WALDEN, or Life in the Woods
by Henry David Thoreau, 1854
ECONOMY:
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WHEN I WROTE the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I
lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which
I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord,
Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only. I
lived there two years and two months. At present I am a sojourner in
civilized life again.
I should not obtrude my affairs so much on the notice of my
readers if very particular inquiries had not been made by my townsmen
concerning my mode of life, which some would call impertinent, though
they do not appear to me at all impertinent, but, considering the
circumstances, very natural and pertinent. Some have asked what I got
to eat; if I did not feel lonesome; if I was not afraid; and the like.
Others have been curious to learn what portion of my income I devoted
to charitable purposes; and some, who have large families, how many
poor children I maintained. I will therefore ask those of my readers
who feel no particular interest in me to pardon me if I undertake to
answer some of these questions in this book. In most books, the I, or
first person, is omitted; in this it will be retained; that, in
respect to egotism, is the main difference. We commonly do not
remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is
speaking. I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody
else whom I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme
by the narrowness of my experience. Moreover, I, on my side, require
of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his
own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men's lives; some
such account as he would send to his kindred from a distant land; for
if he has lived sincerely, it must have been in a distant land to me.
Perhaps these pages are more particularly addressed to poor students.
As for the rest of my readers, they will accept such portions as apply
to them. I trust that none will stretch the seams in putting on the
coat, for it may do good service to him whom it fits.
I would fain say something, not so much concerning the Chinese and
Sandwich Islanders as you who read these pages, who are said to live
in New England; something about your condition, especially your
outward condition or circumstances in this world, in this town, what
it is, whether it is necessary that it be as bad as it is, whether it
cannot be improved as well as not. I have travelled a good deal in
Concord; and everywhere, in shops, and offices, and fields, the
inhabitants have appeared to me to be doing penance in a thousand
remarkable ways. What I have heard of Bramins sitting exposed to four
fires and looking in the face of the sun; or hanging suspended, with
their heads downward, over flames; or looking at the heavens over
their shoulders "until it becomes impossible for them to resume their
natural position, while from the twist of the neck nothing but liquids
can pass into the stomach"; or dwelling, chained for life, at the foot
of a tree; or measuring with their bodies, like caterpillars, the
breadth of vast empires; or standing on one leg on the tops of
pillars- even these forms of conscious penance are hardly more
incredible and astonishing than the scenes which I daily witness. The
twelve labors of Hercules were trifling in comparison with those which
my neighbors have undertaken; for they were only twelve, and had an
end; but I could never see that these men slew or captured any monster
or finished any labor. They have no friend Iolaus to burn with a hot
iron the root of the hydra's head, but as soon as one head is crushed,
two spring up.
I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have
inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these
are more easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born
in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen
with clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in. Who made
them serfs of the soil? Why should they eat their sixty acres, when
man is condemned to eat only his peck of dirt? Why should they begin
digging their graves as soon as they are born? They have got to live a
man's life, pushing all these things before them, and get on as well
as they can. How many a poor immortal soul have I met well-nigh
crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life,
pushing before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean
stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage,
mowing, pasture, and woodlot! The portionless, who struggle with no
such unnecessary inherited encumbrances, find it labor enough to
subdue and cultivate a few cubic feet of flesh.
But men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon
plowed into the soil for compost. By a seeming fate, commonly called
necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up
treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through
and steal. It is a fool's life, as they will find when they get to the
end of it, if not before. It is said that Deucalion and Pyrrha created
men by throwing stones over their heads behind them:
Inde genus durum sumus, experiensque laborum,
Et documenta damus qua simus origine nati.
Or, as Raleigh rhymes it in his sonorous way,
"From thence our kind hard-hearted is, enduring pain and care,
Approving that our bodies of a stony nature are."
So much for a blind obedience to a blundering oracle, throwing the
stones over their heads behind them, and not seeing where they fell.
Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere
ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and
superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be
plucked by them. Their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy
and tremble too much for that. Actually, the laboring man has not
leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain
the manliest relations to men; his labor would be depreciated in the
market. He has no time to be anything but a machine. How can he
remember well his ignorance- which his growth requires- who has so
often to use his knowledge? We should feed and clothe him gratuitously
sometimes, and recruit him with our cordials, before we judge of him.
The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be
preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat
ourselves nor one another thus tenderly.
Some of you, we all know, are poor, find it hard to live, are
sometimes, as it were, gasping for breath. I have no doubt that some
of you who read this book are unable to pay for all the dinners which
you have actually eaten, or for the coats and shoes which are fast
wearing or are already worn out, and have come to this page to spend
borrowed or stolen time, robbing your creditors of an hour. It is very
evident what mean and sneaking lives many of you live, for my sight
has been whetted by experience; always on the limits, trying to get
into business and trying to get out of debt, a very ancient slough,
called by the Latins aes alienum, another's brass, for some of their
coins were made of brass; still living, and dying, and buried by this
other's brass; always promising to pay, promising to pay, tomorrow,
and dying today, insolvent; seeking to curry favor, to get custom, by
how many modes, only not state-prison offences; lying, flattering,
voting, contracting yourselves into a nutshell of civility or dilating
into an atmosphere of thin and vaporous generosity, that you may
persuade your neighbor to let you make his shoes, or his hat, or his
coat, or his carriage, or import his groceries for him; making
yourselves sick, that you may lay up something against a sick day,
something to be tucked away in an old chest, or in a stocking behind
the plastering, or, more safely, in the brick bank; no matter where,
no matter how much or how little.
I sometimes wonder that we can be so frivolous, I may almost say, as
to attend to the gross but somewhat foreign form of servitude called
Negro Slavery, there are so many keen and subtle masters that enslave
both North and South. It is hard to have a Southern overseer; it is
worse to have a Northern one; but worst of all when you are the
slave-driver of yourself. Talk of a divinity in man! Look at the
teamster on the highway, wending to market by day or night; does any
divinity stir within him? His highest duty to fodder and water his
horses! What is his destiny to him compared with the shipping
interests? Does not he drive for Squire Make-a-stir? How godlike, how
immortal, is he? See how he cowers and sneaks, how vaguely all the day
he fears, not being immortal nor divine, but the slave and prisoner of
his own opinion of himself, a fame won by his own deeds. Public
opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a
man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather
indicates, his fate. Self-emancipation even in the West Indian
provinces of the fancy and imagination- what Wilberforce is there to
bring that about? Think, also, of the ladies of the land weaving
toilet cushions against the last day, not to betray too green an
interest in their fates! As if you could kill time without injuring
eternity.
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called
resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go
into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the
bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair
is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of
mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it
is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.
When we consider what, to use the words of the catechism, is the
chief end of man, and what are the true necessaries and means of life,
it appears as if men had deliberately chosen the common mode of living
because they preferred it to any other. Yet they honestly think there
is no choice left. But alert and healthy natures remember that the sun
rose clear. It is never too late to give up our prejudices. No way of
thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof. What
everybody echoes or in silence passes by as true today may turn out to
be falsehood tomorrow, mere smoke of opinion, which some had trusted
for a cloud that would sprinkle fertilizing rain on their fields. What
old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can. Old deeds
for old people, and new deeds for new. Old people did not know enough
once, perchance, to fetch fresh fuel to keep the fire a-going; new
people put a little dry wood under a pot, and are whirled round the
globe with the speed of birds, in a way to kill old people, as the
phrase is. Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an
instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost.
One may almost doubt if the wisest man has learned anything of
absolute value by living. Practically, the old have no very important
advice to give the young, their own experience has been so partial,
and their lives have been such miserable failures, for private
reasons, as they must believe; and it may be that they have some faith
left which belies that experience, and they are only less young than
they were. I have lived some thirty years on this planet, and I have
yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from
my seniors. They have told me nothing, and probably cannot tell me
anything to the purpose. Here is life, an experiment to a great extent
untried by me; but it does not avail me that they have tried it. If I
have any experience which I think valuable, I am sure to reflect that
this my Mentors said nothing about.
One farmer says to me, "You cannot live on vegetable food solely,
for it furnishes nothing to make bones with"; and so he religiously
devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw
material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen,
which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow
along in spite of every obstacle. Some things are really necessaries
of life in some circles, the most helpless and diseased, which in
others are luxuries merely, and in others still are entirely unknown.
The whole ground of human life seems to some to have been gone
over by their predecessors, both the heights and the valleys, and all
things to have been cared for. According to Evelyn, "the wise Solomon
prescribed ordinances for the very distances of trees; and the Roman
praetors have decided how often you may go into your neighbor's land
to gather the acorns which fall on it without trespass, and what share
belongs to that neighbor." Hippocrates has even left directions how we
should cut our nails; that is, even with the ends of the fingers,
neither shorter nor longer. Undoubtedly the very tedium and ennui
which presume to have exhausted the variety and the joys of life are
as old as Adam. But man's capacities have never been measured; nor are
we to judge of what he can do by any precedents, so little has been
tried. Whatever have been thy failures hitherto, "be not afflicted, my
child, for who shall assign to thee what thou hast left undone?"
We might try our lives by a thousand simple tests; as, for instance,
that the same sun which ripens my beans illumines at once a system of
earths like ours. If I had remembered this it would have prevented
some mistakes. This was not the light in which I hoed them. The stars
are the apexes of what wonderful triangles! What distant and different
beings in the various mansions of the universe are contemplating the
same one at the same moment! Nature and human life are as various as
our several constitutions. Who shall say what prospect life offers to
another? Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look
through each other's eyes for an instant? We should live in all the
ages of the world in an hour; ay, in all the worlds of the ages.
History, Poetry, Mythology!- I know of no reading of another's
experience so startling and informing as this would be.
The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul
to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my
good behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well? You may
say the wisest thing you can, old man- you who have lived seventy
years, not without honor of a kind- I hear an irresistible voice which
invites me away from all that. One generation abandons the enterprises
of another like stranded vessels.
I think that we may safely trust a good deal more than we do. We may
waive just so much care of ourselves as we honestly bestow elsewhere.
Nature is as well adapted to our weakness as to our strength. The
incessant anxiety and strain of some is a well-nigh incurable form of
disease. We are made to exaggerate the importance of what work we do;
and yet how much is not done by us! or, what if we had been taken
sick? How vigilant we are! determined not to live by faith if we can
avoid it; all the day long on the alert, at night we unwillingly say
our prayers and commit ourselves to uncertainties. So thoroughly and
sincerely are we compelled to live, reverencing our life, and denying
the possibility of change. This is the only way, we say; but there are
as many ways as there can be drawn radii from one centre. All change
is a miracle to contemplate; but it is a miracle which is taking place
every instant. Confucius said, "To know that we know what we know, and
that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge." When
one man has reduced a fact of the imagination to be a fact to his
understanding, I foresee that all men at length establish their lives
on that basis.
Let us consider for a moment what most of the trouble and anxiety
which I have referred to is about, and how much it is necessary that
we be troubled, or at least careful. It would be some advantage to
live a primitive and frontier life, though in the midst of an outward
civilization, if only to learn what are the gross necessaries of life
and what methods have been taken to obtain them; or even to look over
the old day-books of the merchants, to see what it was that men most
commonly bought at the stores, what they stored, that is, what are the
grossest groceries. For the improvements of ages have had but little
influence on the essential laws of man's existence: as our skeletons,
probably, are not to be distinguished from those of our ancestors.
By the words, necessary of life, I mean whatever, of all that man
obtains by his own exertions, has been from the first, or from long
use has become, so important to human life that few, if any, whether
from savageness, or poverty, or philosophy, ever attempt to do without
it. To many creatures there is in this sense but one necessary of
life, Food. To the bison of the prairie it is a few inches of
palatable grass, with water to drink; unless he seeks the Shelter of
the forest or the mountain's shadow. None of the brute creation
requires more than Food and Shelter. The necessaries of life for man
in this climate may, accurately enough, be distributed under the
several heads of Food, Shelter, Clothing, and Fuel; for not till we
have secured these are we prepared to entertain the true problems of
life with freedom and a prospect of success. Man has invented, not
only houses, but clothes and cooked food; and possibly from the
accidental discovery of the warmth of fire, and the consequent use of
it, at first a luxury, arose the present necessity to sit by it. We
observe cats and dogs acquiring the same second nature. By proper
Shelter and Clothing we legitimately retain our own internal heat; but
with an excess of these, or of Fuel, that is, with an external heat
greater than our own internal, may not cookery properly be said to
begin? Darwin, the naturalist, says of the inhabitants of Tierra del
Fuego, that while his own party, who were well clothed and sitting
close to a fire, were far from too warm, these naked savages, who were
farther off, were observed, to his great surprise, "to be streaming
with perspiration at undergoing such a roasting." So, we are told, the
New Hollander goes naked with impunity, while the European shivers in
his clothes. Is it impossible to combine the hardiness of these
savages with the intellectualness of the civilized man? According to
Liebig, man's body is a stove, and food the fuel which keeps up the
internal combustion in the lungs. In cold weather we eat more, in warm
less. The animal heat is the result of a slow combustion, and disease
and death take place when this is too rapid; or for want of fuel, or
from some defect in the draught, the fire goes out. Of course the
vital heat is not to be confounded with fire; but so much for analogy.
It appears, therefore, from the above list, that the expression,
animal life, is nearly synonymous with the expression, animal heat;
for while Food may be regarded as the Fuel which keeps up the fire
within us- and Fuel serves only to prepare that Food or to increase
the warmth of our bodies by addition from without- Shelter and
Clothing also serve only to retain the heat thus generated and
absorbed.
The grand necessity, then, for our bodies, is to keep warm, to
keep the vital heat in us. What pains we accordingly take, not only
with our Food, and Clothing, and Shelter, but with our beds, which are
our night-clothes, robbing the nests and breasts of birds to prepare
this shelter within a shelter, as the mole has its bed of grass and
leaves at the end of its burrow! The poor man is wont to complain that
this is a cold world; and to cold, no less physical than social, we
refer directly a great part of our ails. The summer, in some climates,
makes possible to man a sort of Elysian life. Fuel, except to cook his
Food, is then unnecessary; the sun is his fire, and many of the fruits
are sufficiently cooked by its rays; while Food generally is more
various, and more easily obtained, and Clothing and Shelter are wholly
or half unnecessary. At the present day, and in this country, as I
find by my own experience, a few implements, a knife, an axe, a spade,
a wheelbarrow, etc., and for the studious, lamplight, stationery, and
access to a few books, rank next to necessaries, and can all be
obtained at a trifling cost. Yet some, not wise, go to the other side
of the globe, to barbarous and unhealthy regions, and devote
themselves to trade for ten or twenty years, in order that they may
live- that is, keep comfortably warm- and die in New England at last.
The luxuriously rich are not simply kept comfortably warm, but
unnaturally hot; as I implied before, they are cooked, of course a la
mode.
Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life,
are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the
elevation of mankind. With respect to luxuries and comforts, the
wisest have ever lived a more simple and meagre life than the poor.
The ancient philosophers, Chinese, Hindoo, Persian, and Greek, were a
class than which none has been poorer in outward riches, none so rich
in inward. We know not much about them. It is remarkable that we know
so much of them as we do. The same is true of the more modern
reformers and benefactors of their race. None can be an impartial or
wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what we
should call voluntary poverty. Of a life of luxury the fruit is
luxury, whether in agriculture, or commerce, or literature, or art.
There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet
it is admirable to profess because it was once admirable to live. To
be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to
found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its
dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust.
It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically,
but practically. The success of great scholars and thinkers is
commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly. They make
shift to live merely by conformity, practically as their fathers did,
and are in no sense the progenitors of a noble race of men. But why do
men degenerate ever? What makes families run out? What is the nature
of the luxury which enervates and destroys nations? Are we sure that
there is none of it in our own lives? The philosopher is in advance of
his age even in the outward form of his life. He is not fed,
sheltered, clothed, warmed, like his contemporaries. How can a man be
a philosopher and not maintain his vital heat by better methods than
other men?
When a man is warmed by the several modes which I have described,
what does he want next? Surely not more warmth of the same kind, as
more and richer food, larger and more splendid houses, finer and more
abundant clothing, more numerous, incessant, and hotter fires, and the
like. When he has obtained those things which are necessary to life,
there is another alternative than to obtain the superfluities; and
that is, to adventure on life now, his vacation from humbler toil
having commenced. The soil, it appears, is suited to the seed, for it
has sent its radicle downward, and it may now send its shoot upward
also with confidence. Why has man rooted himself thus firmly in the
earth, but that he may rise in the same proportion into the heavens
above?- for the nobler plants are valued for the fruit they bear at
last in the air and light, far from the ground, and are not treated
like the humbler esculents, which, though they may be biennials, are
cultivated only till they have perfected their root, and often cut
down at top for this purpose, so that most would not know them in
their flowering season.
I do not mean to prescribe rules to strong and valiant natures,
who will mind their own affairs whether in heaven or hell, and
perchance build more magnificently and spend more lavishly than the
richest, without ever impoverishing themselves, not knowing how they
live- if, indeed, there are any such, as has been dreamed; nor to
those who find their encouragement and inspiration in precisely the
present condition of things, and cherish it with the fondness and
enthusiasm of lovers- and, to some extent, I reckon myself in this
number; I do not speak to those who are well employed, in whatever
circumstances, and they know whether they are well employed or not;-
but mainly to the mass of men who are discontented, and idly
complaining of the hardness of their lot or of the times, when they
might improve them. There are some who complain most energetically and
inconsolably of any, because they are, as they say, doing their duty.
I also have in my mind that seemingly wealthy, but most terribly
impoverished class of all, who have accumulated dross, but know not
how to use it, or get rid of it, and thus have forged their own golden
or silver fetters.
If I should attempt to tell how I have desired to spend my life in
years past, it would probably surprise those of my readers who are
somewhat acquainted with its actual history; it would certainly
astonish those who know nothing about it. I will only hint at some of
the enterprises which I have cherished.
In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious
to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on
the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely
the present moment; to toe that line. You will pardon some
obscurities, for there are more secrets in my trade than in most
men's, and yet not voluntarily kept, but inseparable from its very
nature. I would gladly tell all that I know about it, and never paint
"No Admittance" on my gate.
I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove, and am
still on their trail. Many are the travellers I have spoken concerning
them, describing their tracks and what calls they answered to. I have
met one or two who had heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse,
and even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud, and they seemed as
anxious to recover them as if they had lost them themselves.
To anticipate, not the sunrise and the dawn merely, but, if
possible, Nature herself! How many mornings, summer and winter, before
yet any neighbor was stirring about his business, have I been about
mine! No doubt, many of my townsmen have met me returning from this
enterprise, farmers starting for Boston in the twilight, or
woodchoppers going to their work. It is true, I never assisted the sun
materially in his rising, but, doubt not, it was of the last
importance only to be present at it.
So many autumn, ay, and winter days, spent outside the town,
trying to hear what was in the wind, to hear and carry it express! I
well-nigh sunk all my capital in it, and lost my own breath into the
bargain, running in the face of it. If it had concerned either of the
political parties, depend upon it, it would have appeared in the
Gazette with the earliest intelligence. At other times watching from
the observatory of some cliff or tree, to telegraph any new arrival;
or waiting at evening on the hill-tops for the sky to fall, that I
might catch something, though I never caught much, and that,
manna-wise, would dissolve again in the sun.
For a long time I was reporter to a journal, of no very wide
circulation, whose editor has never yet seen fit to print the bulk of
my contributions, and, as is too common with writers, I got only my
labor for my pains. However, in this case my pains were their own
reward.
For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snow-storms and
rain-storms, and did my duty faithfully; surveyor, if not of highways,
then of forest paths and all across- lot routes, keeping them open,
and ravines bridged and passable at all seasons, where the public heel
had testified to their utility.
I have looked after the wild stock of the town, which give a
faithful herdsman a good deal of trouble by leaping fences; and I have
had an eye to the unfrequented nooks and corners of the farm; though I
did not always know whether Jonas or Solomon worked in a particular
field today; that was none of my business. I have watered the red
huckleberry, the sand cherry and the nettle-tree, the red pine and the
black ash, the white grape and the yellow violet, which might have
withered else in dry seasons.
In short, I went on thus for a long time (I may say it without
boasting), faithfully minding my business, till it became more and
more evident that my townsmen would not after all admit me into the
list of town officers, nor make my place a sinecure with a moderate
allowance. My accounts, which I can swear to have kept faithfully, I
have, indeed, never got audited, still less accepted, still less paid
and settled. However, I have not set my heart on that.
Not long since, a strolling Indian went to sell baskets at the house
of a well-known lawyer in my neighborhood. "Do you wish to buy any
baskets?" he asked. "No, we do not want any," was the reply. "What!"
exclaimed the Indian as he went out the gate, "do you mean to starve
us?" Having seen his industrious white neighbors so well off- that the
lawyer had only to weave arguments, and, by some magic, wealth and
standing followed- he had said to himself: I will go into business; I
will weave baskets; it is a thing which I can do. Thinking that when
he had made the baskets he would have done his part, and then it would
be the white man's to buy them. He had not discovered that it was
necessary for him to make it worth the other's while to buy them, or
at least make him think that it was so, or to make something else
which it would be worth his while to buy. I too had woven a kind of
basket of a delicate texture, but I had not made it worth any one's
while to buy them. Yet not the less, in my case, did I think it worth
my while to weave them, and instead of studying how to make it worth
men's while to buy my baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the
necessity of selling them. The life which men praise and regard as
successful is but one kind. Why should we exaggerate any one kind at
the expense of the others?
Finding that my fellow-citizens were not likely to offer me any room
in the court house, or any curacy or living anywhere else, but I must
shift for myself, I turned my face more exclusively than ever to the
woods, where I was better known. I determined to go into business at
once, and not wait to acquire the usual capital, using such slender
means as I had already got. My purpose in going to Walden Pond was not
to live cheaply nor to live dearly there, but to transact some private
business with the fewest obstacles; to be hindered from accomplishing
which for want of a little common sense, a little enterprise and
business talent, appeared not so sad as foolish.
I have always endeavored to acquire strict business habits; they are
indispensable to every man. If your trade is with the Celestial
Empire, then some small counting house on the coast, in some Salem
harbor, will be fixture enough. You will export such articles as the
country affords, purely native products, much ice and pine timber and
a little granite, always in native bottoms. These will be good
ventures. To oversee all the details yourself in person; to be at once
pilot and captain, and owner and underwriter; to buy and sell and keep
the accounts; to read every letter received, and write or read every
letter sent; to superintend the discharge of imports night and day; to
be upon many parts of the coast almost at the same time- often the
richest freight will be discharged upon a Jersey shore;- to be your
own telegraph, unweariedly sweeping the horizon, speaking all passing
vessels bound coastwise; to keep up a steady despatch of commodities,
for the supply of such a distant and exorbitant market; to keep
yourself informed of the state of the markets, prospects of war and
peace everywhere, and anticipate the tendencies of trade and
civilization- taking advantage of the results of all exploring
expeditions, using new passages and all improvements in navigation;-
charts to be studied, the position of reefs and new lights and buoys
to be ascertained, and ever, and ever, the logarithmic tables to be
corrected, for by the error of some calculator the vessel often splits
upon a rock that should have reached a friendly pier- there is the
untold fate of La Perouse;- universal science to be kept pace with,
studying the lives of all great discoverers and navigators, great
adventurers and merchants, from Hanno and the Phoenicians down to our
day; in fine, account of stock to be taken from time to time, to know
how you stand. It is a labor to task the faculties of a man- such
problems of profit and loss, of interest, of tare and tret, and
gauging of all kinds in it, as demand a universal knowledge.
I have thought that Walden Pond would be a good place for
business, not solely on account of the railroad and the ice trade; it
offers advantages which it may not be good policy to divulge; it is a
good port and a good foundation. No Neva marshes to be filled; though
you must everywhere build on piles of your own driving. It is said
that a flood-tide, with a westerly wind, and ice in the Neva, would
sweep St. Petersburg from the face of the earth.
As this business was to be entered into without the usual capital,
it may not be easy to conjecture where those means, that will still be
indispensable to every such undertaking, were to be obtained. As for
Clothing, to come at once to the practical part of the question,
perhaps we are led oftener by the love of novelty and a regard for the
opinions of men, in procuring it, than by a true utility. Let him who
has work to do recollect that the object of clothing is, first, to
retain the vital heat, and secondly, in this state of society, to
cover nakedness, and he may judge how much of any necessary or
important work may be accomplished without adding to his wardrobe.
Kings and queens who wear a suit but once, though made by some tailor
or dressmaker to their majesties, cannot know the comfort of wearing a
suit that fits. They are no better than wooden horses to hang the
clean clothes on. Every day our garments become more assimilated to
ourselves, receiving the impress of the wearer's character, until we
hesitate to lay them aside without such delay and medical appliances
and some such solemnity even as our bodies. No man ever stood the
lower in my estimation for having a patch in his clothes; yet I am
sure that there is greater anxiety, commonly, to have fashionable, or
at least clean and unpatched clothes, than to have a sound conscience.
But even if the rent is not mended, perhaps the worst vice betrayed is
improvidence. I sometimes try my acquaintances by such tests as this-
Who could wear a patch, or two extra seams only, over the knee? Most
behave as if they believed that their prospects for life would be
ruined if they should do it. It would be easier for them to hobble to
town with a broken leg than with a broken pantaloon. Often if an
accident happens to a gentleman's legs, they can be mended; but if a
similar accident happens to the legs of his pantaloons, there is no
help for it; for he considers, not what is truly respectable, but what
is respected. We know but few men, a great many coats and breeches.
Dress a scarecrow in your last shift, you standing shiftless by, who
would not soonest salute the scarecrow? Passing a cornfield the other
day, close by a hat and coat on a stake, I recognized the owner of the
farm. He was only a little more weather- beaten than when I saw him
last. I have heard of a dog that barked at every stranger who
approached his master's premises with clothes on, but was easily
quieted by a naked thief. It is an interesting question how far men
would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their
clothes. Could you, in such a case, tell surely of any company of
civilized men which belonged to the most respected class? When Madam
Pfeiffer, in her adventurous travels round the world, from east to
west, had got so near home as Asiatic Russia, she says that she felt
the necessity of wearing other than a travelling dress, when she went
to meet the authorities, for she "was now in a civilized country,
where... people are judged of by their clothes." Even in our
democratic New England towns the accidental possession of wealth, and
its manifestation in dress and equipage alone, obtain for the
possessor almost universal respect. But they yield such respect,
numerous as they are, are so far heathen, and need to have a
missionary sent to them. Beside, clothes introduced sewing, a kind of
work which you may call endless; a woman's dress, at least, is never
done.
A man who has at length found something to do will not need to get a
new suit to do it in; for him the old will do, that has lain dusty in
the garret for an indeterminate period. Old shoes will serve a hero
longer than they have served his valet- if a hero ever has a valet-
bare feet are older than shoes, and he can make them do. Only they who
go to soirees and legislative balls must have new coats, coats to
change as often as the man changes in them. But if my jacket and
trousers, my hat and shoes, are fit to worship God in, they will do;
will they not? Who ever saw his old clothes- his old coat, actually
worn out, resolved into its primitive elements, so that it was not a
deed of charity to bestow it on some poor boy, by him perchance to be
bestowed on some poorer still, or shall we say richer, who could do
with less? I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes,
and not rather a new wearer of clothes. If there is not a new man, how
can the new clothes be made to fit? If you have any enterprise before
you, try it in your old clothes. All men want, not something to do
with, but something to do, or rather something to be. Perhaps we
should never procure a new suit, however ragged or dirty the old,
until we have so conducted, so enterprised or sailed in some way, that
we feel like new men in the old, and that to retain it would be like
keeping new wine in old bottles. Our moulting season, like that of the
fowls, must be a crisis in our lives. The loon retires to solitary
ponds to spend it. Thus also the snake casts its slough, and the
caterpillar its wormy coat, by an internal industry and expansion; for
clothes are but our outmost cuticle and mortal coil. Otherwise we
shall be found sailing under false colors, and be inevitably cashiered
at last by our own opinion, as well as that of mankind.
We don garment after garment, as if we grew like exogenous plants by
addition without. Our outside and often thin and fanciful clothes are
our epidermis, or false skin, which partakes not of our life, and may
be stripped off here and there without fatal injury; our thicker
garments, constantly worn, are our cellular integument, or cortex; but
our shirts are our liber, or true bark, which cannot be removed
without girdling and so destroying the man. I believe that all races
at some seasons wear something equivalent to the shirt. It is
desirable that a man be clad so simply that he can lay his hands on
himself in the dark, and that he live in all respects so compactly and
preparedly that, if an enemy take the town, he can, like the old
philosopher, walk out the gate empty-handed without anxiety. While one
thick garment is, for most purposes, as good as three thin ones, and
cheap clothing can be obtained at prices really to suit customers;
while a thick coat can be bought for five dollars, which will last as
many years, thick pantaloons for two dollars, cowhide boots for a
dollar and a half a pair, a summer hat for a quarter of a dollar, and
a winter cap for sixty-two and a half cents, or a better be made at
home at a nominal cost, where is he so poor that, clad in such a suit,
of his own earning, there will not be found wise men to do him
reverence?
When I ask for a garment of a particular form, my tailoress tells me
gravely, "They do not make them so now," not emphasizing the "They" at
all, as if she quoted an authority as impersonal as the Fates, and I
find it difficult to get made what I want, simply because she cannot
believe that I mean what I say, that I am so rash. When I hear this
oracular sentence, I am for a moment absorbed in thought, emphasizing
to myself each word separately that I may come at the meaning of it,
that I may find out by what degree of consanguinity 'They' are related
to me, and what authority they may have in an affair which affects me
so nearly; and, finally, I am inclined to answer her with equal
mystery, and without any more emphasis of the "they"- "It is true,
they did not make them so recently, but they do now." Of what use this
measuring of me if she does not measure my character, but only the
breadth of my shoulders, as it were a peg to bang the coat on? We
worship not the Graces, nor the Parcee, but Fashion. She spins and
weaves and cuts with full authority. The head monkey at Paris puts on
a traveller's cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same. I
sometimes despair of getting anything quite simple and honest done in
this world by the help of men. They would have to be passed through a
powerful press first, to squeeze their old notions out of them, so
that they would not soon get upon their legs again; and then there
would be some one in the company with a maggot in his head, hatched
from an egg deposited there nobody knows when, for not even fire kills
these things, and you would have lost your labor. Nevertheless, we
will not forget that some Egyptian wheat was handed down to us by a
mummy.
On the whole, I think that it cannot be maintained that dressing has
in this or any country risen to the dignity of an art. At present men
make shift to wear what they can get. Like shipwrecked sailors, they
put on what they can find on the beach, and at a little distance,
whether of space or time, laugh at each other's masquerade. Every
generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the
new. We are amused at beholding the costume of Henry VIII, or Queen
Elizabeth, as much as if it was that of the King and Queen of the
Cannibal Islands. All costume off a man is pitiful or grotesque. It is
only the serious eye peering from and the sincere life passed within
it which restrain laughter and consecrate the costume of any people.
Let Harlequin be taken with a fit of the colic and his trappings will
have to serve that mood too. When the soldier is hit by a cannon-ball,
rags are as becoming as purple.
The childish and savage taste of men and women for new patterns
keeps how many shaking and squinting through kaleidoscopes that they
may discover the particular figure which this generation requires
today. The manufacturers have learned that this taste is merely
whimsical. Of two patterns which differ only by a few threads more or
less of a particular color, the one will be sold readily, the other
lie on the shelf, though it frequently happens that after the lapse of
a season the latter becomes the most fashionable. Comparatively,
tattooing is not the hideous custom which it is called. It is not
barbarous merely because the printing is skin-deep and unalterable.
I cannot believe that our factory system is the best mode by which
men may get clothing. The condition of the operatives is becoming
every day more like that of the English; and it cannot be wondered at,
since, as far as I have heard or observed, the principal object is,
not that mankind may be well and honestly clad, but, unquestionably,
that corporations may be enriched. In the long run men hit only what
they aim at. Therefore, though they should fail immediately, they had
better aim at something high.
As for a Shelter, I will not deny that this is now a necessary of
life, though there are instances of men having done without it for
long periods in colder countries than this. Samuel Laing says that
"the Laplander in his skin dress, and in a skin bag which he puts over
his head and shoulders, will sleep night after night on the snow... in
a degree of cold which would extinguish the life of one exposed to it
in any woollen clothing." He had seen them asleep thus. Yet he adds,
"They are not hardier than other people." But, probably, man did not
live long on the earth without discovering the convenience which there
is in a house, the domestic comforts, which phrase may have originally
signified the satisfactions of the house more than of the family;
though these must be extremely partial and occasional in those
climates where the house is associated in our thoughts with winter or
the rainy season chiefly, and two thirds of the year, except for a
parasol, is unnecessary. In our climate, in the summer, it was
formerly almost solely a covering at night. In the Indian gazettes a
wigwam was the symbol of a day's march, and a row of them cut or
painted on the bark of a tree signified that so many times they had
camped. Man was not made so large limbed and robust but that he must
seek to narrow his world and wall in a space such as fitted him. He
was at first bare and out of doors; but though this was pleasant
enough in serene and warm weather, by daylight, the rainy season and
the winter, to say nothing of the torrid sun, would perhaps have
nipped his race in the bud if he had not made haste to clothe himself
with the shelter of a house. Adam and Eve, according to the fable,
wore the bower before other clothes. Man wanted a home, a place of
warmth, or comfort, first of warmth, then the warmth of the
affections.
We may imagine a time when, in the infancy of the human race, some
enterprising mortal crept into a hollow in a rock for shelter. Every
child begins the world again, to some extent, and loves to stay
outdoors, even in wet and cold. It plays house, as well as horse,
having an instinct for it. Who does not remember the interest with
which, when young, he looked at shelving rocks, or any approach to a
cave? It was the natural yearning of that portion, any portion of our
most primitive ancestor which still survived in us. From the cave we
have advanced to roofs of palm leaves, of bark and boughs, of linen
woven and stretched, of grass and straw, of boards and shingles, of
stones and tiles. At last, we know not what it is to live in the open
air, and our lives are domestic in more senses than we think. From the
hearth the field is a great distance. It would be well, perhaps, if we
were to spend more of our days and nights without any obstruction
between us and the celestial bodies, if the poet did not speak so much
from under a roof, or the saint dwell there so long. Birds do not
sing in caves, nor do doves cherish their innocence in dovecots.
However, if one designs to construct a dwelling-house, it behooves
him to exercise a little Yankee shrewdness, lest after all he find
himself in a workhouse, a labyrinth without a clue, a museum, an
almshouse, a prison, or a splendid mausoleum instead. Consider first
how slight a shelter is absolutely necessary. I have seen Penobscot
Indians, in this town, living in tents of thin cotton cloth, while the
snow was nearly a foot deep around them, and I thought that they would
be glad to have it deeper to keep out the wind. Formerly, when how to
get my living honestly, with freedom left for my proper pursuits, was
a question which vexed me even more than it does now, for
unfortunately I am become somewhat callous, I used to see a large box
by the railroad, six feet long by three wide, in which the laborers
locked up their tools at night; and it suggested to me that every man
who was hard pushed might get such a one for a dollar, and, having
bored a few auger holes in it, to admit the air at least, get into it
when it rained and at night, and hook down the lid, and so have
freedom in his love, and in his soul be free. This did not appear the
worst, nor by any means a despicable alternative. You could sit up as
late as you pleased, and, whenever you got up, go abroad without any
landlord or house-lord dogging you for rent. Many a man is harassed to
death to pay the rent of a larger and more luxurious box who would not
have frozen to death in such a box as this. I am far from jesting.
Economy is a subject which admits of being treated with levity, but it
cannot so be disposed of. A comfortable house for a rude and hardy
race, that lived mostly out of doors, was once made here almost
entirely of such materials as Nature furnished ready to their hands.
Gookin, who was superintendent of the Indians subject to the
Massachusetts Colony, writing in 1674, says, "The best of their houses
are covered very neatly, tight and warm, with barks of trees, slipped
from their bodies at those seasons when the sap is up, and made into
great flakes, with pressure of weighty timber, when they are green....
The meaner sort are covered with mats which they make of a kind of
bulrush, and are also indifferently tight and warm, but not so good as
the former.... Some I have seen, sixty or a hundred feet long and
thirty feet broad.... I have often lodged in their wigwams, and found
them as warm as the best English houses." He adds that they were
commonly carpeted and lined within with well-wrought embroidered mats,
and were furnished with various utensils. The Indians had advanced so
far as to regulate the effect of the wind by a mat suspended over the
hole in the roof and moved by a string. Such a lodge was in the first
instance constructed in a day or two at most, and taken down and put
up in a few hours; and every family owned one, or its apartment in
one.
In the savage state every family owns a shelter as good as the best,
and sufficient for its coarser and simpler wants; but I think that I
speak within bounds when I say that, though the birds of the air have
their nests, and the foxes their holes, and the savages their wigwams,
in modern civilized society not more than one half the families own a
shelter. In the large towns and cities, where civilization especially
prevails, the number of those who own a shelter is a very small
fraction of the whole. The rest pay an annual tax for this outside
garment of all, become indispensable summer and winter, which would
buy a village of Indian wigwams, but now helps to keep them poor as
long as they live. I do not mean to insist here on the disadvantage of
hiring compared with owning, but it is evident that the savage owns
his shelter because it costs so little, while the civilized man hires
his commonly because he cannot afford to own it; nor can he, in the
long run, any better afford to hire. But, answers one, by merely
paying this tax, the poor civilized man secures an abode which is a
palace compared with the savage's. An annual rent of from twenty-five
to a hundred dollars (these are the country rates) entitles him to the
benefit of the improvements of centuries, spacious apartments, clean
paint and paper, Rumford fireplace, back plastering, Venetian blinds,
copper pump, spring lock, a commodious cellar, and many other things.
But how happens it that he who is said to enjoy these things is so
commonly a poor civilized man, while the savage, who has them not, is
rich as a savage? If it is asserted that civilization is a real
advance in the condition of man- and I think that it is, though only
the wise improve their advantages- it must be shown that it has
produced better dwellings without making them more costly; and the
cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is
required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run. An
average house in this neighborhood costs perhaps eight hundred
dollars, and to lay up this sum will take from ten to fifteen years of
the laborer's life, even if he is not encumbered with a family-
estimating the pecuniary value of every man's labor at one dollar a
day, for if some receive more, others receive less;- so that he must
have spent more than half his life commonly before his wigwam will be
earned. If we suppose him to pay a rent instead, this is but a
doubtful choice of evils. Would the savage have been wise to exchange
his wigwam for a palace on these terms?
It may be guessed that I reduce almost the whole advantage of
holding this superfluous property as a fund in store against the
future, so far as the individual is concerned, mainly to the defraying
of funeral expenses. But perhaps a man is not required to bury
himself. Nevertheless this points to an important distinction between
the civilized man and the savage; and, no doubt, they have designs on
us for our benefit, in making the life of a civilized people an
institution, in which the life of the individual is to a great extent
absorbed, in order to preserve and perfect that of the race. But I
wish to show at what a sacrifice this advantage is at present
obtained, and to suggest that we may possibly so live as to secure all
the advantage without suffering any of the disadvantage. What mean ye
by saying that the poor ye have always with you, or that the fathers
have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge?
"As I live, saith the Lord God, ye shall not have occasion any
more to use this proverb in Israel.
"Behold all souls are mine; as the soul of the father, so also the
soul of the son is mine: the soul that sinneth, it shall die."
When I consider my neighbors, the farmers of Concord, who are at
least as well off as the other classes, I find that for the most part
they have been toiling twenty, thirty, or forty years, that they may
become the real owners of their farms, which commonly they have
inherited with encumbrances, or else bought with hired money- and we
may regard one third of that toil as the cost of their houses- but
commonly they have not paid for them yet. It is true, the encumbrances
sometimes outweigh the value of the farm, so that the farm itself
becomes one great encumbrance, and still a man is found to inherit it,
being well acquainted with it, as he says. On applying to the
assessors, I am surprised to learn that they cannot at once name a
dozen in the town who own their farms free and clear. If you would
know the history of these homesteads, inquire at the bank where they
are mortgaged. The man who has actually paid for his farm with labor
on it is so rare that every neighbor can point to him. I doubt if
there are three such men in Concord. What has been said of the
merchants, that a very large majority, even ninety-seven in a hundred,
are sure to fail, is equally true of the farmers. With regard to the
merchants, however, one of them says pertinently that a great part of
their failures are not genuine pecuniary failures, but merely failures
to fulfil their engagements, because it is inconvenient; that is, it
is the moral character that breaks down. But this puts an infinitely
worse face on the matter, and suggests, beside, that probably not even
the other three succeed in saving their souls, but are perchance
bankrupt in a worse sense than they who fail honestly. Bankruptcy and
repudiation are the springboards from which much of our civilization
vaults and turns its somersets, but the savage stands on the unelastic
plank of famine. Yet the Middlesex Cattle Show goes off here with
eclat annually, as if all the joints of the agricultural machine were
suent.
The farmer is endeavoring to solve the problem of a livelihood by
a formula more complicated than the problem itself. To get his
shoestrings he speculates in herds of cattle. With consummate skill he
has set his trap with a hair springe to catch comfort and
independence, and then, as he turned away, got his own leg into it.
This is the reason he is poor; and for a similar reason we are all
poor in respect to a thousand savage comforts, though surrounded by
luxuries. As Chapman sings,
"The false society of men-
-for earthly greatness
All heavenly comforts rarefies to air."
And when the farmer has got his house, he may not be the richer
but the poorer for it, and it be the house that has got him. As I
understand it, that was a valid objection urged by Momus against the
house which Minerva made, that she "had not made it movable, by which
means a bad neighborhood might be avoided"; and it may still be urged,
for our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned
rather than housed in them; and the bad neighborhood to be avoided is
our own scurvy selves. I know one or two families, at least, in this
town, who, for nearly a generation, have been wishing to sell their
houses in the outskirts and move into the village, but have not been
able to accomplish it, and only death will set them free.
Granted that the majority are able at last either to own or hire the
modern house with all its improvements. While civilization has been
improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to
inhabit them. It has created palaces, but it was not so easy to create
noblemen and kings. And if the civilized man's pursuits are no
worthier than the savage's, if he is employed the greater part of his
life in obtaining gross necessaries and comforts merely, why should he
have a better dwelling than the former?
But how do the poor minority fare? Perhaps it will be found that
just in proportion as some have been placed in outward circumstances
above the savage, others have been degraded below him. The luxury of
one class is counterbalanced by the indigence of another. On the one
side is the palace, on the other are the almshouse and "silent poor."
The myriads who built the pyramids to be the tombs of the Pharaohs
were fed on garlic, and it may be were not decently buried themselves.
The mason who finishes the cornice of the palace returns at night
perchance to a hut not so good as a wigwam. It is a mistake to suppose
that, in a country where the usual evidences of civilization exist,
the condition of a very large body of the inhabitants may not be as
degraded as that of savages. I refer to the degraded poor, not now to
the degraded rich. To know this I should not need to look farther than
to the shanties which everywhere border our railroads, that last
improvement in civilization; where I see in my daily walks human
beings living in sties, and all winter with an open door, for the sake
of light, without any visible, often imaginable, wood-pile, and the
forms of both old and young are permanently contracted by the long
habit of shrinking from cold and misery, and the development of all
their limbs and faculties is checked. It certainly is fair to look at
that class by whose labor the works which distinguish this generation
are accomplished. Such too, to a greater or less extent, is the
condition of the operatives of every denomination in England, which is
the great workhouse of the world. Or I could refer you to Ireland,
which is marked as one of the white or enlightened spots on the map.
Contrast the physical condition of the Irish with that of the North
American Indian, or the South Sea Islander, or any other savage race
before it was degraded by contact with the civilized man. Yet I have
no doubt that that people's rulers are as wise as the average of
civilized rulers. Their condition only proves what squalidness may
consist with civilization. I hardly need refer now to the laborers in
our Southern States who produce the staple exports of this country,
and are themselves a staple production of the South. But to confine
myself to those who are said to be in moderate circumstances.
Most men appear never to have considered what a house is, and are
actually though needlessly poor all their lives because they think
that they must have such a one as their neighbors have. As if one were
to wear any sort of coat which the tailor might cut out for him, or,
gradually leaving off palm-leaf hat or cap of woodchuck skin, complain
of hard times because he could not afford to buy him a crown! It is
possible to invent a house still more convenient and luxurious than we
have, which yet all would admit that man could not afford to pay for.
Shall we always study to obtain more of these things, and not
sometimes to be content with less? Shall the respectable citizen thus
gravely teach, by precept and example, the necessity of the young
man's providing a certain number of superfluous glow- shoes, and
umbrellas, and empty guest chambers for empty guests, before he dies?
Why should not our furniture be as simple as the Arab's or the
Indian's? When I think of the benefactors of the race, whom we have
apotheosized as messengers from heaven, bearers of divine gifts to
man, I do not see in my mind any retinue at their heels, any carload
of fashionable furniture. Or what if I were to allow- would it not be
a singular allowance?- that our furniture should be more complex than
the Arab's, in proportion as we are morally and intellectually his
superiors! At present our houses are cluttered and defiled with it,
and a good housewife would sweep out the greater part into the dust
hole, and not leave her morning's work undone. Morning work! By the
blushes of Aurora and the music of Memnon, what should be man's
morning work in this world? I had three pieces of limestone on my
desk, but I was terrified to find that they required to be dusted
daily, when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still, and threw
them out the window in disgust. How, then, could I have a furnished
house? I would rather sit in the open air, for no dust gathers on the
grass, unless where man has broken ground.
It is the luxurious and dissipated who set the fashions which the
herd so diligently follow. The traveller who stops at the best houses,
so called, soon discovers this, for the publicans presume him to be a
Sardanapalus, and if he resigned himself to their tender mercies he
would soon be completely emasculated. I think that in the railroad car
we are inclined to spend more on luxury than on safety and
convenience, and it threatens without attaining these to become no
better than a modern drawing-room, with its divans, and ottomans, and
sun-shades, and a hundred other oriental things, which we are taking
west with us, invented for the ladies of the harem and the effeminate
natives of the Celestial Empire, which Jonathan should be ashamed to
know the names of. I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to
myself than be crowded on a velvet cushion. I would rather ride on
earth in an ox cart, with a free circulation, than go to heaven in the
fancy car of an excursion train and breathe a malaria all the way.
The very simplicity and nakedness of man's life in the primitive
ages imply this advantage, at least, that they left him still but a
sojourner in nature. When he was refreshed with food and sleep, he
contemplated his journey again. He dwelt, as it were, in a tent in
this world, and was either threading the valleys, or crossing the
plains, or climbing the mountain-tops. But lo! men have become the
tools of their tools. The man who independently plucked the fruits
when he was hungry is become a farmer; and he who stood under a tree
for shelter, a housekeeper. We now no longer camp as for a night, but
have settled down on earth and forgotten heaven. We have adopted
Christianity merely as an improved method of agriculture. We have
built for this world a family mansion, and for the next a family tomb.
The best works of art are the expression of man's struggle to free
himself from this condition, but the effect of our art is merely to
make this low state comfortable and that higher state to be forgotten.
There is actually no place in this village for a work of fine art, if
any had come down to us, to stand, for our lives, our houses and
streets, furnish no proper pedestal for it. There is not a nail to
hang a picture on, nor a shelf to receive the bust of a hero or a
saint. When I consider how our houses are built and paid for, or not
paid for, and their internal economy managed and sustained, I wonder
that the floor does not give way under the visitor while he is
admiring the gewgaws upon the mantelpiece, and let him through into
the cellar, to some solid and honest though earthy foundation. I
cannot but perceive that this so-called rich and refined life is a
thing jumped at, and I do not get on in the enjoyment of the fine arts
which adorn it, my attention being wholly occupied with the jump; for
I remember that the greatest genuine leap, due to human muscles alone,
on record, is that of certain wandering Arabs, who are said to have
cleared twenty-five feet on level ground. Without factitious support,
man is sure to come to earth again beyond that distance. The first
question which I am tempted to put to the proprietor of such great
impropriety is, Who bolsters you? Are you one of the ninety-seven who
fail, or the three who succeed? Answer me these questions, and then
perhaps I may look at your bawbles and find them ornamental. The cart
before the horse is neither beautiful nor useful. Before we can adorn
our houses with beautiful objects the walls must be stripped, and our
lives must be stripped, and beautiful housekeeping and beautiful
living be laid for a foundation: now, a taste for the beautiful is
most cultivated out of doors, where there is no house and no
housekeeper.
Old Johnson, in his "Wonder-Working Providence," speaking of the
first settlers of this town, with whom he was contemporary, tells us
that "they burrow themselves in the earth for their first shelter
under some hillside, and, casting the soil aloft upon timber, they
make a smoky fire against the earth, at the highest side." They did
not "provide them houses," says he, "till the earth, by the Lord's
blessing, brought forth bread to feed them," and the first year's crop
was so light that "they were forced to cut their bread very thin for a
long season." The secretary of the Province of New Netherland, writing
in Dutch, in 1650, for the information of those who wished to take up
land there, states more particularly that "those in New Netherland,
and especially in New England, who have no means to build farmhouses
at first according to their wishes, dig a square pit in the ground,
cellar fashion, six or seven feet deep, as long and as broad as they
think proper, case the earth inside with wood all round the wall, and
line the wood with the bark of trees or something else to prevent the
caving in of the earth; floor this cellar with plank, and wainscot it
overhead for a ceiling, raise a roof of spars clear up, and cover the
spars with bark or green sods, so that they can live dry and warm in
these houses with their entire families for two, three, and four
years, it being understood that partitions are run through those
cellars which are adapted to the size of the family. The wealthy and
principal men in New England, in the beginning of the colonies,
commenced their first dwelling-houses in this fashion for two reasons:
firstly, in order not to waste time in building, and not to want food
the next season; secondly, in order not to discourage poor laboring
people whom they brought over in numbers from Fatherland. In the
course of three or four years, when the country became adapted to
agriculture, they built themselves handsome houses, spending on them
several thousands."
In this course which our ancestors took there was a show of prudence
at least, as if their principle were to satisfy the more pressing
wants first. But are the more pressing wants satisfied now? When I
think of acquiring for myself one of our luxurious dwellings, I am
deterred, for, so to speak, the country is not yet adapted to human
culture, and we are still forced to cut our spiritual bread far
thinner than our forefathers did their wheaten. Not that all
architectural ornament is to be neglected even in the rudest periods;
but let our houses first be lined with beauty, where they come in
contact with our lives, like the tenement of the shellfish, and not
overlaid with it. But, alas! I have been inside one or two of them,
and know what they are lined with.
