, into whose composition was poureda little alloy of bell-metal. Often, in the repose of my mid-day, therereaches my ears a confused tintinnabulum from without. It is the noiseof my contemporaries. My neighbors tell me of their adventureswith famous gentlemen and ladies, what notabilities they met at thedinner-table; but I am no more interested in such things than in thecontents of the Daily Times. The interest and the conversation are aboutcostume and manners chiefly; but a goose is a goose still, dress itas you will. They tell me of California and Texas, of England and theIndies, of the Hon. Mr.----of Georgia or of Massachusetts, all transientand fleeting phenomena, till I am ready to leap from their court-yardlike the Mameluke bey. I delight to come to my bearings--not walk inprocession with pomp and parade, in a conspicuous place, but to walkeven with the Builder of the universe, if I may--not to live in thisrestless, nervous, bustling, trivial Nineteenth Century, but stand orsit thoughtfully while it goes by. What are men celebrating? They areall on a committee of arrangements, and hourly expect a speech fromsomebody. God is only the president of the day, and Webster is hisorator. I love to weigh, to settle, to gravitate toward that which moststrongly and rightfully attracts me--not hang by the beam of the scaleand try to weigh less--not suppose a case, but take the case that is; totravel the only path I can, and that on which no power can resist me. Itaffords me no satisfaction to commence to spring an arch before I havegot a solid foundation. Let us not play at kittly-benders. There is asolid bottom everywhere. We read that the traveller asked the boy ifthe 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, andhe observed to the boy, "I thought you said that this bog had a hardbottom." "So it has," answered the latter, "but you have not got halfway to it yet." So it is with the bogs and quicksands of society; buthe is an old boy that knows it. Only what is thought, said, or done ata certain rare coincidence is good. I would not be one of those who willfoolishly drive a nail into mere lath and plastering; such a deed wouldkeep me awake nights. Give me a hammer, and let me feel for thefurring. Do not depend on the putty. Drive a nail home and clinch it sofaithfully that you can wake up in the night and think of your work withsatisfaction--a work at which you would not be ashamed to invoke theMuse. So will help you God, and so only. Every nail driven should be asanother 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 tablewhere were rich food and wine in abundance, and obsequious attendance,but sincerity and truth were not; and I went away hungry from theinhospitable board. The hospitality was as cold as the ices. I thoughtthat there was no need of ice to freeze them. They talked to me of theage 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 hadnot got, and could not buy. The style, the house and grounds and"entertainment" pass for nothing with me. I called on the king, but hemade me wait in his hall, and conducted like a man incapacitated forhospitality. There was a man in my neighborhood who lived in a hollowtree. His manners were truly regal. I should have done better had Icalled on him.How long shall we sit in our porticoes practising idle and mustyvirtues, which any work would make impertinent? As if one were to beginthe day with long-suffering, and hire a man to hoe his potatoes; and inthe afternoon go forth to practise Christian meekness and charitywith goodness aforethought! Consider the China pride and stagnantself-complacency of mankind. This generation inclines a little tocongratulate itself on being the last of an illustrious line; and inBoston and London and Paris and Rome, thinking of its long descent,it speaks of its progress in art and science and literature withsatisfaction. There are the Records of the Philosophical Societies, andthe public Eulogies of Great Men! It is the good Adam contemplating hisown virtue. "Yes, we have done great deeds, and sung divine songs, whichshall never die"--that is, as long as we can remember them. The learnedsocieties and great men of Assyria--where are they? What youthfulphilosophers and experimentalists we are! There is not one of my readerswho has yet lived a whole human life. These may be but the spring monthsin the life of the race. If we have had the seven-years' itch, we havenot seen the seventeen-year locust yet in Concord. We are acquaintedwith a mere pellicle of the globe on which we live. Most have not delvedsix feet beneath the surface, nor leaped as many above it. We know notwhere we are. Beside, we are sound asleep nearly half our time. Yet weesteem ourselves wise, and have an established order on the surface.Truly, we are deep thinkers, we are ambitious spirits! As I stand overthe insect crawling amid the pine needles on the forest floor, andendeavoring to conceal itself from my sight, and ask myself why it willcherish those humble thoughts, and bide its head from me who might,perhaps, be its benefactor, and impart to its race some cheeringinformation, I am reminded of the greater Benefactor and Intelligencethat stands over me the human insect.There is an incessant influx of novelty into the world, and yet wetolerate incredible dulness. I need only suggest what kind of sermonsare still listened to in the most enlightened countries. There are suchwords as joy and sorrow, but they are only the burden of a psalm, sungwith a nasal twang, while we believe in the ordinary and mean. We thinkthat we can change our clothes only. It is said that the BritishEmpire is very large and respectable, and that the United States are afirst-rate power. We do not believe that a tide rises and falls behindevery man which can float the British Empire like a chip, if he shouldever harbor it in his mind. Who knows what sort of seventeen-year locustwill next come out of the ground? The government of the world I live inwas not framed, like that of Britain, in after-dinner conversations overthe wine.The life in us is like the water in the river. It may rise this yearhigher than man has ever known it, and flood the parched uplands; eventhis may be the eventful year, which will drown out all our muskrats. Itwas not always dry land where we dwell. I see far inland the bankswhich the stream anciently washed, before science began to record itsfreshets. Every one has heard the story which has gone the rounds of NewEngland, of a strong and beautiful bug which came out of the dry leaf ofan old table of apple-tree wood, which had stood in a farmer'skitchen for sixty years, first in Connecticut, and afterward inMassachusetts--from an egg deposited in the living tree many yearsearlier still, as appeared by counting the annual layers beyond it;which was heard gnawing out for several weeks, hatched perchance bythe heat of an urn. Who does not feel his faith in a resurrection andimmortality strengthened by hearing of this? Who knows what beautifuland winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under manyconcentric layers of woodenness in the dead dry life of society,deposited at first in the alburnum of the green and living tree, whichhas been gradually converted into the semblance of its well-seasonedtomb--heard perchance gnawing out now for years by the astonished familyof man, as they sat round the festive board--may unexpectedly come forthfrom amidst society's most trivial and handselled furniture, to enjoyits perfect summer life at last!I do not say that John or Jonathan will realize all this; but such isthe character of that morrow which mere lapse of time can never make todawn. The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that daydawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but amorning star.

Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817 – May 6, 1862) was an American essayist, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, and historian. A leading transcendentalist, Thoreau is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay “Civil Disobedience” (originally published as “Resistance to Civil Government”), an argument for disobedience to an unjust state.

Thoreau’s books, articles, essays, journals, and poetry amount to more than 20 volumes. Among his lasting contributions are his writings on natural history and philosophy, in which he anticipated the methods and findings of ecology and environmental history, two sources of modern-day environmentalism. His literary style interweaves close observation of nature, personal experience, pointed rhetoric, symbolic meanings, and historical lore, while displaying a poetic sensibility, philosophical austerity, and Yankee attention to practical detail. He was also deeply interested in the idea of survival in the face of hostile elements, historical change, and natural decay; at the same time he advocated abandoning waste and illusion in order to discover life’s true essential needs.