Though we are not so degenerate but that we might possibly live in a
cave or a wigwam or wear skins today, it certainly is better to accept
the advantages, though so dearly bought, which the invention and
industry of mankind offer. In such a neighborhood as this, boards and
shingles, lime and bricks, are cheaper and more easily obtained than
suitable caves, or whole logs, or bark in sufficient quantities, or
even well-tempered clay or flat stones. I speak understandingly on
this subject, for I have made myself acquainted with it both
theoretically and practically. With a little more wit we might use
these materials so as to become richer than the richest now are, and
make our civilization a blessing. The civilized man is a more
experienced and wiser savage. But to make haste to my own experiment.
Near the end of March, 1845, I borrowed an axe and went down to
the woods by Walden Pond, nearest to where I intended to build my
house, and began to cut down some tall, arrowy white pines, still in
their youth, for timber. It is difficult to begin without borrowing,
but perhaps it is the most generous course thus to permit your
fellow-men to have an interest in your enterprise. The owner of the
axe, as he released his hold on it, said that it was the apple of his
eye; but I returned it sharper than I received it. It was a pleasant
hillside where I worked, covered with pine woods, through which I
looked out on the pond, and a small open field in the woods where
pines and hickories were springing up. The ice in the pond was not yet
dissolved, though there were some open spaces, and it was all
dark-colored and saturated with water. There were some slight flurries
of snow during the days that I worked there; but for the most part
when I came out on to the railroad, on my way home, its yellow
sand-heap stretched away gleaming in the hazy atmosphere, and the
rails shone in the spring sun, and I heard the lark and pewee and
other birds already come to commence another year with us. They were
pleasant spring days, in which the winter of man's discontent was
thawing as well as the earth, and the life that had lain torpid began
to stretch itself. One day, when my axe had come off and I had cut a
green hickory for a wedge, driving it with a stone, and had placed the
whole to soak in a pond-hole in order to swell the wood, I saw a
striped snake run into the water, and he lay on the bottom, apparently
without inconvenience, as long as I stayed there, or more than a
quarter of an hour; perhaps because he had not yet fairly come out of
the torpid state. It appeared to me that for a like reason men remain
in their present low and primitive condition; but if they should feel
the influence of the spring of springs arousing them, they would of
necessity rise to a higher and more ethereal life. I had previously
seen the snakes in frosty mornings in my path with portions of their
bodies still numb and inflexible, waiting for the sun to thaw them. On
the 1st of April it rained and melted the ice, and in the early part
of the day, which was very foggy, I heard a stray goose groping about
over the pond and cackling as if lost, or like the spirit of the fog.
So I went on for some days cutting and hewing timber, and also studs
and rafters, all with my narrow axe, not having many communicable or
scholar-like thoughts, singing to myself,
Men say they know many things;
But lo! they have taken wings-
The arts and sciences,
And a thousand appliances;
The wind that blows
Is all that anybody knows.
I hewed the main timbers six inches square, most of the studs on two
sides only, and the rafters and floor timbers on one side, leaving the
rest of the bark on, so that they were just as straight and much
stronger than sawed ones. Each stick was carefully mortised or tenoned
by its stump, for I had borrowed other tools by this time. My days in
the woods were not very long ones; yet I usually carried my dinner of
bread and butter, and read the newspaper in which it was wrapped, at
noon, sitting amid the green pine boughs which I had cut off, and to
my bread was imparted some of their fragrance, for my hands were
covered with a thick coat of pitch. Before I had done I was more the
friend than the foe of the pine tree, though I had cut down some of
them, having become better acquainted with it. Sometimes a rambler in
the wood was attracted by the sound of my axe, and we chatted
pleasantly over the chips which I had made.
By the middle of April, for I made no haste in my work, but rather
made the most of it, my house was framed and ready for the raising. I
had already bought the shanty of James Collins, an Irishman who worked
on the Fitchburg Railroad, for boards. James Collins' shanty was
considered an uncommonly fine one. When I called to see it he was not
at home. I walked about the outside, at first unobserved from within,
the window was so deep and high. It was of small dimensions, with a
peaked cottage roof, and not much else to be seen, the dirt being
raised five feet all around as if it were a compost heap. The roof was
the soundest part, though a good deal warped and made brittle by the
sun. Doorsill there was none, but a perennial passage for the hens
under the door-board. Mrs. C. came to the door and asked me to view it
from the inside. The hens were driven in by my approach. It was dark,
and had a dirt floor for the most part, dank, clammy, and aguish, only
here a board and there a board which would not bear removal. She
lighted a lamp to show me the inside of the roof and the walls, and
also that the board floor extended under the bed, warning me not to
step into the cellar, a sort of dust hole two feet deep. In her own
words, they were good boards overhead, good boards all around, and a
good window"- of two whole squares originally, only the cat had passed
out that way lately. There was a stove, a bed, and a place to sit, an
infant in the house where it was born, a silk parasol, gilt-framed
looking-glass, and a patent new coffee-mill nailed to an oak sapling,
all told. The bargain was soon concluded, for James had in the
meanwhile returned. I to pay four dollars and twenty-five cents
tonight, he to vacate at five tomorrow morning, selling to nobody else
meanwhile: I to take possession at six. It were well, he said, to be
there early, and anticipate certain indistinct but wholly unjust
claims on the score of ground rent and fuel. This he assured me was
the only encumbrance. At six I passed him and his family on the road.
One large bundle held their all- bed, coffee-mill, looking-glass,
hens- all but the cat; she took to the woods and became a wild cat,
and, as I learned afterward, trod in a trap set for woodchucks, and so
became a dead cat at last.
I took down this dwelling the same morning, drawing the nails, and
removed it to the pond-side by small cartloads, spreading the boards
on the grass there to bleach and warp back again in the sun. One early
thrush gave me a note or two as I drove along the woodland path. I was
informed treacherously by a young Patrick that neighbor Seeley, an
Irishman, in the intervals of the carting, transferred the still
tolerable, straight, and drivable nails, staples, and spikes to his
pocket, and then stood when I came back to pass the time of day, and
look freshly up, unconcerned, with spring thoughts, at the
devastation; there being a dearth of work, as he said. He was there to
represent spectatordom, and help make this seemingly insignificant
event one with the removal of the gods of Troy.
I dug my cellar in the side of a hill sloping to the south, where
a woodchuck had formerly dug his burrow, down through sumach and
blackberry roots, and the lowest stain of vegetation, six feet square
by seven deep, to a fine sand where potatoes would not freeze in any
winter. The sides were left shelving, and not stoned; but the sun
having never shone on them, the sand still keeps its place. It was but
two hours' work. I took particular pleasure in this breaking of
ground, for in almost all latitudes men dig into the earth for an
equable temperature. Under the most splendid house in the city is
still to be found the cellar where they store their roots as of old,
and long after the superstructure has disappeared posterity remark its
dent in the earth. The house is still but a sort of porch at the
entrance of a burrow.
At length, in the beginning of May, with the help of some of my
acquaintances, rather to improve so good an occasion for
neighborliness than from any necessity, I set up the frame of my
house. No man was ever more honored in the character of his raisers
than I. They are destined, I trust, to assist at the raising of
loftier structures one day. I began to occupy my house on the 4th of
July, as soon as it was boarded and roofed, for the boards were
carefully feather-edged and lapped, so that it was perfectly
impervious to rain, but before boarding I laid the foundation of a
chimney at one end, bringing two cartloads of stones up the hill from
the pond in my arms. I built the chimney after my hoeing in the fall,
before a fire became necessary for warmth, doing my cooking in the
meanwhile out of doors on the ground, early in the morning: which mode
I still think is in some respects more convenient and agreeable than
the usual one. When it stormed before my bread was baked, I fixed a
few boards over the fire, and sat under them to watch my loaf, and
passed some pleasant hours in that way. In those days, when my hands
were much employed, I read but little, but the least scraps of paper
which lay on the ground, my holder, or tablecloth, afforded me as much
entertainment, in fact answered the same purpose as the Iliad.
It would be worth the while to build still more deliberately than
I did, considering, for instance, what foundation a door, a window, a
cellar, a garret, have in the nature of man, and perchance never
raising any superstructure until we found a better reason for it than
our temporal necessities even. There is some of the same fitness in a
man's building his own house that there is in a bird's building its
own nest. Who knows but if men constructed their dwellings with their
own hands, and provided food for themselves and families simply and
honestly enough, the poetic faculty would be universally developed, as
birds universally sing when they are so engaged? But alas! we do like
cowbirds and cuckoos, which lay their eggs in nests which other birds
have built, and cheer no traveller with their chattering and unmusical
notes. Shall we forever resign the pleasure of construction to the
carpenter? What does architecture amount to in the experience of the
mass of men? I never in all my walks came across a man engaged in so
simple and natural an occupation as building his house. We belong to
the community. It is not the tailor alone who is the ninth part of a
man; it is as much the preacher, and the merchant, and the farmer.
Where is this division of labor to end? and what object does it
finally serve? No doubt another may also think for me; but it is not
therefore desirable that he should do so to the exclusion of my
thinking for myself.
True, there are architects so called in this country, and I have
heard of one at least possessed with the idea of making architectural
ornaments have a core of truth, a necessity, and hence a beauty, as if
it were a revelation to him. All very well perhaps from his point of
view, but only a little better than the common dilettantism. A
sentimental reformer in architecture, he began at the cornice, not at
the foundation. It was only how to put a core of truth within the
ornaments, that every sugarplum, in fact, might have an almond or
caraway seed in it- though I hold that almonds are most wholesome
without the sugar- and not how the inhabitant, the indweller, might
build truly within and without, and let the ornaments take care of
themselves. What reasonable man ever supposed that ornaments were
something outward and in the skin merely- that the tortoise got his
spotted shell, or the shell-fish its mother-o'-pearl tints, by such a
contract as the inhabitants of Broadway their Trinity Church? But a
man has no more to do with the style of architecture of his house than
a tortoise with that of its shell: nor need the soldier be so idle as
to try to paint the precise color of his virtue on his standard. The
enemy will find it out. He may turn pale when the trial comes. This
man seemed to me to lean over the cornice, and timidly whisper his
half truth to the rude occupants who really knew it better than he.
What of architectural beauty I now see, I know has gradually grown
from within outward, out of the necessities and character of the
indweller, who is the only builder- out of some unconscious
truthfulness, and nobleness, without ever a thought for the appearance
and whatever additional beauty of this kind is destined to be produced
will be preceded by a like unconscious beauty of life. The most
interesting dwellings in this country, as the painter knows, are the
most unpretending, humble log huts and cottages of the poor commonly;
it is the life of the inhabitants whose shells they are, and not any
peculiarity in their surfaces merely, which makes them picturesque;
and equally interesting will be the citizen's suburban box, when his
life shall be as simple and as agreeable to the imagination, and there
is as little straining after effect in the style of his dwelling. A
great proportion of architectural ornaments are literally hollow, and
a September gale would strip them off, like borrowed plumes, without
injury to the substantials. They can do without architecture who have
no olives nor wines in the cellar. What if an equal ado were made
about the ornaments of style in literature, and the architects of our
bibles spent as much time about their cornices as the architects of
our churches do? So are made the belles-lettres and the beaux-arts and
their professors. Much it concerns a man, forsooth, how a few sticks
are slanted over him or under him, and what colors are daubed upon his
box. It would signify somewhat, if, in any earnest sense, he slanted
them and daubed it; but the spirit having departed out of the tenant,
it is of a piece with constructing his own coffin- the architecture of
the grave- and "carpenter" is but another name for "coffin-maker." One
man says, in his despair or indifference to life, take up a handful of
the earth at your feet, and paint your house that color. Is he
thinking of his last and narrow house? Toss up a copper for it as
well. What an abundance of leisure be must have! Why do you take up a
handful of dirt? Better paint your house your own complexion; let it
turn pale or blush for you. An enterprise to improve the style of
cottage architecture! When you have got my ornaments ready, I will
wear them.
Before winter I built a chimney, and shingled the sides of my house,
which were already impervious to rain, with imperfect and sappy
shingles made of the first slice of the log, whose edges I was obliged
to straighten with a plane.
I have thus a tight shingled and plastered house, ten feet wide by
fifteen long, and eight-feet posts, with a garret and a closet, a
large window on each side, two trap-doors, one door at the end, and a
brick fireplace opposite. The exact cost of my house, paying the usual
price for such materials as I used, but not counting the work, all of
which was done by myself, was as follows; and I give the details
because very few are able to tell exactly what their houses cost, and
fewer still, if any, the separate cost of the various materials which
compose them:
Boards................................$ 8.03 1/2, (mostly shanty
boards.)
Refuse shingles for roof and sides.... 4.00
Laths................................. 1.25
Two second-hand windows with glass.... 2.43
One thousand old brick................ 4.00
Two casks of lime..................... 2.40 (That was high.)
Hair.................................. 0.31 (More than I needed.)
Mantle-tree iron...................... 0.15
Nails................................. 3.90
Hinges and screws..................... 0.14
Latch................................. 0.10
Chalk................................. 0.01
Transportation........................ 1.40 (I carried a good
part on my back.)
-----
In all................................$ 28.12 1/2
These are all the materials, excepting the timber, stones, and sand,
which I claimed by squatter's right. I have also a small woodshed
adjoining, made chiefly of the stuff which was left after building the
house.
I intend to build me a house which will surpass any on the main
street in Concord in grandeur and luxury, as soon as it pleases me as
much and will cost me no more than my present one.
I thus found that the student who wishes for a shelter can obtain
one for a lifetime at an expense not greater than the rent which he
now pays annually. If I seem to boast more than is becoming, my excuse
is that I brag for humanity rather than for myself; and my
shortcomings and inconsistencies do not affect the truth of my
statement. Notwithstanding much cant and hypocrisy- chaff which I find
it difficult to separate from my wheat, but for which I am as sorry as
any man- I will breathe freely and stretch myself in this respect, it
is such a relief to both the moral and physical system; and I am
resolved that I will not through humility become the devil's attorney.
I will endeavor to speak a good word for the truth. At Cambridge
College the mere rent of a student's room, which is only a little
larger than my own, is thirty dollars each year, though the
corporation had the advantage of building thirty-two side by side and
under one roof, and the occupant suffers the inconvenience of many and
noisy neighbors, and perhaps a residence in the fourth story. I cannot
but think that if we had more true wisdom in these respects, not only
less education would be needed, because, forsooth, more would already
have been acquired, but the pecuniary expense of getting an education
would in a great measure vanish. Those conveniences which the student
requires at Cambridge or elsewhere cost him or somebody else ten times
as great a sacrifice of life as they would with proper management on
both sides. Those things for which the most money is demanded are
never the things which the student most wants. Tuition, for instance,
is an important item in the term bill, while for the far more valuable
education which he gets by associating with the most cultivated of his
contemporaries no charge is made. The mode of founding a college is,
commonly, to get up a subscription of dollars and cents, and then,
following blindly the principles of a division of labor to its
extreme- a principle which should never be followed but with
circumspection- to call in a contractor who makes this a subject of
speculation, and he employs Irishmen or other operatives actually to
lay the foundations, while the students that are to be are said to be
fitting themselves for it; and for these oversights successive
generations have to pay. I think that it would be better than this,
for the students, or those who desire to be benefited by it, even to
lay the foundation themselves. The student who secures his coveted
leisure and retirement by systematically shirking any labor necessary
to man obtains but an ignoble and unprofitable leisure, defrauding
himself of the experience which alone can make leisure fruitful.
"But," says one, "you do not mean that the students should go to work
with their hands instead of their heads?" I do not mean that exactly,
but I mean something which he might think a good deal like that; I
mean that they should not play life, or study it merely, while the
community supports them at this expensive game, but earnestly live it
from beginning to end. How could youths better learn to live than by
at once trying the experiment of living? Methinks this would exercise
their minds as much as mathematics. If I wished a boy to know
something about the arts and sciences, for instance, I would not
pursue the common course, which is merely to send him into the
neighborhood of some professor, where anything is professed and
practised but the art of life;- to survey the world through a
telescope or a microscope, and never with his natural eye; to study
chemistry, and not learn how his bread is made, or mechanics, and not
learn how it is earned; to discover new satellites to Neptune, and not
detect the motes in his eyes, or to what vagabond he is a satellite
himself; or to be devoured by the monsters that swarm all around him,
while contemplating the monsters in a drop of vinegar. Which would
have advanced the most at the end of a month- the boy who had made his
own jackknife from the ore which he had dug and smelted, reading as
much as would be necessary for this- or the boy who had attended the
lectures on metallurgy at the Institute in the meanwhile, and had
received a Rodgers penknife from his father? Which would be most
likely to cut his fingers?... To my astonishment I was informed on
leaving college that I had studied navigation!- why, if I had taken
one turn down the harbor I should have known more about it. Even the
poor student studies and is taught only political economy, while that
economy of living which is synonymous with philosophy is not even
sincerely professed in our colleges. The consequence is, that while he
is reading Adam Smith, Ricardo, and Say, he runs his father in debt
irretrievably.
As with our colleges, so with a hundred "modern improvements"; there
is an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance. The
devil goes on exacting compound interest to the last for his early
share and numerous succeeding investments in them. Our inventions are
wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious
things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which
it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston
or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph
from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing
important to communicate. Either is in such a predicament as the man
who was earnest to be introduced to a distinguished deaf woman, but
when he was presented, and one end of her ear trumpet was put into his
hand, had nothing to say. As if the main object were to talk fast and
not to talk sensibly. We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and
bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the
first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American
ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough. After
all, the man whose horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the
most important messages; he is not an evangelist, nor does he come
round eating locusts and wild honey. I doubt if Flying Childers ever
carried a peck of corn to mill.
One says to me, "I wonder that you do not lay up money; you love
to travel; you might take the cars and go to Fitchburg today and see
the country." But I am wiser than that. I have learned that the
swiftest traveller is he that goes afoot. I say to my friend, Suppose
we try who will get there first. The distance is thirty miles; the
fare ninety cents. That is almost a day's wages. I remember when wages
were sixty cents a day for laborers on this very road. Well, I start
now on foot, and get there before night; I have travelled at that rate
by the week together. You will in the meanwhile have earned your fare,
and arrive there some time tomorrow, or possibly this evening, if you
are lucky enough to get a job in season. Instead of going to
Fitchburg, you will be working here the greater part of the day. And
so, if the railroad reached round the world, I think that I should
keep ahead of you; and as for seeing the country and getting
experience of that kind, I should have to cut your acquaintance
altogether.
Such is the universal law, which no man can ever outwit, and with
regard to the railroad even we may say it is as broad as it is long.
To make a railroad round the world available to all mankind is
equivalent to grading the whole surface of the planet. Men have an
indistinct notion that if they keep up this activity of joint stocks
and spades long enough all will at length ride somewhere, in next to
no time, and for nothing; but though a crowd rushes to the depot, and
the conductor shouts "All aboard!" when the smoke is blown away and
the vapor condensed, it will be perceived that a few are riding, but
the rest are run over- and it will be called, and will be, "A
melancholy accident." No doubt they can ride at last who shall have
earned their fare, that is, if they survive so long, but they will
probably have lost their elasticity and desire to travel by that time.
This spending of the best part of one's life earning money in order to
enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it
reminds me of the Englishman who went to India to make a fortune
first, in order that he might return to England and live the life of a
poet. He should have gone up garret at once. "What!" exclaim a million
Irishmen starting up from all the shanties in the land, "is not this
railroad which we have built a good thing?" Yes, I answer,
comparatively good, that is, you might have done worse; but I wish, as
you are brothers of mine, that you could have spent your time better
than digging in this dirt.
Before I finished my house, wishing to earn ten or twelve dollars by
some honest and agreeable method, in order to meet my unusual
expenses, I planted about two acres and a half of light and sandy soil
near it chiefly with beans, but also a small part with potatoes, corn,
peas, and turnips. The whole lot contains eleven acres, mostly growing
up to pines and hickories, and was sold the preceding season for eight
dollars and eight cents an acre. One farmer said that it was "good for
nothing but to raise cheeping squirrels on." I put no manure whatever
on this land, not being the owner, but merely a squatter, and not
expecting to cultivate so much again, and I did not quite hoe it all
once. I got out several cords of stumps in plowing, which supplied me
with fuel for a long time, and left small circles of virgin mould,
easily distinguishable through the summer by the greater luxuriance of
the beans there. The dead and for the most part unmerchantable wood
behind my house, and the driftwood from the pond, have supplied the
remainder of my fuel. I was obliged to hire a team and a man for the
plowing, though I held the plow myself. My farm outgoes for the first
season were, for implements, seed, work, etc., $14.72 1/2. The seed
corn was given me. This never costs anything to speak of, unless you
plant more than enough. I got twelve bushels of beans, and eighteen
bushels of potatoes, beside some peas and sweet corn. The yellow corn
and turnips were too late to come to anything. My whole income from
the farm was
$ 23.44
Deducting the outgoes............. 14.72 1/2
-----
There are left....................$ 8.71 1/2
beside produce consumed and on hand at the time this estimate was made
of the value of $4.50- the amount on hand much more than balancing a
little grass which I did not raise. All things considered, that is,
considering the importance of a man's soul and of today,
notwithstanding the short time occupied by my experiment, nay, partly
even because of its transient character, I believe that that was doing
better than any farmer in Concord did that year.
The next year I did better still, for I spaded up all the land which
I required, about a third of an acre, and I learned from the
experience of both years, not being in the least awed by many
celebrated works on husbandry, Arthur Young among the rest, that if
one would live simply and eat only the crop which he raised, and raise
no more than he ate, and not exchange it for an insufficient quantity
of more luxurious and expensive things, he would need to cultivate
only a few rods of ground, and that it would be cheaper to spade up
that than to use oxen to plow it, and to select a fresh spot from time
to time than to manure the old, and he could do all his necessary farm
work as it were with his left hand at odd hours in the summer; and
thus he would not be tied to an ox, or horse, or cow, or pig, as at
present. I desire to speak impartially on this point, and as one not
interested in the success or failure of the present economical and
social arrangements. I was more independent than any farmer in
Concord, for I was not anchored to a house or farm, but could follow
the bent of my genius, which is a very crooked one, every moment.
Beside being better off than they already, if my house had been burned
or my crops had failed, I should have been nearly as well off as
before.
I am wont to think that men are not so much the keepers of herds
as herds are the keepers of men, the former are so much the freer. Men
and oxen exchange work; but if we consider necessary work only, the
oxen will be seen to have greatly the advantage, their farm is so much
the larger. Man does some of his part of the exchange work in his six
weeks of haying, and it is no boy's play. Certainly no nation that
lived simply in all respects, that is, no nation of philosophers,
would commit so great a blunder as to use the labor of animals. True,
there never was and is not likely soon to be a nation of philosophers,
nor am I certain it is desirable that there should be. However, I
should never have broken a horse or bull and taken him to board for
any work he might do for me, for fear I should become a horseman or a
herdsman merely; and if society seems to be the gainer by so doing,
are we certain that what is one man's gain is not another's loss, and
that the stable-boy has equal cause with his master to be satisfied?
Granted that some public works would not have been constructed without
this aid, and let man share the glory of such with the ox and horse;
does it follow that he could not have accomplished works yet more
worthy of himself in that case? When men begin to do, not merely
unnecessary or artistic, but luxurious and idle work, with their
assistance, it is inevitable that a few do all the exchange work with
the oxen, or, in other words, become the slaves of the strongest. Man
thus not only works for the animal within him, but, for a symbol of
this, he works for the animal without him. Though we have many
substantial houses of brick or stone, the prosperity of the farmer is
still measured by the degree to which the barn overshadows the house.
This town is said to have the largest houses for oxen, cows, and
horses hereabouts, and it is not behindhand in its public buildings;
but there are very few halls for free worship or free speech in this
county. It should not be by their architecture, but why not even by
their power of abstract thought, that nations should seek to
commemorate themselves? How much more admirable the Bhagvat-Geeta than
all the ruins of the East! Towers and temples are the luxury of
princes. A simple and independent mind does not toil at the bidding of
any prince. Genius is not a retainer to any emperor, nor is its
material silver, or gold, or marble, except to a trifling extent. To
what end, pray, is so much stone hammered? In Arcadia, when I was
there, I did not see any hammering stone. Nations are possessed with
an insane ambition to perpetuate the memory of themselves by the
amount of hammered stone they leave. What if equal pains were taken to
smooth and polish their manners? One piece of good sense would be more
memorable than a monument as high as the moon. I love better to see
stones in place. The grandeur of Thebes was a vulgar grandeur. More
sensible is a rod of stone wall that bounds an honest man's field than
a hundred-gated Thebes that has wandered farther from the true end of
life. The religion and civilization which are barbaric and heathenish
build splendid temples; but what you might call Christianity does not.
Most of the stone a nation hammers goes toward its tomb only. It
buries itself alive. As for the Pyramids, there is nothing to wonder
at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found
degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some
ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have
drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs. I might
possibly invent some excuse for them and him, but I have no time for
it. As for the religion and love of art of the builders, it is much
the same all the world over, whether the building be an Egyptian
temple or the United States Bank. It costs more than it comes to. The
mainspring is vanity, assisted by the love of garlic and bread and
butter. Mr. Balcom, a promising young architect, designs it on the
back of his Vitruvius, with hard pencil and ruler, and the job is let
out to Dobson & Sons, stonecutters. When the thirty centuries begin to
look down on it, mankind begin to look up at it. As for your high
towers and monuments, there was a crazy fellow once in this town who
undertook to dig through to China, and he got so far that, as he said,
he heard the Chinese pots and kettles rattle; but I think that I shall
not go out of my way to admire the hole which he made. Many are
concerned about the monuments of the West and the East- to know who
built them. For my part, I should like to know who in those days did
not build them- who were above such trifling. But to proceed with my
statistics.
By surveying, carpentry, and day-labor of various other kinds in the
village in the meanwhile, for I have as many trades as fingers, I had
earned $13.34. The expense of food for eight months, namely, from July
4th to March 1st, the time when these estimates were made, though I
lived there more than two years- not counting potatoes, a little green
corn, and some peas, which I had raised, nor considering the value of
what was on hand at the last date- was
Rice......................$ 1.73 1/2
Molasses.................. 1.73 (Cheapest form of the
saccharine.)
Rye meal.................. 1.04 3/4
Indian meal............... 0.99 3/4 (Cheaper than rye.)
Pork...................... 0.22
(All Experiments Which Failed)
Flour..................... 0.88 (Costs more than Indian meal,
both money and trouble.)
Sugar..................... 0.80
Lard...................... 0.65
Apples.................... 0.25
Dried apple............... 0.22
Sweet potatoes............ 0.10
One pumpkin............... 0.06
One watermelon............ 0.02
Salt...................... 0.03
Yes, I did eat $8.74, all told; but I should not thus unblushingly
publish my guilt, if I did not know that most of my readers were
equally guilty with myself, and that their deeds would look no better
in print. The next year I sometimes caught a mess of fish for my
dinner, and once I went so far as to slaughter a woodchuck which
ravaged my bean-field- effect his transmigration, as a Tartar would
say- and devour him, partly for experiment's sake; but though it
afforded me a momentary enjoyment, notwithstanding a musky flavor, I
saw that the longest use would not make that a good practice, however
it might seem to have your woodchucks ready dressed by the village
butcher.
Clothing and some incidental expenses within the same dates,
though little can be inferred from this item, amounted to
$ 8.40 3/4
Oil and some household utensils......... 2.00
So that all the pecuniary outgoes, excepting for washing and mending,
which for the most part were done out of the house, and their bills
have not yet been received- and these are all and more than all the
ways by which money necessarily goes out in this part of the world-
were
House...................................$ 28.12 1/2
Farm one year........................... 14.72 1/2
Food eight months....................... 8.74
Clothing, etc., eight months............ 8.40 3/4
Oil, etc., eight months................. 2.00
-----
In all..................................$ 61.99 3/4
I address myself now to those of my readers who have a living to get.
And to meet this I have for farm produce sold
$ 23.44
Earned by day-labor..................... 13.34
-----
In all..................................$ 36.78
which subtracted from the sum of the outgoes leaves a balance of
$25.21 3/4 on the one side- this being very nearly the means with
which I started, and the measure of expenses to be incurred- and on
the other, beside the leisure and independence and health thus
secured, a comfortable house for me as long as I choose to occupy it.
These statistics, however accidental and therefore uninstructive
they may appear, as they have a certain completeness, have a certain
value also. Nothing was given me of which I have not rendered some
account. It appears from the above estimate, that my food alone cost
me in money about twenty-seven cents a week. It was, for nearly two
years after this, rye and Indian meal without yeast, potatoes, rice, a
very little salt pork, molasses, and salt; and my drink, water. It was
fit that I should live on rice, mainly, who love so well the
philosophy of India. To meet the objections of some inveterate
cavillers, I may as well state, that if I dined out occasionally, as I
always had done, and I trust shall have opportunities to do again, it
was frequently to the detriment of my domestic arrangements. But the
dining out, being, as I have stated, a constant element, does not in
the least affect a comparative statement like this.
I learned from my two years' experience that it would cost
incredibly little trouble to obtain one's necessary food, even in this
latitude; that a man may use as simple a diet as the animals, and yet
retain health and strength. I have made a satisfactory dinner,
satisfactory on several accounts, simply off a dish of purslane
(Portulaca oleracea) which I gathered in my cornfield, boiled and
salted. I give the Latin on account of the savoriness of the trivial
name. And pray what more can a reasonable man desire, in peaceful
times, in ordinary noons, than a sufficient number of ears of green
sweet corn boiled, with the addition of salt? Even the little variety
which I used was a yielding to the demands of appetite, and not of
health. Yet men have come to such a pass that they frequently starve,
not for want of necessaries, but for want of luxuries; and I know a
good woman who thinks that her son lost his life because he took to
drinking water only.
The reader will perceive that I am treating the subject rather
from an economic than a dietetic point of view, and he will not
venture to put my abstemiousness to the test unless he has a
well-stocked larder.
Bread I at first made of pure Indian meal and salt, genuine
hoe-cakes, which I baked before my fire out of doors on a shingle or
the end of a stick of timber sawed off in building my house; but it
was wont to get smoked and to have a piny flavor, I tried flour also;
but have at last found a mixture of rye and Indian meal most
convenient and agreeable. In cold weather it was no little amusement
to bake several small loaves of this in succession, tending and
turning them as carefully as an Egyptian his hatching eggs. They were
a real cereal fruit which I ripened, and they had to my senses a
fragrance like that of other noble fruits, which I kept in as long as
possible by wrapping them in cloths. I made a study of the ancient and
indispensable art of bread-making, consulting such authorities as
offered, going back to the primitive days and first invention of the
unleavened kind, when from the wildness of nuts and meats men first
reached the mildness and refinement of this diet, and travelling
gradually down in my studies through that accidental souring of the
dough which, it is supposed, taught the leavening process, and through
the various fermentations thereafter, till I came to "good, sweet,
wholesome bread," the staff of life. Leaven, which some deem the soul
of bread, the spiritus which fills its cellular tissue, which is
religiously preserved like the vestal fire- some precious bottleful, I
suppose, first brought over in the Mayflower, did the business for
America, and its influence is still rising, swelling, spreading, in
cerealian billows over the land- this seed I regularly and faithfully
procured from the village, till at length one morning I forgot the
rules, and scalded my yeast; by which accident I discovered that even
this was not indispensable- for my discoveries were not by the
synthetic but analytic process- and I have gladly omitted it since,
though most housewives earnestly assured me that safe and wholesome
bread without yeast might not be, and elderly people prophesied a
speedy decay of the vital forces. Yet I find it not to be an essential
ingredient, and after going without it for a year am still in the land
of the living; and I am glad to escape the trivialness of carrying a
bottleful in my pocket, which would sometimes pop and discharge its
contents to my discomfiture. It is simpler and more respectable to
omit it. Man is an animal who more than any other can adapt himself to
all climates and circumstances. Neither did I put any sal-soda, or
other acid or alkali, into my bread. It would seem that I made it
according to the recipe which Marcus Porcius Cato gave about two
centuries before Christ. "Panem depsticium sic facito. Manus
mortariumque bene lavato. Farinam in mortarium indito, aquae paulatim
addito, subigitoque pulchre. Ubi bene subegeris, defingito, coquitoque
sub testu." Which I take to mean,- "Make kneaded bread thus. Wash your
hands and trough well. Put the meal into the trough, add water
gradually, and knead it thoroughly. When you have kneaded it well,
mould it, and bake it under a cover," that is, in a baking-kettle. Not
a word about leaven. But I did not always use this staff of life. At
one time, owing to the emptiness of my purse, I saw none of it for
more than a month.
Every New Englander might easily raise all his own breadstuffs in
this land of rye and Indian corn, and not depend on distant and
fluctuating markets for them. Yet so far are we from simplicity and
independence that, in Concord, fresh and sweet meal is rarely sold in
the shops, and hominy and corn in a still coarser form are hardly used
by any. For the most part the farmer gives to his cattle and hogs the
grain of his own producing, and buys flour, which is at least no more
wholesome, at a greater cost, at the store. I saw that I could easily
raise my bushel or two of rye and Indian corn, for the former will
grow on the poorest land, and the latter does not require the best,
and grind them in a hand-mill, and so do without rice and pork; and if
I must have some concentrated sweet, I found by experiment that I
could make a very good molasses either of pumpkins or beets, and I
knew that I needed only to set out a few maples to obtain it more
easily still, and while these were growing I could use various
substitutes beside those which I have named. "For," as the Forefathers
sang,
"we can make liquor to sweeten our lips
Of pumpkins and parsnips and walnut-tree chips."
Finally, as for salt, that grossest of groceries, to obtain this might
be a fit occasion for a visit to the seashore, or, if I did without it
altogether, I should probably drink the less water. I do not learn
that the Indians ever troubled themselves to go after it.
Thus I could avoid all trade and barter, so far as my food was
concerned, and having a shelter already, it would only remain to get
clothing and fuel. The pantaloons which I now wear were woven in a
farmer's family- thank Heaven there is so much virtue still in man;
for I think the fall from the farmer to the operative as great and
memorable as that from the man to the farmer;- and in a new country,
fuel is an encumbrance. As for a habitat, if I were not permitted
still to squat, I might purchase one acre at the same price for which
the land I cultivated was sold- namely, eight dollars and eight cents.
But as it was, I considered that I enhanced the value of the land by
squatting on it.
There is a certain class of unbelievers who sometimes ask me such
questions as, if I think that I can live on vegetable food alone; and
to strike at the root of the matter at once- for the root is faith- I
am accustomed to answer such, that I can live on board nails. If they
cannot understand that, they cannot understand much that I have to
say. For my part, I am glad to bear of experiments of this kind being
tried; as that a young man tried for a fortnight to live on hard, raw
corn on the ear, using his teeth for all mortar. The squirrel tribe
tried the same and succeeded. The human race is interested in these
experiments, though a few old women who are incapacitated for them, or
who own their thirds in mills, may be alarmed.
My furniture, part of which I made myself- and the rest cost me
nothing of which I have not rendered an account- consisted of a bed, a
table, a desk, three chairs, a looking-glass three inches in diameter,
a pair of tongs and andirons, a kettle, a skillet, and a frying-pan, a
dipper, a wash-bowl, two knives and forks, three plates, one cup, one
spoon, a jug for oil, a jug for molasses, and a japanned lamp. None
is so poor that he need sit on a pumpkin. That is shiftlessness. There
is a plenty of such chairs as I like best in the village garrets to be
had for taking them away. Furniture! Thank God, I can sit and I can
stand without the aid of a furniture warehouse. What man but a
philosopher would not be ashamed to see his furniture packed in a cart
and going up country exposed to the light of heaven and the eyes of
men, a beggarly account of empty boxes? That is Spaulding's furniture.
I could never tell from inspecting such a load whether it belonged to
a so-called rich man or a poor one; the owner always seemed
poverty-stricken. Indeed, the more you have of such things the poorer
you are. Each load looks as if it contained the contents of a dozen
shanties; and if one shanty is poor, this is a dozen times as poor.
Pray, for what do we move ever but to get rid of our furniture, our
exuviae; at last to go from this world to another newly furnished, and
leave this to be burned? It is the same as if all these traps were
buckled to a man's belt, and he could not move over the rough country
where our lines are cast without dragging them- dragging his trap. He
was a lucky fox that left his tail in the trap. The muskrat will gnaw
his third leg off to be free. No wonder man has lost his elasticity.
How often he is at a dead set! "Sir, if I may be so bold, what do you
mean by a dead set?" If you are a seer, whenever you meet a man you
will see all that he owns, ay, and much that he pretends to disown,
behind him, even to his kitchen furniture and all the trumpery which
he saves and will not burn, and he will appear to be harnessed to it
and making what headway he can. I think that the man is at a dead set
who has got through a knot-hole or gateway where his sledge load of
furniture cannot follow him. I cannot but feel compassion when I hear
some trig, compact-looking man, seemingly free, all girded and ready,
speak of his "furniture," as whether it is insured or not. "But what
shall I do with my furniture?"- My gay butterfly is entangled in a
spider's web then. Even those who seem for a long while not to have
any, if you inquire more narrowly you will find have some stored in
somebody's barn. I look upon England today as an old gentleman who is
travelling with a great deal of baggage, trumpery which has
accumulated from long housekeeping, which he has not the courage to
burn; great trunk, little trunk, bandbox, and bundle. Throw away the
first three at least. It would surpass the powers of a well man
nowadays to take up his bed and walk, and I should certainly advise a
sick one to lay down his bed and run. When I have met an immigrant
tottering under a bundle which contained his all- looking like an
enormous well which had grown out of the nape of his neck- I have
pitied him, not because that was his all, but because he had all that
to carry. If I have got to drag my trap, I will take care that it be a
light one and do not nip me in a vital part. But perchance it would be
wisest never to put one's paw into it.
I would observe, by the way, that it costs me nothing for
curtains, for I have no gazers to shut out but the sun and moon, and I
am willing that they should look in. The moon will not sour milk nor
taint meat of mine, nor will the sun injure my furniture or fade my
carpet; and if he is sometimes too warm a friend, I find it still
better economy to retreat behind some curtain which nature has
provided, than to add a single item to the details of housekeeping. A
lady once offered me a mat, but as I had no room to spare within the
house, nor time to spare within or without to shake it, I declined it,
preferring to wipe my feet on the sod before my door. It is best to
avoid the beginnings of evil.
Not long since I was present at the auction of a deacon's effects,
for his life had not been ineffectual:
"The evil that men do lives after them."
As usual, a great proportion was trumpery which had begun to
accumulate in his father's day. Among the rest was a dried tapeworm.
And now, after lying half a century in his garret and other dust
holes, these things were not burned; instead of a bonfire, or
purifying destruction of them, there was an auction, or increasing of
them. The neighbors eagerly collected to view them, bought them all,
and carefully transported them to their garrets and dust holes, to lie
there till their estates are settled, when they will start again. When
a man dies he kicks the dust.
The customs of some savage nations might, perchance, be profitably
imitated by us, for they at least go through the semblance of casting
their slough annually; they have the idea of the thing, whether they
have the reality or not. Would it not be well if we were to celebrate
such a "busk," or "feast of first fruits," as Bartram describes to
have been the custom of the Mucclasse Indians? "When a town
celebrates the busk," says he, "having previously provided themselves
with new clothes, new pots, pans, and other household utensils and
furniture, they collect all their worn out clothes and other
despicable things, sweep and cleanse their houses, squares, and the
whole town of their filth, which with all the remaining grain and
other old provisions they cast together into one common heap, and
consume it with fire. After having taken medicine, and fasted for
three days, all the fire in the town is extinguished. During this
fast they abstain from the gratification of every appetite and passion
whatever. A general amnesty is proclaimed; all malefactors may return
to their town."
"On the fourth morning, the high priest, by rubbing dry wood
together, produces new fire in the public square, from whence every
habitation in the town is supplied with the new and pure flame."
They then feast on the new corn and fruits, and dance and sing for
three days, "and the four following days they receive visits and
rejoice with their friends from neighboring towns who have in like
manner purified and prepared themselves."
The Mexicans also practised a similar purification at the end of
every fifty-two years, in the belief that it was time for the world to
come to an end.
I have scarcely heard of a truer sacrament, that is, as the
dictionary defines it,- outward and visible sign of an inward and
spiritual grace," than this, and I have no doubt that they were
originally inspired directly from Heaven to do thus, though they have
no Biblical record of the revelation.
For more than five years I maintained myself thus solely by the
labor of my hands, and I found that, by working about six weeks in a
year, I could meet all the expenses of living. The whole of my
winters, as well as most of my summers, I had free and clear for
study. I have thoroughly tried school- keeping, and found that my
expenses were in proportion, or rather out of proportion, to my
income, for I was obliged to dress and train, not to say think and
believe, accordingly, and I lost my time into the bargain. As I did
not teach for the good of my fellow-men, but simply for a livelihood,
this was a failure. I have tried trade; but I found that it would take
ten years to get under way in that, and that then I should probably be
on my way to the devil. I was actually afraid that I might by that
time be doing what is called a good business. When formerly I was
looking about to see what I could do for a living, some sad experience
in conforming to the wishes of friends being fresh in my mind to tax
my ingenuity, I thought often and seriously of picking huckleberries;
that surely I could do, and its small profits might suffice- for my
greatest skill has been to want but little- so little capital it
required, so little distraction from my wonted moods, I foolishly
thought. While my acquaintances went unhesitatingly into trade or the
professions, I contemplated this occupation as most like theirs;
ranging the hills all summer to pick the berries which came in my way,
and thereafter carelessly dispose of them; so, to keep the flocks of
Admetus. I also dreamed that I might gather the wild herbs, or carry
evergreens to such villagers as loved to be reminded of the woods,
even to the city, by hay-cart loads. But I have since learned that
trade curses everything it handles; and though you trade in messages
from heaven, the whole curse of trade attaches to the business.
As I preferred some things to others, and especially valued my
freedom, as I could fare hard and yet succeed well, I did not wish to
spend my time in earning rich carpets or other fine furniture, or
delicate cookery, or a house in the Grecian or the Gothic style just
yet. If there are any to whom it is no interruption to acquire these
things, and who know how to use them when acquired, I relinquish to
them the pursuit. Some are "industrious," and appear to love labor for
its own sake, or perhaps because it keeps them out of worse mischief;
to such I have at present nothing to say. Those who would not know
what to do with more leisure than they now enjoy, I might advise to
work twice as hard as they do- work till they pay for themselves, and
get their free papers. For myself I found that the occupation of a
day-laborer was the most independent of any, especially as it required
only thirty or forty days in a year to support one. The laborer's day
ends with the going down of the sun, and he is then free to devote
himself to his chosen pursuit, independent of his labor; but his
employer, who speculates from month to month, has no respite from one
end of the year to the other.
In short, I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to
maintain one's self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime, if
we will live simply and wisely; as the pursuits of the simpler nations
are still the sports of the more artificial. It is not necessary that
a man should earn his living by the sweat of his brow, unless he
sweats easier than I do.
One young man of my acquaintance, who has inherited some acres, told
me that he thought he should live as I did, if he had the means. I
would not have any one adopt my mode of living on any account; for,
beside that before he has fairly learned it I may have found out
another for myself, I desire that there may be as many different
persons in the world as possible; but I would have each one be very
careful to find out and pursue his own way, and not his father's or
his mother's or his neighbor's instead. The youth may build or plant
or sail, only let him not be hindered from doing that which he tells
me he would like to do. It is by a mathematical point only that we are
wise, as the sailor or the fugitive slave keeps the polestar in his
eye; but that is sufficient guidance for all our life. We may not
arrive at our port within a calculable period, but we would preserve
the true course.
Undoubtedly, in this case, what is true for one is truer still for a
thousand, as a large house is not proportionally more expensive than a
small one, since one roof may cover, one cellar underlie, and one wall
separate several apartments. But for my part, I preferred the solitary
dwelling. Moreover, it will commonly be cheaper to build the whole
yourself than to convince another of the advantage of the common wall;
and when you have done this, the common partition, to be much cheaper,
must be a thin one, and that other may prove a bad neighbor, and also
not keep his side in repair. The only cooperation which is commonly
possible is exceedingly partial and superficial; and what little true
cooperation there is, is as if it were not, being a harmony inaudible
to men. If a man has faith, he will cooperate with equal faith
everywhere; if he has not faith, he will continue to live like the
rest of the world, whatever company he is joined to. To cooperate in
the highest as well as the lowest sense, means to get our living
together. I heard it proposed lately that two young men should travel
together over the world, the one without money, earning his means as
he went, before the mast and behind the plow, the other carrying a
bill of exchange in his pocket. It was easy to see that they could not
long be companions or cooperate, since one would not operate at all.
They would part at the first interesting crisis in their adventures.
Above all, as I have implied, the man who goes alone can start today;
but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready,
and it may be a long time before they get off.
But all this is very selfish, I have heard some of my townsmen
say. I confess that I have hither- to indulged very little in
philanthropic enterprises. I have made some sacrifices to a sense of
duty, and among others have sacrificed this pleasure also. There are
those who have used all their arts to persuade me to undertake the
support of some poor family in the town; and if I had nothing to do-
for the devil finds employment for the idle- I might try my hand at
some such pastime as that. However, when I have thought to indulge
myself in this respect, and lay their Heaven under an obligation by
maintaining certain poor persons in all respects as comfortably as I
maintain myself, and have even ventured so far as to make them the
offer, they have one and all unhesitatingly preferred to remain poor.
While my townsmen and women are devoted in so many ways to the good of
their fellows, I trust that one at least may be spared to other and
less humane pursuits. You must have a genius for charity as well as
for anything else. As for Doing-good, that is one of the professions
which are full. Moreover, I have tried it fairly, and, strange as it
may seem, am satisfied that it does not agree with my constitution.
Probably I should not consciously and deliberately forsake my
particular calling to do the good which society demands of me, to save
the universe from annihilation; and I believe that a like but
infinitely greater steadfastness elsewhere is all that now preserves
it. But I would not stand between any man and his genius; and to him
who does this work, which I decline, with his whole heart and soul and
life, I would say, Persevere, even if the world call it doing evil, as
it is most likely they will.
I am far from supposing that my case is a peculiar one; no doubt
many of my readers would make a similar defence. At doing something- I
will not engage that my neighbors shall pronounce it good- I do not
hesitate to say that I should be a capital fellow to hire; but what
that is, it is for my employer to find out. What good I do, in the
common sense of that word, must be aside from my main path, and for
the most part wholly unintended. Men say, practically, Begin where you
are and such as you are, without aiming mainly to become of more
worth, and with kindness aforethought go about doing good. If I were
to preach at all in this strain, I should say rather, Set about being
good. As if the sun should stop when he had kindled his fires up to
the splendor of a moon or a star of the sixth magnitude, and go about
like a Robin Goodfellow, peeping in at every cottage window, inspiring
lunatics, and tainting meats, and making darkness visible, instead of
steadily increasing his genial heat and beneficence till he is of such
brightness that no mortal can look him in the face, and then, and in
the meanwhile too, going about the world in his own orbit, doing it
good, or rather, as a truer philosophy has discovered, the world going
about him getting good. When Phaeton, wishing to prove his heavenly
birth by his beneficence, had the sun's chariot but one day, and drove
out of the beaten track, he burned several blocks of houses in the
lower streets of heaven, and scorched the surface of the earth, and
dried up every spring, and made the great desert of Sahara, till at
length Jupiter hurled him headlong to the earth with a thunderbolt,
and the sun, through grief at his death, did not shine for a year.
There is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness
tainted. It is human, it is divine, carrion. If I knew for a certainty
that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing
me good, I should run for my life, as from that dry and parching wind
of the African deserts called the simoom, which fills the mouth and
nose and ears and eyes with dust till you are suffocated, for fear
that I should get some of his good done to me- some of its virus
mingled with my blood. No- in this case I would rather suffer evil the
natural way. A man is not a good man to me because he will feed me if
I should be starving, or warm me if I should be freezing, or pull me
out of a ditch if I should ever fall into one. I can find you a
Newfoundland dog that will do as much. Philanthropy is not love for
one's fellow-man in the broadest sense. Howard was no doubt an
exceedingly kind and worthy man in his way, and has his reward; but,
comparatively speaking, what are a hundred Howards to us, if their
philanthropy do not help us in our best estate, when we are most
worthy to be helped? I never heard of a philanthropic meeting in which
it was sincerely proposed to do any good to me, or the like of me.
The Jesuits were quite balked by those indians who, being burned
at the stake, suggested new modes of torture to their tormentors.
Being superior to physical suffering, it sometimes chanced that they
were superior to any consolation which the missionaries could offer;
and the law to do as you would be done by fell with less
persuasiveness on the ears of those who, for their part, did not care
how they were done by, who loved their enemies after a new fashion,
and came very near freely forgiving them all they did.
Be sure that you give the poor the aid they most need, though it
be your example which leaves them far behind. If you give money, spend
yourself with it, and do not merely abandon it to them. We make
curious mistakes sometimes. Often the poor man is not so cold and
hungry as he is dirty and ragged and gross. It is partly his taste,
and not merely his misfortune. If you give him money, he will perhaps
buy more rags with it. I was wont to pity the clumsy Irish laborers
who cut ice on the pond, in such mean and ragged clothes, while I
shivered in my more tidy and somewhat more fashionable garments, till,
one bitter cold day, one who had slipped into the water came to my
house to warm him, and I saw him strip off three pairs of pants and
two pairs of stockings ere he got down to the skin, though they were
dirty and ragged enough, it is true, and that he could afford to
refuse the extra garments which I offered him, he had so many intra
ones. This ducking was the very thing he needed. Then I began to pity
myself, and I saw that it would be a greater charity to bestow on me a
flannel shirt than a whole slop-shop on him. There are a thousand
hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root,
and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money
on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that
misery which he strives in vain to relieve. It is the pious
slave-breeder devoting the proceeds of every tenth slave to buy a
Sunday's liberty for the rest. Some show their kindness to the poor by
employing them in their kitchens. Would they not be kinder if they
employed themselves there? You boast of spending a tenth part of your
income in charity; maybe you should spend the nine tenths so, and done
with it. Society recovers only a tenth part of the property then. Is
this owing to the generosity of him in whose possession it is found,
or to the remissness of the officers of justice?
Philanthropy is almost the only virtue which is sufficiently
appreciated by mankind. Nay, it is greatly overrated; and it is our
selfishness which overrates it. A robust poor man, one sunny day here
in Concord, praised a fellow-townsman to me, because, as he said, he
was kind to the poor; meaning himself. The kind uncles and aunts of
the race are more esteemed than its true spiritual fathers and
mothers. I once heard a reverend lecturer on England, a man of
learning and intelligence, after enumerating her scientific, literary,
and political worthies, Shakespeare, Bacon, Cromwell, Milton, Newton,
and others, speak next of her Christian heroes, whom, as if his
profession required it of him, he elevated to a place far above all
the rest, as the greatest of the great. They were Penn, Howard, and
Mrs. Fry. Every one must feel the falsehood and cant of this. The
last were not England's best men and women; only, perhaps, her best
philanthropists.
I would not subtract anything from the praise that is due to
philanthropy, but merely demand justice for all who by their lives and
works are a blessing to mankind. I do not value chiefly a man's
uprightness and benevolence, which are, as it were, his stem and
leaves. Those plants of whose greenness withered we make herb tea for
the sick serve but a humble use, and are most employed by quacks. I
want the flower and fruit of a man; that some fragrance be wafted over
from him to me, and some ripeness flavor our intercourse. His goodness
must not be a partial and transitory act, but a constant superfluity,
which costs him nothing and of which he is unconscious. This is a
charity that hides a multitude of sins. The philanthropist too often
surrounds mankind with the remembrance of his own castoff griefs as an
atmosphere, and calls it sympathy. We should impart our courage, and
not our despair, our health and ease, and not our disease, and take
care that this does not spread by contagion. From what southern plains
comes up the voice of wailing? Under what latitudes reside the
heathen to whom we would send light? Who is that intemperate and
brutal man whom we would redeem? If anything ail a man, so that he
does not perform his functions, if he have a pain in his bowels even-
for that is the seat of sympathy- he forthwith sets about reforming-
the world. Being a microcosm himself, he discovers- and it is a true
discovery, and he is the man to make it- that the world has been
eating green apples; to his eyes, in fact, the globe itself is a great
green apple, which there is danger awful to think of that the children
of men will nibble before it is ripe; and straightway his drastic
philanthropy seeks out the Esquimau and the Patagonian, and embraces
the populous Indian and Chinese villages; and thus, by a few years of
philanthropic activity, the powers in the meanwhile using him for
their own ends, no doubt, he cures himself of his dyspepsia, the globe
acquires a faint blush on one or both of its cheeks, as if it were
beginning to be ripe, and life loses its crudity and is once more
sweet and wholesome to live. I never dreamed of any enormity greater
than I have committed. I never knew, and never shall know, a worse man
than myself.
I believe that what so saddens the reformer is not his sympathy with
his fellows in distress, but, though he be the holiest son of God, is
his private ail. Let this be righted, let the spring come to him, the
morning rise over his couch, and he will forsake his generous
companions without apology. My excuse for not lecturing against the
use of tobacco is, that I never chewed it, that is a penalty which
reformed tobacco-chewers have to pay; though there are things enough I
have chewed which I could lecture against. If you should ever be
betrayed into any of these philanthropies, do not let your left hand
know what your right hand does, for it is not worth knowing. Rescue
the drowning and tie your shoestrings. Take your time, and set about
some free labor.
Our manners have been corrupted by communication with the saints.
Our hymn-books resound with a melodious cursing of God and enduring
Him forever. One would say that even the prophets and redeemers had
rather consoled the fears than confirmed the hopes of man. There is
nowhere recorded a simple and irrepressible satisfaction with the gift
of life, any memorable praise of God. All health and success does me
good, however far off and withdrawn it may appear; all disease and
failure helps to make me sad and does me evil, however much sympathy
it may have with me or I with it. If, then, we would indeed restore
mankind by truly Indian, botanic, magnetic, or natural means, let us
first be as simple and well as Nature ourselves, dispel the clouds
which hang over our own brows, and take up a little life into our
pores. Do not stay to be an overseer of the poor, but endeavor to
become one of the worthies of the world.
I read in the Gulistan, or Flower Garden, of Sheik Sadi of Shiraz,
that "they asked a wise man, saying: Of the many celebrated trees
which the Most High God has created lofty and umbrageous, they call
none azad, or free, excepting the cypress, which bears no fruit; what
mystery is there in this? He replied: Each has its appropriate
produce, and appointed season, during the continuance of which it is
fresh and blooming, and during their absence dry and withered; to
neither of which states is the cypress exposed, being always
flourishing; and of this nature are the azads, or religious
independents.- Fix not thy heart on that which is transitory; for the
Dijlah, or Tigris, will continue to flow through Bagdad after the race
of caliphs is extinct: if thy hand has plenty, be liberal as the date
tree; but if it affords nothing to give away, be an azad, or free man,
like the cypress."
COMPLEMENTAL VERSES.
The Pretensions of Poverty.
Thou dost presume too much, poor needy wretch,
To claim a station in the firmament
Because thy humble cottage, or thy tub,
Nurses some lazy or pedantic virtue
In the cheap sunshine or by shady springs,
With roots and pot-herbs; where thy right hand,
Tearing those humane passions from the mind,
Upon whose stocks fair blooming virtues flourish,
Degradeth nature, and benumbeth sense,
And, Gorgon-like, turns active men to stone.
We not require the dull society
Of your necessitated temperance,
Or that unnatural stupidity
That knows nor joy nor sorrow; nor your forc'd
Falsely exalted passive fortitude
Above the active. This low abject brood,
That fix their seats in mediocrity,
Become your servile minds; but we advance
Such virtues only as admit excess,
Brave, bounteous acts, regal magnificence,
All-seeing prudence, magnanimity
That knows no bound, and that heroic virtue
For which antiquity hath left no name,
But patterns only, such as Hercules,
Achilles, Theseus. Back to thy loath'd cell;
And when thou seest the new enlightened sphere,
Study to know but what those worthies were.
T. CAREW
WHERE I LIVED, AND WHAT I LIVED FOR:
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AT A CERTAIN season of our life we are accustomed to consider
every spot as the possible site of a house. I have thus surveyed the
country on every side within a dozen miles of where I live. In
imagination I have bought all the farms in succession, for all were to
be bought, and I knew their price. I walked over each farmer's
premises, tasted his wild apples, discoursed on husbandry with him,
took his farm at his price, at any price, mortgaging it to him in my
mind; even put a higher price on it- took everything but a deed of it-
took his word for his deed, for I dearly love to talk- cultivated it,
and him too to some extent, I trust, and withdrew when I had enjoyed
it long enough, leaving him to carry it on. This experience entitled
me to be regarded as a sort of real-estate broker by my friends.
Wherever I sat, there I might live, and the landscape radiated from me
accordingly. What is a house but a sedes, a seat?- better if a country
seat. I discovered many a site for a house not likely to be soon
improved, which some might have thought too far from the village, but
to my eyes the village was too far from it. Well, there I might live,
I said; and there I did live, for an hour, a summer and a winter life;
saw how I could let the years run off, buffet the winter through, and
see the spring come in. The future inhabitants of this region,
wherever they may place their houses, may be sure that they have been
anticipated. An afternoon sufficed to lay out the land into orchard,
wood-lot, and pasture, and to decide what fine oaks or pines should be
left to stand before the door, and whence each blasted tree could be
seen to the best advantage; and then I let it lie, fallow, perchance,
for a man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can
afford to let alone.
My imagination carried me so far that I even had the refusal of
several farms- the refusal was all I wanted- but I never got my
fingers burned by actual possession. The nearest that I came to actual
possession was when I bought the Hollowell place, and had begun to
sort my seeds, and collected materials with which to make a
wheelbarrow to carry it on or off with; but before the owner gave me a
deed of it, his wife- every man has such a wife- changed her mind and
wished to keep it, and he offered me ten dollars to release him. Now,
to speak the truth, I had but ten cents in the world, and it surpassed
my arithmetic to tell, if I was that man who had ten cents, or who had
a farm, or ten dollars, or all together. However, I let him keep the
ten dollars and the farm too, for I had carried it far enough; or
rather, to be generous, I sold him the farm for just what I gave for
it, and, as he was not a rich man, made him a present of ten dollars,
and still had my ten cents, and seeds, and materials for a wheelbarrow
left. I found thus that I had been a rich man without any damage to my
poverty. But I retained the landscape, and I have since annually
carried off what it yielded without a wheelbarrow. With respect to
landscapes,
"I am monarch of all I survey,
My right there is none to dispute."
I have frequently seen a poet withdraw, having enjoyed the most
valuable part of a farm, while the crusty farmer supposed that he had
got a few wild apples only. Why, the owner does not know it for many
years when a poet has put his farm in rhyme, the most admirable kind
of invisible fence, has fairly impounded it, milked it, skimmed it,
and got all the cream, and left the farmer only the skimmed milk.
The real attractions of the Hollowell farm, to me, were: its
complete retirement, being, about two miles from the village, half a
mile from the nearest neighbor, and separated from the highway by a
broad field; its bounding on the river, which the owner said protected
it by its fogs from frosts in the spring, though that was nothing to
me; the gray color and ruinous state of the house and barn, and the
dilapidated fences, which put such an interval between me and the last
occupant; the hollow and lichen-covered apple trees, nawed by rabbits,
showing what kind of neighbors I should have; but above all, the
recollection I had of it from my earliest voyages up the river, when
the house was concealed behind a dense grove of red maples, through
which I heard the house-dog bark. I was in haste to buy it, before the
proprietor finished getting out some rocks, cutting down the hollow
apple trees, and grubbing up some young birches which had sprung up in
the pasture, or, in short, had made any more of his improvements. To
enjoy these advantages I was ready to carry it on; like Atlas, to take
the world on my shoulders- I never heard what compensation he received
for that- and do all those things which had no other motive or excuse
but that I might pay for it and be unmolested in my possession of it;
for I knew all the while that it would yield the most abundant crop of
the kind I wanted, if I could only afford to let it alone. But it
turned out as I have said.
All that I could say, then, with respect to farming on a large
scale- I have always cultivated a garden- was, that I had had my seeds
ready. Many think that seeds improve with age. I have no doubt that
time discriminates between the good and the bad; and when at last I
shall plant, I shall be less likely to be disappointed. But I would
say to my fellows, once for all, As long as possible live free and
uncommitted. It makes but little difference whether you are committed
to a farm or the county jail.
Old Cato, whose "De Re Rustica" is my "Cultivator," says- and the
only translation I have seen makes sheer nonsense of the passage-
"When you think of getting a farm turn it thus in your mind, not to
buy greedily; nor spare your pains to look at it, and do not think it
enough to go round it once. The oftener you go there the more it will
please you, if it is good." I think I shall not buy greedily, but go
round and round it as long as I live, and be buried in it first, that
it may please me the more at last.
The present was my next experiment of this kind, which I purpose
to describe more at length, for convenience putting the experience of
two years into one. As I have said, I do not propose to write an ode
to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning,
standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up.
When first I took up my abode in the woods, that is, began to
spend my nights as well as days there, which, by accident, was on
Independence Day, or the Fourth of July, 1845, my house was not
finished for winter, but was merely a defence against the rain,
without plastering or chimney, the walls being of rough,
weather-stained boards, with wide chinks, which made it cool at night.
The upright white hewn studs and freshly planed door and window
casings gave it a clean and airy look, especially in the morning, when
its timbers were saturated with dew, so that I fancied that by noon
some sweet gum would exude from them. To my imagination it retained
throughout the day more or less of this auroral character, reminding
me of a certain house on a mountain which I had visited a year before.
This was an airy and unplastered cabin, fit to entertain a travelling
god, and where a goddess might trail her garments. The winds which
passed over my dwelling were such as sweep over the ridges of
mountains, bearing the broken strains, or celestial parts only, of
terrestrial music. The morning wind forever blows, the poem of
creation is uninterrupted; but few are the ears that hear it. Olympus
is but the outside of the earth everywhere.
The only house I had been the owner of before, if I except a boat,
was a tent, which I used occasionally when making excursions in the
summer, and this is still rolled up in my garret; but the boat, after
passing from hand to hand, has gone down the stream of time. With
this more substantial shelter about me, I had made some progress
toward settling in the world. This frame, so slightly clad, was a sort
of crystallization around me, and reacted on the builder. It was
suggestive somewhat as a picture in outlines. I did not need to go
outdoors to take the air, for the atmosphere within had lost none of
its freshness. It was not so much within doors as behind a door where
I sat, even in the rainiest weather. The Harivansa says, "An abode
without birds is like a meat without seasoning." Such was not my
abode, for I found myself suddenly neighbor to the birds; not by
having imprisoned one, but having caged myself near them. I was not
only nearer to some of those which commonly frequent the garden and
the orchard, but to those smaller and more thrilling songsters of the
forest which never, or rarely, serenade a villager- the wood thrush,
the veery, the scarlet tanager, the field sparrow, the whip-poor-will,
and many others.
I was seated by the shore of a small pond, about a mile and a half
south of the village of Concord and somewhat higher than it, in the
midst of an extensive wood between that town and Lincoln, and about
two miles south of that our only field known to fame, Concord Battle
Ground; but I was so low in the woods that the opposite shore, half a
mile off, like the rest, covered with wood, was my most distant
horizon. For the first week, whenever I looked out on the pond it
impressed me like a tarn high up on the side of a mountain, its bottom
far above the surface of other lakes, and, as the sun arose, I saw it
throwing off its nightly clothing of mist, and here and there, by
degrees, its soft ripples or its smooth reflecting surface was
revealed, while the mists, like ghosts, were stealthily withdrawing in
every direction into the woods, as at the breaking up of some
nocturnal conventicle. The very dew seemed to hang upon the trees
later into the day than usual, as on the sides of mountains.
This small lake was of most value as a neighbor in the intervals
of a gentle rain-storm in August, when, both air and water being
perfectly still, but the sky overcast, mid-afternoon had all the
serenity of evening, and the wood thrush sang around, and was heard
from shore to shore. A lake like this is never smoother than at such a
time; and the clear portion of the air above it being, shallow and
darkened by clouds, the water, full of light and reflections, becomes
a lower heaven itself so much the more important. From a hill-top near
by, where the wood had been recently cut off, there was a pleasing
vista southward across the pond, through a wide indentation in the
hills which form the shore there, where their opposite sides sloping
toward each other suggested a stream flowing out in that direction
through a wooded valley, but stream there was none. That way I looked
between and over the near green hills to some distant and higher ones
in the horizon, tinged with blue. Indeed, by standing on tiptoe I
could catch a glimpse of some of the peaks of the still bluer and more
distant mountain ranges in the northwest, those true-blue coins from
heaven's own mint, and also of some portion of the village. But in
other directions, even from this point, I could not see over or beyond
the woods which surrounded me. It is well to have some water in your
neighborhood, to give buoyancy to and float the earth. One value even
of the smallest well is, that when you look into it you see that earth
is not continent but insular. This is as important as that it keeps
butter cool. When I looked across the pond from this peak toward the
Sudbury meadows, which in time of flood I distinguished elevated
perhaps by a mirage in their seething valley, like a coin in a basin,
all the earth beyond the pond appeared like a thin crust insulated and
floated even by this small sheet of interverting water, and I was
reminded that this on which I dwelt was but dry land.
Though the view from my door was still more contracted, I did not
feel crowded or confined in the least. There was pasture enough for my
imagination. The low shrub oak plateau to which the opposite shore
arose stretched away toward the prairies of the West and the steppes
of Tartary, affording ample room for all the roving families of men.
"There are none happy in the world but beings who enjoy freely a vast
horizon"- said Damodara, when his herds required new and larger
pastures.
Both place and time were changed, and I dwelt nearer to those
parts of the universe and to those eras in history which had most
attracted me. Where I lived was as far off as many a region viewed
nightly by astronomers. We are wont to imagine rare and delectable
places in some remote and more celestial corner of the system, behind
the constellation of Cassiopeia's Chair, far from noise and
disturbance. I discovered that my house actually had its site in such
a withdrawn, but forever new and unprofaned, part of the universe. If
it were worth the while to settle in those parts near to the Pleiades
or the Hyades, to Aldebaran or Altair, then I was really there, or at
an equal remoteness from the life which I had left behind, dwindled
and twinkling with as fine a ray to my nearest neighbor, and to be
seen only in moonless nights by him. Such was that part of creation
where I had squatted;
"There was a shepherd that did live,
And held his thoughts as high
As were the mounts whereon his flocks
Did hourly feed him by."
What should we think of the shepherd's life if his flocks always
wandered to higher pastures than his thoughts?
Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal
simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself. I have been
as sincere a worshipper of Aurora as the Greeks. I got up early and
bathed in the pond; that was a religious exercise, and one of the best
things which I did. They say that characters were engraven on the
bathing tub of King Tching-thang to this effect: "Renew thyself
completely each day; do it again, and again, and forever again." I can
understand that. Morning brings back the heroic ages. I was as much
affected by the faint burn of a mosquito making its invisible and
unimaginable tour through my apartment at earliest dawn, when I was
sitting with door and windows open, as I could be by any trumpet that
ever sang of fame. It was Homer's requiem; itself an Iliad and Odyssey
in the air, singing its own wrath and wanderings. There was something
cosmical about it; a standing advertisement, till forbidden, of the
everlasting vigor and fertility of the world. The morning, which is
the most memorable season of the day, is the awakening hour. Then
there is least somnolence in us; and for an hour, at least, some part
of us awakes which slumbers all the rest of the day and night. Little
is to be expected of that day, if it can be called a day, to which we
are not awakened by our Genius, but by the mechanical nudgings of some
servitor, are not awakened by our own newly acquired force and
aspirations from within, accompanied by the undulations of celestial
music, instead of factory bells, and a fragrance filling the air- to a
higher life than we fell asleep from; and thus the darkness bear its
fruit, and prove itself to be good, no less than the light. That man
who does not believe that each day contains an earlier, more sacred,
and auroral hour than he has yet profaned, has despaired of life, and
is pursuing a descending and darkening way. After a partial cessation
of his sensuous life, the soul of man, or its organs rather, are
reinvigorated each day, and his Genius tries again what noble life it
can make. All memorable events, I should say, transpire in morning
time and in a morning atmosphere. The Vedas say, "All intelligences
awake with the morning." Poetry and art, and the fairest and most
memorable of the actions of men, date from such an hour. All poets
and heroes, like Memnon, are the children of Aurora, and emit their
music at sunrise. To him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace
with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning. It matters not what the
clocks say or the attitudes and labors of men. Morning is when I am
awake and there is a dawn in me. Moral reform is the effort to throw
off sleep. Why is it that men give so poor an account of their day if
they have not been slumbering? They are not such poor calculators. If
they had not been overcome with drowsiness, they would have performed
something. The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only
one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion,
only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake
is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How
could I have looked him in the face?
We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by
mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which
does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more
encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his
life by a conscious endeavor. It is something to be able to paint a
particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects
beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very
atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do.
To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. Every
man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the
contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour. If we refused,
or rather used up, such paltry information as we get, the oracles
would distinctly inform us how this might be done.
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to
front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn
what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had
not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so
dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite
necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life,
to live so sturdily and Spartan- like as to put to rout all that was
not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a
corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be
mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and
publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it
by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next
excursion. For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange
uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God, and have
somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to
"glorify God and enjoy him forever."
Still we live meanly, like ants; though the fable tells us that we
were long ago changed into men; like pygmies we fight with cranes; it
is error upon error, and clout upon clout, and our best virtue has for
its occasion a superfluous and evitable wretchedness. Our life is
frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more
than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and
lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your
affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead
of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your
thumb-nail. In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such
are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to
be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go
to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he
must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds. Simplify, simplify.
Instead of three meals a day, if it be necessary eat but one; instead
of a hundred dishes, five; and reduce other things in proportion. Our
life is like a German Confederacy, made up of petty states, with its
boundary forever fluctuating, so that even a German cannot tell you
how it is bounded at any moment. The nation itself, with all its so-
called internal improvements, which, by the way are all external and
superficial, is just such an unwieldy and overgrown establishment,
cluttered with furniture and tripped up by its own traps, ruined by
luxury and heedless expense, by want of calculation and a worthy aim,
as the million households in the land; and the only cure for it, as
for them, is in a rigid economy, a stern and more than Spartan
simplicity of life and elevation of purpose. It lives too fast. Men
think that it is essential that the Nation have commerce, and export
ice, and talk through a telegraph, and ride thirty miles an hour,
without a doubt, whether they do or not; but whether we should live
like baboons or like men, is a little uncertain. If we do not get out
sleepers, and forge rails, and devote days and nights to the work, but
go to tinkering upon our lives to improve them, who will build
railroads? And if railroads are not built, how shall we get to heaven
in season? But if we stay at home and mind our business, who will want
railroads? We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us. Did you
ever think what those sleepers are that underlie the railroad? Each
one is a man, an Irishman, or a Yankee man. The rails are laid on
them, and they are covered with sand, and the cars run smoothly over
them. They are sound sleepers, I assure you. And every few years a new
lot is laid down and run over; so that, if some have the pleasure of
riding on a rail, others have the misfortune to be ridden upon. And
when they run over a man that is walking in his sleep, a supernumerary
sleeper in the wrong position, and wake him up, they suddenly stop the
cars, and make a hue and cry about it, as if this were an exception. I
am glad to know that it takes a gang of men for every five miles to
keep the sleepers down and level in their beds as it is, for this is a
sign that they may sometime get up again.
Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? We are
determined to be starved before we are hungry. Men say that a stitch
in time saves nine, and so they take a thousand stitches today to save
nine tomorrow. As for work, we haven't any of any consequence. We have
the Saint Vitus' dance, and cannot possibly keep our heads still. If I
should only give a few pulls at the parish bell-rope, as for a fire,
that is, without setting the bell, there is hardly a man on his farm
in the outskirts of Concord, notwithstanding that press of engagements
which was his excuse so many times this morning, nor a boy, nor a
woman, I might almost say, but would forsake all and follow that
sound, not mainly to save property from the flames, but, if we will
confess the truth, much more to see it burn, since burn it must, and
we, be it known, did not set it on fire- or to see it put out, and
have a hand in it, if that is done as handsomely; yes, even if it were
the parish church itself. Hardly a man takes a half-hour's nap after
dinner, but when he wakes he holds up his head and asks, "What's the
news?" as if the rest of mankind had stood his sentinels. Some give
directions to be waked every half-hour, doubtless for no other
purpose; and then, to pay for it, they tell what they have dreamed.
After a night's sleep the news is as indispensable as the breakfast.
"Pray tell me anything new that has happened to a man anywhere on this
globe"- and he reads it over his coffee and rolls, that a man has had
his eyes gouged out this morning on the Wachito River; never dreaming
the while that he lives in the dark unfathomed mammoth cave of this
world, and has but the rudiment of an eye himself.
For my part, I could easily do without the post-office. I think that
there are very few important communications made through it. To speak
critically, I never received more than one or two letters in my life-
I wrote this some years ago- that were worth the postage. The
penny-post is, commonly, an institution through which you seriously
offer a man that penny for his thoughts which is so often safely
offered in jest. And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in
a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by
accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat
blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog
killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter- we never need read
of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle,
what do you care for a myriad instances and applications? To a
philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit
and read it are old women over their tea. Yet not a few are greedy
after this gossip. There was such a rush, as I hear, the other day at
one of the offices to learn the foreign news by the last arrival, that
several large squares of plate glass belonging to the establishment
were broken by the pressure- news which I seriously think a ready wit
might write a twelve-month, or twelve years, beforehand with
sufficient accuracy. As for Spain, for instance, if you know how to
throw in Don Carlos and the Infanta, and Don Pedro and Seville and
Granada, from time to time in the right proportions- they may have
changed the names a little since I saw the papers- and serve up a
bull-fight when other entertainments fail, it will be true to the
letter, and give us as good an idea of the exact state or ruin of
things in Spain as the most succinct and lucid reports under this head
in the newspapers: and as for England, almost the last significant
scrap of news from that quarter was the revolution of 1649; and if you
have learned the history of her crops for an average year, you never
need attend to that thing again, unless your speculations are of a
merely pecuniary character. If one may judge who rarely looks into the
newspapers, nothing new does ever happen in foreign parts, a French
revolution not excepted.
What news! how much more important to know what that is which was
never old! "Kieou-he-yu (great dignitary of the state of Wei) sent a
man to Khoung-tseu to know his news. Khoung-tseu caused the messenger
to be seated near him, and questioned him in these terms: What is your
master doing? The messenger answered with respect: My master desires
to diminish the number of his faults, but he cannot come to the end of
them. The messenger being gone, the philosopher remarked: What a
worthy messenger! What a worthy messenger!" The preacher, instead of
vexing the ears of drowsy farmers on their day of rest at the end of
the week- for Sunday is the fit conclusion of an ill-spent week, and
not the fresh and brave beginning of a new one- with this one other
draggle-tail of a sermon, should shout with thundering voice, "Pause!
Avast! Why so seeming fast, but deadly slow?"
Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while
reality is fabulous. If men would steadily observe realities only, and
not allow themselves to be deluded, life, to compare it with such
things as we know, would be like a fairy tale and the Arabian Nights'
Entertainments. If we respected only what is inevitable and has a
right to be, music and poetry would resound along the streets. When
we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy
things have any permanent and absolute existence, that petty fears and
petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality. This is always
exhilarating and sublime. By closing the eyes and slumbering, and
consenting to be deceived by shows, men establish and confirm their
daily life of routine and habit everywhere, which still is built on
purely illusory foundations. Children, who play life, discern its true
law and relations more clearly than men, who fail to live it worthily,
but who think that they are wiser by experience, that is, by failure.
I have read in a Hindoo book, that "there was a king's son, who, being
expelled in infancy from his native city, was brought up by a
forester, and, growing up to maturity in that state, imagined himself
to belong to the barbarous race with which he lived. One of his
father's ministers having discovered him, revealed to him what he was,
and the misconception of his character was removed, and he knew
himself to be a prince. So soul," continues the Hindoo philosopher,
"from the circumstances in which it is placed, mistakes its own
character, until the truth is revealed to it by some holy teacher, and
then it knows itself to be Brahme." I perceive that we inhabitants of
New England live this mean life that we do because our vision does not
penetrate the surface of things. We think that that is which appears
to be. If a man should walk through this town and see only the
reality, where, think you, would the "Mill-dam" go to? If he should
give us an account of the realities he beheld there, we should not
recognize the place in his description. Look at a meeting-house, or a
court-house, or a jail, or a shop, or a dwelling-house, and say what
that thing really is before a true gaze, and they would all go to
pieces in your account of them. Men esteem truth remote, in the
outskirts of the system, behind the farthest star, before Adam and
after the last man. In eternity there is indeed something true and
sublime. But all these times and places and occasions are now and
here. God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be
more divine in the lapse of all the ages. And we are enabled to
apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual
instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us. The
universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions; whether
we travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us. Let us spend our
lives in conceiving then. The poet or the artist never yet had so fair
and noble a design but some of his posterity at least could accomplish
it.
Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown
off the track by every nutshell and mosquito's wing that falls on the
rails. Let us rise early and fast, or break fast, gently and without
perturbation; let company come and let company go, let the bells ring
and the children cry- determined to make a day of it. Why should we
knock under and go with the stream? Let us not be upset and
overwhelmed in that terrible rapid and whirlpool called a dinner,
situated in the meridian shallows. Weather this danger and you are
safe, for the rest of the way is down hill. With unrelaxed nerves,
with morning vigor, sail by it, looking another way, tied to the mast
like Ulysses. If the engine whistles, let it whistle till it is hoarse
for its pains. If the bell rings, why should we run? We will consider
what kind of music they are like. Let us settle ourselves, and work
and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and
prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion
which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and
Boston and Concord, through Church and State, through poetry and
philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in
place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake;
and then begin, having a point d'appui, below freshet and frost and
fire, a place where you might found a wall or a state, or set a
lamp-post safely, or perhaps a gauge, not a Nilometer, but a
Realometer, that future ages might know how deep a freshet of shams
and appearances had gathered from time to time. If you stand right
fronting and face to face to a fact, you will see the sun glimmer on
both its surfaces, as if it were a cimeter, and feel its sweet edge
dividing you through the heart and marrow, and so you will happily
conclude your mortal career. Be it life or death, we crave only
reality. If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats
and feel cold in the extremities; if we are alive, let us go about our
business.
Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I
drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin
current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish
in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count one. I
know not the first letter of the alphabet. I have always been
regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born. The intellect
is a cleaver; it discerns and rifts its way into the secret of things.
I do not wish to be any more busy with my hands than is necessary. My
head is hands and feet. I feel all my best faculties concentrated in
it. My instinct tells me that my head is an organ for burrowing, as
some creatures use their snout and fore paws, and with it I would mine
and burrow my way through these hills. I think that the richest vein
is somewhere hereabouts; so by the divining-rod and thin rising vapors
I judge; and here I will begin to mine.
READING:
=======
WITH A LITTLE more deliberation in the choice of their pursuits, all
men would perhaps become essentially students and observers, for
certainly their nature and destiny are interesting to all alike. In
accumulating property for ourselves or our posterity, in founding a
family or a state, or acquiring fame even, we are mortal; but in
dealing with truth we are immortal, and need fear no change nor
accident. The oldest Egyptian or Hindoo philosopher raised a corner of
the veil from the statue of the divinity; and still the trembling robe
remains raised, and I gaze upon as fresh a glory as he did, since it
was I in him that was then so bold, and it is he in me that now
reviews the vision. No dust has settled on that robe; no time has
elapsed since that divinity was revealed. That time which we really
improve, or which is improvable, is neither past, present, nor future.
My residence was more favorable, not only to thought, but to serious
reading, than a university; and though I was beyond the range of the
ordinary circulating library, I had more than ever come within the
influence of those books which circulate round the world, whose
sentences were first written on bark, and are now merely copied from
time to time on to linen paper. Says the poet Mir Camar Uddin Mast,
"Being seated, to run through the region of the spiritual world; I
have had this advantage in books. To be intoxicated by a single glass
of wine; I have experienced this pleasure when I have drunk the liquor
of the esoteric doctrines." I kept Homer's Iliad on my table through
the summer, though I looked at his page only now and then. Incessant
labor with my hands, at first, for I had my house to finish and my
beans to hoe at the same time, made more study impossible. Yet I
sustained myself by the prospect of such reading in future. I read one
or two shallow books of travel in the intervals of my work, till that
employment made me ashamed of myself, and I asked where it was then
that I lived.
The student may read Homer or Aeschylus in the Greek without
danger of dissipation or luxuriousness, for it implies that he in some
measure emulate their heroes, and consecrate morning hours to their
pages. The heroic books, even if printed in the character of our
mother tongue, will always be in a language dead to degenerate times;
and we must laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line,
conjecturing a larger sense than common use permits out of what wisdom
and valor and generosity we have. The modern cheap and fertile press,
with all its translations, has done little to bring us nearer to the
heroic writers of antiquity. They seem as solitary, and the letter in
which they are printed as rare and curious, as ever. It is worth the
expense of youthful days and costly hours, if you learn only some
words of an ancient language, which are raised out of the trivialness
of the street, to be perpetual suggestions and provocations. It is not
in vain that the farmer remembers and repeats the few Latin words
which he has heard. Men sometimes speak as if the study of the
classics would at length make way for more modern and practical
studies; but the adventurous student will always study classics, in
whatever language they may be written and however ancient they may be.
For what are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man?
They are the only oracles which are not decayed, and there are such
answers to the most modern inquiry in them as Delphi and Dodona never
gave. We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old. To
read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble
exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise
which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as
the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life
to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as
they were written. It is not enough even to be able to speak the
language of that nation by which they are written, for there is a
memorable interval between the spoken and the written language, the
language heard and the language read. The one is commonly transitory,
a sound, a tongue, a dialect merely, almost brutish, and we learn it
unconsciously, like the brutes, of our mothers. The other is the
maturity and experience of that; if that is our mother tongue, this is
our father tongue, a reserved and select expression, too significant
to be heard by the ear, which we must be born again in order to speak.
The crowds of men who merely spoke the Greek and Latin tongues in the
Middle Ages were not entitled by the accident of birth to read the
works of genius written in those languages; for these were not written
in that Greek or Latin which they knew, but in the select language of
literature. They had not learned the nobler dialects of Greece and
Rome, but the very materials on which they were written were waste
paper to them, and they prized instead a cheap contemporary
literature. But when the several nations of Europe had acquired
distinct though rude written languages of their own, sufficient for
the purposes of their rising literatures, then first learning revived,
and scholars were enabled to discern from that remoteness the
treasures of antiquity. What the Roman and Grecian multitude could not
hear, after the lapse of ages a few scholars read, and a few scholars
only are still reading it.
However much we may admire the orator's occasional bursts of
eloquence, the noblest written words are commonly as far behind or
above the fleeting spoken language as the firmament with its stars is
behind the clouds. There are the stars, and they who can may read
them. The astronomers forever comment on and observe them. They are
not exhalations like our daily colloquies and vaporous breath. What is
called eloquence in the forum is commonly found to be rhetoric in the
study. The orator yields to the inspiration of a transient occasion,
and speaks to the mob before him, to those who can hear him; but the
writer, whose more equable life is his occasion, and who would be
distracted by the event and the crowd which inspire the orator, speaks
to the intellect and health of mankind, to all in any age who can
understand him.
No wonder that Alexander carried the Iliad with him on his
expeditions in a precious casket. A written word is the choicest of
relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more
universal than any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to
life itself. It may be translated into every language, and not only be
read but actually breathed from all human lips;- not be represented on
canvas or in marble only, but be carved out of the breath of life
itself. The symbol of an ancient man's thought becomes a modern man's
speech. Two thousand summers have imparted to the monuments of Grecian
literature, as to her marbles, only a maturer golden and autumnal
tint, for they have carried their own serene and celestial atmosphere
into all lands to protect them against the corrosion of time. Books
are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of
generations and nations. Books, the oldest and the best, stand
naturally and rightfully on the shelves of every cottage. They have no
cause of their own to plead, but while they enlighten and sustain the
reader his common sense will not refuse them. Their authors are a
natural and irresistible aristocracy in every society, and, more than
kings or emperors, exert an influence on mankind. When the illiterate
and perhaps scornful trader has earned by enterprise and industry his
coveted leisure and independence, and is admitted to the circles of
wealth and fashion, he turns inevitably at last to those still higher
but yet inaccessible circles of intellect and genius, and is sensible
only of the imperfection of his culture and the vanity and
insufficiency of all his riches, and further proves his good sense by
the pains which be takes to secure for his children that intellectual
culture whose want he so keenly feels; and thus it is that he becomes
the founder of a family.
Those who have not learned to read the ancient classics in the
language in which they were written must have a very imperfect
knowledge of the history of the human race; for it is remarkable that
no transcript of them has ever been made into any modern tongue,
unless our civilization itself may be regarded as such a transcript.
Homer has never yet been printed in English, nor Aeschylus, nor Virgil
even- works as refined, as solidly done, and as beautiful almost as
the morning itself; for later writers, say what we will of their
genius, have rarely, if ever, equalled the elaborate beauty and finish
and the lifelong and heroic literary labors of the ancients. They only
talk of forgetting them who never knew them. It will be soon enough to
forget them when we have the learning and the genius which will enable
us to attend to and appreciate them. That age will be rich indeed when
those relics which we call Classics, and the still older and more than
classic but even less known Scriptures of the nations, shall have
still further accumulated, when the Vaticans shall be filled with
Vedas and Zendavestas and Bibles, with Homers and Dantes and
Shakespeares, and all the centuries to come shall have successively
deposited their trophies in the forum of the world. By such a pile we
may hope to scale heaven at last.
The works of the great poets have never yet been read by mankind,
for only great poets can read them. They have only been read as the
multitude read the stars, at most astrologically, not astronomically.
Most men have learned to read to serve a paltry convenience, as they
have learned to cipher in order to keep accounts and not be cheated in
trade; but of reading as a noble intellectual exercise they know
little or nothing; yet this only is reading, in a high sense, not that
which lulls us as a luxury and suffers the nobler faculties to sleep
the while, but what we have to stand on tip-toe to read and devote our
most alert and wakeful hours to.
I think that having learned our letters we should read the best that
is in literature, and not be forever repeating our a-b-abs, and words
of one syllable, in the fourth or fifth classes, sitting on the lowest
and foremost form all our lives. Most men are satisfied if they read
or hear read, and perchance have been convicted by the wisdom of one
good book, the Bible, and for the rest of their lives vegetate and
dissipate their faculties in what is called easy reading. There is a
work in several volumes in our Circulating Library entitled "Little
Reading," which I thought referred to a town of that name which I had
not been to. There are those who, like cormorants and ostriches, can
digest all sorts of this, even after the fullest dinner of meats and
vegetables, for they suffer nothing to be wasted. If others are the
machines to provide this provender, they are the machines to read it.
They read the nine thousandth tale about Zebulon and Sophronia, and
how they loved as none had ever loved before, and neither did the
course of their true love run smooth- at any rate, how it did run and
stumble, and get up again and go on! how some poor unfortunate got up
on to a steeple, who had better never have gone up as far as the
belfry; and then, having needlessly got him up there, the happy
novelist rings the bell for all the world to come together and hear, O
dear! how he did get down again! For my part, I think that they had
better metamorphose all such aspiring heroes of universal noveldom
into man weather-cocks, as they used to put heroes among the
constellations, and let them swing round there till they are rusty,
and not come down at all to bother honest men with their pranks. The
next time the novelist rings the bell I will not stir though the
meeting-house burn down. "The Skip of the Tip-Toe-Hop, a Romance of
the Middle Ages, by the celebrated author of 'Tittle-Tol-Tan,' to
appear in monthly parts; a great rush; don't all come together." All
this they read with saucer eyes, and erect and primitive curiosity,
and with unwearied gizzard, whose corrugations even yet need no
sharpening, just as some little four-year-old bencher his two-cent
gilt-covered edition of Cinderella- without any improvement, that I
can see, in the pronunciation, or accent, or emphasis, or any more
skill in extracting or inserting the moral. The result is dulness of
sight, a stagnation of the vital circulations, and a general deliquium
and sloughing off of all the intellectual faculties. This sort of
gingerbread is baked daily and more sedulously than pure wheat or
rye-and-Indian in almost every oven, and finds a surer market.
The best books are not read even by those who are called good
readers. What does our Concord culture amount to? There is in this
town, with a very few exceptions, no taste for the best or for very
good books even in English literature, whose words all can read and
spell. Even the college-bred and so-called liberally educated men here
and elsewhere have really little or no acquaintance with the English
classics; and as for the recorded wisdom of mankind, the ancient
classics and Bibles, which are accessible to all who will know of
them, there are the feeblest efforts anywhere made to become
acquainted with them. I know a woodchopper, of middle age, who takes a
French paper, not for news as he says, for he is above that, but to
"keep himself in practice," he being a Canadian by birth; and when I
ask him what he considers the best thing he can do in this world, he
says, beside this, to keep up and add to his English. This is about as
much as the college-bred generally do or aspire to do, and they take
an English paper for the purpose. One who has just come from reading
perhaps one of the best English books will find how many with whom he
can converse about it? Or suppose he comes from reading a Greek or
Latin classic in the original, whose praises are familiar even to the
so-called illiterate; he will find nobody at all to speak to, but must
keep silence about it. Indeed, there is hardly the professor in our
colleges, who, if he has mastered the difficulties of the language,
has proportionally mastered the difficulties of the wit and poetry of
a Greek poet, and has any sympathy to impart to the alert and heroic
reader; and as for the sacred Scriptures, or Bibles of mankind, who in
this town can tell me even their titles? Most men do not know that
any nation but the Hebrews have had a scripture. A man, any man, will
go considerably out of his way to pick up a silver dollar; but here
are golden words, which the wisest men of antiquity have uttered, and
whose worth the wise of every succeeding age have assured us of;- and
yet we learn to read only as far as Easy Reading, the primers and
class-books, and when we leave school, the "Little Reading," and
story-books, which are for boys and beginners; and our reading, our
conversation and thinking, are all on a very low level, worthy only of
pygmies and manikins.
I aspire to be acquainted with wiser men than this our Concord
soil has produced, whose names are hardly known here. Or shall I hear
the name of Plato and never read his book? As if Plato were my
townsman and I never saw him- my next neighbor and I never heard him
speak or attended to the wisdom of his words. But how actually is it?
His Dialogues, which contain what was immortal in him, lie on the next
shelf, and yet I never read them. We are underbred and low-lived and
illiterate; and in this respect I confess I do not make any very broad
distinction between the illiterateness of my townsman who cannot read
at all and the illiterateness of him who has learned to read only what
is for children and feeble intellects. We should be as good as the
worthies of antiquity, but partly by first knowing how good they were.
We are a race of tit-men, and soar but little higher in our
intellectual flights than the columns of the daily paper.
It is not all books that are as dull as their readers. There are
probably words addressed to our condition exactly, which, if we could
really bear and understand, would be more salutary than the morning or
the spring to our lives, and possibly put a new aspect on the face of
things for us. How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the
reading of a book! The book exists for us, perchance, which will
explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable
things we may find somewhere uttered. These same questions that
disturb and puzzle and confound us have in their turn occurred to all
the wise men; not one has been omitted; and each has answered them,
according to his ability, by his words and his life. Moreover, with
wisdom we shall learn liberality. The solitary hired man on a farm in
the outskirts of Concord, who has had his second birth and peculiar
religious experience, and is driven as he believes into the silent
gravity and exclusiveness by his faith, may think it is not true; but
Zoroaster, thousands of years ago, travelled the same road and had the
same experience; but he, being wise, knew it to be universal, and
treated his neighbors accordingly, and is even said to have invented
and established worship among men. Let him humbly commune with
Zoroaster then, and through the liberalizing influence of all the
worthies, with Jesus Christ himself, and let "our church" go by the
board.
We boast that we belong to the Nineteenth Century and are making the
most rapid strides of any nation. But consider how little this village
does for its own culture. I do not wish to flatter my townsmen, nor to
be flattered by them, for that will not advance either of us. We need
to be provoked- goaded like oxen, as we are, into a trot. We have a
comparatively decent system of common schools, schools for infants
only; but excepting the half-starved Lyceum in the winter, and
latterly the puny beginning of a library suggested by the State, no
school for ourselves. We spend more on almost any article of bodily
aliment or ailment than on our mental ailment. It is time that we had
uncommon schools, that we did not leave off our education when we
begin to be men and women. It is time that villages were universities,
and their elder inhabitants the fellows of universities, with leisure-
if they are, indeed, so well off- to pursue liberal studies the rest
of their lives. Shall the world be confined to one Paris or one Oxford
forever? Cannot students be boarded here and get a liberal education
under the skies of Concord? Can we not hire some Abelard to lecture to
us? Alas! what with foddering the cattle and tending the store, we are
kept from school too long, and our education is sadly neglected. In
this country, the village should in some respects take the place of
the nobleman of Europe. It should be the patron of the fine arts. It
is rich enough. It wants only the magnanimity and refinement. It can
spend money enough on such things as farmers and traders value, but it
is thought Utopian to propose spending money for things which more
intelligent men know to be of far more worth. This town has spent
seventeen thousand dollars on a town-house, thank fortune or politics,
but probably it will not spend so much on living wit, the true meat to
put into that shell, in a hundred years. The one hundred and
twenty-five dollars annually subscribed for a Lyceum in the winter is
better spent than any other equal sum raised in the town. If we live
in the Nineteenth Century, why should we not enjoy the advantages
which the Nineteenth Century offers? Why should our life be in any
respect provincial? If we will read newspapers, why not skip the
gossip of Boston and take the best newspaper in the world at once?-
not be sucking the pap of "neutral family" papers, or browsing "Olive
Branches" here in New England. Let the reports of all the learned
societies come to us, and we will see if they know anything. Why
should we leave it to Harper & Brothers and Redding & Co. to select
our reading? As the nobleman of cultivated taste surrounds himself
with whatever conduces to his culture- genius- learning- wit- books-
paintings- statuary- music- philosophical instruments, and the like;
so let the village do-not stop short at a pedagogue, a parson, a
sexton, a parish library, and three selectmen, because our Pilgrim
forefathers got through a cold winter once on a bleak rock with these.
To act collectively is according to the spirit of our institutions;
and I am confident that, as our circumstances are more flourishing,
our means are greater than the nobleman's. New England can hire all
the wise men in the world to come and teach her, and board them round
the while, and not be provincial at all. That is the uncommon school
we want. Instead of noblemen, let us have noble villages of men. If it
is necessary, omit one bridge over the river, go round a little there,
and throw one arch at least over the darker gulf of ignorance which
surrounds us.
SOUNDS:
======
BUT WHILE we are confined to books, though the most select and
classic, and read only particular written languages, which are
themselves but dialects and provincial, we are in danger of forgetting
the language which all things and events speak without metaphor, which
alone is copious and standard. Much is published, but little printed.
The rays which stream through the shutter will be no longer remembered
when the shutter is wholly removed. No method nor discipline can
supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a
course of history or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well
selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life,
compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen?
Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer? Read your fate,
see what is before you, and walk on into futurity.
I did not read books the first summer; I hoed beans. Nay, I often
did better than this. There were times when I could not afford to
sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the
head or hands. I love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes, in a
summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny
doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and
hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while
the birds sing around or flitted noiseless through the house, until by
the sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some traveller's
wagon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time. I
grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better
than any work of the hands would have been. They were not time
subtracted from my life, but so much over and above my usual
allowance. I realized what the Orientals mean by contemplation and the
forsaking of works. For the most part, I minded not how the hours
went. The day advanced as if to light some work of mine; it was
morning, and lo, now it is evening, and nothing memorable is
accomplished. Instead of singing like the birds, I silently smiled at
my incessant good fortune. As the sparrow had its trill, sitting on
the hickory before my door, so had I my chuckle or suppressed warble
which he might hear out of my nest. My days were not days of the week,
bearing the stamp of any heathen deity, nor were they minced into
hours and fretted by the ticking of a clock; for I lived like the Puri
Indians, of whom it is said that "for yesterday, today, and tomorrow
they have only one word, and they express the variety of meaning by
pointing backward for yesterday forward for tomorrow, and overhead for
the passing day." This was sheer idleness to my fellow-townsmen, no
doubt; but if the birds and flowers had tried me by their standard, I
should not have been found wanting. A man must find his occasions in
himself, it is true. The natural day is very calm, and will hardly
reprove his indolence.
I had this advantage, at least, in my mode of life, over those who
were obliged to look abroad for amusement, to society and the theatre,
that my life itself was become my amusement and never ceased to be
novel. It was a drama of many scenes and without an end. If we were
always, indeed, getting our living, and regulating our lives according
to the last and best mode we had learned, we should never be troubled
with ennui. Follow your genius closely enough, and it will not fail to
show you a fresh prospect every hour. Housework was a pleasant
pastime. When my floor was dirty, I rose early, and, setting all my
furniture out of doors on the grass, bed and bedstead making but one
budget, dashed water on the floor, and sprinkled white sand from the
pond on it, and then with a broom scrubbed it clean and white; and by
the time the villagers had broken their fast the morning sun had dried
my house sufficiently to allow me to move in again, and my meditations
were almost uninterupted. It was pleasant to see my whole household
effects out on the grass, making a little pile like a gypsy's pack,
and my three-legged table, from which I did not remove the books and
pen and ink, standing amid the pines and hickories. They seemed glad
to get out themselves, and as if unwilling to be brought in. I was
sometimes tempted to stretch an awning over them and take my seat
there. It was worth the while to see the sun shine on these things,
and hear the free wind blow on them; so much more interesting most
familiar objects look out of doors than in the house. A bird sits on
the next bough, life-everlasting grows under the table, and blackberry
vines run round its legs; pine cones, chestnut burs, and strawberry
leaves are strewn about. It looked as if this was the way these forms
came to be transferred to our furniture, to tables, chairs, and
bedsteads- because they once stood in their midst.
My house was on the side of a hill, immediately on the edge of the
larger wood, in the midst of a young forest of pitch pines and
hickories, and half a dozen rods from the pond, to which a narrow
footpath led down the hill. In my front yard grew the strawberry,
blackberry, and life-everlasting, johnswort and goldenrod, shrub oaks
and sand cherry, blueberry and groundnut. Near the end of May, the
sand cherry (Cerasus pumila) adorned the sides of the path with its
delicate flowers arranged in umbels cylindrically about its short
stems, which last, in the fall, weighed down with goodsized and
handsome cherries, fell over in wreaths like rays on every side. I
tasted them out of compliment to Nature, though they were scarcely
palatable. The sumach (Rhus glabra) grew luxuriantly about the house,
pushing up through the embankment which I had made, and growing five
or six feet the first season. Its broad pinnate tropical leaf was
pleasant though strange to look on. The large buds, suddenly pushing
out late in the spring from dry sticks which had seemed to be dead,
developed themselves as by magic into graceful green and tender
boughs, an inch in diameter; and sometimes, as I sat at my window, so
heedlessly did they grow and tax their weak joints, I heard a fresh
and tender bough suddenly fall like a fan to the ground, when there
was not a breath of air stirring, broken off by its own weight. In
August, the large masses of berries, which, when in flower, had
attracted many wild bees, gradually assumed their bright velvety
crimson hue, and by their weight again bent down and broke the tender
limbs.
As I sit at my window this summer afternoon, hawks are circling
about my clearing; the tantivy of wild pigeons, flying by two and
threes athwart my view, or perching restless on the white pine boughs
behind my house, gives a voice to the air; a fish hawk dimples the
glassy surface of the pond and brings up a fish; a mink steals out of
the marsh before my door and seizes a frog by the shore; the sedge is
bending under the weight of the reed-birds flitting hither and
thither; and for the last half-hour I have heard the rattle of
railroad cars, now dying away and then reviving like the beat of a
partridge, conveying travellers from Boston to the country. For I did
not live so out of the world as that boy who, as I hear, was put out
to a farmer in the east part of the town, but ere long ran away and
came home again, quite down at the heel and homesick. He had never
seen such a dull and out-of-the-way place; the folks were all gone
off; why, you couldn't even hear the whistle! I doubt if there is such
a place in Massachusetts now:
"In truth, our village has become a butt
For one of those fleet railroad shafts, and o'er
Our peaceful plain its soothing sound is- Concord."
The Fitchburg Railroad touches the pond about a hundred rods south
of where I dwell. I usually go to the village along its causeway, and
am, as it were, related to society by this link. The men on the
freight trains, who go over the whole length of the road, bow to me as
to an old acquaintance, they pass me so often, and apparently they
take me for an employee; and so I am. I too would fain be a
track-repairer somewhere in the orbit of the earth.
The whistle of the locomotive penetrates my woods summer and winter,
sounding like the scream of a hawk sailing over some farmer's yard,
informing me that many restless city merchants are arriving within the
circle of the town, or adventurous country traders from the other
side. As they come under one horizon, they shout their warning to get
off the track to the other, heard sometimes through the circles of two
towns. Here come your groceries, country; your rations, countrymen!
Nor is there any man so independent on his farm that he can say them
nay. And here's your pay for them! screams the countryman's whistle;
timber like long battering-rams going twenty miles an hour against the
city's walls, and chairs enough to seat all the weary and heavy-laden
that dwell within them. With such huge and lumbering civility the
country hands a chair to the city. All the Indian huckleberry hills
are stripped, all the cranberry meadows are raked into the city. Up
comes the cotton, down goes the woven cloth; up comes the silk, down
goes the woollen; up come the books, but down goes the wit that writes
them.
When I meet the engine with its train of cars moving off with
planetary motion- or, rather, like a comet, for the beholder knows not
if with that velocity and with that direction it will ever revisit
this system, since its orbit does not look like a returning curve-
with its steam cloud like a banner streaming behind in golden and
silver wreaths, like many a downy cloud which I have seen, high in the
heavens, unfolding its masses to the light- as if this traveling
demigod, this cloud- compeller, would ere long take the sunset sky for
the livery of his train; when I hear the iron horse make the bills
echo with his snort like thunder, shaking the earth with his feet, and
breathing fire and smoke from his nostrils (what kind of winged horse
or fiery dragon they will put into the new Mythology I don't know), it
seems as if the earth had got a race now worthy to inhabit it. If all
were as it seems, and men made the elements their servants for noble
ends! If the cloud that hangs over the engine were the perspiration of
heroic deeds, or as beneficent as that which floats over the farmer's
fields, then the elements and Nature herself would cheerfully
accompany men on their errands and be their escort.
I watch the passage of the morning cars with the same feeling that I
do the rising of the sun, which is hardly more regular. Their train of
clouds stretching far behind and rising higher and higher, going to
heaven while the cars are going to Boston, conceals the sun for a
minute and casts my distant field into the shade, a celestial train
beside which the petty train of cars which bugs the earth is but the
barb of the spear. The stabler of the iron horse was up early this
winter morning by the light of the stars amid the mountains, to fodder
and harness his steed. Fire, too, was awakened thus early to put the
vital beat in him and get him off. If the enterprise were as innocent
as it is early! If the snow lies deep, they strap on his snowshoes,
and, with the giant plow, plow a furrow from the mountains to the
seaboard, in which the cars, like a following drill-barrow, sprinkle
all the restless men and floating merchandise in the country for seed.
All day the fire-steed flies over the country, stopping only that his
master may rest, and I am awakened by his tramp and defiant snort at
midnight, when in some remote glen in the woods he fronts the elements
incased in ice and snow; and he will reach his stall only with the
morning star, to start once more on his travels without rest or
slumber. Or perchance, at evening, I hear him in his stable blowing
off the superfluous energy of the day, that he may calm his nerves and
cool his liver and brain for a few hours of iron slumber. If the
enterprise were as heroic and commanding as it is protracted and
unwearied!
Far through unfrequented woods on the confines of towns, where
once only the hunter penetrated by day, in the darkest night dart
these bright saloons without the knowledge of their inhabitants; this
moment stopping at some brilliant station-house in town or city, where
a social crowd is gathered, the next in the Dismal Swamp, scaring the
owl and fox. The startings and arrivals of the cars are now the epochs
in the village day. They go and come with such regularity and
precision, and their whistle can be heard so far, that the farmers set
their clocks by them, and thus one well-conducted institution
regulates a whole country. Have not men improved somewhat in
punctuality since the railroad was invented? Do they not talk and
think faster in the depot than they did in the stage-office? There is
something electrifying in the atmosphere of the former place. I have
been astonished at the miracles it has wrought; that some of my
neighbors, who, I should have prophesied, once for all, would never
get to Boston by so prompt a conveyance, are on hand when the bell
rings. To do things "railroad fashion" is now the byword; and it is
worth the while to be warned so often and so sincerely by any power to
get off its track. There is no stopping to read the riot act, no
firing over the heads of the mob, in this case. We have constructed a
fate, an Atropos, that never turns aside. (Let that be the name of
your engine.) Men are advertised that at a certain hour and minute
these bolts will be shot toward particular points of the compass; yet
it interferes with no man's business, and the children go to school on
the other track. We live the steadier for it. We are all educated thus
to be sons of Tell. The air is full of invisible bolts. Every path
but your own is the path of fate. Keep on your own track, then.
What recommends commerce to me is its enterprise and bravery. It
does not clasp its hands and pray to Jupiter. I see these men every
day go about their business with more or less courage and content,
doing more even than they suspect, and perchance better employed than
they could have consciously devised. I am less affected by their
heroism who stood up for half an hour in the front line at Buena
Vista, than by the steady and cheerful valor of the men who inhabit
the snowplow for their winter quarters; who have not merely the
three-o'-clock-in-the-morning courage, which Bonaparte thought was the
rarest, but whose courage does not go to rest so early, who go to
sleep only when the storm sleeps or the sinews of their iron steed are
frozen. On this morning of the Great Snow, perchance, which is still
raging and chilling men's blood, I bear the muffled tone of their
engine bell from out the fog bank of their chilled breath, which
announces that the cars are coming, without long delay,
notwithstanding the veto of a New England northeast snow-storm, and I
behold the plowmen covered with snow and rime, their heads peering,
above the mould-board which is turning down other than daisies and the
nests of field mice, like bowlders of the Sierra Nevada, that occupy
an outside place in the universe.
Commerce is unexpectedly confident and serene, alert, adventurous,
and unwearied. It is very natural in its methods withal, far more so
than many fantastic enterprises and sentimental experiments, and hence
its singular success. I am refreshed and expanded when the freight
train rattles past me, and I smell the stores which go dispensing
their odors all the way from Long Wharf to Lake Champlain, reminding
me of foreign parts, of coral reefs, and Indian oceans, and tropical
climes, and the extent of the globe. I feel more like a citizen of the
world at the sight of the palm-leaf which will cover so many flaxen
New England heads the next summer, the Manilla hemp and cocoanut
husks, the old junk, gunny bags, scrap iron, and rusty nails. This
carload of torn sails is more legible and interesting now than if they
should be wrought into paper and printed books. Who can write so
graphically the history of the storms they have weathered as these
rents have done? They are proof-sheets which need no correction. Here
goes lumber from the Maine woods, which did not go out to sea in the
last freshet, risen four dollars on the thousand because of what did
go out or was split up; pine, spruce, cedar- first, second, third, and
fourth qualities, so lately all of one quality, to wave over the bear,
and moose, and caribou. Next rolls Thomaston lime, a prime lot, which
will get far among the hills before it gets slacked. These rags in
bales, of all hues and qualities, the lowest condition to which cotton
and linen descend, the final result of dress- of patterns which are
now no longer cried up, unless it be in Milwaukee, as those splendid
articles, English, French, or American prints, ginghams, muslins,
etc., gathered from all quarters both of fashion and poverty, going to
become paper of one color or a few shades only, on which, forsooth,
will be written tales of real life, high and low, and founded on fact!
This closed car smells of salt fish, the strong New England and
commercial scent, reminding me of the Grand Banks and the fisheries.
Who has not seen a salt fish, thoroughly cured for this world, so that
nothing can spoil it, and putting, the perseverance of the saints to
the blush? with which you may sweep or pave the streets, and split
your kindlings, and the teamster shelter himself and his lading
against sun, wind, and rain behind it- and the trader, as a Concord
trader once did, bang it up by his door for a sign when he commences
business, until at last his oldest customer cannot tell surely whether
it be animal, vegetable, or mineral, and yet it shall be as pure as a
snowflake, and if it be put into a pot and boiled, will come out an
excellent dunfish for a Saturday's dinner. Next Spanish hides, with
the tails still preserving their twist and the angle of elevation they
had when the oxen that wore them were careering over the pampas of the
Spanish Main- a type of all obstinacy, and evincing how almost
hopeless and incurable are all constitutional vices. I confess, that
practically speaking, when I have learned a man's real disposition, I
have no hopes of changing it for the better or worse in this state of
existence. As the Orientals say, "A cur's tail may be warmed, and
pressed, and bound round with ligatures, and after a twelve years'
labor bestowed upon it, still it will retain its natural form." The
only effectual cure for such inveteracies as these tails exhibit is to
make glue of them, which I believe is what is usually done with them,
and then they will stay put and stick. Here is a hogshead of molasses
or of brandy directed to John Smith, Cuttingsville, Vermont, some
trader among the Green Mountains, who imports for the farmers near his
clearing, and now perchance stands over his bulkhead and thinks of the
last arrivals on the coast, how they may affect the price for him,
telling his customers this moment, as he has told them twenty times
before this morning, that he expects some by the next train of prime
quality. It is advertised in the Cuttingsville Times.
While these things go up other things come down. Warned by the
whizzing sound, I look up from my book and see some tall pine, hewn on
far northern hills, which has winged its way over the Green Mountains
and the Connecticut, shot like an arrow through the township within
ten minutes, and scarce another eye beholds it; going
"to be the mast
Of some great ammiral."
And hark! here comes the cattle-train bearing the cattle of a thousand
hills, sheepcots, stables, and cow-yards in the air, drovers with
their sticks, and shepherd boys in the midst of their flocks, all but
the mountain pastures, whirled along like leaves blown from the
mountains by the September gales. The air is filled with the bleating
of calves and sheep, and the hustling of oxen, as if a pastoral valley
were going by. When the old bellwether at the head rattles his bell,
the mountains do indeed skip like rams and the little hills like
lambs. A carload of drovers, too, in the midst, on a level with their
droves now, their vocation gone, but still clinging to their useless
sticks as their badge of office. But their dogs, where are they? It is
a stampede to them; they are quite thrown out; they have lost the
scent. Methinks I hear them barking behind the Peterboro' Hills, or
panting up the western slope of the Green Mountains. They will not be
in at the death. Their vocation, too, is gone. Their fidelity and
sagacity are below par now. They will slink back to their kennels in
disgrace, or perchance run wild and strike a league with the wolf and
the fox. So is your pastoral life whirled past and away. But the bell
rings, and I must get off the track and let the cars go by;
What's the railroad to me?
I never go to see
Where it ends.
It fills a few hollows,
And makes banks for the swallows,
It sets the sand a-blowing,
And the blackberries a-growing,
but I cross it like a cart-path in the woods. I will not have my eyes
put out and my ears spoiled by its smoke and steam and hissing.
Now that the cars are gone by and all the restless world with
them, and the fishes in the pond no longer feel their rumbling, I am
more alone than ever. For the rest of the long afternoon, perhaps, my
meditations are interrupted only by the faint rattle of a carriage or
team along the distant highway.
Sometimes, on Sundays, I heard the bells, the Lincoln, Acton,
Bedford, or Concord bell, when the wind was favorable, a faint, sweet,
and, as it were, natural melody, worth importing into the wilderness.
At a sufficient distance over the woods this sound acquires a certain
vibratory hum, as if the pine needles in the horizon were the strings
of a harp which it swept. All sound heard at the greatest possible
distance produces one and the same effect, a vibration of the
universal lyre, just as the intervening atmosphere makes a distant
ridge of earth interesting to our eyes by the azure tint it imparts to
it. There came to me in this case a melody which the air had strained,
and which had conversed with every leaf and needle of the wood, that
portion of the sound which the elements had taken up and modulated and
echoed from vale to vale. The echo is, to some extent, an original
sound, and therein is the magic and charm of it. It is not merely a
repetition of what was worth repeating in the bell, but partly the
voice of the wood; the same trivial words and notes sung by a
wood-nymph.
At evening, the distant lowing of some cow in the horizon beyond the
woods sounded sweet and melodious, and at first I would mistake it for
the voices of certain minstrels by whom I was sometimes serenaded, who
might be straying over hill and dale; but soon I was not unpleasantly
disappointed when it was prolonged into the cheap and natural music of
the cow. I do not mean to be satirical, but to express my appreciation
of those youths' singing, when I state that I perceived clearly that
it was akin to the music of the cow, and they were at length one
articulation of Nature.
Regularly at half-past seven, in one part of the summer, after the
evening train had gone by, the whip-poor-wills chanted their vespers
for half an hour, sitting on a stump by my door, or upon the
ridge-pole of the house. They would begin to sing almost with as much
precision as a clock, within five minutes of a particular time,
referred to the setting of the sun, every evening. I had a rare
opportunity to become acquainted with their habits. Sometimes I heard
four or five at once in different parts of the wood, by accident one a
bar behind another, and so near me that I distinguished not only the
cluck after each note, but often that singular buzzing sound like a
fly in a spider's web, only proportionally louder. Sometimes one would
circle round and round me in the woods a few feet distant as if
tethered by a string, when probably I was near its eggs. They sang at
intervals throughout the night, and were again as musical as ever just
before and about dawn.
When other birds are still, the screech owls take up the strain,
like mourning women their ancient u-lu-lu. Their dismal scream is
truly Ben Jonsonian. Wise midnight bags! It is no honest and blunt
tu-whit tu- who of the poets, but, without jesting, a most solemn
graveyard ditty, the mutual consolations of suicide lovers remembering
the pangs and the delights of supernal love in the infernal groves.
Yet I love to hear their wailing, their doleful responses, trilled
along the woodside; reminding me sometimes of music and singing birds;
as if it were the dark and tearful side of music, the regrets and
sighs that would fain be sung. They are the spirits, the low spirits
and melancholy forebodings, of fallen souls that once in human shape
night-walked the earth and did the deeds of darkness, now expiating
their sins with their wailing hymns or threnodies in the scenery of
their transgressions. They give me a new sense of the variety and
capacity of that nature which is our common dwelling. Oh-o-o-o-o that
I never had been bor-r-r-r-n! sighs one on this side of the pond, and
circles with the restlessness of despair to some new perch on the gray
oaks. Then- that I never had been bor-r-r-r-n! echoes another on the
farther side with tremulous sincerity, and- bor-r-r-r-n! comes
faintly from far in the Lincoln woods.
I was also serenaded by a hooting owl. Near at hand you could
fancy it the most melancholy sound in Nature, as if she meant by this
to stereotype and make permanent in her choir the dying moans of a
human being- some poor weak relic of mortality who has left hope
behind, and howls like an animal, yet with human sobs, on entering the
dark valley, made more awful by a certain gurgling melodiousness- I
find myself beginning with the letters gl when I try to imitate it-
expressive of a mind which has reached the gelatinous, mildewy stage
in the mortification of all healthy and courageous thought. It
reminded me of ghouls and idiots and insane howlings. But now one
answers from far woods in a strain made really melodious by distance-
Hoo hoo hoo, hoorer hoo: and indeed for the most part it suggested
only pleasing associations, whether heard by day or night, summer or
winter.
I rejoice that there are owls. Let them do the idiotic and
maniacal hooting for men. It is a sound admirably suited to swamps and
twilight woods which no day illustrates, suggesting a vast and
undeveloped nature which men have not recognized. They represent the
stark twilight and unsatisfied thoughts which all have. All day the
sun has shone on the surface of some savage swamp, where the single
spruce stands hung with usnea lichens, and small hawks circulate
above, and the chickadee lisps amid the evergreens, and the partridge
and rabbit skulk beneath; but now a more dismal arid fitting day
dawns, and a different race of creatures awakes to express the meaning
of Nature there.
Late in the evening I heard the distant rumbling of wagons over
bridges- a sound heard farther than almost any other at night- the
baying of dogs, and sometimes again the lowing of some disconsolate
cow in a distant barn-yard. In the meanwhile all the shore rang with
the trump of bullfrogs, the sturdy spirits of ancient wine-bibbers and
wassailers, still unrepentant, trying to sing a catch in their Stygian
lake- if the Walden nymphs will pardon the comparison, for though
there are almost no weeds, there are frogs there- who would fain keep
up the hilarious rules of their old festal tables, though their voices
have waxed hoarse and solemnly grave, mocking at mirth, and the mine
has lost its flavor, and become only liquor to distend their paunches,
and sweet intoxication never comes to drown the memory of the past,
but mere saturation and waterloggedness and distention. The most
aldermanic, with his chin upon a heart-leaf, which serves for a napkin
to his drooling chaps, under this northern shore quaffs a deep draught
of the once scorned water, and passes round the cup with the
ejaculation tr-r-r-oonk, tr-r-r--oonk, tr-r-r-oonk! and straightway
comes over the water from some distant cove the same password
repeated, where the next in seniority and girth has gulped down to his
mark; and when this observance has made the circuit of the shores,
then ejaculates the master of ceremonies, with satisfaction,
tr-r-r-oonk! and each in his turn repeats the same down to the least
distended, leakiest, and flabbiest paunched, that there be no mistake;
and then the howl goes round again and again, until the sun disperses
the morning mist, and only the patriarch is not under the pond, but
vainly bellowing troonk from time to time, and pausing for a reply.
I am not sure that I ever heard the sound of cock-crowing from my
clearing, and I thought that it might be worth the while to keep a
cockerel for his music merely, as a singing bird. The note of this
once wild Indian pheasant is certainly the most remarkable of any
bird's, and if they could be naturalized without being domesticated,
it would soon become the most famous sound in our woods, surpassing
the clangor of the goose and the hooting of the owl; and then imagine
the cackling of the hens to fill the pauses when their lords' clarions
rested! No wonder that man added this bird to his tame stock- to say
nothing of the eggs and drumsticks. To walk in a winter morning in a
wood where these birds abounded, their native woods, and hear the wild
cockerels crow on the trees, clear and shrill for miles over the
resounding earth, drowning the feebler notes of other birds- think of
it! It would put nations on the alert. Who would not be early to rise,
and rise earlier and earlier every successive day of his life, till he
became unspeakably healthy, wealthy, and wise? This foreign bird's
note is celebrated by the poets of all countries along with the notes
of their native songsters. All climates agree with brave Chanticleer.
He is more indigenous even than the natives. His health is ever good,
his lungs are sound, his spirits never flag. Even the sailor on the
Atlantic and Pacific is awakened by his voice; but its shrill sound
never roused me from my slumbers. I kept neither dog, cat, cow, pig,
nor hens, so that you would have said there was a deficiency of
domestic sounds; neither the chum, nor the spinning-wheel, nor even
the singing of the kettle, nor the hissing of the urn, nor children
crying, to comfort one. An old-fashioned man would have lost his
senses or died of ennui before this. Not even rats in the wall, for
they were starved out, or rather were never baited in- only squirrels
on the roof and under the floor, a whip-poor-will on the ridge-pole, a
blue jay screaming beneath the window, a hare or woodchuck under the
house, a screech owl or a cat owl behind it, a flock of wild geese or
a laughing loon on the pond, and a fox to bark in the night. Not even
a lark or an oriole, those mild plantation birds, ever visited my
clearing. No cockerels to crow nor hens to cackle in the yard. No
yard! but unfenced nature reaching up to your very sills. A young
forest growing up under your meadows, and wild sumachs and blackberry
vines breaking through into your cellar; sturdy pitch pines rubbing
and creaking against the shingles for want of room, their roots
reaching quite under the house. Instead of a scuttle or a blind blown
off in the gale- a pine tree snapped off or torn up by the roots
behind your house for fuel. Instead of no path to the front-yard gate
in the Great Snow- no gate- no front-yard- and no path to the
civilized world.
SOLITUDE:
========
THIS IS A delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense, and
imbibes delight through every pore. I go and come with a strange
liberty in Nature, a part of herself. As I walk along the stony shore
of the pond in my shirt-sleeves, though it is cool as well as cloudy
and windy, and I see nothing special to attract me, all the elements
are unusually congenial to me. The bullfrogs trump to usher in the
night, and the note of the whip-poor-will is borne on the rippling
wind from over the water. Sympathy with the fluttering alder and
poplar leaves almost takes away my breath; yet, like the lake, my
serenity is rippled but not ruffled. These small waves raised by the
evening wind are as remote from storm as the smooth reflecting
surface. Though it is now dark, the mind still blows and roars in the
wood, the waves still dash, and some creatures lull the rest with
their notes. The repose is never complete. The wildest animals do not
repose, but seek their prey now; the fox, and skunk, and rabbit, now
roam the fields and woods without fear. They are Nature's watchmen-
links which connect the days of animated life.
When I return to my house I find that visitors have been there and
left their cards, either a bunch of flowers, or a wreath of evergreen,
or a name in pencil on a yellow walnut leaf or a chip. They who come
rarely to the woods take some little piece of the forest into their
hands to play with by the way, which they leave, either intentionally
or accidentally. One has peeled a willow wand, woven it into a ring,
and dropped it on my table. I could always tell if visitors had called
in my absence, either by the bended twigs or grass, or the print of
their shoes, and generally of what sex or age or quality they were by
some slight trace left, as a flower dropped, or a bunch of grass
plucked and thrown away, even as far off as the railroad, half a mile
distant, or by the lingering odor of a cigar or pipe. Nay, I was
frequently notified of the passage of a traveller along the highway
sixty rods off by the scent of his pipe.
There is commonly sufficient space about us. Our horizon is never
quite at our elbows. The thick wood is not just at our door, nor the
pond, but somewhat is always clearing, familiar and worn by us,
appropriated and fenced in some way, and reclaimed from Nature. For
what reason have I this vast range and circuit, some square miles of
unfrequented forest, for my privacy, abandoned to me by men? My
nearest neighbor is a mile distant, and no house is visible from any
place but the hill-tops within half a mile of my own. I have my
horizon bounded by woods all to myself; a distant view of the railroad
where it touches the pond on the one hand, and of the fence which
skirts the woodland road on the other. But for the most part it is as
solitary where I live as on the prairies. It is as much Asia or Africa
as New England. I have, as it were, my own sun and moon and stars, and
a little world all to myself. At night there was never a traveller
passed my house, or knocked at my door, more than if I were the first
or last man; unless it were in the spring, when at long intervals some
came from the village to fish for pouts- they plainly fished much more
in the Walden Pond of their own natures, and baited their hooks with
darkness- but they soon retreated, usually with light baskets, and
left "the world to darkness and to me," and the black kernel of the
night was never profaned by any human neighborhood. I believe that men
are generally still a little afraid of the dark, though the witches
are all hung, and Christianity and candles have been introduced.
Yet I experienced sometimes that the most sweet and tender, the most
innocent and encouraging society may be found in any natural object,
even for the poor misanthrope and most melancholy man. There can be no
very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of nature and has
his senses still. There was never yet such a storm but it was Aeolian
music to a healthy and innocent ear. Nothing can rightly compel a
simple and brave man to a vulgar sadness. While I enjoy the friendship
of the seasons I trust that nothing can make life a burden to me. The
gentle rain which waters my beans and keeps me in the house today is
not drear and melancholy, but good for me too. Though it prevents my
hoeing them, it is of far more worth than my hoeing. If it should
continue so long as to cause the seeds to rot in the ground and
destroy the potatoes in the low lands, it would still be good for the
grass on the uplands, and, being good for the grass, it would be good
for me. Sometimes, when I compare myself with other men, it seems as
if I were more favored by the gods than they, beyond any deserts that
I am conscious of; as if I had a warrant and surety at their hands
which my fellows have not, and were especially guided and guarded. I
do not flatter myself, but if it be possible they flatter me. I have
never felt lonesome, or in the least oppressed by a sense of solitude,
but once, and that was a few weeks after I came to the woods, when,
for an hour, I doubted if the near neighborhood of man was not
essential to a serene and healthy life. To be alone was something
unpleasant. But I was at the same time conscious of a slight insanity
in my mood, and seemed to foresee my recovery. In the midst of a
gentle rain while these thoughts prevailed, I was suddenly sensible of
such sweet and beneficent society in Nature, in the very pattering of
the drops, and in every sound and sight around my house, an infinite
and unaccountable friendliness all at once like an atmosphere
sustaining me, as made the fancied advantages of human neighborhood
insignificant, and I have never thought of them since. Every little
pine needle expanded and swelled with sympathy and befriended me. I
was so distinctly made aware of the presence of something kindred to
me, even in scenes which we are accustomed to call wild and dreary,
and also that the nearest of blood to me and humanest was not a person
nor a villager, that I thought no place could ever be strange to me
again.
"Mourning untimely consumes the sad;
Few are their days in the land of the living,
Beautiful daughter of Toscar."
Some of my pleasantest hours were during the long rain-storms in the
spring or fall, which confined me to the house for the afternoon as
well as the forenoon, soothed by their ceaseless roar and pelting;
when an early twilight ushered in a long evening in which many
thoughts had time to take root and unfold themselves. In those driving
northeast rains which tried the village houses so, when the maids
stood ready with mop and pail in front entries to keep the deluge out,
I sat behind my door in my little house, which was all entry, and
thoroughly enjoyed its protection. In one heavy thunder-shower the
lightning struck a large pitch pine across the pond, making a very
conspicuous and perfectly regular spiral groove from top to bottom, an
inch or more deep, and four or five inches wide, as you would groove a
walking-stick. I passed it again the other day, and was struck with
awe on looking up and beholding that mark, now more distinct than
ever, where a terrific and resistless bolt came down out of the
harmless sky eight years ago. Men frequently say to me, "I should
think you would feel lonesome down there, and want to be nearer to
folks, rainy and snowy days and nights especially." I am tempted to
reply to such- This whole earth which we inhabit is but a point in
space. How far apart, think you, dwell the two most distant
inhabitants of yonder star, the breadth of whose disk cannot be
appreciated by our instruments? Why should I feel lonely? is not our
planet in the Milky Way? This which you put seems to me not to be the
most important question. What sort of space is that which separates a
man from his fellows and makes him solitary? I have found that no
exertion of the legs can bring two minds much nearer to one another.
What do we want most to dwell near to? Not to many men surely, the
depot, the post-office, the bar-room, the meeting-house, the
school-house, the grocery, Beacon Hill, or the Five Points, where men
most congregate, but to the perennial source of our life, whence in
all our experience we have found that to issue, as the willow stands
near the water and sends out its roots in that direction. This will
vary with different natures, but this is the place where a wise man
will dig his cellar.... I one evening overtook one of my townsmen, who
has accumulated what is called "a handsome property"- though I never
got a fair view of it- on the Walden road, driving a pair of cattle to
market, who inquired of me how I could bring my mind to give up so
many of the comforts of life. I answered that I was very sure I liked
it passably well; I was not joking. And so I went home to my bed, and
left him to pick his way through the darkness and the mud to Brighton-
or Bright-town- which place he would reach some time in the morning.
Any prospect of awakening or coming to life to a dead man makes
indifferent all times and places. The place where that may occur is
always the same, and indescribably pleasant to all our senses. For the
most part we allow only outlying and transient circumstances to make
our occasions. They are, in fact, the cause of our distraction.
Nearest to all things is that power which fashions their being. Next
to us the grandest laws are continually being executed. Next to us is
not the workman whom we have hired, with whom we love so well to talk,
but the workman whose work we are.
"How vast and profound is the influence of the subtile powers of
Heaven and of Earth!"
"We seek to perceive them, and we do not see them; we seek to hear
them, and we do not hear them; identified with the substance of
things, they cannot be separated from them."
"They cause that in all the universe men purify and sanctify their
hearts, and clothe themselves in their holiday garments to offer
sacrifices and oblations to their ancestors. It is an ocean of subtile
intelligences. They are everywhere, above us, on our left, on our
right; they environ us on all sides."
We are the subjects of an experiment which is not a little
interesting to me. Can we not do without the society of our gossips a
little while under these circumstances- have our own thoughts to cheer
us? Confucius says truly, "Virtue does not remain as an abandoned
orphan; it must of necessity have neighbors."
With thinking we may be beside ourselves in a sane sense. By a
conscious effort of the mind we can stand aloof from actions and their
consequences; and all things, good and bad, go by us like a torrent.
We are not wholly involved in Nature. I may be either the driftwood in
the stream, or Indra in the sky looking down on it. I may be affected
by a theatrical exhibition; on the other hand, I may not be affected
by an actual event which appears to concern me much more. I only know
myself as a human entity; the scene, so to speak, of thoughts and
affections; and am sensible of a certain doubleness by which I can
stand as remote from myself as from another. However intense my
experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of
me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but spectator, sharing no
experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is
you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the
spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the
imagination only, so far as he was concerned. This doubleness may
easily make us poor neighbors and friends sometimes.
I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To
be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating.
I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so
companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when
we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man
thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will.
Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between
a man and his fellows. The really diligent student in one of the
crowded hives of Cambridge College is as solitary as a dervis in the
desert. The farmer can work alone in the field or the woods all day,
hoeing or chopping, and not feel lonesome, because he is employed; but
when he comes home at night he cannot sit down in a room alone, at the
mercy of his thoughts, but must be where he can "see the folks," and
recreate, and, as he thinks, remunerate himself for his day's
solitude; and hence he wonders how the student can sit alone in the
house all night and most of the day without ennui and "the blues"; but
he does not realize that the student, though in the house, is still at
work in his field, and chopping in his woods, as the farmer in his,
and in turn seeks the same recreation and society that the latter
does, though it may be a more condensed form of it.
Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals,
not having had time to acquire any new value for each other. We meet
at meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of that
old musty cheese that we are. We have had to agree on a certain set of
rules, called etiquette and politeness, to make this frequent meeting
tolerable and that we need not come to open war. We meet at the
post-office, and at the sociable, and about the fireside every night;
we live thick and are in each other's way, and stumble over one
another, and I think that we thus lose some respect for one another.
Certainly less frequency would suffice for all important and hearty
communications. Consider the girls in a factory- never alone, hardly
in their dreams. It would be better if there were but one inhabitant
to a square mile, as where I live. The value of a man is not in his
skin, that we should touch him.
I have heard of a man lost in the woods and dying of famine and
exhaustion at the foot of a tree, whose loneliness was relieved by the
grotesque visions with which, owing to bodily weakness, his diseased
imagination surrounded him, and which he believed to be real. So also,
owing to bodily and mental health and strength, we may be continually
cheered by a like but more normal and natural society, and come to
know that we are never alone.
I have a great deal of company in my house; especially in the
morning, when nobody calls. Let me suggest a few comparisons, that
some one may convey an idea of my situation. I am no more lonely than
the loon in the pond that laughs so loud, or than Walden Pond itself.
What company has that lonely lake, I pray? And yet it has not the blue
devils, but the blue angels in it, in the azure tint of its waters.
The sun is alone, except in thick weather, when there sometimes appear
to be two, but one is a mock sun. God is alone- but the devil, he is
far from being alone; he sees a great deal of company; he is legion. I
am no more lonely than a single mullein or dandelion in a pasture, or
a bean leaf, or sorrel, or a horse-fly, or a bumblebee. I am no more
lonely than the Mill Brook, or a weathercock, or the north star, or
the south wind, or an April shower, or a January thaw, or the first
spider in a new house.
I have occasional visits in the long winter evenings, when the
snow falls fast and the wind howls in the wood, from an old settler
and original proprietor, who is reported to have dug Walden Pond, and
stoned it, and fringed it with pine woods; who tells me stories of old
time and of new eternity; and between us we manage to pass a cheerful
evening with social mirth and pleasant views of things, even without
apples or cider- a most wise and humorous friend, whom I love much,
who keeps himself more secret than ever did Goffe or Whalley; and
though he is thought to be dead, none can show where he is buried. An
elderly dame, too, dwells in my neighborhood, invisible to most
persons, in whose odorous herb garden I love to stroll sometimes,
gathering simples and listening to her fables; for she has a genius of
unequalled fertility, and her memory runs back farther than mythology,
and she can tell me the original of every fable, and on what fact
every one is founded, for the incidents occurred when she was young. A
ruddy and lusty old dame, who delights in all weathers and seasons,
and is likely to outlive all her children yet.
The indescribable innocence and beneficence of Nature- of sun and
wind and rain, of summer and winter- such health, such cheer, they
afford forever! and such sympathy have they ever with our race, that
all Nature would be affected, and the sun's brightness fade, and the
winds would sigh humanely, and the clouds rain tears, and the woods
shed their leaves and put on mourning in midsummer, if any man should
ever for a just cause grieve. Shall I not have intelligence with the
earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself?
What is the pill which will keep us well, serene, contented? Not
my or thy great-grandfather's, but our great-grandmother Nature's
universal, vegetable, botanic medicines, by which she has kept herself
young always, outlived so many old Parrs in her day, and fed her
health with their decaying fatness. For my panacea, instead of one of
those quack vials of a mixture dipped from Acheron and the Dead Sea,
which come out of those long shallow black-schooner looking wagons
which we sometimes see made to carry bottles, let me have a draught of
undiluted morning air. Morning air! If men will not drink of this at
the fountainhead of the day, why, then, we must even bottle up some
and sell it in the shops, for the benefit of those who have lost their
subscription ticket to morning time in this world. But remember, it
will not keep quite till noonday even in the coolest cellar, but drive
out the stopples long ere that and follow westward the steps of
Aurora. I am no worshipper of Hygeia, who was the daughter of that old
herb-doctor Esculapius, and who is represented on monuments holding a
serpent in one hand, and in the other a cup out of which the serpent
sometimes drinks; but rather of Hebe, cup-bearer to Jupiter, who was
the daughter of Juno and wild lettuce, and who had the power of
restoring gods and men to the vigor of youth. She was probably the
only thoroughly sound-conditioned, healthy, and robust young lady that
ever walked the globe, and wherever she came it was spring. VISITORS
VISITORS:
========
I THINK THAT I love society as much as most, and am ready enough to
fasten myself like a bloodsucker for the time to any full-blooded man
that comes in my way. I am naturally no hermit, but might possibly sit
out the sturdiest frequenter of the bar-room, if my business called me
thither.
I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for
friendship, three for society. When visitors came in larger and
unexpected numbers there was but the third chair for them all, but
they generally economized the room by standing up. It is surprising
how many great men and women a small house will contain. I have had
twenty-five or thirty souls, with their bodies, at once under my roof,
and yet we often parted without being aware that we had come very near
to one another. Many of our houses, both public and private, with
their almost innumerable apartments, their huge halls and their
cellars for the storage of wines and other munitions of peace, appear
to be extravagantly large for their inhabitants. They are so vast and
magnificent that the latter seem to be only vermin which infest them.
I am surprised when the herald blows his summons before some Tremont
or Astor or Middlesex House, to see come creeping out over the piazza
for all inhabitants a ridiculous mouse, which soon again slinks into
some hole in the pavement.
One inconvenience I sometimes experienced in so small a house, the
difficulty of getting to a sufficient distance from my guest when we
began to utter the big thoughts in big words. You want room for your
thoughts to get into sailing trim and run a course or two before they
make their port. The bullet of your thought must have overcome its
lateral and ricochet motion and fallen into its last and steady course
before it reaches the ear of the bearer, else it may plow out again
through the side of his head. Also, our sentences wanted room to
unfold and form their columns in the interval. Individuals, like
nations, must have suitable broad and natural boundaries, even a
considerable neutral ground, between them. I have found it a singular
luxury to talk across the pond to a companion on the opposite side. In
my house we were so near that we could not begin to bear- we could not
speak low enough to be heard; as when you throw two stones into calm
water so near that they break each other's undulations. If we are
merely loquacious and loud talkers, then we can afford to stand very
near together, cheek by jowl, and feel each other's breath; but if we
speak reservedly and thoughtfully, we want to be farther apart, that
all animal heat and moisture may have a chance to evaporate. If we
would enjoy the most intimate society with that in each of us which is
without, or above, being spoken to, we must not only be silent, but
commonly so far apart bodily that we cannot possibly hear each other's
voice in any case. Referred to this standard, speech is for the
convenience of those who are hard of hearing; but there are many fine
things which we cannot say if we have to shout. As the conversation
began to assume a loftier and grander tone, we gradually shoved our
chairs farther apart till they touched the wall in opposite corners,
and then commonly there was not room enough.
My "best" room, however, my withdrawing room, always ready for
company, on whose carpet the sun rarely fell, was the pine wood behind
my house. Thither in summer days, when distinguished guests came, I
took them, and a priceless domestic swept the floor and dusted the
furniture and kept the things in order.
If one guest came he sometimes partook of my frugal meal, and it was
no interruption to conversation to be stirring a hasty-pudding, or
watching the rising and maturing of a loaf of bread in the ashes, in
the meanwhile. But if twenty came and sat in my house there was
nothing said about dinner, though there might be bread enough for two,
more than if eating were a forsaken habit; but we naturally practised
abstinence; and this was never felt to be an offence against
hospitality, but the most proper and considerate course. The waste and
decay of physical life, which so often needs repair, seemed
miraculously retarded in such a case, and the vital vigor stood its
ground. I could entertain thus a thousand as well as twenty; and if
any ever went away disappointed or hungry from my house when they
found me at home, they may depend upon it that I sympathized with them
at least. So easy is it, though many housekeepers doubt it, to
establish new and better customs in the place of the old. You need not
rest your reputation on the dinners you give. For my own part, I was
never so effectually deterred from frequenting a man's house, by any
kind of Cerberus whatever, as by the parade one made about dining me,
which I took to be a very polite and roundabout hint never to trouble
him so again. I think I shall never revisit those scenes. I should be
proud to have for the motto of my cabin those lines of Spenser which
one of my visitors inscribed on a yellow walnut leaf for a card:
"Arrived there, the little house they fill,
Ne looke for entertainment where none was;
Rest is their feast, and all things at their will:
The noblest mind the best contentment has."
When Winslow, afterward governor of the Plymouth Colony, went with a
companion on a visit of ceremony to Massasoit on foot through the
woods, and arrived tired and hungry at his lodge, they were well
received by the king, but nothing was said about eating that day. When
the night arrived, to quote their own words- "He laid us on the bed
with himself and his wife, they at the one end and we at the other, it
being only planks laid a foot from the ground and a thin mat upon
them. Two more of his chief men, for want of room, pressed by and upon
us; so that we were worse weary of our lodging than of our journey."
At one o'clock the next day Massasoit "brought two fishes that he had
shot," about thrice as big as a bream. "These being boiled, there were
at least forty looked for a share in them; the most eat of them. This
meal only we had in two nights and a day; and had not one of us bought
a partridge, we had taken our journey fasting." Fearing that they
would be light-headed for want of food and also sleep, owing to "the
savages' barbarous singing, (for they use to sing themselves asleep,)"
and that they might get home while they had strength to travel, they
departed. As for lodging, it is true they were but poorly entertained,
though what they found an inconvenience was no doubt intended for an
honor; but as far as eating was concerned, I do not see how the
Indians could have done better. They had nothing to eat themselves,
and they were wiser than to think that apologies could supply the
place of food to their guests; so they drew their belts tighter and
said nothing about it. Another time when Winslow visited them, it
being a season of plenty with them, there was no deficiency in this
respect.
As for men, they will hardly fail one anywhere. I had more
visitors while I lived in the woods than at any other period in my
life; I mean that I had some. I met several there under more favorable
circumstances than I could anywhere else. But fewer came to see me on
trivial business. In this respect, my company was winnowed by my mere
distance from town. I had withdrawn so far within the great ocean of
solitude, into which the rivers of society empty, that for the most
part, so far as my needs were concerned, only the finest sediment was
deposited around me. Beside, there were wafted to me evidences of
unexplored and uncultivated continents on the other side.
Who should come to my lodge this morning but a true Homeric or
Paphlagonian man- he had so suitable and poetic a name that I am sorry
I cannot print it here- a Canadian, a woodchopper and post-maker, who
can hole fifty posts in a day, who made his last supper on a woodchuck
which his dog caught. He, too, has heard of Homer, and, "if it were
not for books," would "not know what to do rainy days," though perhaps
he has not read one wholly through for many rainy seasons. Some priest
who could pronounce the Greek itself taught him to read his verse in
the Testament in his native parish far away; and now I must translate
to him, while he holds the book, Achilles' reproof to Patroclus for
his sad countenance.- "Why are you in tears, Patroclus, like a young
girl?"
"Or have you alone heard some news from Phthia?
They say that Menoetius lives yet, son of Actor,
And Peleus lives, son of Aeacus, among the Myrmidons,
Either of whom having died, we should greatly grieve."
He says, "That's good." He has a great bundle of white oak bark under
his arm for a sick man, gathered this Sunday morning.- I suppose
there's no harm in going after such a thing today," says he. To him
Homer was a great writer, though what his writing was about he did not
know. A more simple and natural man it would be hard to find. Vice and
disease, which cast such a sombre moral hue over the world, seemed to
have hardly any existance for him. He was about twenty-eight years
old, and had left Canada and his father's house a dozen years before
to work in the States, and earn money to buy a farm with at last,
perhaps in his native country. He was cast in the coarsest mould; a
stout but sluggish body, yet gracefully carried, with a thick sunburnt
neck, dark bushy hair, and dull sleepy blue eyes, which were
occasionally lit up with expression. He wore a flat gray cloth cap, a
dingy wool-colored greatcoat, and cowhide boots. He was a great
consumer of meat, usually carrying his dinner to his work a couple of
miles past my house- for he chopped all summer- in a tin pail; cold
meats, often cold woodchucks, and coffee in a stone bottle which
dangled by a string from his belt; and sometimes he offered me a
drink. He came along early, crossing my bean-field, though without
anxiety or haste to get to his work, such as Yankees exhibit. He
wasn't a-going to hurt himself. He didn't care if he only earned his
board. Frequently he would leave his dinner in the bushes, when his
dog had caught a woodchuck by the way, and go back a mile and a half
to dress it and leave it in the cellar of the house where he boarded,
after deliberating first for half an hour whether he could not sink it
in the pond safely till nightfall- loving to dwell long upon these
themes. He would say, as he went by in the morning, "How thick the
pigeons are! If working every day were not my trade, I could get all
the meat I should want by hunting-pigeons, woodchucks, rabbits,
partridges- by gosh! I could get all I should want for a week in one
day."
He was a skilful chopper, and indulged in some flourishes and
ornaments in his art. He cut his trees level and close to the ground,
that the sprouts which came up afterward might be more vigorous and a
sled might slide over the stumps; and instead of leaving a whole tree
to support his corded wood, he would pare it away to a slender stake
or splinter which you could break off with your hand at last.
He interested me because he was so quiet and solitary and so happy
withal; a well of good humor and contentment which overflowed at his
eyes. His mirth was without alloy. Sometimes I saw him at his work in
the woods, felling trees, and he would greet me with a laugh of
inexpressible satisfaction, and a salutation in Canadian French,
though he spoke English as well. When I approached him he would
suspend his work, and with half-suppressed mirth lie along the trunk
of a pine which he had felled, and, peeling off the inner bark, roll
it up into a ball and chew it while he laughed and talked. Such an
exuberance of animal spirits had he that he sometimes tumbled down and
rolled on the ground with laughter at anything which made him think
and tickled him. Looking round upon the trees he would exclaim - "By
George! I can enjoy myself well enough here chopping; I want no better
sport." Sometimes, when at leisure, he amused himself all day in the
woods with a pocket pistol, firing salutes to himself at regular
intervals as he walked. In the winter he had a fire by which at noon
he warmed his coffee in a kettle; and as he sat on a log to eat his
dinner the chickadees would sometimes come round and alight on his arm
and peck at the potato in his fingers; and he said that he "liked to
have the little fellers about him."
In him the animal man chiefly was developed. In physical endurance
and contentment he was cousin to the pine and the rock. I asked him
once if he was not sometimes tired at night, after working all day;
and he answered, with a sincere and serious look, "Gorrappit, I never
was tired in my life." But the intellectual and what is called
spiritual man in him were slumbering as in an infant. He had been
instructed only in that innocent and ineffectual way in which the
Catholic priests teach the aborigines, by which the pupil is never
educated to the degree of consciousness, but only to the degree of
trust and reverence, and a child is not made a man, but kept a child.
When Nature made him, she gave him a strong body and contentment for
his portion, and propped him on every side with reverence and
reliance, that he might live out his threescore years and ten a child.
He was so genuine and unsophisticated that no introduction would serve
to introduce him, more than if you introduced a woodchuck to your
neighbor. He had got to find him out as you did. He would not play
any part. Men paid him wages for work, and so helped to feed and
clothe him; but he never exchanged opinions with them. He was so
simply and naturally humble- if he can be called humble who never
aspires- that humility was no distinct quality in him, nor could he
conceive of it. Wiser men were demigods to him. If you told him that
such a one was coming, he did as if he thought that anything so grand
would expect nothing of himself, but take all the responsibility on
itself, and let him be forgotten still. He never heard the sound of
praise. He particularly reverenced the writer and the preacher. Their
performances were miracles. When I told him that I wrote considerably,
he thought for a long time that it was merely the handwriting which I
meant, for he could write a remarkably good hand himself. I sometimes
found the name of his native parish handsomely written in the snow by
the highway, with the proper French accent, and knew that he had
passed. I asked him if he ever wished to write his thoughts. He said
that he had read and written letters for those who could not, but he
never tried to write thoughts- no, he could not, he could not tell
what to put first, it would kill him, and then there was spelling to
be attended to at the same time!
I heard that a distinguished wise man and reformer asked him if he
did not want the world to be changed; but he answered with a chuckle
of surprise in his Canadian accent, not knowing that the question had
ever been entertained before, "No, I like it well enough." It would
have suggested many things to a philosopher to have dealings with him.
To a stranger he appeared to know nothing of things in general; yet I
sometimes saw in him a man whom I had not seen before, and I did not
know whether he was as wise as Shakespeare or as simply ignorant as a
child, whether to suspect him of a fine poetic consciousness or of
stupidity. A townsman told me that when he met him sauntering through
the village in his small close-fitting cap, and whistling to himself,
he reminded him of a prince in disguise.
His only books were an almanac and an arithmetic, in which last he
was considerably expert. The former was a sort of cyclopaedia to him,
which he supposed to contain an abstract of human knowledge, as indeed
it does to a considerable extent. I loved to sound him on the various
reforms of the day, and he never failed to look at them in the most
simple and practical light. He had never heard of such things before.
Could he do without factories? I asked. He had worn the home-made
Vermont gray, he said, and that was good. Could he dispense with tea
and coffee? Did this country afford any beverage beside water? He had
soaked hemlock leaves in water and drank it, and thought that was
better than water in warm weather. When I asked him if he could do
without money, he showed the convenience of money in such a way as to
suggest and coincide with the most philosophical accounts of the
origin of this institution, and the very derivation of the word
pecunia. If an ox were his property, and he wished to get needles and
thread at the store, he thought it would be inconvenient and
impossible soon to go on mortgaging some portion of the creature each
time to that amount. He could defend many institutions better than any
philosopher, because, in describing them as they concerned him, he
gave the true reason for their prevalence, and speculation had not
suggested to him any other. At another time, hearing Plato's
definition of a man- a biped without feathers- and that one exhibited
a cock plucked and called it Plato's man, he thought it an important
difference that the knees bent the wrong way. He would sometimes
exclaim, "How I love to talk! By George, I could talk all day!" I
asked him once, when I had not seen him for many months, if he had got
a new idea this summer. "Good Lord"- said he, "a man that has to work
as I do, if he does not forget the ideas he has had, he will do well.
May he the man you hoe with is inclined to race; then, by gorry, your
mind must be there; you think of weeds." He would sometimes ask me
first on such occasions, if I had made any improvement. One winter day
I asked him if he was always satisfied with himself, wishing to
suggest a substitute within him for the priest without, and some
higher motive for living. "Satisfied!" said he; "some men are
satisfied with one thing, and some with another. One man, perhaps, if
he has got enough, will be satisfied to sit all day with his back to
the fire and his belly to the table, by George!" Yet I never, by any
manoeuvring, could get him to take the spiritual view of things; the
highest that he appeared to conceive of was a simple expediency, such
as you might expect an animal to appreciate; and this, practically, is
true of most men. If I suggested any improvement in his mode of life,
he merely answered, without expressing any regret, that it was too
late. Yet he thoroughly believed in honesty and the like virtues.
There was a certain positive originality, however slight, to be
detected in him, and I occasionally observed that he was thinking for
himself and expressing his own opinion, a phenomenon so rare that I
would any day walk ten miles to observe it, and it amounted to the
re-origination of many of the institutions of society. Though he
hesitated, and perhaps failed to express himself distinctly, he always
had a presentable thought behind. Yet his thinking was so primitive
and immersed in his animal life, that, though more promising than a
merely learned man's, it rarely ripened to anything which can be
reported. He suggested that there might be men of genius in the lowest
grades of life, however permanently humble and illiterate, who take
their own view always, or do not pretend to see at all; who are as
bottomless even as Walden Pond was thought to be, though they may be
dark and muddy.
Many a traveller came out of his way to see me and the inside of
my house, and, as an excuse for calling, asked for a glass of water. I
told them that I drank at the pond, and pointed thither, offering to
lend them a dipper. Far off as I lived, I was not exempted from the
annual visitation which occurs, methinks, about the first of April,
when everybody is on the move; and I had my share of good luck, though
there were some curious specimens among my visitors. Half-witted men
from the almshouse and elsewhere came to see me; but I endeavored to
make them exercise all the wit they had, and make their confessions to
me; in such cases making wit the theme of our conversation; and so was
compensated. Indeed, I found some of them to be wiser than the
so-called overseers of the poor and selectmen of the town, and thought
it was time that the tables were turned. With respect to wit, I
learned that there was not much difference between the half and the
whole. One day, in particular, an inoffensive, simpleminded pauper,
whom with others I had often seen used as fencing stuff, standing or
sitting on a bushel in the fields to keep cattle and himself from
straying, visited me, and expressed a wish to live as I did. He told
me, with the utmost simplicity and truth, quite superior, or rather
inferior, to anything that is called humility, that he was "deficient
in intellect." These were his words. The Lord had made him so, yet he
supposed the Lord cared as much for him as for another. "I have
always been so," said he, "from my childhood; I never had much mind; I
was not like other children; I am weak in the head. It was the Lord's
will, I suppose." And there he was to prove the truth of his words. He
was a metaphysical puzzle to me. I have rarely met a fellow-man on
such promising ground- it was so simple and sincere and so true all
that he said. And, true enough, in proportion as he appeared to humble
himself was he exalted. I did not know at first but it was the result
of a wise policy. It seemed that from such a basis of truth and
frankness as the poor weak-headed pauper had laid, our intercourse
might go forward to something better than the intercourse of sages.
I had some guests from those not reckoned commonly among the
town's poor, but who should be; who are among the world's poor, at any
rate; guests who appeal, not to your hospitality, but to your
hospitality; who earnestly wish to be helped, and preface their appeal
with the information that they are resolved, for one thing, never to
help themselves. I require of a visitor that he be not actually
starving, though he may have the very best appetite in the world,
however he got it. Objects of charity are not guests. Men who did not
know when their visit had terminated, though I went about my business
again, answering them from greater and greater remoteness. Men of
almost every degree of wit called on me in the migrating season. Some
who had more wits than they knew what to do with; runaway slaves with
plantation manners, who listened from time to time, like the fox in
the fable, as if they heard the hounds a-baying on their track, and
looked at me beseechingly, as much as to say,
"O Christian, will you send me back?
One real runaway slave, among the rest, whom I helped to forward
toward the north star. Men of one idea, like a hen with one chicken,
and that a duckling; men of a thousand ideas, and unkempt heads, like
those hens which are made to take charge of a hundred chickens, all in
pursuit of one bug, a score of them lost in every morning's dew- and
become frizzled and mangy in consequence; men of ideas instead of
legs, a sort of intellectual centipede that made you crawl all over.
One man proposed a book in which visitors should write their names, as
at the White Mountains; but, alas! I have too good a memory to make
that necessary.
I could not but notice some of the peculiarities of my visitors.
Girls and boys and young women generally seemed glad to be in the
woods. They looked in the pond and at the flowers, and improved their
time. Men of business, even farmers, thought only of solitude and
employment, and of the great distance at which I dwelt from something
or other; and though they said that they loved a ramble in the woods
occasionally, it was obvious that they did not. Restless committed
men, whose time was an taken up in getting a living or keeping it;
ministers who spoke of God as if they enjoyed a monopoly of the
subject, who could not bear all kinds of opinions; doctors, lawyers,
uneasy housekeepers who pried into my cupboard and bed when I was out-
how came Mrs.- to know that my sheets were not as clean as hers?-
young men who had ceased to be young, and had concluded that it was
safest to follow the beaten track of the professions- all these
generally said that it was not possible to do so much good in my
position. Ay! there was the rub. The old and infirm and the timid, of
whatever age or sex, thought most of sickness, and sudden accident and
death; to them life seemed full of danger- what danger is there if you
don't think of any?- and they thought that a prudent man would
carefully select the safest position, where Dr. B. might be on hand at
a moment's warning. To them the village was literally a com-munity, a
league for mutual defence, and you would suppose that they would not
go a-huckleberrying without a medicine chest. The amount of it is, if
a man is alive, there is always danger that he may die, though the
danger must be allowed to be less in proportion as he is
dead-and-alive to begin with. A man sits as many risks as he runs.
Finally, there were the self-styled reformers, the greatest bores of
all, who thought that I was forever singing,
This is the house that I built;
This is the man that lives in the house that I built;
but they did not know that the third line was,
These are the folks that worry the man
That lives in the house that I built.
I did not fear the hen-harriers, for I kept no chickens; but I feared
the men-harriers rather.
I had more cheering visitors than the last. Children come
a-berrying, railroad men taking a Sunday morning walk in clean shirts,
fishermen and hunters, poets and philosophers; in short, all honest
pilgrims, who came out to the woods for freedom's sake, and really
left the village behind, I was ready to greet with- "Welcome,
Englishmen! welcome, Englishmen!" for I had had communication with
that race.
THE BEAN-FIELD:
==============
MEANWHILE MY beans, the length of whose rows, added together, was
seven miles already planted, were impatient to be hoed, for the
earliest had grown considerably before the latest were in the ground;
indeed they were not easily to be put off. What was the meaning of
this so steady and self-respecting, this small Herculean labor, I knew
not. I came to love my rows, my beans, though so many more than I
wanted. They attached me to the earth, and so I got strength like
Antaeus. But why should I raise them? Only Heaven knows. This was my
curious labor all summer- to make this portion of the earth's surface,
which had yielded only cinquefoil, blackberries, johnswort, and the
like, before, sweet wild fruits and pleasant flowers, produce instead
this pulse. What shall I learn of beans or beans of me? I cherish
them, I hoe them, early and late I have an eye to them; and this is my
day's work. It is a fine broad leaf to look on. My auxiliaries are the
dews and rains which water this dry soil, and what fertility is in the
soil itself, which for the most part is lean and effete. My enemies
are worms, cool days, and most of all woodchucks. The last have
nibbled for me a quarter of an acre clean. But what right had I to
oust johnswort and the rest, and break up their ancient herb garden?
Soon, however, the remaining beans will be too tough for them, and go
forward to meet new foes.
When I was four years old, as I well remember, I was brought from
Boston to this my native town, through these very woods and this
field, to the pond. It is one of the oldest seenes stamped on my
memory. And now tonight my flute has waked the echoes over that very
water. The pines still stand here older than I; or, if some have
fallen, I have cooked my supper with their stumps, and a new growth is
rising all around, preparing another aspect for new infant eyes.
Almost the same johnswort springs from the same perennial root in this
pasture, and even I have at length helped to clothe that fabulous
landscape of my infant dreams, and one of the results of my presence
and influence is seen in these bean leaves, corn blades, and potato
vines.
I planted about two acres and a half of upland; and as it was only
about fifteen years since the land was cleared, and I myself had got
out two or three cords of stumps, I did not give it any manure; but in
the course of the summer it appeared by the arrowheads which I turned
up in hoeing, that an extinct nation had anciently dwelt here and
planted corn and beans ere white men came to clear the land, and so,
to some extent, had exhausted the soil for this very crop.
Before yet any woodchuck or squirrel had run across the road, or the
sun had got above the shrub oaks, while all the dew was on, though the
farmers warned me against it- I would advise you to do all your work
if possible while the dew is on- I began to level the ranks of haughty
weeds in my bean-field and throw dust upon their heads. Early in the
morning I worked barefooted, dabbling like a plastic artist in the
dewy and crumbling sand, but later in the day the sun blistered my
feet. There the sun lighted me to hoe beans, pacing slowly backward
and forward over that yellow gravelly upland, between the long green
rows, fifteen rods, the one end terminating in a shrub oak copse where
I could rest in the shade, the other in a blackberry field where the
green berries deepened their tints by the time I had made another
bout. Removing the weeds, putting fresh soil about the bean stems, and
encouraging this weed which I had sown, making the yellow soil express
its summer thought in bean leaves and blossoms rather than in wormwood
and piper and millet grass, making the earth say beans instead of
grass- this was my daily work. As I had little aid from horses or
cattle, or hired men or boys, or improved implements of husbandry, I
was much slower, and became much more intimate with my beans than
usual. But labor of the hands, even when pursued to the verge of
drudgery, is perhaps never the worst form of idleness. It has a
constant and imperishable moral, and to the scholar it yields a
classic result. A very agricola laboriosus was I to travellers bound
westward through Lincoln and Wayland to nobody knows where; they
sitting at their ease in gigs, with elbows on knees, and reins loosely
hanging in festoons; I the home-staying, laborious native of the soil.
But soon my homestead was out of their sight and thought. It was the
only open and cultivated field for a great distance on either side of
the road, so they made the most of it; and sometimes the man in the
field heard more of travellers' gossip and comment than was meant for
his ear: "Beans so late! peas so late!"- for I continued to plant when
others had begun to hoe- the ministerial husbandman had not suspected
it. "Corn, my boy, for fodder; corn for fodder." "Does he live there?"
asks the black bonnet of the gray coat; and the hard-featured farmer
reins up his grateful dobbin to inquire what you are doing where he
sees no manure in the furrow, and recommends a little chip dirt, or
any little waste stuff, or it may be ashes or plaster. But here were
two acres and a half of furrows, and only a hoe for cart and two hands
to draw it- there being an aversion to other carts and horses- and
chip dirt far away. Fellow-travellers as they rattled by compared it
aloud with the fields which they had passed, so that I came to know
how I stood in the agricultural world. This was one field not in Mr.
Colman's report. And, by the way, who estimates the value of the crop
which nature yields in the still wilder fields unimproved by man? The
crop of English hay is carefully weighed, the moisture calculated, the
silicates and the potash; but in all dells and pond-holes in the woods
and pastures and swamps grows a rich and various crop only unreaped by
man. Mine was, as it were, the connecting link between wild and
cultivated fields; as some states are civilized, and others
half-civilized, and others savage or barbarous, so my field was,
though not in a bad sense, a half-cultivated field. They were beans
cheerfully returning to their wild and primitive state that I
cultivated, and my hoe played the Ranz des Vaches for them.
Near at hand, upon the topmost spray of a birch, sings the brown
thrasher- or red mavis, as some love to call him- all the morning,
glad of your society, that would find out another farmer's field if
yours were not here. While you are planting the seed, he cries- "Drop
it, drop it- cover it up, cover it up- pull it up, pull it up, pull it
up." But this was not corn, and so it was safe from such enemies as
he. You may wonder what his rigmarole, his amateur Paganini
performances on one string or on twenty, have to do with your
planting, and yet prefer it to leached ashes or plaster. It was a
cheap sort of top dressing in which I had entire faith.
As I drew a still fresher soil about the rows with my hoe, I
disturbed the ashes of unchronicled nations who in primeval years
lived under these heavens, and their small implements of war and
hunting were brought to the light of this modern day. They lay mingled
with other natural stones, some of which bore the marks of having been
burned by Indian fires, and some by the sun, and also bits of pottery
and glass brought hither by the recent cultivators of the soil. When
my hoe tinkled against the stones, that music echoed to the woods and
the sky, and was an accompaniment to my labor which yielded an instant
and immeasurable crop. It was no longer beans that I hoed, nor I that
hoed beans; and I remembered with as much pity as pride, if I
remembered at all, my acquaintances who had gone to the city to attend
the oratorios. The nighthawk circled overhead in the sunny afternoons-
for I sometimes made a day of it- like a mote in the eye, or in
heaven's eye, falling from time to time with a swoop and a sound as if
the heavens were rent, torn at last to very rags and tatters, and yet
a seamless cope remained; small imps that fill the air and lay their
eggs on the ground on bare sand or rocks on the tops of hills, where
few have found them; graceful and slender like ripples caught up from
the pond, as leaves are raised by the wind to float in the heavens;
such kindredship is in nature. The hawk is aerial brother of the wave
which he sails over and surveys, those his perfect air- inflated wings
answering to the elemental unfledged pinions of the sea. Or sometimes
I watched a pair of hen- hawks circling high in the sky, alternately
soaring and descending, approaching, and leaving one another, as if
they were the embodiment of my own thoughts, Or I was attracted by the
passage of wild pigeons from this wood to that, with a slight
quivering winnowing sound and carrier haste; or from under a rotten
stump my hoe turned up a sluggish portentous and outlandish spotted
salamander, a trace of Egypt and the Nile, yet our contemporary. When
I paused to lean on my hoe, these sounds and sights I heard and saw
anywhere in the row, a part of the inexhaustible entertainment which
the country offers.
On gala days the town fires its great guns, which echo like
popguns to these woods, and some waifs of martial music occasionally
penetrate thus far. To me, away there in my bean-field at the other
end of the town, the big guns sounded as if a puffball had burst; and
when there was a military turnout of which I was ignorant, I have
sometimes had a vague sense all the day of some sort of itching and
disease in the horizon, as if some eruption would break out there
soon, either scarlatina or canker-rash, until at length some more
favorable puff of wind, making haste over the fields and up the
Wayland road, brought me information of the "trainers." It seemed by
the distant hum as if somebody's bees had swarmed, and that the
neighbors, according to Virgil's advice, by a faint tintinnabulum upon
the most sonorous of their domestic utensils, were endeavoring to call
them down into the hive again. And when the sound died quite away, and
the hum had ceased, and the most favorable breezes told no tale, I
knew that they had got the last drone of them all safely into the
Middlesex hive, and that now their minds were bent on the honey with
which it was smeared.
I felt proud to know that the liberties of Massachusetts and of
our fatherland were in such safe keeping; and as I turned to my hoeing
again I was filled with an inexpressible confidence, and pursued my
labor cheerfully with a calm trust in the future.
When there were several bands of musicians, it sounded as if all the
village was a vast bellows and all the buildings expanded and
collapsed alternately with a din. But sometimes it was a really noble
and inspiring strain that reached these woods, and the trumpet that
sings of fame, and I felt as if I could spit a Mexican with a good
relish- for why should we always stand for trifles?- and looked round
for a woodchuck or a skunk to exercise my chivalry upon. These martial
strains seemed as far away as Palestine, and reminded me of a march of
crusaders in the horizon, with a slight tantivy and tremulous motion
of the elm tree tops which overhang the village. This was one of the
great days; though the sky had from my clearing only the same
everlastingly great look that it wears daily, and I saw no difference
in it.
It was a singular experience that long acquaintance which I
cultivated with beans, what with planting, and hoeing, and harvesting,
and threshing, and picking over and selling them- the last was the
hardest of all- I might add eating, for I did taste. I was determined
to know beans. When they were growing, I used to hoe from five o'clock
in the morning till noon, and commonly spent the rest of the day about
other affairs. Consider the intimate and curious acquaintance one
makes with various kinds of weeds- it will bear some iteration in the
account, for there was no little iteration in the labor- disturbing
their delicate organizations so ruthlessly, and making such invidious
distinctions with his hoe, levelling whole ranks of one species, and
sedulously cultivating another. That's Roman wormwood- that's pigweed-
that's sorrel- that's piper-grass- have at him, chop him up, turn his
roots upward to the sun, don't let him have a fibre in the shade, if
you do he'll turn himself t'other side up and be as green as a leek in
two days. A long war, not with cranes, but with weeds, those Trojans
who had sun and rain and dews on their side. Daily the beans saw me
come to their rescue armed with a hoe, and thin the ranks of their
enemies, filling up the trenches with weedy dead. Many a lusty crest-
waving Hector, that towered a whole foot above his crowding comrades,
fell before my weapon and rolled in the dust.
Those summer days which some of my contemporaries devoted to the
fine arts in Boston or Rome, and others to contemplation in India, and
others to trade in London or New York, I thus, with the other farmers
of New England, devoted to husbandry. Not that I wanted beans to eat,
for I am by nature a Pythagorean, so far as beans are concerned,
whether they mean porridge or voting, and exchanged them for rice;
but, perchance, as some must work in fields if only for the sake of
tropes and expression, to serve a parable-maker one day. It was on
the whole a rare amusement, which, continued too long, might have
become a dissipation. Though I gave them no manure, and did not hoe
them all once, I hoed them unusualy well as far as I went, and was
paid for it in the end, "there being in truth," as Evelyn says, "no
compost or laetation whatsoever comparable to this continual motion,
repastination, and turning of the mould with the spade." "The earth,"
he adds elsewhere, "especially if fresh, has a certain magnetism in
it, by which it attracts the salt, power, or virtue (call it either)
which gives it life, and is the logic of all the labor and stir we
keep about it, to sustain us; all dungings and other sordid temperings
being but the vicars succedaneous to this improvement." Moreover, this
being one of those "worn- out and exhausted lay fields which enjoy
their sabbath," had perchance, as Sir Kenelm Digby thinks likely,
attracted "vital spirits" from the air. I harvested twelve bushels of
beans.
But to be more particular, for it is complained that Mr. Colman
has reported chiefly the expensive experiments of gentlemen farmers,
my outgoes were,
For a hoe.....................................$ 0.54
Plowing, harrowing, and furrowing............. 7.50 (Too much.)
Beans for seed................................ 3.12 1/2
Potatoes for seed............................. 1.33
Peas for seed................................. 0.40
Turnip seed................................... 0.06
White line for crow fence..................... 0.02
Horse cultivator and boy three hours.......... 1.00
Horse and cart to get crop.................... 0.75
-----
In all.......................................$ 14.72 1/2
My income was (patremfamilias vendacem, non emacem esse oportet),
from
Nine bushels and twelve quarts of beans sold..$ 16.94
Five bushels large potatoes................... 2.50
Nine bushels small potatoes................... 2.25
Grass......................................... 1.00
Stalks........................................ 0.75
-----
In all......................................$ 23.44
Leaving a pecuniary profit,
as I have elsewhere said, of..............$ 8.71 1/2
This is the result of my experience in raising beans: Plant the
common small white bush bean about the first of June, in rows three
feet by eighteen inches apart, being careful to select fresh round and
unmixed seed. First look out for worms, and supply vacancies by
planting anew. Then look out for woodchucks, if it is an exposed
place, for they will nibble off the earliest tender leaves almost
clean as they go; and again, when the young tendrils make their
appearance, they have notice of it, and will shear them off with both
buds and young pods, sitting erect like a squirrel. But above all
harvest as early as possible, if you would escape frosts and have a
fair and salable crop; you may save much loss by this means.
This further experience also I gained: I said to myself, I will
not plant beans and corn with so much industry another summer, but
such seeds, if the seed is not lost, as sincerity, truth, simplicity,
faith, innocence, and the like, and see if they will not grow in this
soil, even with less toil and manurance, and sustain me, for surely it
has not been exhausted for these crops. Alas! I said this to myself;
but now another summer is gone, and another, and another, and I am
obliged to say to you, Reader, that the seeds which I planted, if
indeed they were the seeds of those virtues, were wormeaten or had
lost their vitality, and so did not come up. Commonly men will only
be brave as their fathers were brave, or timid. This generation is
very sure to plant corn and beans each new year precisely as the
Indians did centuries ago and taught the first settlers to do, as if
there were a fate in it. I saw an old man the other day, to my
astonishment, making the holes with a hoe for the seventieth time at
least, and not for himself to lie down in! But why should not the New
Englander try new adventures, and not lay so much stress on his grain,
his potato and grass crop, and his orchards- raise other crops than
these? Why concern ourselves so much about our beans for seed, and not
be concerned at all about a new generation of men? We should really be
fed and cheered if when we met a man we were sure to see that some of
the qualities which I have named, which we all prize more than those
other productions, but which are for the most part broadcast and
floating in the air, had taken root and grown in him. Here comes such
a subtile and ineffable quality, for instance, as truth or justice,
though the slightest amount or new variety of it, along the road. Our
ambassadors should be instructed to send home such seeds as these, and
Congress help to distribute them over all the land. We should never
stand upon ceremony with sincerity. We should never cheat and insult
and banish one another by our meanness, if there were present the
kernel of worth and friendliness. We should not meet thus in haste.
Most men I do not meet at all, for they seem not to have time; they
are busy about their beans. We would not deal with a man thus plodding
ever, leaning on a hoe or a spade as a staff between his work, not as
a mushroom, but partially risen out of the earth, something more than
erect, like swallows alighted and walking on the ground:
"And as he spake, his mings would now and then
Spread, as he meant to fly, then close again-"
so that we should suspect that we might be conversing with an angel.
Bread may not always nourish us; but it always does us good, it even
takes stiffness out of our joints, and makes us supple and buoyant,
when we knew not what ailed us, to recognize any generosity in man or
Nature, to share any unmixed and heroic joy.
Ancient poetry and mythology suggest, at least, that husbandry was
once a sacred art; but it is pursued with irreverent haste and
heedlessness by us, our object being to have large farms and large
crops merely. We have no festival, nor procession, nor ceremony, not
excepting our cattle-shows and so-called Thanksgivings, by which the
farmer expresses a sense of the sacredness of his calling, or is
reminded of its sacred origin. It is the premium and the feast which
tempt him. He sacrifices not to Ceres and the Terrestrial Jove, but to
the infernal Plutus rather. By avarice and selfishness, and a
grovelling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil
as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape
is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farmer leads the
meanest of lives. He knows Nature but as a robber. Cato says that the
profits of agriculture are particularly pious or just (maximeque pius
quaestus), and according to Varro the old Romans "called the same
earth Mother and Ceres, and thought that they who cultivated it led a
pious and useful life, and that they alone were left of the race of
King Saturn."
We are wont to forget that the sun looks on our cultivated fields
and on the prairies and forests without distinction. They all reflect
and absorb his rays alike, and the former make but a small part of the
glorious picture which he beholds in his daily course. In his view
the earth is all equally cultivated like a garden. Therefore we
should receive the benefit of his light and beat with a corresponding
trust and magnanimity. What though I value the seed of these beans,
and harvest that in the fall of the year? This broad field which I
have looked at so long looks not to me as the principal cultivator,
but away from me to influences more genial to it, which water and make
it green. These beans have results which are not harvested by me. Do
they not grow for woodchucks partly? The ear of wheat (in Latin spica,
obsoletely speca, from spe, hope) should not be the only hope of the
husbandman; its kernel or grain (granum from gerendo, bearing) is not
all that it bears. How, then, can our harvest fail? Shall I not
rejoice also at the abundance of the weeds whose seeds are the granary
of the birds? It matters little comparatively whether the fields fill
the farmer's barns. The true husbandman will cease from anxiety, as
the squirrels manifest no concern whether the woods will bear
chestnuts this year or not, and finish his labor with every day,
relinquishing all claim to the produce of his fields, and sacrificing
in his mind not only his first but his last fruits also. VILLAGE
THE VILLAGE:
===========
AFTER HOEING, or perhaps reading and writing, in the forenoon, I
usually bathed again in the pond, swimming across one of its coves for
a stint, and washed the dust of labor from my person, or smoothed out
the last wrinkle which study had made, and for the afternoon was
absolutely free. Every day or two I strolled to the village to hear
some of the gossip which is incessantly going on there, circulating
either from mouth to mouth, or from newspaper to newspaper, and which,
taken in homeopathic doses, was really as refreshing in its way as the
rustle of leaves and the peeping of frogs. As I walked in the woods to
see the birds and squirrels, so I walked in the village to see the men
and boys; instead of the wind among the pines I heard the carts
rattle. In one direction from my house there was a colony of muskrats
in the river meadows; under the grove of elms and buttonwoods in the
other horizon was a village of busy men, as curious to me as if they
had been prairie-dogs, each sitting at the mouth of its burrow, or
running over to a neighbor's to gossip. I went there frequently to
observe their habits. The village appeared to me a great news room;
and on one side, to support it, as once at Redding & Company's on
State Street, they kept nuts and raisins, or salt and meal and other
groceries. Some have such a vast appetite for the former commodity,
that is, the news, and such sound digestive organs, that they can sit
forever in public avenues without stirring, and let it simmer and
whisper through them like the Etesian winds, or as if inhaling ether,
it only producing numbness and insensibility to pain- otherwise it
would often be painful to bear- without affecting the consciousness. I
hardly ever failed, when I rambled through the village, to see a row
of such worthies, either sitting on a ladder sunning themselves, with
their bodies inclined forward and their eyes glancing along the line
this way and that, from time to time, with a voluptuous expression, or
else leaning against a barn with their hands in their pockets, like
caryatides, as if to prop it up. They, being commonly out of doors,
heard whatever was in the wind. These are the coarsest mills, in
which all gossip is first rudely digested or cracked up before it is
emptied into finer and more delicate hoppers within doors. I observed
that the vitals of the village were the grocery, the bar-room, the
post-office, and the bank; and, as a necessary part of the machinery,
they kept a bell, a big gun, and a fire-engine, at convenient places;
and the houses were so arranged as to make the most of mankind, in
lanes and fronting one another, so that every traveller had to run the
gauntlet, and every man, woman, and child might get a lick at him. Of
course, those who were stationed nearest to the head of the line,
where they could most see and be seen, and have the first blow at him,
paid the highest prices for their places; and the few straggling
inhabitants in the outskirts, where long gaps in the line began to
occur, and the traveller could get over walls or turn aside into
cow-paths, and so escape, paid a very slight ground or window tax.
Signs were hung out on all sides to allure him; some to catch him by
the appetite, as the tavern and victualling cellar; some by the fancy,
as the dry goods store and the jeweller's; and others by the hair or
the feet or the skirts, as the barber, the shoe-maker, or the tailor.
Besides, there was a still more terrible standing invitation to call
at every one of these houses, and company expected about these times.
For the most part I escaped wonderfully from these dangers, either by
proceeding at once boldly and without deliberation to the goal, as is
recommended to those who run the gauntlet, or by keeping my thoughts
on high things, like Orpheus, who, "loudly singing the praises of the
gods to his lyre, drowned the voices of the Sirens, and kept out of
danger." Sometimes I bolted suddenly, and nobody could tell my
whereabouts, for I did not stand much about gracefulness, and never
hesitated at a gap in a fence. I was even accustomed to make an
irruption into some houses, where I was well entertained, and after
learning the kernels and very last sieveful of news- what had
subsided, the prospects of war and peace, and whether the world was
likely to hold together much longer- I was let out through the rear
avenues, and so escaped to the woods again.
It was very pleasant, when I stayed late in town, to launch myself
into the night, especially if it was dark and tempestuous, and set
sail from some bright village parlor or lecture room, with a bag of
rye or Indian meal upon my shoulder, for my snug harbor in the woods,
having made all tight without and withdrawn under hatches with a merry
crew of thoughts, leaving only my outer man at the helm, or even tying
up the helm when it was plain sailing. I had many a genial thought by
the cabin fire "as I sailed." I was never cast away nor distressed in
any weather, though I encountered some severe storms. It is darker in
the woods, even in common nights, than most suppose. I frequently had
to look up at the opening between the trees above the path in order to
learn my route, and, where there was no cart-path, to feel with my
feet the faint track which I had worn, or steer by the known relation
of particular trees which I felt with my hands, passing between two
pines for instance, not more than eighteen inches apart, in the midst
of the woods, invariably, in the darkest night. Sometimes, after
coming home thus late in a dark and muggy night, when my feet felt the
path which my eyes could not see, dreaming and absent-minded all the
way, until I was aroused by having to raise my hand to lift the latch,
I have not been able to recall a single step of my walk, and I have
thought that perhaps my body would find its way home if its master
should forsake it, as the hand finds its way to the mouth without
assistance. Several times, when a visitor chanced to stay into
evening, and it proved a dark night, I was obliged to conduct him to
the cart-path in the rear of the house, and then point out to him the
direction he was to pursue, and in keeping which he was to be guided
rather by his feet than his eyes. One very dark night I directed thus
on their way two young men who had been fishing in the pond. They
lived about a mile off through the woods, and were quite used to the
route. A day or two after one of them told me that they wandered about
the greater part of the night, close by their own premises, and did
not get home till toward morning, by which time, as there had been
several heavy showers in the meanwhile, and the leaves were very wet,
they were drenched to their skins. I have heard of many going astray
even in the village streets, when the darkness was so thick that you
could cut it with a knife, as the saying is. Some who live in the
outskirts, having come to town a-shopping in their wagons, have been
obliged to put up for the night; and gentlemen and ladies making a
call have gone half a mile out of their way, feeling the sidewalk only
with their feet, and not knowing when they turned. It is a surprising
and memorable, as well as valuable experience, to be lost in the woods
any time. Often in a snow-storm, even by day, one will come out upon a
well-known road and yet find it impossible to tell which way leads to
the village. Though he knows that he has travelled it a thousand
times, he cannot recognize a feature in it, but it is as strange to
him as if it were a road in Siberia. By night, of course, the
perplexity is infinitely greater. In our most trivial walks, we are
constantly, though unconsciously, steering like pilots by certain
well-known beacons and headlands, and if we go beyond our usual course
we still carry in our minds the bearing of some neighboring cape; and
not till we are completely lost, or turned round- for a man needs only
to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost-
do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of nature. Every man
has to learn the points of compass again as often as be awakes,
whether from sleep or any abstraction. Not till we are lost, in other
words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves,
and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.
One afternoon, near the end of the first summer, when I went to
the village to get a shoe from the cobbler's, I was seized and put
into jail, because, as I have elsewhere related, I did not pay a tax
to, or recognize the authority of, the State which buys and sells men,
women, and children, like cattle, at the door of its senate-house. I
had gone down to the woods for other purposes. But, wherever a man
goes, men will pursue and paw him with their dirty institutions, and,
if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow
society. It is true, I might have resisted forcibly with more or less
effect, might have run "amok" against society; but I preferred that
society should run "amok" against me, it being the desperate party.
However, I was released the next day, obtained my mended shoe, and
returned to the woods in season to get my dinner of huckleberries on
Fair Haven Hill. I was never molested by any person but those who
represented the State. I had no lock nor bolt but for the desk which
held my papers, not even a nail to put over my latch or windows. I
never fastened my door night or day, though I was to be absent several
days; not even when the next fall I spent a fortnight in the woods of
Maine. And yet my house was more respected than if it had been
surrounded by a file of soldiers. The tired rambler could rest and
warm himself by my fire, the literary amuse himself with the few books
on my table, or the curious, by opening my closet door, see what was
left of my dinner, and what prospect I had of a supper. Yet, though
many people of every class came this way to the pond, I suffered no
serious inconvenience from these sources, and I never missed anything
but one small book, a volume of Homer, which perhaps was improperly
gilded, and this I trust a soldier of our camp has found by this time.
I am convinced, that if all men were to live as simply as I then did,
thieving and robbery would be unknown. These take place only in
communities where some have got more than is sufficient while others
have not enough. The Pope's Homers would soon get properly
distributed.
"Nec bella fuerunt,
Faginus astabat dum scyphus ante dapes."
"Nor wars did men molest,
When only beechen bowls were in request."
"You who govern public affairs, what need have you to employ
punishments? Love virtue, and the people will be virtuous. The virtues
of a superior man are like the wind; the virtues of a common man are
like the grass- I the grass, when the wind passes over it, bends."
THE PONDS:
=========
SOMETIMES, having had a surfeit of human society and gossip, and
worn out all my village friends, I rambled still farther westward than
I habitually dwell, into yet more unfrequented parts of the town, "to
fresh woods and pastures new," or, while the sun was setting, made my
supper of huckleberries and blueberries on Fair Haven Hill, and laid
up a store for several days. The fruits do not yield their true flavor
to the purchaser of them, nor to him who raises them for the market.
There is but one way to obtain it, yet few take that way. If you would
know the flavor of huckleberries, ask the cowboy or the partridge. It
is a vulgar error to suppose that you have tasted huckleberries who
never plucked them. A huckleberry never reaches Boston; they have not
been known there since they grew on her three hills. The ambrosial and
essential part of the fruit is lost with the bloom which is rubbed off
in the market cart, and they become mere provender. As long as Eternal
justice reigns, not one innocent huckleberry can be transported
thither from the country's hills.
Occasionally, after my hoeing was done for the day, I joined some
impatient companion who had been fishing on the pond since morning, as
silent and motionless as a duck or a floating leaf, and, after
practising various kinds of philosophy, had concluded commonly, by the
time I arrived, that he belonged to the ancient sect of Coenobites.
There was one older man, an excellent fisher and skilled in all kinds
of woodcraft, who was pleased to look upon my house as a building
erected for the convenience of fishermen; and I was equally pleased
when he sat in my doorway to arrange his lines. Once in a while we sat
together on the pond, he at one end of the boat, and I at the other;
but not many words passed between us, for he had grown deaf in his
later years, but he occasionally hummed a psalm, which harmonized well
enough with my philosophy. Our intercourse was thus altogether one of
unbroken harmony, far more pleasing to remember than if it had been
carried on by speech. When, as was commonly the case, I had none to
commune with, I used to raise the echoes by striking with a paddle on
the side of my boat, filling the surrounding woods with circling and
dilating sound, stirring them up as the keeper of a menagerie his wild
beasts, until I elicited a growl from every wooded vale and hillside.
In warm evenings I frequently sat in the boat playing the flute, and
saw the perch, which I seem to have charmed, hovering around me, and
the moon travelling over the ribbed bottom, which was strewed with the
wrecks of the forest. Formerly I had come to this pond adventurously,
from time to time, in dark summer nights, with a companion, and,
making a fire close to the water's edge, which we thought attracted
the fishes, we caught pouts with a bunch of worms strung on a thread,
and when we had done, far in the night, threw the burning brands high
into the air like skyrockets, which, coming down into the pond, were
quenched with a loud hissing, and we were suddenly groping in total
darkness. Through this, whistling a tune, we took our way to the
haunts of men again. But now I had made my home by the shore.
Sometimes, after staying in a village parlor till the family had all
retired, I have returned to the woods, and, partly with a view to the
next day's dinner, spent the hours of midnight fishing from a boat by
moonlight, serenaded by owls and foxes, and hearing, from time to
time, the creaking note of some unknown bird close at hand. These
experiences were very memorable and valuable to me- anchored in forty
feet of water, and twenty or thirty rods from the shore, surrounded
sometimes by thousands of small perch and shiners, dimpling the
surface with their tails in the moonlight, and communicating by a long
flaxen line with mysterious nocturnal fishes which had their dwelling
forty feet below, or sometimes dragging sixty feet of line about the
pond as I drifted in the gentle night breeze, now and then feeling a
slight vibration along it, indicative of some life prowling about its
extremity, of dull uncertain blundering purpose there, and slow to
make up its mind. At length you slowly raise, pulling hand over hand,
some horned pout squeaking and squirming to the upper air. It was very
queer, especially in dark nights, when your thoughts had wandered to
vast and cosmogonal themes in other spheres, to feel this faint jerk,
which came to interrupt your dreams and link you to Nature again. It
seemed as if I might next cast my line upward into the air, as well as
downward into this element, which was scarcely more dense. Thus I
caught two fishes as it were with one hook.
The scenery of Walden is on a humble scale, and, though very
beautiful, does not approach to grandeur, nor can it much concern one
who has not long frequented it or lived by its shore; yet this pond is
so remarkable for its depth and purity as to merit a particular
description. It is a clear and deep green well, half a mile long and a
mile and three quarters in circumference, and contains about sixty-one
and a half acres; a perennial spring in the midst of pine and oak
woods, without any visible inlet or outlet except by the clouds and
evaporation. The surrounding hills rise abruptly from the water to the
height of forty to eighty feet, though on the southeast and east they
attain to about one hundred and one hundred and fifty feet
respectively, within a quarter and a third of a mile. They are
exclusively woodland. All our Concord waters have two colors at least;
one when viewed at a distance, and another, more proper, close at
hand. The first depends more on the light, and follows the sky. In
clear weather, in summer, they appear blue at a little distance,
especially if agitated, and at a great distance all appear alike. In
stormy weather they are sometimes of a dark slate-color. The sea,
however, is said to be blue one day and green another without any
perceptible change in the atmosphere. I have seen our river, when, the
landscape being covered with snow, both water and ice were almost as
green as grass. Some consider blue "to be the color of pure water,
whether liquid or solid." But, looking directly down into our waters
from a boat, they are seen to be of very different colors. Walden is
blue at one time and green at another, even from the same point of
view. Lying between the earth and the heavens, it partakes of the
color of both. Viewed from a hilltop it reflects the color of the sky;
but near at hand it is of a yellowish tint next the shore where you
can see the sand, then a light green, which gradually deepens to a
uniform dark green in the body of the pond. In some lights, viewed
even from a hilltop, it is of a vivid green next the shore. Some have
referred this to the reflection of the verdure; but it is equally
green there against the railroad sandbank, and in the spring, before
the leaves are expanded, and it may be simply the result of the
prevailing blue mixed with the yellow of the sand. Such is the color
of its iris. This is that portion, also, where in the spring, the ice
being warmed by the heat of the sun reflected from the bottom, and
also transmitted through the earth, melts first and forms a narrow
canal about the still frozen middle. Like the rest of our waters, when
much agitated, in clear weather, so that the surface of the waves may
reflect the sky at the right angle, or because there is more light
mixed with it, it appears at a little distance of a darker blue than
the sky itself; and at such a time, being on its surface, and looking
with divided vision, so as to see the reflection, I have discerned a
matchless and indescribable light blue, such as watered or changeable
silks and sword blades suggest, more cerulean than the sky itself,
alternating with the original dark green on the opposite sides of the
waves, which last appeared but muddy in comparison. It is a vitreous
greenish blue, as I remember it, like those patches of the winter sky
seen through cloud vistas in the west before sundown. Yet a single
glass of its water held up to the light is as colorless as an equal
quantity of air. It is well known that a large plate of glass will
have a green tint, owing, as the makers say, to its "body," but a
small piece of the same will be colorless. How large a body of Walden
water would be required to reflect a green tint I have never proved.
The water of our river is black or a very dark brown to one looking
directly down on it, and, like that of most ponds, imparts to the body
of one bathing in it a yellowish tinge; but this water is of such
crystalline purity that the body of the bather appears of an alabaster
whiteness, still more unnatural, which, as the limbs are magnified and
distorted withal, produces a monstrous effect, making fit studies for
a Michael Angelo.
The water is so transparent that the bottom can easily be
discerned at the depth of twenty-five or thirty feet. Paddling over
it, you may see, many feet beneath the surface, the schools of perch
and shiners, perhaps only an inch long, yet the former easily
distinguished by their transverse bars, and you think that they must
be ascetic fish that find a subsistence there. Once, in the winter,
many years ago, when I had been cutting holes through the ice in order
to catch pickerel, as I stepped ashore I tossed my axe back on to the
ice, but, as if some evil genius had directed it, it slid four or five
rods directly into one of the holes, where the water was twenty-five
feet deep. Out of curiosity, I lay down on the ice and looked through
the hole, until I saw the axe a little on one side, standing on its
head, with its helve erect and gently swaying to and fro with the
pulse of the pond; and there it might have stood erect and swaying
till in the course of time the handle rotted off, if I had not
disturbed it. Making another hole directly over it with an ice chisel
which I had, and cutting down the longest birch which I could find in
the neighborhood with my knife, I made a slip-noose, which I attached
to its end, and, letting it down carefully, passed it over the knob of
the handle, and drew it by a line along the birch, and so pulled the
axe out again.
The shore is composed of a belt of smooth rounded white stones
like paving-stones, excepting one or two short sand beaches, and is so
steep that in many places a single leap will carry you into water over
your head; and were it not for its remarkable transparency, that would
be the last to be seen of its bottom till it rose on the opposite
side. Some think it is bottomless. It is nowhere muddy, and a casual
observer would say that there were no weeds at all in it; and of
noticeable plants, except in the little meadows recently overflowed,
which do not properly belong to it, a closer scrutiny does not detect
a flag nor a bulrush, nor even a lily, yellow or white, but only a few
small heart-leaves and potamogetons, and perhaps a water-target or
two; all which however a bather might not perceive; and these plants
are clean and bright like the element they grow in. The stones extend
a rod or two into the water, and then the bottom is pure sand, except
in the deepest parts, where there is usually a little sediment,
probably from the decay of the leaves which have been wafted on to it
so many successive falls, and a bright green weed is brought up on
anchors even in midwinter.
We have one other pond just like this, White Pond, in Nine Acre
Corner, about two and a half miles westerly; but, though I am
acquainted with most of the ponds within a dozen miles of this centre
I do not know a third of this pure and well-like character.
Successive nations perchance have drank at, admired, and fathomed it,
and passed away, and still its water is green and pellucid as ever.
Not an intermitting spring! Perhaps on that spring morning when Adam
and Eve were driven out of Eden Walden Pond was already in existence,
and even then breaking up in a gentle spring rain accompanied with
mist and a southerly wind, and covered with myriads of ducks and
geese, which had not heard of the fall, when still such pure lakes
sufficed them. Even then it had commenced to rise and fall, and had
clarified its waters and colored them of the hue they now wear, and
obtained a patent of Heaven to be the only Walden Pond in the world
and distiller of celestial dews. Who knows in how many unremembered
nations' literatures this has been the Castalian Fountain? or what
nymphs presided over it in the Golden Age? It is a gem of the first
water which Concord wears in her coronet.
Yet perchance the first who came to this well have left some trace
of their footsteps. I have been surprised to detect encircling the
pond, even where a thick wood has just been cut down on the shore, a
narrow shelf-like path in the steep hillside, alternately rising and
falling, approaching and receding from the water's edge, as old
probably as the race of man here, worn by the feet of aboriginal
hunters, and still from time to time unmittingly trodden by the
present occupants of the land. This is particularly distinct to one
standing on the middle of the pond in winter, just after a light snow
has fallen, appearing as a clear undulating white line, unobscured by
weeds and twigs, and very obvious a quarter of a mile off in many
places where in summer it is hardly distinguishable close at hand. The
snow reprints it, as it were, in clear white type alto-relievo. The
ornamented grounds of villas which will one day be built here may
still preserve some trace of this.
The pond rises and falls, but whether regularly or not, and within
what period, nobody knows, though, as usual, many pretend to know. It
is commonly higher in the winter and lower in the summer, though not
corresponding to the general wet and dryness. I can remember when it
was a foot or two lower, and also when it was at least five feet
higher, than when I lived by it. There is a narrow sand-bar running
into it, with very deep water on one side, on which I helped boil a
kettle of chowder, some six rods from the main shore, about the year
1824, which it has not been possible to do for twenty-five years; and,
on the other hand, my friends used to listen with incredulity when I
told them, that a few years later I was accustomed to fish from a boat
in a secluded cove in the woods, fifteen rods from the only shore they
knew, which place was long since converted into a meadow. But the
pond has risen steadily for two years, and now, in the summer of '52,
is just five feet higher than when I lived there, or as high as it was
thirty years ago, and fishing goes on again in the meadow. This makes
a difference of level, at the outside, of six or seven feet; and yet
the water shed by the surrounding hills is insignificant in amount,
and this overflow must be referred to causes which affect the deep
springs. This same summer the pond has begun to fall again. It is
remarkable that this fluctuation, whether periodical or not, appears
thus to require many years for its accomplishment. I have observed one
rise and a part of two falls, and I expect that a dozen or fifteen
years hence the water will again be as low as I have ever known it.
Flint's Pond, a mile eastward, allowing for the disturbance occasioned
by its inlets and outlets, and the smaller intermediate ponds also,
sympathize with Walden, and recently attained their greatest height at
the same time with the latter. The same is true, as far as my
observation goes, of White Pond.
This rise and fall of Walden at long intervals serves this use at
least; the water standing at this great height for a year or more,
though it makes it difficult to walk round it, kills the shrubs and
trees which have sprung up about its edge since the last rise- pitch
pines, birches, alders, aspens, and others- and, falling again, leaves
an unobstructed shore; for, unlike many ponds and all waters which are
subject to a daily tide, its shore is cleanest when the water is
lowest. On the side of the pond next my house a row of pitch pines,
fifteen feet high, has been killed and tipped over as if by a lever,
and thus a stop put to their encroachments; and their size indicates
how many years have elapsed since the last rise to this height. By
this fluctuation the pond asserts its title to a shore, and thus the
shore is shorn, and the trees cannot hold it by right of possession.
These are the lips of the lake, on which no beard grows. It licks its
chaps from time to time. When the water is at its height, the alders,
willows, and maples send forth a mass of fibrous red roots several
feet long from all sides of their stems in the water, and to the
height of three or four feet from the ground, in the effort to
maintain themselves; and I have known the high blueberry bushes about
the shore, which commonly produce no fruit, bear an abundant crop
under these circumstances.
Some have been puzzled to tell how the shore became so regularly
paved. My townsmen have all heard the tradition- the oldest people
tell me that they heard it in their youth- that anciently the Indians
were holding a pow-wow upon a hill here, which rose as high into the
heavens as the pond now sinks deep into the earth, and they used much
profanity, as the story goes, though this vice is one of which the
Indians were never guilty, and while they were thus engaged the hill
shook and suddenly sank, and only one old squaw, named Walden,
escaped, and from her the pond was named. It has been conjectured that
when the hill shook these stones rolled down its side and became the
present shore. It is very certain, at any rate, that once there was no
pond here, and now there is one; and this Indian fable does not in any
respect conflict with the account of that ancient settler whom I have
mentioned, who remembers so well when he first came here with his
divining-rod, saw a thin vapor rising from the sward, and the hazel
pointed steadily downward, and he concluded to dig a well here. As for
the stones, many still think that they are hardly to be accounted for
by the action of the waves on these hills; but I observe that the
surrounding hills are remarkably full of the same kind of stones, so
that they have been obliged to pile them up in walls on both sides of
the railroad cut nearest the pond; and, moreover, there are most
stones where the shore is most abrupt; so that, unfortunately, it is
no longer a mystery to me. I detect the paver. If the name was not
derived from that of some English locality- Saffron Walden, for
instance- one might suppose that it was called originally Walled-in
Pond.
The pond was my well ready dug. For four months in the year its
water is as cold as it is pure at all times; and I think that it is
then as good as any, if not the best, in the town. In the winter, all
water which is exposed to the air is colder than springs and wells
which are protected from it. The temperature of the pond water which
had stood in the room where I sat from five o'clock in the afternoon
till noon the next day, the sixth of March, 1846, the thermometer
having been up to 65' or 70' some of the time, owing partly to the sun
on the roof, was 42', or one degree colder than the water of one of
the coldest wells in the village just drawn. The temperature of the
Boiling Spring the same day was 45', or the warmest of any water
tried, though it is the coldest that I know of in summer, when,
beside, shallow and stagnant surface water is not mingled with it.
Moreover, in summer, Walden never becomes so warm as most water which
is exposed to the sun, on account of its depth. In the warmest weather
I usually placed a pailful in my cellar, where it became cool in the
night, and remained so during the day; though I also resorted to a
spring in the neighborhood. It was as good when a week old as the day
it was dipped, and had no taste of the pump. Whoever camps for a week
in summer by the shore of a pond, needs only bury a pail of water a
few feet deep in the shade of his camp to be independent of the luxury
of ice.
There have been caught in Walden pickerel, one weighing seven
pounds- to say nothing of another which carried off a reel with great
velocity, which the fisherman safely set down at eight pounds because
he did not see him- perch and pouts, some of each weighing over two
pounds, shiners, chivins or roach (Leuciscus pulchellus), a very few
breams, and a couple of eels, one weighing four pounds- I am thus
particular because the weight of a fish is commonly its only title to
fame, and these are the only eels I have heard of here;- also, I have
a faint recollection of a little fish some five inches long, with
silvery sides and a greenish back, somewhat dace-like in its
character, which I mention here chiefly to link my facts to fable.
Nevertheless, this pond is not very fertile in fish. Its pickerel,
though not abundant, are its chief boast. I have seen at one time
lying on the ice pickerel of at least three different kinds: a long
and shallow one, steel-colored, most like those caught in the river; a
bright golden kind, with greenish reflections and remarkably deep,
which is the most common here; and another, golden-colored, and shaped
like the last, but peppered on the sides with small dark brown or
black spots, intermixed with a few faint blood-red ones, very much
like a trout. The specific name reticulatus would not apply to this;
it should be guttatus rather. These are all very firm fish, and weigh
more than their size promises. The shiners, pouts, and perch also, and
indeed all the fishes which inhabit this pond, are much cleaner,
handsomer, and firmer-fleshed than those in the river and most other
ponds, as the water is purer, and they can easily be distinguished
from them. Probably many ichthyologists would make new varieties of
some of them. There are also a clean race of frogs and tortoises, and
a few mussels in it; muskrats and minks leave their traces about it,
and occasionally a travelling mud-turtle visits it. Sometimes, when I
pushed off my boat in the morning, I disturbed a great mud-turtle
which had secreted himself under the boat in the night. Ducks and
geese frequent it in the spring and fall, the white-bellied swallows
(Hirundo bicolor) skim over it, and the peetweets (Totanus macularius)
"teeter" along its stony shores all summer. I have sometimes disturbed
a fish hawk sitting on a white pine over the water; but I doubt if it
is ever profaned by the wind of a gull, like Fair Haven. At most, it
tolerates one annual loon. These are all the animals of consequence
which frequent it now.
You may see from a boat, in calm weather, near the sandy eastern,
shore where the water is eight or ten feet deep, and also in some
other parts of the pond, some circular heaps half a dozen feet in
diameter by a foot in height, consisting of small stones less than a
hen's egg in size, where all around is bare sand. At first you wonder
if the Indians could have formed them on the ice for any purpose, and
so, when the ice melted, they sank to the bottom; but they are too
regular and some of them plainly too fresh for that. They are similar
to those found in rivers; but as there are no suckers nor lampreys
here, I know not by what fish they could be made. Perhaps they are the
nests of the chivin. These lend a pleasing mystery to the bottom.
The shore is irregular enough not to be monotonous. I have in my
mind's eye the western, indented with deep bays, the bolder northern,
and the beautifully scalloped southern shore, where successive capes
overlap each other and suggest unexplored coves between. The forest
has never so good a setting, nor is so distinctly beautiful, as when
seen from the middle of a small lake amid hills which rise from the
water's edge; for the water in which it is reflected not only makes
the best foreground in such a case, but, with its winding shore, the
most natural and agreeable boundary to it. There is no rawness nor
imperfection in its edge there, as where the axe has cleared a part,
or a cultivated field abuts on it. The trees have ample room to expand
on the water side, and each sends forth its most vigorous branch in
that direction. There Nature has woven a natural selvage, and the eye
rises by just gradations from the low shrubs of the shore to the
highest trees. There are few traces of man's hand to be seen. The
water laves the shore as it did a thousand years ago.
A lake is the landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature.
It is earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth
of his own nature. The fluviatile trees next the shore are the slender
eyelashes which fringe it, and the wooded hills and cliffs around are
its overhanging brows.
Standing on the smooth sandy beach at the east end of the pond, in a
calm September afternoon, when a slight haze makes the opposite
shore-line indistinct, I have seen whence came the expression, "the
glassy surface of a lake." When you invert your head, it looks like a
thread of finest gossamer stretched across the valley, and gleaming
against the distant pine woods, separating one stratum of the
atmosphere from another. You would think that you could walk dry under
it to the opposite hills, and that the swallows which skim over might
perch on it. Indeed, they sometimes dive below this line, as it were
by mistake, and are undeceived. As you look over the pond westward you
are obliged to employ both your hands to defend your eyes against the
reflected as well as the true sun, for they are equally bright; and
if, between the two, you survey its surface critically, it is
literally as smooth as glass, except where the skater insects, at
equal intervals scattered over its whole extent, by their motions in
the sun produce the finest imaginable sparkle on it, or, perchance, a
duck plumes itself, or, as I have said, a swallow skims so low as to
touch it. It may be that in the distance a fish describes an arc of
three or four feet in the air, and there is one bright flash where it
emerges, and another where it strikes the water; sometimes the whole
silvery arc is revealed; or here and there, perhaps, is a thistle-down
floating on its surface, which the fishes dart at and so dimple it
again. It is like molten glass cooled but not congealed, and the few
motes in it are pure and beautiful like the imperfections in glass.
You may often detect a yet smoother and darker water, separated from
the rest as if by an invisible cobweb, boom of the water nymphs,
resting on it. From a hilltop you can see a fish leap in almost any
part; for not a pickerel or shiner picks an insect from this smooth
surface but it manifestly disturbs the equilibrium of the whole lake.
It is wonderful with what elaborateness this simple fact is
advertised- this piscine murder will out- and from my distant perch I
distinguish the circling undulations when they are half a dozen rods
in diameter. You can even detect a water-bug (Gyrinus) ceaselessly
progressing over the smooth surface a quarter of a mile off; for they
furrow the water slightly, making a conspicuous ripple bounded by two
diverging lines, but the skaters glide over it without rippling it
perceptibly. When the surface is considerably agitated there are no
skaters nor water-bugs on it, but apparently, in calm days, they leave
their havens and adventurously glide forth from the shore by short
impulses till they completely cover it. It is a soothing employment,
on one of those fine days in the fall when all the warmth of the sun
is fully appreciated, to sit on a stump on such a height as this,
overlooking the pond, and study the dimpling circles which are
incessantly inscribed on its otherwise invisible surface amid the
reflected skies and trees. Over this great expanse there is no
disturbance but it is thus at once gently smoothed away and assuaged,
as, when a vase of water is jarred, the trembling circles seek the
shore and all is smooth again. Not a fish can leap or an insect fall
on the pond but it is thus reported in circling dimples, in lines of
beauty, as it were the constant welling up of its fountain, the gentle
pulsing of its life, the heaving of its breast. The thrills of joy
and thrills of pain are undistinguishable. How peaceful the phenomena
of the lake! Again the works of man shine as in the spring. Ay, every
leaf and twig and stone and cobweb sparkles now at mid-afternoon as
when covered with dew in a spring morning. Every motion of an oar or
an insect produces a flash of light; and if an oar falls, how sweet
the echo!
In such a day, in September or October, Walden is a perfect forest
mirror, set round with stones as precious to my eye as if fewer or
rarer. Nothing so fair, so pure, and at the same time so large, as a
lake, perchance, lies on the surface of the earth. Sky water. It needs
no fence. Nations come and go without defiling it. It is a mirror
which no stone can crack, whose quicksilver will never wear off, whose
gilding Nature continually repairs; no storms, no dust, can dim its
surface ever fresh;- a mirror in which all impurity presented to it
sinks, swept and dusted by the sun's hazy brush- this the light
dust-cloth- which retains no breath that is breathed on it, but sends
its own to float as clouds high above its surface, and he reflected in
its bosom still.
A field of water betrays the spirit that is in the air. It is
continually receiving new life and motion from above. It is
intermediate in its nature between land and sky. On land only the
grass and trees wave, but the water itself is rippled by the wind. I
see where the breeze dashes across it by the streaks or flakes of
light. It is remarkable that we can look down on its surface. We
shall, perhaps, look down thus on the surface of air at length, and
mark where a still subtler spirit sweeps over it.
The skaters and water-bugs finally disappear in the latter part of
October, when the severe frosts have come; and then and in November,
usually, in a calm day, there is absolutely nothing to ripple the
surface. One November afternoon, in the calm at the end of a
rain-storm of several days' duration, when the sky was still
completely overcast and the air was full of mist, I observed that the
pond was remarkably smooth, so that it was difficult to distinguish
its surface; though it no longer reflected the bright tints of
October, but the sombre November colors of the surrounding hills.
Though I passed over it as gently as possible, the slight undulations
produced by my boat extended almost as far as I could see, and gave a
ribbed appearance to the reflections. But, as I was looking over the
surface, I saw here and there at a distance a faint glimmer, as if
some skater insects which had escaped the frosts might be collected
there, or, perchance, the surface, being so smooth, betrayed where a
spring welled up from the bottom. Paddling gently to one of these
places, I was surprised to find myself surrounded by myriads of small
perch, about five inches long, of a rich bronze color in the green
water, sporting there, and constantly rising to the surface and
dimpling it, sometimes leaving bubbles on it. In such transparent and
seemingly bottomless water, reflecting the clouds, I seemed to be
floating through the air as in a balloon, and their swimming impressed
me as a kind of flight or hovering, as if they were a compact flock of
birds passing just beneath my level on the right or left, their fins,
like sails, set all around them. There were many such schools in the
pond, apparently improving the short season before winter would draw
an icy shutter over their broad skylight, sometimes giving to the
surface an appearance as if a slight breeze struck it, or a few
rain-drops fell there. When I approached carelessly and alarmed them,
they made a sudden splash and rippling with their tails, as if one had
struck the water with a brushy bough, and instantly took refuge in the
depths. At length the wind rose, the mist increased, and the waves
began to run, and the perch leaped much higher than before, half out
of water, a hundred black points, three inches long, at once above the
surface. Even as late as the fifth of December, one year, I saw some
dimples on the surface, and thinking it was going to rain hard
immediately, the air being fun of mist, I made haste to take my place
at the oars and row homeward; already the rain seemed rapidly
increasing, though I felt none on my cheek, and I anticipated a
thorough soaking. But suddenly the dimples ceased, for they were
produced by the perch, which the noise of my oars had seared into the
depths, and I saw their schools dimly disappearing; so I spent a dry
afternoon after all.
An old man who used to frequent this pond nearly sixty years ago,
when it was dark with surrounding forests, tells me that in those days
he sometimes saw it all alive with ducks and other water-fowl, and
that there were many eagles about it. He came here a-fishing, and used
an old log canoe which he found on the shore. It was made of two white
pine logs dug out and pinned together, and was cut off square at the
ends. It was very clumsy, but lasted a great many years before it
became water-logged and perhaps sank to the bottom. He did not know
whose it was; it belonged to the pond. He used to make a cable for his
anchor of strips of hickory bark tied together. An old man, a potter,
who lived by the pond before the Revolution, told him once that there
was an iron chest at the bottom, and that he had seen it. Sometimes
it would come floating up to the shore; but when you went toward it,
it would go back into deep water and disappear. I was pleased to hear
of the old log canoe, which took the place of an Indian one of the
same material but more graceful construction, which perchance had
first been a tree on the bank, and then, as it were, fell into the
water, to float there for a generation, the most proper vessel for the
lake. I remember that when I first looked into these depths there were
many large trunks to be seen indistinctly lying on the bottom, which
had either been blown over formerly, or left on the ice at the last
cutting, when wood was cheaper; but now they have mostly disappeared.
When I first paddled a boat on Walden, it was completely
surrounded by thick and lofty pine and oak woods, and in some of its
coves grape-vines had run over the trees next the water and formed
bowers under which a boat could pass. The hills which form its shores
are so steep, and the woods on them were then so high, that, as you
looked down from the west end, it had the appearance of an
amphitheatre for some land of sylvan spectacle. I have spent many an
hour, when I was younger, floating over its surface as the zephyr
willed, having paddled my boat to the middle, and lying on my back
across the seats, in a summer forenoon, dreaming awake, until I was
aroused by the boat touching the sand, and I arose to see what shore
my fates had impelled me to; days when idleness was the most
attractive and productive industry. Many a forenoon have I stolen
away, preferring to spend thus the most valued part of the day; for I
was rich, if not in money, in sunny hours and summer days, and spent
them lavishly; nor do I regret that I did not waste more of them in
the workshop or the teacher's desk. But since I left those shores the
woodchoppers have still further laid them waste, and now for many a
year there will be no more rambling through the aisles of the wood,
with occasional vistas through which you see the water. My Muse may be
excused if she is silent henceforth. How can you expect the birds to
sing when their groves are cut down?
Now the trunks of trees on the bottom, and the old log canoe, and
the dark surrounding woods, are gone, and the villagers, who scarcely
know where it lies, instead of going to the pond to bathe or drink,
are thinking to bring its water, which should be as sacred as the
Ganges at least, to the village in a pipe, to wash their dishes with!-
to earn their Walden by the turning of a cock or drawing of a plug!
That devilish Iron Horse, whose ear-rending neigh is heard throughout
the town, has muddied the Boiling Spring with his foot, and he it is
that has browsed off all the woods on Walden shore, that Trojan horse,
with a thousand men in his belly, introduced by mercenary Greeks!
Where is the country's champion, the Moore of Moore Hill, to meet him
at the Deep Cut and thrust an avenging lance between the ribs of the
bloated pest?
Nevertheless, of all the characters I have known, perhaps Walden
wears best, and best preserves its purity. Many men have been likened
to it, but few deserve that honor. Though the woodchoppers have laid
bare first this shore and then that, and the Irish have built their
sties by it, and the railroad has infringed on its border, and the
ice-men have skimmed it once, it is itself unchanged, the same water
which my youthful eyes fell on; all the change is in me. It has not
acquired one permanent wrinkle after all its ripples. It is
perennially young, and I may stand and see a swallow dip apparently to
pick an insect from its surface as of yore. It struck me again
tonight, as if I had not seen it almost daily for more than twenty
years- Why, here is Walden, the same woodland lake that I discovered
so many years ago; where a forest was cut down last winter another is
springing up by its shore as lustily as ever; the same thought is
welling up to its surface that was then; it is the same liquid joy and
happiness to itself and its Maker, ay, and it may be to me. It is the
work of a brave man surely, in whom there was no guile! He rounded
this water with his hand, deepened and clarified it in his thought,
and in his will bequeathed it to Concord. I see by its face that it is
visited by the same reflection; and I can almost say, Walden, is it
you?
It is no dream of mine,
To ornament a line;
I cannot come nearer to God and Heaven
Than I live to Walden even.
I am its stony shore,
And the breeze that passes o'er;
In the hollow of my hand
Are its water and its sand,
And its deepest resort
Lies high in my thought.
The cars never pause to look at it; yet I fancy that the engineers
and firemen and brakemen, and those passengers who have a season
ticket and see it often, are better men for the sight. The engineer
does not forget at night, or his nature does not, that he has beheld
this vision of serenity and purity once at least during the day.
Though seen but once, it helps to wash out State Street and the
engine's soot. One proposes that it be called "God's Drop."
I have said that Walden has no visible inlet nor outlet, but it is
on the one hand distantly and indirectly related to Flint's Pond,
which is more elevated, by a chain of small ponds coming from that
quarter, and on the other directly and manifestly to Concord River,
which is lower, by a similar chain of ponds through which in some
other geological period it may have flowed, and by a little digging,
which God forbid, it can be made to flow thither again. If by living
thus reserved and austere, like a hermit in the woods, so long, it has
acquired such wonderful purity, who would not regret that the
comparatively impure waters of Flint's Pond should be mingled with it,
or itself should ever go to waste its sweetness in the ocean wave?
Flint's, or Sandy Pond, in Lincoln, our greatest lake and inland
sea, lies about a mile east of Walden. It is much larger, being said
to contain one hundred and ninety-seven acres, and is more fertile in
fish; but it is comparatively shallow, and not remarkably pure. A walk
through the woods thither was often my recreation. It was worth the
while, if only to feel the wind blow on your cheek freely, and see the
waves run, and remember the life of mariners. I went a- chestnutting
there in the fall, on windy days, when the nuts were dropping into the
water and were washed to my feet; and one day, as I crept along its
sedgy shore, the fresh spray blowing in my face, I came upon the
mouldering wreck of a boat, the sides gone, and hardly more than the
impression of its flat bottom left amid the rushes; yet its model was
sharply defined, as if it were a large decayed pad, with its veins. It
was as impressive a wreck as one could imagine on the seashore, and
had as good a moral. It is by this time mere vegetable mould and
undistinguishable pond shore, through which rushes and flags have
pushed up. I used to admire the ripple marks on the sandy bottom, at
the north end of this pond, made firm and hard to the feet of the
wader by the pressure of the water, and the rushes which grew in
Indian file, in waving lines, corresponding to these marks, rank
behind rank, as if the waves had planted them. There also I have
found, in considerable quantities, curious balls, composed apparently
of fine grass or roots, of pipewort perhaps, from half an inch to four
inches in diameter, and perfectly spherical. These wash back and forth
in shallow water on a sandy bottom, and are sometimes cast on the
shore. They are either solid grass, or have a little sand in the
middle. At first you would say that they were formed by the action of
the waves, like a pebble; yet the smallest are made of equally coarse
materials, half an inch long, and they are produced only at one season
of the year. Moreover, the waves, I suspect, do not so much construct
as wear down a material which has already acquired consistency. They
preserve their form when dry for an indefinite period.
Flint's Pond! Such is the poverty of our nomenclature. What right
had the unclean and stupid farmer, whose farm abutted on this sky
water, whose shores he has ruthlessly laid bare, to give his name to
it? Some skin-flint, who loved better the reflecting surface of a
dollar, or a bright cent, in which he could see his own brazen face;
who regarded even the wild ducks which settled in it as trespassers;
his fingers grown into crooked and bony talons from the lodge habit of
grasping harpy-like;- so it is not named for me. I go not there to see
him nor to hear of him; who never saw it, who never bathed in it, who
never loved it, who never protected it, who never spoke a good word
for it, nor thanked God that He had made it. Rather let it be named
from the fishes that swim in it, the wild fowl or quadrupeds which
frequent it, the wild flowers which grow by its shores, or some wild
man or child the thread of whose history is interwoven with its own;
not from him who could show no title to it but the deed which a
like-minded neighbor or legislature gave him- him who thought only of
its money value; whose presence perchance cursed all the shores; who
exhausted the land around it, and would fain have exhausted the waters
within it; who regretted only that it was not English hay or cranberry
meadow- there was nothing to redeem it, forsooth, in his eyes- and
would have drained and sold it for the mud at its bottom. It did not
turn his mill, and it was no privilege to him to behold it. I respect
not his labors, his farm where everything has its price, who would
carry the landscape, who would carry his God, to market, if he could
get anything for him; who goes to market for his god as it is; on
whose farm nothing grows free, whose fields bear no crops, whose
meadows no flowers, whose trees no fruits, but dollars; who loves not
the beauty of his fruits, whose fruits are not ripe for him till they
are turned to dollars. Give me the poverty that enjoys true wealth.
Farmers are respectable and interesting to me in proportion as they
are poor- poor farmers. A model farm! where the house stands like a
fungus in a muckheap, chambers for men horses, oxen, and swine,
cleansed and uncleansed, all contiguous to one another! Stocked with
men! A great grease- spot, redolent of manures and buttermilk! Under a
high state of cultivation, being manured with the hearts and brains of
men! As if you were to raise your potatoes in the churchyard! Such is
a model farm.
No, no; if the fairest features of the landscape are to be named
after men, let them be the noblest and worthiest men alone. Let our
lakes receive as true names at least as the Icarian Sea, where "still
the shore" a "brave attempt resounds."
Goose Pond, of small extent, is on my way to Flint's; Fair Haven, an
expansion of Concord River, said to contain some seventy acres, is a
mile southwest; and White Pond, of about forty acres, is a mile and a
half beyond Fair Haven. This is my lake country. These, with Concord
River, are my water privileges; and night and day, year in year out,
they grind such grist as I carry to them.
Since the wood-cutters, and the railroad, and I myself have profaned
Walden, perhaps the most attractive, if not the most beautiful, of all
our lakes, the gem of the woods, is White Pond;- a poor name from its
commonness, whether derived from the remarkable purity of its waters
or the color of its sands. In these as in other respects, however, it
is a lesser twin of Walden. They are so much alike that you would say
they must be connected under ground. It has the same stony shore, and
its waters are of the same hue. As at Walden, in sultry dogday
weather, looking down through the woods on some of its bays which are
not so deep but that the reflection from the bottom tinges them, its
waters are of a misty bluish-green or glaucous color. Many years
since I used to go there to collect the sand by cartloads, to make
sandpaper with, and I have continued to visit it ever since. One who
frequents it proposes to call it Virid Lake. Perhaps it might be
called Yellow Pine Lake, from the following circumstance. About
fifteen years ago you could see the top of a pitch pine, of the kind
called yellow pine hereabouts, though it is not a distinct species,
projecting above the surface in deep water, many rods from the shore.
It was even supposed by some that the pond had sunk, and this was one
of the primitive forest that formerly stood there. I find that even so
long ago as 1792, in a "Topographical Description of the Town of
Concord," by one of its citizens, in the Collections of the
Massachusetts Historical Society, the author, after speaking of Walden
and White Ponds, adds, "In the middle of the latter may be seen, when
the water is very low, a tree which appears as if it grew in the place
where it now stands, although the roots are fifty feet below the
surface of the water; the top of this tree is broken off, and at that
place measures fourteen inches in diameter." In the spring of '49 I
talked with the man who lives nearest the pond in Sudbury, who told me
that it was he who got out this tree ten or fifteen years before. As
near as he could remember, it stood twelve or fifteen rods from the
shore, where the water was thirty or forty feet deep. It was in the
winter, and he had been getting out ice in the forenoon, and had
resolved that in the afternoon, with the aid of his neighbors, he
would take out the old yellow pine. He sawed a channel in the ice
toward the shore, and hauled it over and along and out on to the ice
with oxen; but, before he had gone far in his work, he was surprised
to find that it was wrong end upward, with the stumps of the branches
pointing down, and the small end firmly fastened in the sandy bottom.
It was about a foot in diameter at the big end, and he had expected to
get a good saw-log, but it was so rotten as to be fit only for fuel,
if for that. He had some of it in his shed then. There were marks of
an axe and of woodpeckers on the butt. He thought that it might have
been a dead tree on the shore, but was finally blown over into the
pond, and after the top had become water-logged, while the butt-end
was still dry and light, had drifted out and sunk wrong end up. His
father, eighty years old, could not remember when it was not there.
Several pretty large logs may still be seen lying on the bottom,
where, owing to the undulation of the surface, they look like huge
water snakes in motion.
This pond has rarely been profaned by a boat, for there is little in
it to tempt a fisherman. Instead of the white lily, which requires
mud, or the common sweet flag, the blue flag (Iris versicolor) grows
thinly in the pure water, rising from the stony bottom all around the
shore, where it is visited by hummingbirds in June; and the color both
of its bluish blades and its flowers and especially their reflections,
is in singular harmony with the glaucous water.
White Pond and Walden are great crystals on the surface of the
earth, Lakes of Light. If they were permanently congealed, and small
enough to be clutched, they would, perchance, be carried off by
slaves, like precious stones, to adorn the heads of emperors; but
being liquid, and ample, and secured to us and our successors forever,
we disregard them, and run after the diamond of Kohinoor. They are too
pure to have a market value; they contain no muck. How much more
beautiful than our lives, how much more transparent than our
characters, are they! We never learned meanness of them. How much
fairer than the pool before the farmers door, in which his ducks swim!
Hither the clean wild ducks come. Nature has no human inhabitant who
appreciates her. The birds with their plumage and their notes are in
harmony with the flowers, but what youth or maiden conspires with the
wild luxuriant beauty of Nature? She flourishes most alone, far from
the towns where they reside. Talk of heaven! ye disgrace earth.
BAKER FARM:
==========
SOMETIMES I rambled to pine groves, standing like temples, or like
fleets at sea, full-rigged, with wavy boughs, and rippling with light,
so soft and green and shady that the Druids would have forsaken their
oaks to worship in them; or to the cedar wood beyond Flint's Pond,
where the trees, covered with hoary blue berries, spiring higher and
higher, are fit to stand before Valhalla, and the creeping juniper
covers the ground with wreaths full of fruit; or to swamps where the
usnea lichen hangs in festoons from the white spruce trees, and
toadstools, round tables of the swamp gods, cover the ground, and more
beautiful fungi adorn the stumps, like butterflies or shells,
vegetable winkles; where the swamp-pink and dogwood grow, the red
alder berry glows like eyes of imps, the waxwork grooves and crushes
the hardest woods in its folds, and the wild holly berries make the
beholder forget his home with their beauty, and he is dazzled and
tempted by nameless other wild forbidden fruits, too fair for mortal
taste. Instead of calling on some scholar, I paid many a visit to
particular trees, of kinds which are rare in this neighborhood,
standing far away in the middle of some pasture, or in the depths of a
wood or swamp, or on a hilltop; such as the black birch, of which we
have some handsome specimens two feet in diameter; its cousin, the
yellow birch, with its loose golden vest, perfumed like the first; the
beech, which has so neat a hole and beautifully lichen-painted,
perfect in all its details, of which, excepting scattered specimens, I
know but one small grove of sizable trees left in the township,
supposed by some to have been planted by the pigeons that were once
baited with beechnuts near by; it is worth the while to see the silver
grain sparkle when you split this wood; the bass; the hornbeam; the
Celtis occidentalis, or false elm, of which we have but one
well-grown; some taller mast of a pine, a shingle tree, or a more
perfect hemlock than usual, standing like a pagoda in the midst of the
woods; and many others I could mention. These were the shrines I
visited both summer and winter.
Once it chanced that I stood in the very abutment of a rainbow's
arch, which filled the lower stratum of the atmosphere, tinging the
grass and leaves around, and dazzling me as if I looked through
colored crystal. It was a lake of rainbow light, in which, for a short
while, I lived like a dolphin. If it had lasted longer it might have
tinged my employments and life. As I walked on the railroad causeway,
I used to wonder at the halo of light around my shadow, and would fain
fancy myself one of the elect. One who visited me declared that the
shadows of some Irishmen before him had no halo about them, that it
was only natives that were so distinguished. Benvenuto Cellini tells
us in his memoirs, that, after a certain terrible dream or vision
which he had during his confinement in the castle of St. Angelo a
resplendent light appeared over the shadow of his head at morning and
evening, whether he was in Italy or France, and it was particularly
conspicuous when the grass was moist with dew. This was probably the
same phenomenon to which I have referred, which is especially observed
in the morning, but also at other times, and even by moonlight. Though
a constant one, it is not commonly noticed, and, in the case of an
excitable imagination like Cellini's, it would be basis enough for
superstition. Beside, he tells us that he showed it to very few. But
are they not indeed distinguished who are conscious that they are
regarded at all?
I set out one afternoon to go a-fishing to Fair Haven, through the
woods, to eke out my scanty fare of vegetables. My way led through
Pleasant Meadow, an adjunct of the Baker Farm, that retreat of which a
poet has since sung, beginning,
"Thy entry is a pleasant field,
Which some mossy fruit trees yield
Partly to a ruddy brook,
By gliding musquash undertook,
And mercurial trout,
Darting about."
I thought of living there before I went to Walden. I "hooked" the
apples, leaped the brook, and scared the musquash and the trout. It
was one of those afternoons which seem indefinitely long before one,
in which many events may happen, a large portion of our natural life,
though it was already half spent when I started. By the way there came
up a shower, which compelled me to stand half an hour under a pine,
piling boughs over my head, and wearing my handkerchief for a shed;
and when at length I had made one cast over the pickerelweed, standing
up to my middle in water, I found myself suddenly in the shadow of a
cloud, and the thunder began to rumble with such emphasis that I could
do no more than listen to it. The gods must be proud, thought I, with
such forked flashes to rout a poor unarmed fisherman. So I made haste
for shelter to the nearest hut, which stood half a mile from any road,
but so much the nearer to the pond, and had long been uninhabited:
"And here a poet builded,
In the completed years,
For behold a trivial cabin
That to destruction steers."
So the Muse fables. But therein, as I found, dwelt now John Field, an
Irishman, and his wife, and several children, from the broad-faced boy
who assisted his father at his work, and now came running by his side
from the bog to escape the rain, to the wrinkled, sibyl-like,
cone-headed infant that sat upon its father's knee as in the palaces
of nobles, and looked out from its home in the midst of wet and hunger
inquisitively upon the stranger, with the privilege of infancy, not
knowing but it was the last of a noble line, and the hope and cynosure
of the world, instead of John Field's poor starveling brat. There we
sat together under that part of the roof which leaked the least, while
it showered and thundered without. I had sat there many times of old
before the ship was built that floated his family to America. An
honest, hard-working, but shiftless man plainly was John Field; and
his wife, she too was brave to cook so many successive dinners in the
recesses of that lofty stove; with round greasy face and bare breast,
still thinking to improve her condition one day; with the never absent
mop in one hand, and yet no effects of it visible anywhere. The
chickens, which had also taken shelter here from the rain, stalked
about the room like members of the family, to humanized, methought, to
roast well. They stood and looked in my eye or pecked at my shoe
significantly. Meanwhile my host told me his story, how hard he
worked "bogging" for a neighboring farmer, turning up a meadow with a
spade or bog hoe at the rate of ten dollars an acre and the use of the
land with manure for one year, and his little broad-faced son worked
cheerfully at his father's side the while, not knowing how poor a
bargain the latter had made. I tried to help him with my experience,
telling him that he was one of my nearest neighbors, and that I too,
who came a-fishing here, and looked like a loafer, was getting my
living like himself; that I lived in a tight, light, and clean house,
which hardly cost more than the annual rent of such a ruin as his
commonly amounts to; and how, if he chose, he might in a month or two
build himself a palace of his own; that I did not use tea, nor coffee,
nor butter, nor milk, nor fresh meat, and so did not have to work to
get them; again, as I did not work hard, I did not have to eat hard,
and it cost me but a trifle for my food; but as he began with tea, and
coffee, and butter, and milk, and beef, he had to work hard to pay for
them, and when he had worked hard he had to eat hard again to repair
the waste of his system- and so it was as broad as it was long, indeed
it was broader than it was long, for he was discontented and wasted
his life into the bargain; and yet he had rated it as a gain in coming
to America, that here you could get tea, and coffee, and meat every
day. But the only true America is that country where you are at
liberty to pursue such a mode of life as may enable you to do without
these, and where the state does not endeavor to compel you to sustain
the slavery and war and other superfluous expenses which directly or
indirectly result from the use of such things. For I purposely talked
to him as if he were a philosopher, or desired to be one. I should be
glad if all the meadows on the earth were left in a wild state, if
that were the consequence of men's beginning to redeem themselves. A
man will not need to study history to find out what is best for his
own culture. But alas! the culture of an Irishman is an enterprise to
be undertaken with a sort of moral bog hoe. I told him, that as he
worked so hard at bogging, he required thick boots and stout clothing,
which yet were soon soiled and worn out, but I wore light shoes and
thin clothing, which cost not half so much, though he might think that
I was dressed like a gentleman (which, however, was not the case), and
in an hour or two, without labor, but as a recreation, I could, if I
wished, catch as many fish as I should want for two days, or earn
enough money to support me a week. If he and his family would live
simply, they might all go a-huckleberrying in the summer for their
amusement. John heaved a sigh at this, and his wife stared with arms
a-kimbo, and both appeared to be wondering if they had capital enough
to begin such a course with, or arithmetic enough to carry it through.
It was sailing by dead reckoning to them, and they saw not clearly how
to make their port so; therefore I suppose they still take life
bravely, after their fashion, face to face, giving it tooth and nail,
not having skill to split its massive columns with any fine entering
wedge, and rout it in detail;- thinking to deal with it roughly, as
one should handle a thistle. But they fight at an overwhelming
disadvantage- living, John Field, alas! without arithmetic, and
failing so.
"Do you ever fish?" I asked. "Oh yes, I catch a mess now and then
when I am lying by; good perch I catch.- "What's your bait?" "I catch
shiners with fishworms, and bait the perch with them." "You'd better
go now, John," said his wife, with glistening and hopeful face; but
John demurred.
The shower was now over, and a rainbow above the eastern woods
promised a fair evening; so I took my departure. When I had got
without I asked for a drink, hoping to get a sight of the well bottom,
to complete my survey of the premises; but there, alas! are shallows
and quicksands, and rope broken withal, and bucket irrecoverable.
Meanwhile the right culinary vessel was selected, water was seemingly
distilled, and after consultation and long delay passed out to the
thirsty one- not yet suffered to cool, not yet to settle. Such gruel
sustains life here, I thought; so, shutting my eyes, and excluding the
motes by a skilfully directed undercurrent, I drank to genuine
hospitality the heartiest draught I could. I am not squeamish in such
cases when manners are concerned.
As I was leaving the Irishman's roof after the rain, bending my
steps again to the pond, my haste to catch pickerel, wading in retired
meadows, in sloughs and bog-holes, in forlorn and savage places,
appeared for an instant trivial to me who had been sent to school and
college; but as I ran down the hill toward the reddening west, with
the rainbow over my shoulder, and some faint tinkling sounds borne to
my ear through the cleansed air, from I know not what quarter, my Good
Genius seemed to say- Go fish and hunt far and wide day by day-
farther and wider- and rest thee by many brooks and hearth-sides
without misgiving. Remember thy Creator in the days of thy youth. Rise
free from care before the dawn, and seek adventures. Let the noon
find thee by other lakes, and the night overtake thee everywhere at
home. There are no larger fields than these, no worthier games than
may here be played. Grow wild according to thy nature, like these
sedges and brakes, which will never become English bay. Let the
thunder rumble; what if it threaten ruin to farmers' crops? that is
not its errand to thee. Take shelter under the cloud, while they flee
to carts and sheds. Let not to get a living be thy trade, but thy
sport. Enjoy the land, but own it not. Through want of enterprise and
faith men are where they are, buying and selling, and spending their
lives like serfs.
O Baker Farm!
"Landscape where the richest element
Is a little sunshine innocent."...
"No one runs to revel
On thy rail-fenced lea."...
"Debate with no man hast thou,
With questions art never perplexed,
As tame at the first sight as now,
In thy plain russet gabardine dressed."
"Come ye who love,
And ye who hate,
Children of the Holy Dove,
And Guy Faux of the state,
And hang conspiracies
From the tough rafters of the trees!"
Men come tamely home at night only from the next field or street,
where their household echoes haunt, and their life pines because it
breathes its own breath over again; their shadows, morning and
evening, reach farther than their daily steps. We should come home
from far, from adventures, and perils, and discoveries every day, with
new experience and character.
Before I had reached the pond some fresh impulse had brought out
John Field, with altered mind, letting go "bogging" ere this sunset.
But he, poor man, disturbed only a couple of fins while I was catching
a fair string, and he said it was his luck; but when we changed seats
in the boat luck changed seats too. Poor John Field!- I trust he does
not read this, unless he will improve by it- thinking to live by some
derivative old-country mode in this primitive new country- to catch
perch with shiners. It is good bait sometimes, I allow. With his
horizon all his own, yet he a poor man, born to be poor, with his
inherited Irish poverty or poor life, his Adam's grandmother and boggy
ways, not to rise in this world, he nor his posterity, till their
wading webbed bog-trotting feet get talaria to their heels.
HIGHER LAWS:
===========
AS I CAME home through the woods with my string of fish, trailing my
pole, it being now quite dark, I caught a glimpse of a woodchuck
stealing across my path, and felt a strange thrill of savage delight,
and was strongly tempted to seize and devour him raw; not that I was
hungry then, except for that wildness which he represented. Once or
twice, however, while I lived at the pond, I found myself ranging the
woods, like a half-starved hound, with a strange abandonment, seeking
some kind of venison which I might devour, and no morsel could have
been too savage for me. The wildest scenes had become unaccountably
familiar. I found in myself, and still find, an instinct toward a
higher, or, as it is named, spiritual life, as do most men, and
another toward a primitive rank and savage one, and I reverence them
both. I love the wild not less than the good. The wildness and
adventure that are in fishing still recommended it to me. I like
sometimes to take rank hold on life and spend my day more as the
animals do. Perhaps I have owed to this employment and to hunting,
when quite young, my closest acquaintance with Nature. They early
introduce us to and detain us in scenery with which otherwise, at that
age, we should have little acquaintance. Fishermen, hunters,
woodchoppers, and others, spending their lives in the fields and
woods, in a peculiar sense a part of Nature themselves, are often in a
more favorable mood for observing her, in the intervals of their
pursuits, than philosophers or poets even, who approach her with
expectation. She is not afraid to exhibit herself to them. The
traveller on the prairie is naturally a hunter, on the head waters of
the Missouri and Columbia a trapper, and at the Falls of St. Mary a
fisherman. He who is only a traveller learns things at second-hand and
by the halves, and is poor authority. We are most interested when
science reports what those men already know practically or
instinctively, for that alone is a true humanity, or account of human
experience.
They mistake who assert that the Yankee has few amusements,
because he has not so many public holidays, and men and boys do not
play so many games as they do in England, for here the more primitive
but solitary amusements of hunting, fishing, and the like have not yet
given place to the former. Almost every New England boy among my
contemporaries shouldered a fowling-piece between the ages of ten and
fourteen; and his hunting and fishing grounds were not limited, like
the preserves of an English nobleman, but were more boundless even
than those of a savage. No wonder, then, that he did not oftener stay
to play on the common. But already a change is taking place, owing,
not to an increased humanity, but to an increased scarcity of game,
for perhaps the hunter is the greatest friend of the animals hunted,
not excepting the Humane Society.
Moreover, when at the pond, I wished sometimes to add fish to my
fare for variety. I have actually fished from the same kind of
necessity that the first fishers did. Whatever humanity I might
conjure up against it was all factitious, and concerned my philosophy
more than my feelings. I speak of fishing only now, for I had long
felt differently about fowling, and sold my gun before I went to the
woods. Not that I am less humane than others, but I did not perceive
that my feelings were much affected. I did not pity the fishes nor the
worms. This was habit. As for fowling, during the last years that I
carried a gun my excuse was that I was studying ornithology, and
sought only new or rare birds. But I confess that I am now inclined to
think that there is a finer way of studying ornithology than this. It
requires so much closer attention to the habits of the birds, that, if
for that reason only, I have been willing to omit the gun. Yet
notwithstanding the objection on the score of humanity, I am compelled
to doubt if equally valuable sports are ever substituted for these;
and when some of my friends have asked me anxiously about their boys,
whether they should let them hunt, I have answered, yes- remembering
that it was one of the best parts of my education- make them hunters,
though sportsmen only at first, if possible, mighty hunters at last,
so that they shall not find game large enough for them in this or any
vegetable wilderness- hunters as well as fishers of men. Thus far I am
of the opinion of Chaucer's nun, who
"yave not of the text a pulled hen
That saith that hunters ben not holy men."
There is a period in the history of the individual, as of the race,
when the hunters are the "best men,- as the Algonquins called them. We
cannot but pity the boy who has never fired a gun; he is no more
humane, while his education has been sadly neglected. This was my
answer with respect to those youths who were bent on this pursuit,
trusting that they would soon outgrow it. No humane being, past the
thoughtless age of boyhood, will wantonly murder any creature which
holds its life by the same tenure that he does. The hare in its
extremity cries like a child. I warn you, mothers, that my sympathies
do not always make the usual philanthropic distinctions.
Such is oftenest the young man's introduction to the forest, and the
most original part of himself. He goes thither at first as a hunter
and fisher, until at last, if he has the seeds of a better life in
him, he distinguishes his proper objects, as a poet or naturalist it
may be, and leaves the gun and fish-pole behind. The mass of men are
still and always young in this respect. In some countries a hunting
parson is no uncommon sight. Such a one might make a good shepherd's
dog, but is far from being the Good Shepherd. I have been surprised to
consider that the only obvious employment, except wood-chopping,
ice-cutting, or the like business, which ever to my knowledge detained
at Walden Pond for a whole half-day any of my fellow-citizens, whether
fathers or children of the town, with just one exception, was fishing.
Commonly they did not think that they were lucky, or well paid for
their time, unless they got a long string of fish, though they had the
opportunity of seeing the pond all the while. They might go there a
thousand times before the sediment of fishing would sink to the bottom
and leave their purpose pure; but no doubt such a clarifying process
would be going on all the while. The Governor and his Council faintly
remember the pond, for they went a-fishing there when they were boys;
but now they are too old and dignified to go a-fishing, and so they
know it no more forever. Yet even they expect to go to heaven at last.
If the legislature regards it, it is chiefly to regulate the number of
books to be used there; but they know nothing about the book of hooks
with which to angle for the pond itself, impaling the legislature for
a bait. Thus, even in civilized communities, the embryo man passes
through the hunter stage of development.
I have found repeatedly, of late years, that I cannot fish without
falling a little in self-respect. I have tried it again and again. I
have skill at it, and, like many of my fellows, a certain instinct for
it, which revives from time to time, but always when I have done I
feel that it would have been better if I had not fished. I think that
I do not mistake. It is a faint intimation, yet so are the first
streaks of morning. There is unquestionably this instinct in me which
belongs to the lower orders of creation; yet with every year I am less
a fisherman, though without more humanity or even wisdom; at present I
am no fisherman at all. But I see that if I were to live in a
wilderness I should again be tempted to become a fisher and hunter in
earnest. Beside, there is something essentially unclean about this
diet and all flesh, and I began to see where housework commences, and
whence the endeavor, which costs so much, to wear a tidy and
respectable appearance each day, to keep the house sweet and free from
all ill odors and sights. Having been my own butcher and scullion and
cook, as well as the gentleman for whom the dishes were served up, I
can speak from an unusually complete experience. The practical
objection to animal food in my case was its uncleanness; and besides,
when I had caught and cleaned and cooked and eaten my fish, they
seemed not to have fed me essentially. It was insignificant and
unnecessary, and cost more than it came to. A little bread or a few
potatoes would have done as well, with less trouble and filth. Like
many of my contemporaries, I had rarely for many years used animal
food, or tea, or coffee, etc.; not so much because of any ill effects
which I had traced to them, as because they were not agreeable to my
imagination. The repugnance to animal food is not the effect of
experience, but is an instinct. It appeared more beautiful to live low
and fare hard in many respects; and though I never did so, I went far
enough to please my imagination. I believe that every man who has ever
been earnest to preserve his higher or poetic faculties in the best
condition has been particularly inclined to abstain from animal food,
and from much food of any kind. It is a significant fact, stated by
entomologists- I find it in Kirby and Spence- that "some insects in
their perfect state, though furnished with organs of feeding, make no
use of them"; and they lay it down as "a general rule, that almost all
insects in this state eat much less than in that of larvae. The
voracious caterpillar when transformed into a butterfly... and the
gluttonous maggot when become a fly" content themselves with a drop or
two of honey or some other sweet liquid. The abdomen under the wings
of the butterfly stir represents the larva. This is the tidbit which
tempts his insectivorous fate. The gross feeder is a man in the larva
state; and there are whole nations in that condition, nations without
fancy or imagination, whose vast abdomens betray them.
It is hard to provide and cook so simple and clean a diet as will
not offend the imagination; but this, I think, is to be fed when we
feed the body; they should both sit down at the same table. Yet
perhaps this may be done. The fruits eaten temperately need not make
us ashamed of our appetites, nor interrupt the worthiest pursuits. But
put an extra condiment into your dish, and it will poison you. It is
not worth the while to live by rich cookery. Most men would feel shame
if caught preparing with their own hands precisely such a dinner,
whether of animal or vegetable food, as is every day prepared for them
by others. Yet till this is otherwise we are not civilized, and, if
gentlemen and ladies, are not true men and women. This certainly
suggests what change is to be made. It may be vain to ask why the
imagination will not be reconciled to flesh and fat. I am satisfied
that it is not. Is it not a reproach that man is a carnivorous animal?
True, he can and does live, in a great measure, by preying on other
animals; but this is a miserable way- as any one who will go to
snaring rabbits, or slaughtering lambs, may learn- and he will be
regarded as a benefactor of his race who shall teach man to confine
himself to a more innocent and wholesome diet. Whatever my own
practice may be, I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of
the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating
animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each
other when they came in contact with the more civilized.
If one listens to the faintest but constant suggestions of his
genius, which are certainly true, he sees not to what extremes, or
even insanity, it may lead him; and yet that way, as he grows more
resolute and faithful, his road lies. The faintest assured objection
which one healthy man feels will at length prevail over the arguments
and customs of mankind. No man ever followed his genius till it misled
him. Though the result were bodily weakness, yet perhaps no one can
say that the consequences were to be regretted, for these were a life
in conformity to higher principles. If the day and the night are such
that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers
and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal-
that is your success. All nature is your congratulation, and you have
cause momentarily to bless yourself. The greatest gains and values
are farthest from being appreciated. We easily come to doubt if they
exist. We soon forget them. They are the highest reality. Perhaps the
facts most astounding and most real are never communicated by man to
man. The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and
indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little
star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched.
Yet, for my part, I was never unusually squeamish; I could sometimes
eat a fried rat with a good relish, if it were necessary. I am glad to
have drunk water so long, for the same reason that I prefer the
natural sky to an opium-eater's heaven. I would fain keep sober
always; and there are infinite degrees of drunkenness. I believe that
water is the only drink for a wise man; wine is not so noble a liquor;
and think of dashing the hopes of a morning with a cup of warm coffee,
or of an evening with a dish of tea! Ah, how low I fall when I am
tempted by them! Even music may be intoxicating. Such apparently
slight causes destroyed Greece and Rome, and will destroy England and
America. Of all ebriosity, who does not prefer to be intoxicated by
the air he breathes? I have found it to be the most serious objection
to coarse labors long continued, that they compelled me to eat and
drink coarsely also. But to tell the truth, I find myself at present
somewhat less particular in these respects. I carry less religion to
the table, ask no blessing; not because I am wiser than I was, but, I
am obliged to confess, because, however much it is to be regretted,
with years I have grown more coarse and indifferent. Perhaps these
questions are entertained only in youth, as most believe of poetry. My
practice is "nowhere," my opinion is here. Nevertheless I am far from
regarding myself as one of those privileged ones to whom the Ved
refers when it says, that "he who has true faith in the Omnipresent
Supreme Being may eat all that exists," that is, is not bound to
inquire what is his food, or who prepares it; and even in their case
it is to be observed, as a Hindoo commentator has remarked, that the
Vedant limits this privilege to "the time of distress."
Who has not sometimes derived an inexpressible satisfaction from his
food in which appetite had no share? I have been thrilled to think
that I owed a mental perception to the commonly gross sense of taste,
that I have been inspired through the palate, that some berries which
I had eaten on a hillside had fed my genius. "The soul not being
mistress of herself," says Thseng-tseu, "one looks, and one does not
see; one listens, and one does not hear; one eats, and one does not
know the savor of food." He who distinguishes the true savor of his
food can never be a glutton; he who does not cannot be otherwise. A
puritan may go to his brown-bread crust with as gross an appetite as
ever an alderman to his turtle. Not that food which entereth into the
mouth defileth a man, but the appetite with which it is eaten. It is
neither the quality nor the quantity, but the devotion to sensual
savors; when that which is eaten is not a viand to sustain our animal,
or inspire our spiritual life, but food for the worms that possess us.
If the hunter has a taste for mud-turtles, muskrats, and other such
savage tidbits, the fine lady indulges a taste for jelly made of a
calf's foot, or for sardines from over the sea, and they are even. He
goes to the mill-pond, she to her preserve-pot. The wonder is how
they, how you and I, can live this slimy, beastly life, eating and
drinking.
Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant's
truce between virtue and vice. Goodness is the only investment that
never fails. In the music of the harp which trembles round the world
it is the insisting on this which thrills us. The harp is the
travelling patterer for the Universe's Insurance Company, recommending
its laws, and our little goodness is all the assessment that we pay.
Though the youth at last grows indifferent, the laws of the universe
are not indifferent, but are forever on the side of the most
sensitive. Listen to every zephyr for some reproof, for it is surely
there, and he is unfortunate who does not hear it. We cannot touch a
string or move a stop but the charming moral transfixes us. Many an
irksome noise, go a long way off, is heard as music, a proud, sweet
satire on the meanness of our lives.
We are conscious of an animal in us, which awakens in proportion
as our higher nature slumbers. It is reptile and sensual, and perhaps
cannot be wholly expelled; like the worms which, even in life and
health, occupy our bodies. Possibly we may withdraw from it, but never
change its nature. I fear that it may enjoy a certain health of its
own; that we may be well, yet not pure. The other day I picked up the
lower jaw of a hog, with white and sound teeth and tusks, which
suggested that there was an animal health and vigor distinct from the
spiritual. This creature succeeded by other means than temperance and
purity. "That in which men differ from brute beasts," says Mencius,
"is a thing very inconsiderable; the common herd lose it very soon;
superior men preserve it carefully." Who knows what sort of life would
result if we had attained to purity? If I knew so wise a man as could
teach me purity I would go to seek him forthwith. "A command over our
passions, and over the external senses of the body, and good acts, are
declared by the Ved to be indispensable in the mind's approximation to
God." Yet the spirit can for the time pervade and control every member
and function of the body, and transmute what ill form is the grossest
sensuality into purity and devotion. The generative energy, which,
when we are loose, dissipates and makes us unclean, when we are
continent invigorates and inspires us. Chastity is the flowering of
man; and what are called Genius, Heroism, Holiness, and the like, are
but various fruits which succeed it. Man flows at once to God when the
channel of purity is open. By turns our purity inspires and our
impurity casts us down. He is blessed who is assured that the animal
is dying out in him day by day, and the divine being established.
Perhaps there is none but has cause for shame on account of the
inferior and brutish nature to which he is allied. I fear that we are
such gods or demigods only as fauns and satyrs, the divine allied to
beasts, the creatures of appetite, and that, to some extent, our very
life is our disgrace.
"How happy's he who hath due place assigned
To his beasts and disafforested his mind!
Can use this horse, goat, wolf, and ev'ry beast,
And is not ass himself to all the rest!
Else man not only is the herd of swine,
But he's those devils too which did incline
Them to a headlong rage, and made them worse."
All sensuality is one, though it takes many forms; all purity is
one. It is the same whether a man eat, or drink, or cohabit, or sleep
sensually. They are but one appetite, and we only need to see a person
do any one of these things to know how great a sensualist he is. The
impure can neither stand nor sit with purity. When the reptile is
attacked at one mouth of his burrow, he shows himself at another. If
you would be chaste, you must be temperate. What is chastity? How
shall a man know if he is chaste? He shall not know it. We have heard
of this virtue, but we know not what it is. We speak conformably to
the rumor which we have heard. From exertion come wisdom and purity;
from sloth ignorance and sensuality. In the student sensuality is a
sluggish habit of mind. An unclean person is universally a slothful
one, one who sits by a stove, whom the sun shines on prostrate, who
reposes without being fatigued. If you would avoid uncleanness, and
all the sins, work earnestly, though it be at cleaning a stable.
Nature is hard to be overcome, but she must be overcome. What avails
it that you are Christian, if you are not purer than the heathen, if
you deny yourself no more, if you are not more religious? I know of
many systems of religion esteemed heathenish whose precepts fill the
reader with shame, and provoke him to new endeavors, though it be to
the performance of rites merely.
I hesitate to say these things, but it is not because of the
subject- I care not how obscene my words are- but because I cannot
speak of them without betraying my impurity. We discourse freely
without shame of one form of sensuality, and are silent about another.
We are so degraded that we cannot speak simply of the necessary
functions of human nature. In earlier ages, in some countries, every
function was reverently spoken of and regulated by law. Nothing was
too trivial for the Hindoo lawgiver, however offensive it may be to
modern taste. He teaches how to eat, drink, cohabit, void excrement
and urine, and the like, elevating what is mean, and does not falsely
excuse himself by calling these things trifles.
Every man is the builder of a temple, called his body, to the god he
worships, after a style purely his own, nor can he get off by
hammering marble instead. We are all sculptors and painters, and our
material is our own flesh and blood and bones. Any nobleness begins at
once to refine a man's features, any meanness or sensuality to imbrute
them.
John Farmer sat at his door one September evening, after a hard
day's work, his mind still running on his labor more or less. Having
bathed, he sat down to re-create his intellectual man. It was a rather
cool evening, and some of his neighbors were apprehending a frost. He
had not attended to the train of his thoughts long when he heard some
one playing on a flute, and that sound harmonized with his mood. Still
he thought of his work; but the burden of his thought was, that though
this kept running in his head, and he found himself planning and
contriving it against his will, yet it concerned him very little. It
was no more than the scurf of his skin, which was constantly shuffled
off. But the notes of the flute came home to his ears out of a
different sphere from that he worked in, and suggested work for
certain faculties which slumbered in him. They gently did away with
the street, and the village, and the state in which he lived. A voice
said to him- Why do you stay here and live this mean moiling life,
when a glorious existence is possible for you? Those same stars
twinkle over other fields than these.- But how to come out of this
condition and actually migrate thither? All that he could think of was
to practise some new austerity, to let his mind descend into his body
and redeem it, and treat himself with ever increasing respect.
BRUTE NEIGHBORS:
===============
SOMETIMES I had a companion in my fishing, who came through the
village to my house from the other side of the town, and the catching
of the dinner was as much a social exercise as the eating of it.
Hermit. I wonder what the world is doing now. I have not heard so
much as a locust over the sweet-fern these three hours. The pigeons
are all asleep upon their roosts- no flutter from them. Was that a
farmer's noon horn which sounded from beyond the woods just now? The
hands are coming in to boiled salt beef and cider and Indian bread.
Why will men worry themselves so? He that does not eat need not work.
I wonder how much they have reaped. Who would live there where a body
can never think for the barking of Bose? And oh, the housekeeping! to
keep bright the devil's door-knobs, and scour his tubs this bright
day! Better not keep a house. Say, some hollow tree; and then for
morning calls and dinner-parties! Only a woodpecker tapping. Oh, they
swarm; the sun is too warm there; they are born too far into life for
me. I have water from the spring, and a loaf of brown bread on the
shelf.- Hark! I hear a rustling of the leaves. Is it some ill-fed
village bound yielding to the instinct of the chase? or the lost pig
which is said to be in these woods, whose tracks I saw after the rain?
It comes on apace; my sumachs and sweetbriers tremble.- Eh, Mr. Poet,
is it you? How do you like the world today?
Poet. See those clouds; how they hang! That's the greatest thing I
have seen today. There's nothing like it in old paintings, nothing
like it in foreign lands- unless when we were off the coast of Spain.
That's a true Mediterranean sky. I thought, as I have my living to
get, and have not eaten today, that I might go a-fishing. That's the
true industry for poets. It is the only trade I have learned. Come,
let's along.
Hermit. I cannot resist. My brown bread will soon be gone. I will go
with you gladly soon, but I am just concluding a serious meditation. I
think that I am near the end of it. Leave me alone, then, for a while.
But that we may not be delayed, you shall be digging the bait
meanwhile. Angleworms are rarely to be met with in these parts, where
the soil was never fattened with manure; the race is nearly extinct.
The sport of digging the bait is nearly equal to that of catching the
fish, when one's appetite is not too keen; and this you may have all
to yourself today. I would advise you to set in the spade down yonder
among the groundnuts, where you see the johnswort waving. I think that
I may warrant you one worm to every three sods you turn up, if you
look well in among the roots of the grass, as if you were weeding. Or,
if you choose to go farther, it will not be unwise, for I have found
the increase of fair bait to be very nearly as the squares of the
distances.
Hermit alone. Let me see; where was I? Methinks I was nearly in this
frame of mind; the world lay about at this angle. Shall I go to heaven
or a-fishing? If I should soon bring this meditation to an end, would
another so sweet occasion be likely to offer? I was as near being
resolved into the essence of things as ever I was in my life. I fear
my thoughts will not come back to me. If it would do any good, I would
whistle for them. When they make us an offer, is it wise to say, We
will think of it? My thoughts have left no track, and I cannot find
the path again. What was it that I was thinking of? It was a very hazy
day. I will just try these three sentences of Confut- see; they may
fetch that state about again. I know not whether it was the dumps or a
budding ecstasy. Mem. There never is but one opportunity of a kind.
Poet. How now, Hermit, is it too soon? I have got just thirteen
whole ones, beside several which are imperfect or undersized; but they
will do for the smaller fry; they do not cover up the hook so much.
Those village worms are quite too large; a shiner may make a meal off
one without finding the skewer.
Hermit. Well, then, let's be off. Shall we to the Concord? There's
good sport there if the water be not too high.
Why do precisely these objects which we behold make a world? Why has
man just these species of animals for his neighbors; as if nothing but
a mouse could have filled this crevice? I suspect that Pilpay & Co.
have put animals to their best use, for they are all beasts of burden,
in a sense, made to carry some portion of our thoughts.
The mice which haunted my house were not the common ones, which
are said to have been introduced into the country, but a wild native
kind not found in the village. I sent one to a distinguished
naturalist, and it interested him much. When I was building, one of
these had its nest underneath the house, and before I had laid the
second floor, and swept out the shavings, would come out regularly at
lunch time and pick up the crumbs at my feet. It probably had never
seen a man before; and it soon became quite familiar, and would run
over my shoes and up my clothes. It could readily ascend the sides of
the room by short impulses, like a squirrel, which it resembled in its
motions. At length, as I leaned with my elbow on the bench one day, it
ran up my clothes, and along my sleeve, and round and round the paper
which held my dinner, while I kept the latter close, and dodged and
played at bopeep with it; and when at last I held still a piece of
cheese between my thumb and finger, it came and nibbled it, sitting in
my hand, and afterward cleaned its face and paws, like a fly, and
walked away.
A phoebe soon built in my shed, and a robin for protection in a pine
which grew against the house. In June the partridge (Tetrao umbellus),
which is so shy a bird, led her brood past my windows, from the woods
in the rear to the front of my house, clucking and calling to them
like a hen, and in all her behavior proving herself the hen of the
woods. The young suddenly disperse on your approach, at a signal from
the mother, as if a whirlwind had swept them away, and they so exactly
resemble the dried leaves and twigs that many a traveler has placed
his foot in the midst of a brood, and heard the whir of the old bird
as she flew off, and her anxious calls and mewing, or seen her trail
her mings to attract his attention, without suspecting their
neighborhood. The parent will sometimes roll and spin round before you
in such a dishabille, that you cannot, for a few moments, detect what
kind of creature it is. The young squat still and flat, often running
their heads under a leaf, and mind only their mother's directions
given from a distance, nor will your approach make them run again and
betray themselves. You may even tread on them, or have your eyes on
them for a minute, without discovering them. I have held them in my
open hand at such a time, and still their only care, obedient to their
mother and their instinct, was to squat there without fear or
trembling. So perfect is this instinct, that once, when I had laid
them on the leaves again, and one accidentally fell on its side, it
was found with the rest in exactly the same position ten minutes
afterward. They are not callow like the young of most birds, but more
perfectly developed and precocious even than chickens. The remarkably
adult yet innocent expression of their open and serene eyes is very
memorable. All intelligence seems reflected in them. They suggest not
merely the purity of infancy, but a wisdom clarified by experience.
Such an eye was not born when the bird was, but is coeval with the sky
it reflects. The woods do not yield another such a gem. The traveller
does not often look into such a limpid well. The ignorant or reckless
sportsman often shoots the parent at such a time, and leaves these
innocents to fall a prey to some prowling beast or bird, or gradually
mingle with the decaying leaves which they so much resemble. It is
said that when hatched by a hen they will directly disperse on some
alarm, and so are lost, for they never hear the mother's call which
gathers them again. These were my hens and chickens.
It is remarkable how many creatures live wild and free though secret
in the woods, and still sustain themselves in the neighborhood of
towns, suspected by hunters only. How retired the otter manages to
live here! He grows to be four feet long, as big as a small boy,
perhaps without any human being getting a glimpse of him. I formerly
saw the raccoon in the woods behind where my house is built, and
probably still heard their whinnering at night. Commonly I rested an
hour or two in the shade at noon, after planting, and ate my lunch,
and read a little by a spring which was the source of a swamp and of a
brook, oozing from under Brister's Hill, half a mile from my field.
The approach to this was through a succession of descending grassy
hollows, full of young pitch pines, into a larger wood about the
swamp. There, in a very secluded and shaded spot, under a spreading
white pine, there was yet a clean, firm sward to sit on. I had dug out
the spring and made a well of clear gray water, where I could dip up a
pailful without roiling it, and thither I went for this purpose almost
every day in midsummer, when the pond was warmest. Thither, too, the
woodcock led her brood, to probe the mud for worms, flying but a foot
above them down the bank, while they ran in a troop beneath; but at
last, spying me, she would leave her young and circle round and round
me, nearer and nearer till within four or five feet, pretending broken
wings and legs, to attract my attention, and get off her young, who
would already have taken up their march, with faint, wiry peep, single
file through the swamp, as she directed. Or I heard the peep of the
young when I could not see the parent bird. There too the turtle
doves sat over the spring, or fluttered from bough to bough of the
soft white pines over my head; or the red squirrel, coursing down the
nearest bough, was particularly familiar and inquisitive. You only
need sit still long enough in some attractive spot in the woods that
all its inhabitants may exhibit themselves to you by turns.
I was witness to events of a less peaceful character. One day when I
went out to my wood-pile, or rather my pile of stumps, I observed two
large ants, the one red, the other much larger, nearly half an inch
long, and black, fiercely contending with one another. Having once got
hold they never let go, but struggled and wrestled and rolled on the
chips incessantly. Looking farther, I was surprised to find that the
chips were covered with such combatants, that it was not a duellum,
but a bellum, a war between two races of ants, the red always pitted
against the black, and frequently two red ones to one black. The
legions of these Myrmidons covered all the hills and vales in my
woodyard, and the ground was already strewn with the dead and dying,
both red and black. It was the only battle which I have ever
witnessed, the only battle-field I ever trod while the battle was
raging; internecine war; the red republicans on the one hand, and the
black imperialists on the other. On every side they were engaged in
deadly combat, yet without any noise that I could hear, and human
soldiers never fought so resolutely. I watched a couple that were fast
locked in each other's embraces, in a little sunny valley amid the
chips, now at noonday prepared to fight till the sun went down, or
life went out. The smaller red champion had fastened himself like a
vice to his adversary's front, and through all the tumblings on that
field never for an instant ceased to gnaw at one of his feelers near
the root, having already caused the other to go by the board; while
the stronger black one dashed him from side to side, and, as I saw on
looking nearer, had already divested him of several of his members.
They fought with more pertinacity than bulldogs. Neither manifested
the least disposition to retreat. It was evident that their battle-cry
was "Conquer or die." In the meanwhile there came along a single red
ant on the hillside of this valley, evidently full of excitement, who
either had despatched his foe, or had not yet taken part in the
battle; probably the latter, for he had lost none of his limbs; whose
mother had charged him to return with his shield or upon it. Or
perchance he was some Achilles, who had nourished his wrath apart, and
had now come to avenge or rescue his Patroclus. He saw this unequal
combat from afar- for the blacks were nearly twice the size of the
red- he drew near with rapid pace till be stood on his guard within
half an inch of the combatants; then, watching his opportunity, he
sprang upon the black warrior, and commenced his operations near the
root of his right fore leg, leaving the foe to select among his own
members; and so there were three united for life, as if a new kind of
attraction had been invented which put all other locks and cements to
shame. I should not have wondered by this time to find that they had
their respective musical bands stationed on some eminent chip, and
playing their national airs the while, to excite the slow and cheer
the dying combatants. I was myself excited somewhat even as if they
had been men. The more you think of it, the less the difference. And
certainly there is not the fight recorded in Concord history, at
least, if in the history of America, that will bear a moment's
comparison with this, whether for the numbers engaged in it, or for
the patriotism and heroism displayed. For numbers and for carnage it
was an Austerlitz or Dresden. Concord Fight! Two killed on the
patriots' side, and Luther Blanchard wounded! Why here every ant was a
Buttrick- "Fire! for God's sake fire!"- and thousands shared the fate
of Davis and Hosmer. There was not one hireling there. I have no doubt
that it was a principle they fought for, as much as our ancestors, and
not to avoid a three-penny tax on their tea; and the results of this
battle will be as important and memorable to those whom it concerns as
those of the battle of Bunker Hill, at least.
I took up the chip oil which the three I have particularly described
were struggling, carried it into my house, and placed it under a
tumbler on my window-sill, in order to see the issue. Holding a
microscope to the first-mentioned red ant, I saw that, though he was
assiduously gnawing at the near fore leg of his enemy, having severed
his remaining feeler, his own breast was all torn away, exposing what
vitals he had there to the jaws of the black warrior, whose
breastplate was apparently too thick for him to pierce; and the dark
carbuncles of the sufferer's eyes shone with ferocity such as war only
could excite. They struggled half an hour longer under the tumbler,
and when I looked again the black soldier had severed the heads of his
foes from their bodies, and the still living heads were hanging on
either side of him like ghastly trophies at his saddle-bow, still
apparently as firmly fastened as ever, and he was endeavoring with
feeble struggles, being without feelers and with only the remnant of a
leg, and I know not how many other wounds, to divest himself of them;
which at length, after half an hour more, he accomplished. I raised
the glass, and he went off over the window-sill in that crippled
state. Whether he finally survived that combat, and spent the
remainder of his days in some Hotel des Invalides, I do not know; but
I thought that his industry would not be worth much thereafter. I
never learned which party was victorious, nor the cause of the war;
but I felt for the rest of that day as if I had had my feelings
excited and harrowed by witnessing the struggle, the ferocity and
carnage, of a human battle before my door.
Kirby and Spence tell us that the battles of ants have long been
celebrated and the date of them recorded, though they say that Huber
is the only modern author who appears to have witnessed them. "Aeneas
Sylvius," say they, "after giving a very circumstantial account of one
contested with great obstinacy by a great and small species on the
trunk of a pear tree," adds that "'this action was fought in the
pontificate of Eugenius the Fourth, in the presence of Nicholas
Pistoriensis, an eminent lawyer, who related the whole, history of the
battle with the greatest fidelity.' A similar engagement between great
and small ants is recorded by Olaus Magnus, in which the small ones,
being victorious, are said to have buried the bodies of their own
soldiers, but left those of their giant enemies a prey to the birds.
This event happened previous to the expulsion of the tyrant Christiern
the Second from Sweden." The battle which I witnessed took place in
the Presidency of Polk, five years before the passage of Webster's
Fugitive-Slave Bill.
Many a village Bose, fit only to course a mud-turtle in a
victualling cellar, sported his heavy quarters in the woods, without
the knowledge of his master, and ineffectually smelled at old fox
burrows and woodchucks' holes; led perchance by some slight cur which
nimbly threaded the wood, and might still inspire a natural terror in
its denizens;- now far behind his guide, barking like a canine bull
toward some small squirrel which had treed itself for scrutiny, then,
cantering off, bending the bushes with his weight, imagining that he
is on the track of some stray member of the jerbilla family. Once I
was surprised to see a cat walking along the stony shore of the pond,
for they rarely wander so far from home. The surprise was mutual.
Nevertheless the most domestic cat, which has lain on a rug all her
days, appears quite at home in the woods, and, by her sly and stealthy
behavior, proves herself more native there than the regular
inhabitants. Once, when berrying, I met with a cat with young kittens
in the woods, quite wild, and they all, like their mother, had their
backs up and were fiercely spitting at me. A few years before I lived
in the woods there was what was called a "winged cat" in one of the
farm-houses in Lincoln nearest the pond, Mr. Gilian Baker's. When I
called to see her in June, 1842, she was gone a-hunting in the woods,
as was her wont (I am not sure whether it was a male or female, and so
use the more common pronoun), but her mistress told me that she came
into the neighborhood a little more than a year before, in April, and
was finally taken into their house; that she was of a dark
brownish-gray color, with a white spot on her throat, and white feet,
and had a large bushy tail like a fox; that in the winter the fur grew
thick and flatted out along her sides, forming stripes ten or twelve
inches long by two and a half wide, and under her chin like a muff,
the upper side loose, the under matted like felt, and in the spring
these appendages dropped off. They gave me a pair of her "wings,"
which I keep still. There is no appearance of a membrane about them.
Some thought it was part flying squirrel or some other wild animal,
which is not impossible, for, according to naturalists, prolific
hybrids have been produced by the union of the marten and domestic
cat. This would have been the right kind of cat for me to keep, if I
had kept any; for why should not a poet's cat be winged as well as his
horse?
In the fall the loon (Colymbus glacialis) came, as usual, to moult
and bathe in the pond, making the woods ring with his wild laughter
before I had risen. At rumor of his arrival all the Mill-dam sportsmen
are on the alert, in gigs and on foot, two by two and three by three,
with patent rifles and conical balls and spy-glasses. They come
rustling through the woods like autumn leaves, at least ten men to one
loon. Some station themselves on this side of the pond, some on that,
for the poor bird cannot be omnipresent; if he dive here he must come
up there. But now the kind October wind rises, rustling the leaves and
rippling the surface of the water, so that no loon can be heard or
seen, though his foes sweep the pond with spy-glasses, and make the
woods resound with their discharges. The waves generously rise and
dash angrily, taking sides with all water-fowl, and our sportsmen must
beat a retreat to town and shop and unfinished jobs. But they were
too often successful. When I went to get a pail of water early in the
morning I frequently saw this stately bird sailing out of my cove
within a few rods. If I endeavored to overtake him in a boat, in order
to see how he would manoeuvre, he would dive and be completely lost,
so that I did not discover him again, sometimes, till the latter part
of the day. But I was more than a match for him on the surface. He
commonly went off in a rain.
As I was paddling along the north shore one very calm October
afternoon, for such days especially they settle on to the lakes, like
the milkweed down, having looked in vain over the pond for a loon,
suddenly one, sailing out from the shore toward the middle a few rods
in front of me, set up his mild laugh and betrayed himself. I pursued
with a paddle and he dived, but when he came up I was nearer than
before. He dived again, but I miscalculated the direction he would
take, and we were fifty rods apart when he came to the surface this
time, for I had helped to widen the interval; and again he laughed
long and loud, and with more reason than before. He manoeuvred so
cunningly that I could not get within half a dozen rods of him. Each
time, when he came to the surface, turning his head this way and that,
he cooly surveyed the water and the land, and apparently chose his
course so that he might come up where there was the widest expanse of
water and at the greatest distance from the boat. It was surprising
how quickly he made up his mind and put his resolve into execution. He
led me at once to the widest part of the pond, and could not be driven
from it. While he was thinking one thing in his brain, I was
endeavoring to divine his thought in mine. It was a pretty game,
played on the smooth surface of the pond, a man against a loon.
Suddenly your adversary's checker disappears beneath the board, and
the problem is to place yours nearest to where his will appear again.
Sometimes he would come up unexpectedly on the opposite side of me,
having apparently passed directly under the boat. So long-winded was
he and so unweariable, that when he had swum farthest he would
immediately plunge again, nevertheless; and then no wit could divine
where in the deep pond, beneath the smooth surface, he might be
speeding his way like a fish, for he had time and ability to visit the
bottom of the pond in its deepest part. It is said that loons have
been caught in the New York lakes eighty feet beneath the surface,
with hooks set for trout- though Walden is deeper than that. How
surprised must the fishes be to see this ungainly visitor from another
sphere speeding his way amid their schools! Yet he appeared to know
his course as surely under water as on the surface, and swam much
faster there. Once or twice I saw a ripple where he approached the
surface, just put his head out to reconnoitre, and instantly dived
again. I found that it was as well for me to rest on my oars and wait
his reappearing as to endeavor to calculate where he would rise; for
again and again, when I was straining my eyes over the surface one
way, I would suddenly be startled by his unearthly laugh behind me.
But why, after displaying so much cunning, did he invariably betray
himself the moment he came up by that loud laugh? Did not his white
breast enough betray him? He was indeed a silly loon, I thought. I
could commonly hear the splash of the water when he came up, and so
also detected him. But after an hour he seemed as fresh as ever, dived
as willingly, and swam yet farther than at first. It was surprising
to see how serenely he sailed off with unruffled breast when he came
to the surface, doing all the work with his webbed feet beneath. His
usual note was this demoniac laughter, yet somewhat like that of a
water-fowl; but occasionally, when he had balked me most successfully
and come up a long way off, he uttered a long-drawn unearthly howl,
probably more like that of a wolf than any bird; as when a beast puts
his muzzle to the ground and deliberately howls. This was his looning-
perhaps the wildest sound that is ever heard here, making the woods
ring far and wide. I concluded that he laughed in derision of my
efforts, confident of his own resources. Though the sky was by this
time overcast, the pond was so smooth that I could see where he broke
the surface when I did not hear him. His white breast, the stillness
of the air, and the smoothness of the water were all against him. At
length having come up fifty rods off, he uttered one of those
prolonged howls, as if calling on the god of loons to aid him, and
immediately there came a wind from the east and rippled the surface,
and filled the whole air with misty rain, and I was impressed as if it
were the prayer of the loon answered, and his god was angry with me;
and so I left him disappearing far away on the tumultuous surface.
For hours, in fall days, I watched the ducks cunningly tack and veer
and hold the middle of the pond, far from the sportsman; tricks which
they will have less need to practise in Louisiana bayous. When
compelled to rise they would sometimes circle round and round and over
the pond at a considerable height, from which they could easily see to
other ponds and the river, like black motes in the sky; and, when I
thought they had gone off thither long since, they would settle down
by a slanting flight of a quarter of a mile on to a distant part which
was left free; but what beside safety they got by sailing in the
middle of Walden I do not know, unless they love its water for the
same reason that I do.
HOUSE-WARMING:
=============
IN OCTOBER I went a-graping to the river meadows, and loaded
myself with clusters more precious for their beauty and fragrance than
for food. There, too, I admired, though I did not gather, the
cranberries, small waxen gems, pendants of the meadow grass, pearly
and red, which the farmer plucks with an ugly rake, leaving the smooth
meadow in a snarl, heedlessly measuring them by the bushel and the
dollar only, and sells the spoils of the meads to Boston and New York;
destined to be jammed, to satisfy the tastes of lovers of Nature
there. So butchers rake the tongues of bison out of the prairie grass,
regardless of the torn and drooping plant. The barberry's brilliant
fruit was likewise food for my eyes merely; but I collected a small
store of wild apples for coddling, which the proprietor and travellers
had overlooked. When chestnuts were ripe I laid up half a bushel for
winter. It was very exciting at that season to roam the then boundless
chestnut woods of Lincoln- they now sleep their long sleep under the
railroad- with a bag on my shoulder, and a stick to open burs with in
my hand, for I did not always wait for the frost, amid the rustling of
leaves and the loud reproofs of the red squirrels and the jays, whose
half-consumed nuts I sometimes stole, for the burs which they had
selected were sure to contain sound ones. Occasionally I climbed and
shook the trees. They grew also behind my house, and one large tree,
which almost overshadowed it, was, when in flower, a bouquet which
scented the whole neighborhood, but the squirrels and the jays got
most of its fruit; the last coming in flocks early in the morning and
picking the nuts out of the burs before they fell, I relinquished
these trees to them and visited the more distant woods composed wholly
of chestnut. These nuts, as far as they went, were a good substitute
for bread. Many other substitutes might, perhaps, be found. Digging
one day for fishworms, I discovered the groundnut (Apios tuberosa) on
its string, the potato of the aborigines, a sort of fabulous fruit,
which I had begun to doubt if I had ever dug and eaten in childhood,
as I had told, and had not dreamed it. I had often since seen its
crumpled red velvety blossom supported by the stems of other plants
without knowing it to be the same. Cultivation has well-nigh
exterminated it. It has a sweetish taste, much like that of a
frost-bitten potato, and I found it better boiled than roasted. This
tuber seemed like a faint promise of Nature to rear her own children
and feed them simply here at some future period. In these days of
fatted cattle and waving grain-fields this humble root, which was once
the totem of an Indian tribe, is quite forgotten, or known only by its
flowering vine; but let wild Nature reign here once more, and the
tender and luxurious English grains will probably disappear before a
myriad of foes, and without the care of man the crow may carry back
even the last seed of corn to the great cornfield of the Indian's God
in the southwest, whence he is said to have brought it; but the now
almost exterminated ground-nut will perhaps revive and flourish in
spite of frosts and wildness, prove itself indigenous, and resume its
ancient importance and dignity as the diet of the hunter tribe. Some
Indian Ceres or Minerva must have been the inventor and bestower of
it; and when the reign of poetry commences here, its leaves and string
of nuts may be represented on our works of art.
Already, by the first of September, I had seen two or three small
maples turned scarlet across the pond, beneath where the white stems
of three aspens diverged, at the point of a promontory, next the
water. Ah, many a tale their color told! Arid gradually from week to
week the character of each tree came out, and it admired itself
reflected in the smooth mirror of the lake. Each morning the manager
of this gallery substituted some new picture, distinguished by more
brilliant or harmonious coloring, for the old upon the walls.
The wasps came by thousands to my lodge in October, as to winter
quarters, and settled on my windows within and on the walls overhead,
sometimes deterring visitors from entering. Each morning, when they
were numbed with cold, I swept some of them out, but I did not trouble
myself much to get rid of them; I even felt complimented by their
regarding my house as a desirable shelter. They never molested me
seriously, though they bedded with me; and they gradually disappeared,
into what crevices I do not know, avoiding winter and unspeakable
cold.
Like the wasps, before I finally went into winter quarters in
November, I used to resort to the northeast side of Walden, which the
sun, reflected from the pitch pine woods and the stony shore, made the
fireside of the pond; it is so much pleasanter and wholesomer to be
warmed by the sun while you can be, than by an artificial fire. I thus
warmed myself by the still glowing embers which the summer, like a
departed hunter, had left.
When I came to build my chimney I studied masonry. My bricks,
being second-hand ones, required to be cleaned with a trowel, so that
I learned more than usual of the qualities of bricks and trowels. The
mortar on them was fifty years old, and was said to be still growing
harder; but this is one of those sayings which men love to repeat
whether they are true or not. Such sayings themselves grow harder and
adhere more firmly with age, and it would take many blows with a
trowel to clean an old wiseacre of them. Many of the villages of
Mesopotamia are built of secondhand bricks of a very good quality,
obtained from the ruins of Babylon, and the cement on them is older
and probably harder still. However that may be, I was struck by the
peculiar toughness of the steel which bore so many violent blows
without being worn out. As my bricks had been in a chimney before,
though I did not read the name of Nebuchadnezzar on them, I picked out
its many fireplace bricks as I could find, to save work and waste, and
I filled the spaces between the bricks about the fireplace with stones
from the pond shore, and also made my mortar with the white sand from
the same place. I lingered most about the fireplace, as the most vital
part of the house. Indeed, I worked so deliberately, that though I
commenced at the ground in the morning, a course of bricks raised a
few inches above the floor served for my pillow at night; yet I did
not get a stiff neck for it that I remember; my stiff neck is of older
date. I took a poet to board for a fortnight about those times, which
caused me to be put to it for room. He brought his own knife, though
I had two, and we used to scour them by thrusting them into the earth.
He shared with me the labors of cooking. I was pleased to see my work
rising so square and solid by degrees, and reflected, that, if it
proceeded slowly, it was calculated to endure a long time. The chimney
is to some extent an independent structure, standing on the ground,
and rising through the house to the heavens; even after the house is
burned it still stands sometimes, and its importance and independence
are apparent. This was toward the end of summer. It was now November.
The north wind had already begun to cool the pond, though it took
many weeks of steady blowing to accomplish it, it is so deep. When I
began to have a fire at evening, before I plastered my house, the
chimney carried smoke particularly well, because of the numerous
chinks between the boards. Yet I passed some cheerful evenings in that
cool and airy apartment, surrounded by the rough brown boards full of
knots, and rafters with the bark on high overhead. My house never
pleased my eye so much after it was plastered, though I was obliged to
confess that it was more comfortable. Should not every apartment in
which man dwells be lofty enough to create some obscurity overhead,
where flickering shadows may play at evening about the rafters? These
forms are more agreeable to the fancy and imagination than fresco
paintings or other the most expensive furniture. I now first began to
inhabit my house, I may say, when I began to use it for warmth as well
as shelter. I had got a couple of old fire-dogs to keep the wood from
the hearth, and it did me good to see the soot form on the back of the
chimney which I had built, and I poked the fire with more right and
more satisfaction than usual. My dwelling was small, and I could
hardly entertain an echo in it; but it seemed larger for being a
single apartment and remote from neighbors. All the attractions of a
house were concentrated in one room; it was kitchen, chamber, parlor,
and keeping-room; and whatever satisfaction parent or child, master or
servant, derive from living in a house, I enjoyed it all. Cato says,
the master of a family (patremfamilias) must have in his rustic villa
"cellam oleariam, vinariam, dolia multa, uti lubeat caritatem
expectare, et rei, et virtuti, et gloriae erit," that is, "an oil and
wine cellar, many casks, so that it may be pleasant to expect hard
times; it will be for his advantage, and virtue, and glory." I had in
my cellar a firkin of potatoes, about two quarts of peas with the
weevil in them, and on my shelf a little rice, a jug of molasses, and
of rye and Indian meal a peck each.
I sometimes dream of a larger and more populous house, standing in a
golden age, of enduring materials, and without gingerbread work, which
shall still consist of only one room, a vast, rude, substantial,
primitive hall, without ceiling or plastering, with bare rafters and
purlins supporting a sort of lower heaven over one's head-useful to
keep off rain and snow, where the king and queen posts stand out to
receive your homage, when you have done reverence to the prostrate
Saturn of an older dynasty on stepping over the sill; a cavernous
house, wherein you must reach up a torch upon a pole to see the roof;
where some may live in the fireplace, some in the recess of a window,
and some on settles, some at one end of the hall, some at another, and
some aloft on rafters with the spiders, if they choose; a house which
you have got into when you have opened the outside door, and the
ceremony is over; where the weary traveller may wash, and eat, and
converse, and sleep, without further journey; such a shelter as you
would be glad to reach in a tempestuous night, containing all the
essentials of a house, and nothing for house-keeping; where you can
see all the treasures of the house at one view, and everything hangs
upon its peg, that a man should use; at once kitchen, pantry, parlor,
chamber, storehouse, and garret; where you can see so necessary a
thin, as a barrel or a ladder, so convenient a thing as a cupboard,
and hear the pot boil, and pay your respects to the fire that cooks
your dinner, and the oven that bakes your bread, and the necessary
furniture and utensils are the chief ornaments; where the washing is
not put out, nor the fire, nor the mistress, and perhaps you are
sometimes requested to move from off the trapdoor, when the cook would
descend into the cellar, and so learn whether the ground is solid or
hollow beneath you without stamping. A house whose inside is as open
and manifest as a bird's nest, and you cannot go in at the front door
and out at the back without seeing some of its inhabitants; where to
be a guest is to be presented with the freedom of the house, and not
to be carefully excluded from seven eighths of it, shut up in a
particular cell, and told to make yourself at home therein solitary
confinement. Nowadays the host does not admit you to his hearth, but
has got the mason to build one for yourself somewhere in his alley,
and hospitality is the art of keeping you at the greatest distance.
There is as much secrecy about the cooking as if he had a design to
poison you. I am aware that I have been on many a man's premises, and
might have been legally ordered off, but I am not aware that I have
been in many men's houses. I might visit in my old clothes a king and
queen who lived simply in such a house as I have described, if I were
going their way; but backing out of a modern palace will be all that I
shall desire to learn, if ever I am caught in one.
It would seem as if the very language of our parlors would lose
all its nerve and degenerate into palaver wholly, our lives pass at
such remoteness from its symbols, and its metaphors and tropes are
necessarily so far fetched, through slides and dumbwaiters, as it
were; in other words, the parlor is so far from the kitchen and
workshop. The dinner even is only the parable of a dinner, commonly.
As if only the savage dwelt near enough to Nature and Truth to borrow
a trope from them. How can the scholar, who dwells away in the North
West Territory or the Isle of Man, tell what is parliamentary in the
kitchen?
However, only one or two of my guests were ever bold enough to
stay and eat a hasty-pudding with me; but when they saw that crisis
approaching they beat a hasty retreat rather, as if it would shake the
house to its foundations. Nevertheless, it stood through a great many
hasty-puddings.
I did not plaster till it was freezing weather. I brought over
some whiter and cleaner sand for this purpose from the opposite shore
of the pond in a boat, a sort of conveyance which would have tempted
me to go much farther if necessary. My house had in the meanwhile been
shingled down to the ground on every side. In lathing I was pleased to
be able to send home each nail with a single blow of the hammer, and
it was my ambition to transfer the plaster from the board to the wall
neatly and rapidly. I remembered the story of a conceited fellow, who,
in fine clothes, was wont to lounge about the village once, giving
advice to workmen. Venturing one day to substitute deeds for words, he
turned up his cuffs, seized a plasterer's board, and having loaded his
trowel without mishap, with a complacent look toward the lathing
overhead, made a bold gesture thitherward; and straightway, to his
complete discomfiture, received the whole contents in his ruffled
bosom. I admired anew the economy and convenience of plastering, which
so effectually shuts out the cold and takes a handsome finish, and I
learned the various casualties to which the plasterer is liable. I was
surprised to see how thirsty the bricks were which drank up all the
moisture in my plaster before I had smoothed it, and how many pailfuls
of water it takes to christen a new hearth. I had the previous winter
made a small quantity of lime by burning the shells of the Unio
fluviatilis, which our river affords, for the sake of the experiment;
so that I knew where my materials came from. I might have got good
limestone within a mile or two and burned it myself, if I had cared to
do so.
The pond had in the meanwhile skimmed over in the shadiest and
shallowest coves, some days or even weeks before the general freezing.
The first ice is especially interesting and perfect, being hard, dark,
and transparent, and affords the best opportunity that ever offers for
examining the bottom where it is shallow; for you can lie at your
length on ice only an inch thick, like a skater insect on the surface
of the water, and study the bottom at your leisure, only two or three
inches distant, like a picture behind a glass, and the water is
necessarily always smooth then. There are many furrows in the sand
where some creature has travelled about and doubled on its tracks;
and, for wrecks, it is strewn with the cases of caddis-worms made of
minute grains of white quartz. Perhaps these have creased it, for you
find some of their cases in the furrows, though they are deep and
broad for them to make. But the ice itself is the object of most
interest, though you must improve the earliest opportunity to study
it. If you examine it closely the morning after it freezes, you find
that the greater part of the bubbles, which at first appeared to be
within it, are against its under surface, and that more are
continually rising from the bottom; while the ice is as yet
comparatively solid and dark, that is, you see the water through it.
These bubbles are from an eightieth to an eighth of an inch in
diameter, very clear and beautiful, and you see your face reflected in
them through the ice. There may be thirty or forty of them to a square
inch. There are also already within the ice narrow oblong
perpendicular bubbles about half an inch long, sharp cones with the
apex upward; or oftener, if the ice is quite fresh, minute spherical
bubbles one directly above another, like a string of beads. But these
within the ice are not so numerous nor obvious as those beneath. I
sometimes used to cast on stones to try the strength of the ice, and
those which broke through carried in air with them, which formed very
large and conspicuous white bubbles beneath. One day when I came to
the same place forty-eight hours afterward, I found that those large
bubbles were still perfect, though an inch more of ice had formed, as
I could see distinctly by the seam in the edge of a cake. But as the
last two days had been very warm, like an Indian summer, the ice was
not now transparent, showing the dark green color of the water, and
the bottom, but opaque and whitish or gray, and though twice as thick
was hardly stronger than before, for the air bubbles had greatly
expanded under this heat and run together, and lost their regularity;
they were no longer one directly over another, but often like silvery
coins poured from a bag, one overlapping another, or in thin flakes,
as if occupying slight cleavages. The beauty of the ice was gone, and
it was too late to study the bottom. Being curious to know what
position my great bubbles occupied with regard to the new ice, I broke
out a cake containing a middling sized one, and turned it bottom
upward. The new ice had formed around and under the bubble, so that it
was included between the two ices. It was wholly in the lower ice, but
close against the upper, and was flattish, or perhaps slightly
lenticular, with a rounded edge, a quarter of an inch deep by four
inches in diameter; and I was surprised to find that directly under
the bubble the ice was melted with great regularity in the form of a
saucer reversed, to the height of five eighths of an inch in the
middle, leaving a thin partition there between the water and the
bubble, hardly an eighth of an inch thick; and in many places the
small bubbles in this partition had burst out downward, and probably
there was no ice at all under the largest bubbles, which were a foot
in diameter. I inferred that the infinite number of minute bubbles
which I had first seen against the under surface of the ice were now
frozen in likewise, and that each, in its degree, had operated like a
burning-glass on the ice beneath to melt and rot it. These are the
little air-guns which contribute to make the ice crack and whoop.
At length the winter set in good earnest, just as I had finished
plastering, and the wind began to howl around the house as if it had
not had permission to do so till then. Night after night the geese
came lumbering in the dark with a clangor and a whistling of wings,
even after the ground was covered with snow, some to alight in Walden,
and some flying low over the woods toward Fair Haven, bound for
Mexico. Several times, when returning from the village at ten or
eleven o'clock at night, I heard the tread of a flock of geese, or
else ducks, on the dry leaves in the woods by a pond-hole behind my
dwelling, where they had come up to feed, and the faint honk or quack
of their leader as they hurried off. In 1845 Walden froze entirely
over for the first time on the night of the 22d of December, Flint's
and other shallower ponds and the river having been frozen ten days or
more; in '46, the 16th; in '49, about the 31st; and in '50, about the
27th of December; in '52, the 5th of January; in '53, the 31st of
December. The snow had already covered the ground since the 25th of
November, and surrounded me suddenly with the scenery of winter. I
withdrew yet farther into my shell, and endeavored to keep a bright
fire both within my house and within my breast. My employment out of
doors now was to collect the dead wood in the forest, bringing it in
my hands or on my shoulders, or sometimes trailing a dead pine tree
under each arm to my shed. An old forest fence which had seen its best
days was a great haul for me. I sacrificed it to Vulcan, for it was
past serving the god Terminus. How much more interesting an event is
that man's supper who has just been forth in the snow to hunt, nay,
you might say, steal, the fuel to cook it with! His bread and meat are
sweet. There are enough fagots and waste wood of all kinds in the
forests of most of our towns to support many fires, but which at
present warm none, and, some think, hinder the growth of the young
wood. There was also the driftwood of the pond. In the course of the
summer I had discovered a raft of pitch pine logs with the bark on,
pinned together by the Irish when the railroad was built. This I
hauled up partly on the shore. After soaking two years and then lying
high six months it was perfectly sound, though waterlogged past
drying. I amused myself one winter day with sliding this piecemeal
across the pond, nearly half a mile, skating behind with one end of a
log fifteen feet long on my shoulder, and the other on the ice; or I
tied several logs together with a birch withe, and then, with a longer
birch or alder which had a book at the end, dragged them across.
Though completely waterlogged and almost as heavy as lead, they not
only burned long, but made a very hot fire; nay, I thought that they
burned better for the soaking, as if the pitch, being confined by the
water, burned longer, as in a lamp.
Gilpin, in his account of the forest borderers of England, says that
"the encroachments of trespassers, and the houses and fences thus
raised on the borders of the forest," were "considered as great
nuisances by the old forest law, and were severely punished under the
name of purprestures, as tending ad terrorem ferarum- ad nocumentum
forestae, etc.," to the frightening of the game and the detriment of
the forest. But I was interested in the preservation of the venison
and the vert more than the hunters or woodchoppers, and as much as
though I had been the Lord Warden himself; and if any part was burned,
though I burned it myself by accident, I grieved with a grief that
lasted longer and was more inconsolable than that of the proprietors;
nay, I grieved when it was cut down by the proprietors themselves. I
would that our farmers when they cut down a forest felt some of that
awe which the old Romans did when they came to thin, or let in the
light to, a consecrated grove (lucum conlucare), that is, would
believe that it is sacred to some god. The Roman made an expiatory
offering, and prayed, Whatever god or goddess thou art to whom this
grove is sacred, be propitious to me, my family, and children, etc.
It is remarkable what a value is still put upon wood even in this
age and in this new country, a value more permanent and universal than
that of gold. After all our discoveries and inventions no man will go
by a pile of wood. It is as precious to us as it was to our Saxon and
Norman ancestors. If they made their bows of it, we make our
gun-stocks of it. Michaux, more than thirty years ago, says that the
price of wood for fuel in New York and Philadelphia "nearly equals,
and sometimes exceeds, that of the best wood in Paris, though this
immense capital annually requires more than three hundred thousand
cords, and is surrounded to the distance of three hundred miles by
cultivated plains." In this town the price of wood rises almost
steadily, and the only question is, how much higher it is to be this
year than it was the last. Mechanics and tradesmen who come in person
to the forest on no other errand, are sure to attend the wood auction,
and even pay a high price for the privilege of gleaning after the
woodchopper. It is now many years that men have resorted to the forest
for fuel and the materials of the arts: the New Englander and the New
Hollander, the Parisian and the Celt, the farmer and Robin Hood, Goody
Blake and Harry Gill; in most parts of the world the prince and the
peasant, the scholar and the savage, equally require still a few
sticks from the forest to warm them and cook their food. Neither
could I do without them.
Every man looks at his wood-pile with a kind of affection. I love to
have mine before my window, and the more chips the better to remind me
of my pleasing work. I had an old axe which nobody claimed, with which
by spells in winter days, on the sunny side of the house, I played
about the stumps which I had got out of my bean-field. As my driver
prophesied when I was plowing, they warmed me twice- once while I was
splitting them, and again when they were on the fire, so that no fuel
could give out more heat. As for the axe, I was advised to get the
village blacksmith to "jump" it; but I jumped him, and, putting a
hickory helve from the woods into it, made it do. If it was dull, it
was at least hung true.
A few pieces of fat pine were a great treasure. It is interesting to
remember how much of this food for fire is still concealed in the
bowels of the earth. In previous years I had often gone prospecting
over some bare hillside, where a pitch pine wood had formerly stood,
and got out the fat pine roots. They are almost indestructible. Stumps
thirty or forty years old, at least, will still be sound at the core,
though the sapwood has all become vegetable mould, as appears by the
scales of the thick bark forming a ring level with the earth four or
five inches distant from the heart. With axe and shovel you explore
this mine, and follow the marrowy store, yellow as beef tallow, or as
if you had struck on a vein of gold, deep into the earth. But commonly
I kindled my fire with the dry leaves of the forest, which I had
stored up in my shed before the snow came. Green hickory finely split
makes the woodchopper's kindlings, when he has a camp in the woods.
Once in a while I got a little of this. When the villagers were
lighting their fires beyond the horizon, I too gave notice to the
various wild inhabitants of Walden vale, by a smoky streamer from my
chimney, that I was awake.
Light-winged Smoke, Icarian bird,
Melting thy pinions in thy upward flight,
Lark without song, and messenger of dawn,
Circling above the hamlets as thy nest;
Or else, departing dream, and shadowy form
Of midnight vision, gathering up thy skirts;
By night star-veiling, and by day
Darkening the light and blotting out the sun;
Go thou my incense upward from this hearth,
And ask the gods to pardon this clear flame.
Hard green wood just cut, though I used but little of that, answered
my purpose better than any other. I sometimes left a good fire when I
went to take a walk in a winter afternoon; and when I returned, three
or four hours afterward, it would be still alive and glowing. My house
was not empty though I was gone. It was as if I had left a cheerful
housekeeper behind. It was I and Fire that lived there; and commonly
my housekeeper proved trustworthy. One day, however, as I was
splitting wood, I thought that I would just look in at the window and
see if the house was not on fire; it was the only time I remember to
have been particularly anxious on this score; so I looked and saw that
a spark had caught my bed, and I went in and extinguished it when it
had burned a place as big as my hand. But my house occupied so sunny
and sheltered a position, and its roof was so low, that I could afford
to let the fire go out in the middle of almost any winter day.
The moles nested in my cellar, nibbling every third potato, and
making a snug bed even there of some hair left after plastering and of
brown paper; for even the wildest animals love comfort and warmth as
well as man, and they survive the winter only because they are so
careful to secure them. Some of my friends spoke as if I was coming to
the woods on purpose to freeze myself. The animal merely makes a bed,
which he warms with his body, in a sheltered place; but man, having
discovered fire, boxes up some air in a spacious apartment, and warms
that, instead of robbing himself, makes that his bed, in which he can
move about divested of more cumbrous clothing, maintain a kind of
summer in the midst of winter, and by means of windows even admit the
light, and with a lamp lengthen out the day. Thus he goes a step or
two beyond instinct, and saves a little time for the fine arts.
Though, when I had been exposed to the rudest blasts a long time, my
whole body began to grow torpid, when I reached the genial atmosphere
of my house I soon recovered my faculties and prolonged my life. But
the most luxuriously housed has little to boast of in this respect,
nor need we trouble ourselves to speculate how the human race may be
at last destroyed. It would be easy to cut their threads any time with
a little sharper blast from the north. We go on dating from Cold
Fridays and Great Snows; but a little colder Friday, or greater snow
would put a period to man's existence on the globe.
The next winter I used a small cooking-stove for economy, since I
did not own the forest; but it did not keep fire so well as the open
fireplace. Cooking was then, for the most part, no longer a poetic,
but merely a chemic process. It will soon be forgotten, in these days
of stoves, that we used to roast potatoes in the ashes, after the
Indian fashion. The stove not only took up room and scented the house,
but it concealed the fire, and I felt as if I had lost a companion.
You can always see a face in the fire. The laborer, looking into it at
evening, pulifies his thoughts of the dross and earthiness which they
have accumulated during the day. But I could no longer sit and look
into the fire, and the pertinent words of a poet recurred to me with
new force.
"Never, bright flame, may be denied to me
Thy dear, life imaging, close sympathy.
What but my hopes shot upward e'er so bright?
What but my fortunes sunk so low in night?
Why art thou banished from our hearth and hall,
Thou who art welcomed and beloved by all?
Was thy existence then too fanciful
For our life's common light, who are so dull?
Did thy bright gleam mysterious converse hold
With our congenial souls? secrets too bold?
Well, we are safe and strong, for now we sit
Beside a hearth where no dim shadows flit,
Where nothing cheers nor saddens, but a fire
Warms feet and hands- nor does to more aspire;
By whose compact utilitarian heap
The present may sit down and go to sleep,
Nor fear the ghosts who from the dim past walked,
And with us by the unequal light of the old wood fire talked."
FORMER INHABITANTS; AND WINTER VISITORS.
I WEATHERED some merry snow-storms, and spent some cheerful winter
evenings by my fireside, while the snow whirled wildly without, and
even the hooting of the owl was hushed. For many weeks I met no one in
my walks but those who came occasionally to cut wood and sled it to
the village. The elements, however, abetted me in making a path
through the deepest snow in the woods, for when I had once gone
through the wind blew the oak leaves into my tracks, where they
lodged, and by absorbing the rays of the sun melted the snow, and so
not only made a my bed for my feet, but in the night their dark line
was my guide. For human society I was obliged to conjure up the former
occupants of these woods. Within the memory of many of my townsmen the
road near which my house stands resounded with the laugh and gossip of
inhabitants, and the woods which border it were notched and dotted
here and there with their little gardens and dwellings, though it was
then much more shut in by the forest than now. In some places, within
my own remembrance, the pines would scrape both sides of a chaise at
once, and women and children who were compelled to go this way to
Lincoln alone and on foot did it with fear, and often ran a good part
of the distance. Though mainly but a humble route to neighboring
villages, or for the woodman's team, it once amused the traveller more
than now by its variety, and lingered longer in his memory. Where now
firm open fields stretch from the village to the woods, it then ran
through a maple swamp on a foundation of logs, the remnants of which,
doubtless, still underlie the present dusty highway, from the
Stratton, now the Alms-House, Farm, to Brister's Hill.
East of my bean-field, across the road, lived Cato Ingraham, slave
of Duncan Ingraham, Esquire, gentleman, of Concord village, who built
his slave a house, and gave him permission to live in Walden Woods;-
Cato, not Uticensis, but Concordiensis. Some say that he was a Guinea
Negro. There are a few who remember his little patch among the
walnuts, which he let row up till he should be old and need them; but
a younger and whiter speculator got them at last. He too, however,
occupies an equally narrow house at present. Cato's half-obliterated
cellar-hole still remains, though known to few, being concealed from
the traveller by a fringe of pines. It is now filled with the smooth
sumach (Rhus glabra), and one of the earliest species of goldenrod
(Solidago stricta) grows there luxuriantly.
Here, by the very corner of my field, still nearer to town,
Zilpha, a colored woman, had her little house, where she spun linen
for the townsfolk, making the Walden Woods ring with her shrill
singing, for she had a loud and notable voice. At length, in the war
of 1812, her dwelling was set on fire by English soldiers, prisoners
on parole, when she was away, and her cat and dog and hens were all
burned up together. She led a hard life, and somewhat inhumane. One
old frequenter of these woods remembers, that as he passed her house
one noon he heard her muttering to herself over her gurgling pot- "Ye
are all bones, bones!" I have seen bricks amid the oak copse there.
Down the road, on the right hand, on Brister's Hill, lived Brister
Freeman, "a handy Negro," slave of Squire Cummings once-there where
grow still the apple trees which Brister planted and tended; large old
trees now, but their fruit still wild and ciderish to my taste. Not
long since I read his epitaph in the old Lincoln burying-ground, a
little on one side, near the unmarked graves of some British
grenadiers who fell in the retreat from Concord- where he is styled
"Sippio Brister"- Scipio Africanus he had some title to be called- "a
man of color," as if he were discolored. It also told me, with staring
emphasis, when he died; which was but an indirect way of informing me
that he ever lived. With him dwelt Fenda, his hospitable wife, who
told fortunes, yet pleasantly-large, round, and black, blacker than
any of the children of night, such a dusky orb as never rose on
Concord before or since.
Farther down the hill, on the left, on the old road in the woods,
are marks of some homestead of the Stratton family; whose orchard once
covered all the slope of Brister's Hill, but was long since killed out
by pitch pines, excepting a few stumps, whose old roots furnish still
the wild stocks of many a thrifty village tree.
Nearer yet to town, you come to Breed's location, on the other
side of the way, just on the edge of the wood; ground famous for the
pranks of a demon not distinctly named in old mythology, who has acted
a prominent and astounding part in our New England life, and deserves,
as much as any mythological character, to have his biography written
one day; who first comes in the guise of a friend or hired man, and
then robs and murders the whole family- New-England Rum. But history
must not yet tell the tragedies enacted here; let time intervene in
some measure to assuage and lend an azure tint to them. Here the most
indistinct and dubious tradition says that once a tavern stood; the
well the same, which tempered the traveller's beverage and refreshed
his steed. Here then men saluted one another, and heard and told the
news, and went their ways again.
Breed's hut was standing only a dozen years ago, though it had
long been unoccupied. It was about the size of mine. It was set on
fire by mischievous boys, one Election night, if I do not mistake. I
lived on the edge of the village then, and had just lost myself over
Davenant's "Gondibert," that winter that I labored with a lethargy-
which, by the way, I never knew whether to regard as a family
complaint, having an uncle who goes to sleep shaving himself, and is
obliged to sprout potatoes in a cellar Sundays, in order to keep awake
and keep the Sabbath, or as the consequence of my attempt to read
Chalmers' collection of English poetry without skipping. It fairly
overcame my Nervii. I had just sunk my head on this when the bells
rung fire, and in hot haste the engines rolled that way, led by a
straggling troop of men and boys, and I among the foremost, for I had
leaped the brook. We thought it was far south over the woods- we who
had run to fires before- barn, shop, or dwelling-house, or all
together. "It's Baker's barn," cried one. "It is the Codman place,"
affirmed another. And then fresh sparks went up above the wood, as if
the roof fell in, and we all shouted "Concord to the rescue!" Wagons
shot past with furious speed and crushing loads, bearing, perchance,
among the rest, the agent of the Insurance Company, who was bound to
go however far; and ever and anon the engine bell tinkled behind, more
slow and sure; and rearmost of all, as it was afterward whispered,
came they who set the fire and gave the alarm. Thus we kept on like
true idealists, rejecting the evidence of our senses, until at a turn
in the road we heard the crackling and actually felt the heat of the
fire from over the wall, and realized, alas! that we were there. The
very nearness of the fire but cooled our ardor. At first we thought to
throw a frog-pond on to it; but concluded to let it burn, it was so
far gone and so worthless. So we stood round our engine, jostled one
another, expressed our sentiments through speaking-trumpets, or in
lower tone referred to the great conflagrations which the world has
witnessed, including Bascom's shop, and, between ourselves, we thought
that, were we there in season with our "tub," and a full frog-pond by,
we could turn that threatened last and universal one into another
flood. We finally retreated without doing any mischief- returned to
sleep and "Gondibert." But as for "Gondibert," I would except that
passage in the preface about wit being the soul's powder- "but most of
mankind are strangers to wit, as Indians are to powder."
It chanced that I walked that way across the fields the following
night, about the same hour, and hearing a low moaning at this spot, I
drew near in the dark, and discovered the only survivor of the family
that I know, the heir of both its virtues and its vices, who alone was
interested in this burning, lying on his stomach and looking over the
cellar wall at the still smouldering cinders beneath, muttering to
himself, as is his wont. He had been working far off in the river
meadows all day, and had improved the first moments that he could call
his own to visit the home of his fathers and his youth. He gazed into
the cellar from all sides and points of view by turns, always lying
down to it, as if there was some treasure, which he remembered,
concealed between the stones, where there was absolutely nothing but a
heap of bricks and ashes. The house being gone, he looked at what
there was left. He was soothed by the sympathy which my mere presence,
implied, and showed me, as well as the darkness permitted, where the
well was covered up; which, thank Heaven, could never be burned; and
he groped long about the wall to find the well-sweep which his father
had cut and mounted, feeling for the iron hook or staple by which a
burden had been fastened to the heavy end- all that he could now cling
to- to convince me that it was no common "rider." I felt it, and still
remark it almost daily in my walks, for by it hangs the history of a
family.
Once more, on the left, where are seen the well and lilac bushes
by the wall, in the now open field, lived Nutting and Le Grosse. But
to return toward Lincoln.
Farther in the woods than any of these, where the road approaches
nearest to the pond, Wyman the potter squatted, and furnished his
townsmen with earthenware, and left descendants to succeed him.
Neither were they rich in worldly goods, holding the land by
sufferance while they lived; and there often the sheriff came in vain
to collect the taxes, and "attached a chip," for form's sake, as I
have read in his accounts, there being nothing else that he could lay
his hands on. One day in midsummer, when I was hoeing, a man who was
carrying a load of pottery to market stopped his horse against my
field and inquired concerning Wyman the younger. He had long ago
bought a potter's wheel of him, and wished to know what had become of
him. I had read of the potter's clay and wheel in Scripture, but it
had never occurred to me that the pots we use were not such as had
come down unbroken from those days, or grown on trees like gourds
somewhere, and I was pleased to hear that so fictile an art was ever
practiced in my neighborhood.
The last inhabitant of these woods before me was an Irishman, Hugh
Quoil (if I have spelt his name with coil enough), who occupied
Wyman's tenement- Col. Quoil, he was called. Rumor said that he had
been a soldier at Waterloo. If he had lived I should have made him
fight his battles over again. His trade here was that of a ditcher.
Napoleon went to St. Helena; Quoil came to Walden Woods. All I know of
him is tragic. He was a man of manners, like one who had seen the
world, and was capable of more civil speech than you could well attend
to. He wore a greatcoat in midsummer, being affected with the
trembling delirium, and his face was the color of carmine. He died in
the road at the foot of Brister's Hill shortly after I came to the
woods, so that I have not remembered him as a neighbor. Before his
house was pulled down, when his comrades avoided it as "an unlucky
castle," I visited it. There lay his old clothes curled up by use, as
if they were himself, upon his raised plank bed. His pipe lay broken
on the hearth, instead of a bowl broken at the fountain. The last
could never have been the symbol of his death, for he confessed to me
that, though he had heard of Brister's Spring, he had never seen it;
and soiled cards, kings of diamonds, spades, and hearts, were
scattered over the floor. One black chicken which the administrator
could not catch, black as night and as silent, not even croaking,
awaiting Reynard, still went to roost in the next apartment. In the
rear there was the dim outline of a garden, which had been planted but
had never received its first hoeing, owing to those terrible shaking
fits, though it was now harvest time. It was overrun with Roman
wormwood and beggar-ticks, which last stuck to my clothes for all
fruit. The skin of a woodchuck was freshly stretched upon the back of
the house, a trophy of his last Waterloo; but no warm cap or mittens
would he want more.
Now only a dent in the earth marks the site of these dwellings, with
buried cellar stones, and strawberries, raspberries, thimbleberries,
hazel-bushes, and sumachs growing in the sunny sward there; some pitch
pine or gnarled oak occupies what was the chimney nook, and a
sweet-scented black birch, perhaps, waves where the door-stone was.
Sometimes the well dent is visible, where once a spring oozed; now dry
and tearless grass; or it was covered deep- not to be discovered till
some late day- with a flat stone under the sod, when the last of the
race departed. What a sorrowful act must that be- the covering up of
wells! coincident with the opening of wells of tears. These cellar
dents, like deserted fox burrows, old holes, are all that is left
where once were the stir and bustle of human life, and "fate, free
will, foreknowledge absolute," in some form and dialect or other were
by turns discussed. But all I can learn of their conclusions amounts
to just this, that "Cato and Brister pulled wool"; which is about as
edifying as the history of more famous schools of philosophy.
Still grows the vivacious lilac a generation after the door and
lintel and the sill are gone, unfolding its sweet-scented flowers each
spring, to be plucked by the musing traveller; planted and tended once
by children's hands, hi front-yard plots- now standing by wallsides in
retired pastures, and giving place to new- rising forests;- the last
of that stirp, sole survivor of that family. Little did the dusky
children think that the puny slip with its two eyes only, which they
stuck in the ground in the shadow of the house and daily watered,
would root itself so, and outlive them, and house itself in the rear
that shaded it, and grown man's garden and orchard, and tell their
story faintly to the lone wanderer a half-century after they had grown
up and died- blossoming as fair, and smelling as sweet, as in that
first spring. I mark its still tender, civil, cheerful lilac colors.
But this small village, germ of something more, why did it fail
while Concord keeps its ground? Were there no natural advantages- no
water privileges, forsooth? Ay, the deep Walden Pond and cool
Brister's Spring- privilege to drink long and healthy draughts at
these, all unimproved by these men but to dilute their glass. They
were universally a thirsty race. Might not the basket, stable-broom,
mat-making, corn-parching, linen-spinning, and pottery business have
thrived here, making the wilderness to blossom like the rose, and a
numerous posterity have inherited the land of their fathers? The
sterile soil would at least have been proof against a lowland
degeneracy. Alas! how little does the memory of these human
inhabitants enhance the beauty of the landscape! Again, perhaps,
Nature will try, with me for a first settler, and my house raised last
spring to be the oldest in the hamlet.
I am not aware that any man has ever built on the spot which I
occupy. Deliver me from a city built on the site of a more ancient
city, whose materials are ruins, whose gardens cemeteries. The soil is
blanched and accursed there, and before that becomes necessary the
earth itself will be destroyed. With such reminiscences I repeopled
the woods and lulled myself asleep.
At this season I seldom had a visitor. When the snow lay deepest
no wanderer ventured near my house for a week or fortnight at a time,
but there I lived as snug as a meadow mouse, or as cattle and poultry
which are said to have survived for a long time buried in drifts, even
without food; or like that early settler's family in the town of
Sutton, in this State, whose cottage was completely covered by the
great snow of 1717 when he was absent, and an Indian found it only by
the hole which the chimney's breath made in the drift, and so relieved
the family. But no friendly Indian concerned himself about me; nor
needed he, for the master of the house was at home. The Great Snow!
How cheerful it is to hear of! When the farmers could not get to the
woods and swamps with their teams, and were obliged to cut down the
shade trees before their houses, and, when the crust was harder, cut
off the trees in the swamps, ten feet from the ground, as it appeared
the next spring.
In the deepest snows, the path which I used from the highway to my
house, about half a mile long, might have been represented by a
meandering dotted line, with wide intervals between the dots. For a
week of even weather I took exactly the same number of steps, and of
the same length, coming and going, stepping deliberately and with the
precision of a pair of dividers in my own deep tracks- to such routine
the winter reduces us- yet often they were filled with heaven's own
blue. But no weather interfered fatally with my walks, or rather my
going abroad, for I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the
deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech tree, or a yellow
birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines; when the ice and snow
causing their limbs to droop, and so sharpening their tops, had
changed the pines into fir trees; wading to the tops of the highest
bills when the show was nearly two feet deep on a level, and shaking
down another snow-storm on my head at every step; or sometimes
creeping and floundering thither on my hands and knees, when the
hunters had gone into winter quarters. One afternoon I amused myself
by watching a barred owl (Strix nebulosa) sitting on one of the lower
dead limbs of a white pine, close to the trunk, in broad daylight, I
standing within a rod of him. He could hear me when I moved and
cronched the snow with my feet, but could not plainly see me. When I
made most noise he would stretch out his neck, and erect his neck
feathers, and open his eyes wide; but their lids soon fell again, and
he began to nod. I too felt a slumberous influence after watching him
half an hour, as he sat thus with his eyes half open, like a cat,
winged brother of the cat. There was only a narrow slit left between
their lids, by which be preserved a pennisular relation to me; thus,
with half-shut eyes, looking out from the land of dreams, and
endeavoring to realize me, vague object or mote that interrupted his
visions. At length, on some louder noise or my nearer approach, he
would grow uneasy and sluggishly turn about on his perch, as if
impatient at having his dreams disturbed; and when he launched himself
off and flapped through the pines, spreading his wings to unexpected
breadth, I could not hear the slightest sound from them. Thus, guided
amid the pine boughs rather by a delicate sense of their neighborhood
than by sight, feeling his twilight way, as it were, with his
sensitive pinions, he found a new perch, where he might in peace await
the dawning of his day.
As I walked over the long causeway made for the railroad through the
meadows, I encountered many a blustering and nipping wind, for nowhere
has it freer play; and when the frost had smitten me on one cheek,
heathen as I was, I turned to it the other also. Nor was it much
better by the carriage road from Brister's Hill. For I came to town
still, like a friendly Indian, when the contents of the broad open
fields were all piled up between the walls of the Walden road, and
half an hour sufficed to obliterate the tracks of the last traveller.
And when I returned new drifts would have formed, through which I
floundered, where the busy northwest wind had been depositing the
powdery snow round a sharp angle in the road, and not a rabbit's
track, nor even the fine print, the small type, of a meadow mouse was
to be seen. Yet I rarely failed to find, even in midwinter, some warm
and springly swamp where the grass and the skunk-cabbage still put
forth with perennial verdure, and some hardier bird occasionally
awaited the return of spring.
Sometimes, notwithstanding the snow, when I returned from my walk at
evening I crossed the deep tracks of a woodchopper leading from my
door, and found his pile of whittlings on the hearth, and my house
filled with the odor of his pipe. Or on a Sunday afternoon, if I
chanced to be at home, I heard the cronching of the snow made by the
step of a long-headed farmer, who from far through the woods sought my
house, to have a social "crack"; one of the few of his vocation who
are "men on their farms"; who donned a frock instead of a professor's
gown, and is as ready to extract the moral out of church or state as
to haul a load of manure from his barn-yard. We talked of rude and
simple times, when men sat about large fires in cold, bracing weather,
with clear heads; and when other dessert failed, we tried our teeth on
many a nut which wise squirrels have long since abandoned, for those
which have the thickest shells are commonly empty.
The one who came from farthest to my lodge, through deepest snows
and most dismal tempests, was a poet. A farmer, a hunter, a soldier, a
reporter, even a philosopher, may be daunted; but nothing can deter a
poet, for he is actuated by pure love. Who can predict his comings and
goings? His business calls him out at all hours, even when doctors
sleep. We made that small house ring with boisterous mirth and resound
with the murmur of much sober talk, making amends then to Walden vale
for the long silences. Broadway was still and deserted in comparison.
At suitable intervals there were regular salutes of laughter, which
might have been referred indifferently to the last-uttered or the
forth-coming jest. We made many a "bran new" theory of life over a
thin dish of gruel, which combined the advantages of conviviality with
the clear-headedness which philosophy requires.
I should not forget that during my last winter at the pond there was
another welcome visitor, who at one time came through the village,
through snow and rain and darkness, till he saw my lamp through the
trees, and shared with me some long winter evenings. One of the last
of the philosophers- Connecticut gave him to the world- he peddled
first her wares, afterwards, as he declares, his brains. These he
peddles still, prompting God and disgracing man, bearing for fruit his
brain only, like the nut its kernel. I think that he must be the man
of the most faith of any alive. His words and attitude always suppose
a better state of things than other men are acquainted with, and he
will be the last man to be disappointed as the ages revolve. He has no
venture in the present. But though comparatively disregarded now, when
his day comes, laws unsuspected by most will take effect, and masters
of families and rulers will come to him for advice.
"How blind that cannot see serenity!"
A true friend of man; almost the only friend of human progress. An Old
Mortality, say rather an Immortality, with unwearied patience and
faith making plain the image engraven in men's bodies, the God of whom
they are but defaced and leaning monuments. With his hospitable
intellect he embraces children, beggars, insane, and scholars, and
entertains the thought of all, adding to it commonly some breadth and
elegance. I think that he should keep a caravansary on the world's
highway, where philosophers of all nations might put up, and on his
sign should be printed, "Entertainment for man, but not for his beast.
Enter ye that have leisure and a quiet mind, who earnestly seek the
right road." He is perhaps the sanest man and has the fewest crotchets
of any I chance to know; the same yesterday and tomorrow. Of yore we
had sauntered and talked, and effectually put the world behind us; for
he was pledged to no institution in it, freeborn, ingenuus. Whichever
way we turned, it seemed that the heavens and the earth had met
together, since he enhanced the beauty of the landscape. A blue-robed
man, whose fittest roof is the overarching sky which reflects his
serenity. I do not see how he can ever die; Nature cannot spare him.
Having each some shingles of thought well dried, we sat and whittled
them, trying our knives, and admiring the clear yellowish grain of the
pumpkin pine. We waded so gently and reverently, or we pulled together
so smoothly, that the fishes of thought were not seared from the
stream, nor feared any angler on the bank, but came and went grandly,
like the clouds which float through the western sky, and the
mother-o'-pearl flocks which sometimes form and dissolve there. There
we worked, revising mythology, rounding a fable here and there, and
building castles in the air for which earth offered no worthy
foundation. Great Looker! Great Expecter! to converse with whom was a
New England Night's Entertainment. Ah! such discourse we had, hermit
and philosopher, and the old settler I have spoken of- we three- it
expanded and racked my little house; I should not dare to say how many
pounds' weight there was above the atmospheric pressure on every
circular inch; it opened its seams so that they had to be calked with
much dulness thereafter to stop the consequent leak;- but I had enough
of that kind of oakum already picked.
There was one other with whom I had "solid seasons," long to be
remembered, at his house in the village, and who looked in upon me
from time to time; but I had no more for society there.
There too, as everywhere, I sometimes expected the Visitor who never
comes. The Vishnu Purana says, "The house-holder is to remain at
eventide in his courtyard as long as it takes to milk a cow, or longer
if he pleases, to await the arrival of a guest." I often performed
this duty of hospitality, waited long enough to milk a whole herd of
cows, but did not see the man approaching from the town.
WINTER ANIMALS:
==============
WHEN THE ponds were firmly frozen, they afforded not only new and
shorter routes to many points, but new views from their surfaces of
the familiar landscape around them. When I crossed Flint's Pond, after
it was covered with snow, though I had often paddled about and skated
over it, it was so unexpectedly wide and so strange that I could think
of nothing but Baffin's Bay. The Lincoln hills rose up around me at
the extremity of a snowy plain, in which I did not remember to have
stood before; and the fishermen, at an indeterminable distance over
the ice, moving slowly about with their wolfish dogs, passed for
sealers, or Esquimaux, or in misty weather loomed like fabulous
creatures, and I did not know whether they were giants or pygmies. I
took this course when I went to lecture in Lincoln in the evening,
travelling in no road and passing no house between my own hut and the
lecture room. In Goose Pond, which lay in my way, a colony of muskrats
dwelt, and raised their cabins high above the ice, though none could
be seen abroad when I crossed it. Walden, being like the rest usually
bare of snow, or with only shallow and interrupted drifts on it, was
my yard where I could walk freely when the snow was nearly two feet
deep on a level elsewhere and the villagers were confined to their
streets. There, far from the village street, and except at very long
intervals, from the jingle of sleigh-bells, I slid and skated, as in a
vast moose-yard well trodden, overhung by oak woods and solemn pines
bent down with snow or bristling with icicles.
For sounds in winter nights, and often in winter days, I heard the
forlorn but melodious note of a hooting owl indefinitely far; such a
sound as the frozen earth would yield if struck with a suitable
plectrum, the very lingua vernacula of Walden Wood, and quite familiar
to me at last, though I never saw the bird while it was making it. I
seldom opened my door in a winter evening without hearing it; Hoo hoo
hoo, hoorer, hoo, sounded sonorously, and the first three syllables
accented somewhat like how der do; or sometimes hoo, hoo only. One
night in the beginning of winter, before the pond froze over, about
nine o'clock, I was startled by the loud honking of a goose, and,
stepping to the door, heard the sound of their wings like a tempest in
the woods as they flew low over my house. They passed over the pond
toward Fair Haven, seemingly deterred from settling by my light, their
commodore honking all the while with a regular beat. Suddenly an
unmistakable cat owl from very near me, with the most harsh and
tremendous voice I ever heard from any inhabitant of the woods,
responded at regular intervals to the goose, as if determined to
expose and disgrace this intruder from Hudson's Bay by exhibiting a
greater compass and volume of voice in a native, and boo-hoo him out
of Concord horizon. What do you mean by alarming the citadel at this
time of night consecrated to me? Do you think I am ever caught napping
at such an hour, and that I have not got lungs and a larynx as well as
yourself? Boo-hoo, boo-hoo, boo-hoo! It was one of the most thrilling
discords I ever heard. And yet, if you had a discriminating ear, there
were in it the elements of a concord such as these plains never saw
nor heard.
I also heard the whooping of the ice in the pond, my great
bed-fellow in that part of Concord, as if it were restless in its bed
and would fain turn over, were troubled with flatulency and had
dreams; or I was waked by the cracking of the ground by the frost, as
if some one had driven a team against my door, and in the morning
would find a crack in the earth a quarter of a mile long and a third
of an inch wide.
Sometimes I heard the foxes as they ranged over the snow-crust, in
moonlight nights, in search of a partridge or other game, barking
raggedly and demoniacally like forest dogs, as if laboring with some
anxiety, or seeking expression, struggling for light and to be dogs
outright and run freely in the streets; for if we take the ages into
our account, may there not be a civilization going on among brutes as
well as men? They seemed to me to be rudimental, burrowing men, still
standing on their defence, awaiting their transformation. Sometimes
one came near to my window, attracted by my light, barked a vulpine
curse at me, and then retreated.
Usually the red squirrel (Sciurus Hudsonius) waked me in the dawn,
coursing over the roof and up and down the sides of the house, as if
sent out of the woods for this purpose. In the course of the winter I
threw out half a bushel of ears of sweet corn, which had not got ripe,
on to the snow-crust by my door, and was amused by watching the
motions of the various animals which were baited by it. In the
twilight and the night the rabbits came regularly and made a hearty
meal. All day long the red squirrels came and went, and afforded me
much entertainment by their manoeuvres. One would approach at first
warily through the shrub oaks, running over the snow-crust by fits and
starts like a leaf blown by the wind, now a few paces this way, with
wonderful speed and waste of energy, making inconceivable haste with
his "trotters," as if it were for a wager, and now as many paces that
way, but never getting on more than half a rod at a time; and then
suddenly pausing with a ludicrous expression and a gratuitous
somerset, as if all the eyes in the universe were eyed on him- for all
the motions of a squirrel, even in the most solitary recesses of the
forest, imply spectators as much as those of a dancing girl- wasting
more time in delay and circumspection than would have sufficed to walk
the whole distance- I never saw one walk- and then suddenly, before
you could say Jack Robinson, he would be in the top of a young pitch
pine, winding up his clock and chiding all imaginary spectators,
soliloquizing and talking to all the universe at the same time- for no
reason that I could ever detect, or he himself was aware of, I
suspect. At length he would reach the corn, and selecting a suitable
ear, frisk about in the same uncertain trigonometrical way to the
topmost stick of my wood-pile, before my window, where he looked me in
the face, and there sit for hours, supplying himself with a new ear
from time to time, nibbling at first voraciously and throwing the
half-naked cobs about; till at length he grew more dainty still and
played with his food, tasting only the inside of the kernel, and the
ear, which was held balanced over the stick by one paw, slipped from
his careless grasp and fell to the ground, when he would look over at
it with a ludicrous expression of uncertainty, as if suspecting that
it had life, with a mind not made up whether to get it again, or a new
one, or be off; now thinking of corn, then listening to hear what was
in the wind. So the little impudent fellow would waste many an ear in
a forenoon; till at last, seizing some longer and plumper one,
considerably bigger than himself, and skilfully balancing it, he would
set out with it to the woods, like a tiger with a buffalo, by the same
zig-zag course and frequent pauses, scratching along with it as if it
were too heavy for him and falling all the while, making its fall a
diagonal between a perpendicular and horizontal, being determined to
put it through at any rate;- a singularly frivolous and whimsical
fellow;- and so he would get off with it to where he lived, perhaps
carry it to the top of a pine tree forty or fifty rods distant, and I
would afterwards find the cobs strewn about the woods in various
directions.
At length the jays arrive, whose discordant screams were heard
long before, as they were warily making their approach an eighth of a
mile off, and in a stealthy and sneaking manner they flit from tree to
tree, nearer and nearer, and pick up the kernels which the squirrels
have dropped. Then, sitting on a pitch pine bough, they attempt to
swallow in their haste a kernel which is too big for their throats and
chokes them; and after great labor they disgorge it, and spend an hour
in the endeavor to crack it by repeated blows with their bills. They
were manifestly thieves, and I had not much respect for them; but the
squirrels, though at first shy, went to work as if they were taking
what was their own.
Meanwhile also came the chickadees in flocks, which, picking up
the crumbs the squirrels had dropped, flew to the nearest twig and,
placing them under their claws, hammered away at them with their
little bills, as if it were an insect in the bark, till they were
sufficiently reduced for their slender throats. A little flock of
these titmice came daily to pick a dinner out of my woodpile, or the
crumbs at my door, with faint flitting lisping notes, like the
tinkling of icicles in the grass, or else with sprightly day day day,
or more rarely, in springlike days, a wiry summery phebe from the
woodside. They were so familiar that at length one alighted on an
armful of wood which I was carrying in, and pecked at the sticks
without fear. I once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a
moment while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I felt that I was
more distinguished by that circumstance than I should have been by any
epaulet I could have worn. The squirrels also grew at last to be quite
familiar, and occasionally stepped upon my shoe, when that was the
nearest way.
When the ground was not yet quite covered, and again near the end of
winter, when the snow was melted on my south hillside and about my
wood-pile, the partridges came out of the woods morning and evening to
feed there. Whichever side you walk in the woods the partridge bursts
away on whirring wings, jarring the snow from the dry leaves and twigs
on high, which comes sifting down in the sunbeams like golden dust,
for this brave bird is not to be scared by winter. It is frequently
covered up by drifts, and, it is said, "sometimes plunges from on wing
into the soft snow, where it remains concealed for a day or two." I
used to start them in the open land also, where they had come out of
the woods at sunset to "bud" the wild apple trees. They will come
regularly every evening to particular trees, where the cunning
sportsman lies in wait for them, and the distant orchards next the
woods suffer thus not a little. I am glad that the partridge gets fed,
at any rate. It is Nature's own bird which lives on buds and
diet-drink.
In dark winter mornings, or in short winter afternoons, I
sometimes heard a pack of hounds threading all the woods with hounding
cry and yelp, unable to resist the instinct of the chase, and the note
of the hunting-horn at intervals, proving that man was in the rear.
The woods ring again, and yet no fox bursts forth on to the open level
of the pond, nor following pack pursuing their Actaeon. And perhaps at
evening I see the hunters returning with a single brush trailing from
their sleigh for a trophy, seeking their inn. They tell me that if the
fox would remain in the bosom of the frozen earth he would be safe, or
if be would run in a straight line away no foxhound could overtake
him; but, having left his pursuers far behind, he stops to rest and
listen till they come up, and when he runs he circles round to his old
haunts, where the hunters await him. Sometimes, however, he will run
upon a wall many rods, and then leap off far to one side, and he
appears to know that water will not retain his scent. A hunter told me
that he once saw a fox pursued by hounds burst out on to Walden when
the ice was covered with shallow puddles, run part way across, and
then return to the same shore. Ere long the hounds arrived, but here
they lost the scent. Sometimes a pack hunting by themselves would pass
my door, and circle round my house, and yelp and hound without
regarding me, as if afflicted by a species of madness, so that nothing
could divert them from the pursuit. Thus they circle until they fall
upon the recent trail of a fox, for a wise hound will forsake
everything else for this. One day a man came to my hut from Lexington
to inquire after his hound that made a large track, and had been
hunting for a week by himself. But I fear that he was not the wiser
for all I told him, for every time I attempted to answer his questions
he interrupted me by asking, "What do you do here?" He had lost a dog,
but found a man.
One old hunter who has a dry tongue, who used to come to bathe in
Walden once every year when the water was warmest, and at such times
looked in upon me, told me that many years ago he took his gun one
afternoon and went out for a cruise in Walden Wood; and as he walked
the Wayland road he heard the cry of hounds approaching, and ere long
a fox leaped the wall into the road, and as quick as thought leaped
the other wall out of the road, and his swift bullet had not touched
him. Some way behind came an old hound and her three pups in full
pursuit, hunting on their own account, and disappeared again in the
woods. Late in the afternoon, as he was resting in the thick woods
south of Walden, he heard the voice of the hounds far over toward Fair
Haven still pursuing the fox; and on they came, their hounding cry
which made all the woods ring sounding nearer and nearer, now from
Well Meadow, now from the Baker Farm. For a long time he stood still
and listened to their music, so sweet to a hunter's ear, when suddenly
the fox appeared, threading the solemn aisles with an easy coursing
pace, whose sound was concealed by a sympathetic rustle of the leaves,
swift and still, keeping the round, leaving his pursuers far behind;
and, leaping upon a rock amid the woods, he sat erect and listening,
with his back to the hunter. For a moment compassion restrained the
latter's arm; but that was a short-lived mood, and as quick as thought
can follow thought his piece was levelled, and whang!- the fox,
rolling over the rock, lay dead on the ground. The hunter still kept
his place and listened to the hounds. Still on they came, and now the
near woods resounded through all their aisles with their demoniac cry.
At length the old hound burst into view with muzzle to the ground, and
snapping the air as if possessed, and ran directly to the rock; but,
spying the dead fox, she suddenly ceased her hounding as if struck
dumb with amazement, and walked round and round him in silence; and
one by one her pups arrived, and, like their mother, were sobered into
silence by the mystery. Then the hunter came forward and stood in
their midst, and the mystery was solved. They waited in silence while
he skinned the fox, then followed the brush a while, and at length
turned off into the woods again. That evening a Weston squire came to
the Concord hunter's cottage to inquire for his hounds, and told how
for a week they had been hunting on their own account from Weston
woods. The Concord hunter told him what he knew and offered him the
skin; but the other declined it and departed. He did not find his
hounds that night, but the next day learned that they had crossed the
river and put up at a farmhouse for the night, whence, having been
well fed, they took their departure early in the morning.
The hunter who told me this could remember one Sam Nutting, who used
to hunt bears on Fair Haven Ledges, and exchange their skins for rum
in Concord village; who told him, even, that he had seen a moose
there. Nutting had a famous foxhound named Burgoyne- he pronounced it
Bugine- which my informant used to borrow. In the "Wast Book" of an
old trader of this town, who was also a captain, town-clerk, and
representative, I find the following entry. Jan. 18th, 1742-3, "John
Melven Cr. by 1 Grey Fox 0-2-3"; they are not now found here; and in
his ledger, Feb, 7th, 1743, Hezekiah Stratton has credit "by 1/2 a
Catt skin 0-1-4 1/2"; of course, a wild-cat, for Stratton was a
sergeant in the old French war, and would not have got credit for
hunting less noble game. Credit is given for deerskins also, and they
were daily sold. One man still preserves the horns of the last deer
that was killed in this vicinity, and another has told me the
particulars of the hunt in which his uncle was engaged. The hunters
were formerly a numerous and merry crew here. I remember well one
gaunt Nimrod who would catch up a leaf by the roadside and play a
strain on it wilder and more melodious, if my memory serves me, than
any hunting-horn.
At midnight, when there was a moon, I sometimes met with hounds in
my path prowling about the woods, which would skulk out of my way, as
if afraid, and stand silent amid the bushes till I had passed.
Squirrels and wild mice disputed for my store of nuts. There were
scores of pitch pines around my house, from one to four inches in
diameter, which had been gnawed by mice the previous winter- a
Norwegian winter for them, for the snow lay long and deep, and they
were obliged to mix a large proportion of pine bark with their other
diet. These trees were alive and apparently flourishing at midsummer,
and many of them had grown a foot, though completely girdled; but
after another winter such were without exception dead. It is
remarkable that a single mouse should thus be allowed a whole pine
tree for its dinner, gnawing round instead of up and down it; but
perhaps it is necessary in order to thin these trees, which are wont
to grow up densely.
The hares (Lepus Americanus) were very familiar. One had her form
under my house all winter, separated from me only by the flooring, and
she startled me each morning by her hasty departure when I began to
stir- thump, thump, thump, striking her head against the floor timbers
in her hurry. They used to come round my door at dusk to nibble the
potato parings which I had thrown out, and were so nearly the color of
the round that they could hardly be distinguished when still.
Sometimes in the twilight I alternately lost and recovered sight of
one sitting motionless under my window. When I opened my door in the
evening, off they would go with a squeak and a bounce. Near at hand
they only excited my pity. One evening one sat by my door two paces
from me, at first trembling with fear, yet unwilling to move; a poor
wee thing, lean and bony, with ragged ears and sharp nose, scant tail
and slender paws. It looked as if Nature no longer contained the breed
of nobler bloods, but stood on her last toes. Its large eyes appeared
young and unhealthy, almost dropsical. I took a step, and lo, away it
scud with an elastic spring over the snow-crust, straightening its
body and its limbs into graceful length, and soon put the forest
between me and itself- the wild free venison, assenting its vigor and
the dignity of Nature. Not without reason was its slenderness. Such
then was its nature. (Lepus, levipes, light-foot, some think.)
What is a country without rabbits and partridges? They are among the
most simple and indigenous animal products; ancient and venerable
families known to antiquity as to modern times; of the very hue and
substance of Nature, nearest allied to leaves and to the ground- and
to one another; it is either winged or it is legged. It is hardly as
if you had seen a wild creature when a rabbit or a partridge bursts
away, only a natural one, as much to be expected as rustling leaves.
The partridge and the rabbit are still sure to thrive, like true
natives of the soil, whatever revolutions occur. If the forest is cut
off, the sprouts and bushes which spring up afford them concealment,
and they become more numerous than ever. That must be a poor country
indeed that does not support a hare. Our woods teem with them both,
and around every swamp may be seen the partridge or rabbit walk, beset
with twiggy fences and horse-hair snares, which some cow-boy tends.
THE POND IN WINTER:
==================
AFTER A still winter night I awoke with the impression that some
question had been put to me, which I had been endeavoring in vain to
answer in my sleep, as what- how- when- where? But there was dawning
Nature, in whom all creatures live, looking in at my broad windows
with serene and satisfied face, and no question on her lips. I awoke
to an answered question, to Nature and daylight. The snow lying deep
on the earth dotted with young pines, and the very slope of the hill
on which my house is placed, seemed to say, Forward! Nature puts no
question and answers none which we mortals ask. She has long ago taken
her resolution. "O Prince, our eyes contemplate with admiration and
transmit to the soul the wonderful and varied spectacle of this
universe. The night veils without doubt a part of this glorious
creation; but day comes to reveal to us this great work, which extends
from earth even into the plains of the ether."
Then to my morning work. First I take an axe and pail and go in
search of water, if that be not a dream. After a cold and snowy night
it needed a divining-rod to find it. Every winter the liquid and
trembling surface of the pond, which was so sensitive to every breath,
and reflected every light and shadow, becomes solid to the depth of a
foot or a foot and a half, so that it will support the heaviest teams,
and perchance the snow covers it to an equal depth, and it is not to
be distinguished from any level field. Like the marmots in the
surrounding hills, it closes its eyelids and becomes dormant for three
months or more. Standing on the snow-covered plain, as if in a pasture
amid the hills, I cut my way first through a foot of snow, and then a
foot of ice, and open a window under my feet, where, kneeling to
drink, I look down into the quiet parlor of the fishes, pervaded by a
softened light as through a window of ground glass, with its bright
sanded floor the same as in summer; there a perennial waveless
serenity reigns as in the amber twilight sky, corresponding to the
cool and even temperament of the inhabitants. Heaven is under our feet
is well as over our heads.
Early in the morning, while all things are crisp with frost, men
come with fishing-reels and slender lunch, and let down their fine
lines through the snowy field to take pickerel and perch; wild men,
who instinctively follow other fashions and trust other authorities
than their townsmen, and by their goings and comings stitch towns
together in parts where else they would be ripped. They sit and eat
their luncheon in stout fear- naughts on the dry oak leaves on the
shore, as wise in natural lore as the citizen is in artificial. They
never consulted with books, and know and can tell much less than they
have done. The things which they practice are said not yet to be
known. Here is one fishing for pickerel with grown perch for bait. You
look into his pail with wonder as into a summer pond, as if he kept
summer locked up at home, or knew where she had retreated. How, pray,
did he get these in midwinter? Oh, he got worms out of rotten logs
since the ground froze, and so he caught them. His life itself passes
deeper in nature than the studies of the naturalist penetrate; himself
a subject for the naturalist. The latter raises the moss and bark
gently with his knife in search of insects; the former lays open logs
to their core with his axe, and moss and bark fly far and wide. He
gets his living by barking trees. Such a man has some right to fish,
and I love to see nature carried out in him. The perch swallows the
grub-worm, the pickerel swallows the perch, and the fisher-man
swallows the pickerel; and so all the chinks in the scale of being are
filled.
When I strolled around the pond in misty weather I was sometimes
amused by the primitive mode which some ruder fisher-man had adopted.
He would perhaps have placed alder branches over the narrow holes in
the ice, which were four or five rods apart and an equal distance from
the shore, and having fastened the end of the line to a stick to
prevent its being pulled through, have passed the slack line over a
twig of the alder, a foot or more above the ice, and tied a dry oak
leaf to it, which, being pulled down, would show when he had a bite.
These alders loomed through the mist at regular intervals as you
walked half way round the pond.
Ah, the pickerel of Walden! when I see them lying on the ice, or
in the well which the fisherman cuts in the ice, making a little hole
to admit the water, I am always surprised by their rare beauty, as if
they were fabulous fishes, they are so foreign to the streets, even to
the woods, foreign as Arabia to our Concord life. They possess a quite
dazzling and transcendent beauty which separates them by a wide
interval from the cadaverous cod and haddock whose fame is trumpeted
in our streets. They are not green like the pines, nor gray like the
stones, nor blue like the sky; but they have, to my eyes, if possible,
yet rarer colors, like flowers and precious stones, as if they were
the pearls, the animalized nuclei or crystals of the Walden water.
They, of course, are Walden all over and all through; are themselves
small Waldens in the animal kingdom, Waldenses. It is surprising that
they are caught here- that in this deep and capacious spring, far
beneath the rattling teams and chaises and tinkling sleighs that
travel the Walden road, this great gold and emerald fish swims. I
never chanced to see its kind in any market; it would be the cynosure
of all eyes there. Easily, with a few convulsive quirks, they give up
their watery ghosts, like a mortal translated before his time to the
thin air of heaven.
As I was desirous to recover the long lost bottom of Walden Pond,
I surveyed it carefully, before the ice broke up, early in '46, with
compass and chain and sounding line. There have been many stories told
about the bottom, or rather no bottom, of this pond, which certainly
had no foundation for themselves. It is remarkable how long men will
believe in the bottomlessness of a pond without taking the trouble to
sound it. I have visited two such Bottomless Ponds in one walk in this
neighborhood. Many have believed that Walden reached quite through to
the other side of the globe. Some who have lain flat on the ice for a
long time, looking down through the illusive medium, perchance with
watery eyes into the bargain, and driven to hasty conclusions by the
fear of catching cold in their breasts, have seen vast holes "into
which a load of hay might be drived," if there were anybody to drive
it, the undoubted source of the Styx and entrance to the Infernal
Regions from these parts. Others have gone down from the village with
a "fifty-six" and a wagon load of inch rope, but yet have failed to
find any bottom; for while the "fifty-six" was resting by the way,
they were paying out the rope in the vain attempt to fathom their
truly immeasurable capacity for marvellousness. But I can assure my
readers that Walden has a reasonably tight bottom at a not
unreasonable, though at an unusual, depth. I fathomed it easily with a
cod-line and a stone weighing about a pound and a half, and could tell
accurately when the stone left the bottom, by having to pull so much
harder before the water got underneath to help me. The greatest depth
was exactly one hundred and two feet; to which may be added the five
feet which it has risen since, making one hundred and seven. This is a
remarkable depth for so small an area; yet not an inch of it can be
spared by the imagination. What if all ponds were shallow? Would it
not react on the minds of men? I am thankful that this pond was made
deep and pure for a symbol. While men believe in the infinite some
ponds will be thought to be bottomless.
A factory-owner, bearing what depth I had found, thought that it
could not be true, for, judging from his acquaintance with dams, sand
would not lie at so steep an angle. But the deepest ponds are not so
deep in proportion to their area as most suppose, and, if drained,
would not leave very remarkable valleys. They are not like cups
between the hills; for this one, which is so unusually deep for its
area, appears in a vertical section through its centre not deeper than
a shallow plate. Most ponds, emptied, would leave a meadow no more
hollow than we frequently see. William Gilpin, who is so admirable in
all that relates to landscapes, and usually so correct, standing at
the head of Loch Fyne, in Scotland, which he describes as "a bay of
salt water, sixty or seventy fathoms deep, four miles in breadth, and
about fifty miles long, surrounded by mountains, observes, "If we
could have seen it immediately after the diluvian crash, or whatever
convulsion of nature occasioned it, before the waters gushed in, what
a horrid chasm must it have appeared!
"So high as heaved the tumid hills, so low
Down sunk a hollow bottom broad and deep,
Capacious bed of waters."
But if, using the shortest diameter of Loch Fyne, we apply these
proportions to Walden, which, as we have seen, appears already in a
vertical section only like a shallow plate, it will appear four times
as shallow. So much for the increased horrors of the chasm of Loch
Fyne when emptied. No doubt many a smiling valley with its stretching
cornfields occupies exactly such a "horrid chasm," from which the
waters have receded, though it requires the insight and the far sight
of the geologist to convince the unsuspecting inhabitants of this
fact. Often an inquisitive eye may detect the shores of a primitive
lake in the low horizon hills, and no subsequent elevation of the
plain have been necessary to conceal their history. But it is
easiest, as they who work on the highways know, to find the hollows by
the puddles after a shower. The amount of it is, the imagination, give
it the least license, dives deeper and soars higher than Nature goes.
So, probably, the depth of the ocean will be found to be very
inconsiderable compared with its breadth.
As I sounded through the ice I could determine the shape of the
bottom with greater accuracy than is possible in surveying harbors
which do not freeze over, and I was surprised at its general
regularity. In the deepest part there are several acres more level
than almost any field which is exposed to the sun, wind, and plow. In
one instance, on a line arbitrarily chosen, the depth did not vary
more than one foot in thirty rods; and generally, near the middle, I
could calculate the variation for each one hundred feet in any
direction beforehand within three or four inches. Some are accustomed
to speak of deep and dangerous holes even in quiet sandy ponds like
this, but the effect of water under these circumstances is to level
all inequalities. The regularity of the bottom and its conformity to
the shores and the range of the neighboring hills were so perfect that
a distant promontory betrayed itself in the soundings quite across the
pond, and its direction could be determined by observing the opposite
shore. Cape becomes bar, and plain shoal, and valley and gorge deep
water and channel.
When I had mapped the pond by the scale of ten rods to an inch,
and put down the soundings, more than a hundred in all, I observed
this remarkable coincidence. Having noticed that the number indicating
the greatest depth was apparently in the centre of the map, I laid a
rule on the map lengthwise, and then breadthwise, and found, to my
surprise, that the line of greatest length intersected the line of
greatest breadth exactly at the point of greatest depth,
notwithstanding that the middle is so nearly level, the outline of the
pond far from regular, and the extreme length and breadth were got by
measuring into the coves; and I said to myself, Who knows but this
hint would conduct to the deepest part of the ocean as well as of a
pond or puddle? Is not this the rule also for the height of mountains,
regarded as the opposite of valleys? We know that a hill is not
highest at its narrowest part.
Of five coves, three, or all which had been sounded, were observed
to have a bar quite across their mouths and deeper water within, so
that the bay tended to be an expansion of water within the land not
only horizontally but vertically, and to form a basin or independent
pond, the direction of the two capes showing the course of the bar.
Every harbor on the sea-coast, also, has its bar at its entrance. In
proportion as the mouth of the cove was wider compared with its
length, the water over the bar was deeper compared with that in the
basin. Given, then, the length and breadth of the cove, and the
character of the surrounding shore, and you have almost elements
enough to make out a formula for all cases.
In order to see how nearly I could guess, with this experience, at
the deepest point in a pond, by observing the outlines of a surface
and the character of its shores alone, I made a plan of White Pond,
which contains about forty-one acres, and, like this, has no island in
it, nor any visible inlet or outlet; and as the line of greatest
breadth fell very near the line of least breadth, where two opposite
capes approached each other and two opposite bays receded, I ventured
to mark a point a short distance from the latter line, but still on
the line of greatest length, as the deepest. The deepest part was
found to be within one hundred feet of this, still farther in the
direction to which I had inclined, and was only one foot deeper,
namely, sixty feet. Of course, a stream running through, or an island
in the pond, would make the problem much more complicated.
If we knew all the laws of Nature, we should need only one fact,
or the description of one actual phenomenon, to infer all the
particular results at that point. Now we know only a few laws, and our
result is vitiated, not, of course, by any confusion or irregularity
in Nature, but by our ignorance of essential elements in the
calculation. Our notions of law and harmony are commonly confined to
those instances which we detect; but the harmony which results from a
far greater number of seemingly conflicting, but really concurring,
laws, which we have not detected, is still more wonderful. The
particular laws are as our points of view, as, to the traveller, a
mountain outline varies with every step, and it has an infinite number
of profiles, though absolutely but one form. Even when cleft or bored
through it is not comprehended in its entireness.
What I have observed of the pond is no less true in ethics. It is
the law of average. Such a rule of the two diameters not only guides
us toward the sun in the system and the heart in man, but draws lines
through the length and breadth of the aggregate of a man's particular
daily behaviors and waves of life into his coves and inlets, and where
they intersect will be the height or depth of his character. Perhaps
we need only to know how his shores trend and his adjacent country or
circumstances, to infer his depth and concealed bottom. If he is
surrounded by mountainous circumstances, an Achillean shore, whose
peaks overshadow and are reflected in his bosom, they suggest a
corresponding depth in him. But a low and smooth shore proves him
shallow on that side. In our bodies, a bold projecting brow falls off
to and indicates a corresponding depth of thought. Also there is a bar
across the entrance of our every cove, or particular inclination; each
is our harbor for a season, in which we are detained and partially
land-locked. These inclinations are not whimsical usually, but their
form, size, and direction are determined by the promontories of the
shore, the ancient axes of elevation. When this bar is gradually
increased by storms, tides, or currents, or there is a subsidence of
the waters, so that it reaches to the surface, that which was at first
but an inclination in the shore in which a thought was harbored
becomes an individual lake, cut off from the ocean, wherein the
thought secures its own conditions- changes, perhaps, from salt to
fresh, becomes a sweet sea, dead sea, or a marsh. At the advent of
each individual into this life, may we not suppose that such a bar has
risen to the surface somewhere? It is true, we are such poor
navigators that our thoughts, for the most part, stand off and on upon
a harborless coast, are conversant only with the bights of the bays of
poesy, or steer for the public ports of entry, and go into the dry
docks of science, where they merely refit for this world, and no
natural currents concur to individualize them.
As for the inlet or outlet of Walden, I have not discovered any
but rain and snow and evaporation, though perhaps, with a thermometer
and a line, such places may be found, for where the water flows into
the pond it will probably be coldest in summer and warmest in winter.
When the ice-men were at work here in '46-7, the cakes sent to the
shore were one day rejected by those who were stacking them up there,
not being thick enough to lie side by side with the rest; and the
cutters thus discovered that the ice over a small space was two or
three inches thinner than elsewhere, which made them think that there
was an inlet there. They also showed me in another place what they
thought was a "leach-hole," through which the pond leaked out under a
hill into a neighboring meadow, pushing me out on a cake of ice to see
it. It was a small cavity under ten feet of water; but I think that I
can warrant the pond not to need soldering till they find a worse leak
than that. One has suggested, that if such a "leach-hole" should be
found, its connection with the meadow, if any existed, might be proved
by conveying some, colored powder or sawdust to the mouth of the hole,
and then putting a strainer over the spring in the meadow, which would
catch some of the particles carried through by the current.
While I was surveying, the ice, which was sixteen inches thick,
undulated under a slight wind like water. It is well known that a
level cannot be used on ice. At one rod from the shore its greatest
fluctuation, when observed by means of a level on land directed toward
a graduated staff on the ice, was three quarters of an inch, though
the ice appeared firmly attached to the shore. It was probably greater
in the middle. Who knows but if our instruments were delicate enough
we might detect an undulation in the crust of the earth? When two legs
of my level were on the shore and the third on the ice, and the sights
were directed over the latter, a rise or fall of the ice of an almost
infinitesimal amount made a difference of several feet on a tree
across the pond. When I began to cut holes for sounding there were
three or four inches of water on the ice under a deep snow which had
sunk it thus far; but the water began immediately to run into these
holes, and continued to run for two days in deep streams, which wore
away the ice on every side, and contributed essentially, if not
mainly, to dry the surface of the pond; for, as the water ran in, it
raised and floated the ice. This was somewhat like cutting a hole in
the bottom of a ship to let the water out. When such holes freeze, and
a rain succeeds, and finally a new freezing forms a fresh smooth ice
over all, it is beautifully mottled internally by dark figures, shaped
somewhat like a spider's web, what you may call ice rosettes, produced
by the channels worn by the water flowing from all sides to a centre.
Sometimes, also, when the ice was covered with shallow puddles, I saw
a double shadow of myself, one standing on the head of the other, one
on the ice, the other on the trees or hillside.
While yet it is cold January, and snow and ice are thick and
solid, the prudent landlord comes from the village to get ice to cool
his summer drink; impressively, even pathetically, wise, to foresee
the heat and thirst of July now in January- wearing a thick coat and
mittens! when so many things are not provided for. It may be that he
lays up no treasures in this world which will cool his summer drink in
the next. He cuts and saws the solid pond, unroofs the house of
fishes, and carts off their very element and air, held fast by chains
and stakes like corded wood, through the favoring winter air, to
wintry cellars, to underlie the summer there. It looks like solidified
azure, as, far off, it is drawn through the streets. These
ice-cutters are a merry race, full of jest and sport, and when I went
among them they were wont to invite me to saw pit-fashion with them, I
standing underneath.
In the winter of '46-7 there came a hundred men of Hyperborean
extraction swoop down on to our pond one morning, with many carloads
of ungainly-looking farming tools-sleds, plows, drill-barrows,
turf-knives, spades, saws, rakes, and each man was armed with a
double-pointed pike-staff, such as is not described in the New-England
Farmer or the Cultivator. I did not know whether they had come to sow
a crop of winter rye, or some other kind of grain recently introduced
from Iceland. As I saw no manure, I judged that they meant to skim the
land, as I had done, thinking the soil was deep and had lain fallow
long enough. They said that a gentleman farmer, who was behind the
scenes, wanted to double his money, which, as I understood, amounted
to half a million already; but in order to cover each one of his
dollars with another, he took off the only coat, ay, the skin itself,
of Walden Pond in the midst of a hard winter. They went to work at
once, plowing, barrowing, rolling, furrowing, in admirable order, as
if they were bent on making this a model farm; but when I was looking
sharp to see what kind of seed they dropped into the furrow, a gang of
fellows by my side suddenly began to book up the virgin mould itself,
with a peculiar jerk, clean down to the sand, or rather the water- for
it was a very springy soil- indeed all the terra firma there was- and
haul it away on sleds, and then I guessed that they must be cutting
peat in a bog. So they came and went every day, with a peculiar shriek
from the locomotive, from and to some point of the polar regions, as
it seemed to me, like a flock of arctic snow-birds. But sometimes
Squaw Walden had her revenge, and a hired man, walking behind his
team, slipped through a crack in the ground down toward Tartarus, and
he who was so brave before suddenly became but the ninth part of a
man, almost gave up his animal heat, and was glad to take refuge in my
house, and acknowledged that there was some virtue in a stove; or
sometimes the frozen soil took a piece of steel out of a plowshare, or
a plow got set in the furrow and had to be cut out.
To speak literally, a hundred Irishmen, with Yankee overseers,
came from Cambridge every day to get out the ice. They divided it into
cakes by methods too well known to require description, and these,
being sledded to the shore, were rapidly hauled off on to an ice
platform, and raised by grappling irons and block and tackle, worked
by horses, on to a stack, as surely as so many barrels of flour, and
there placed evenly side by side, and row upon row, as if they formed
the solid base of an obelisk designed to pierce the clouds. They told
me that in a good day they could get out a thousand tons, which was
the yield of about one acre. Deep ruts and "cradle-holes" were worn in
the ice, as on terra firma, by the passage of the sleds over the same
track, and the horses invariably ate their oats out of cakes of ice
hollowed out like buckets. They stacked up the cakes thus in the open
air in a pile thirty-five feet high on one side and six or seven rods
square, putting hay between the outside layers to exclude the air; for
when the wind, though never so cold, finds a passage through, it will
wear large cavities, leaving slight supports or studs only here and
there, and finally topple it down. At first it looked like a vast blue
fort or Valhalla; but when they began to tuck the coarse meadow hay
into the crevices, and this became covered with rime and icicles, it
looked like a venerable moss-grown and hoary ruin, built of
azure-tinted marble, the abode of Winter, that old man we see in the
almanac- his shanty, as if he had a design to estivate with us. They
calculated that not twenty-five per cent of this would reach its
destination, and that two or three per cent would be wasted in the
cars. However, a still greater part of this heap had a different
destiny from what was intended; for, either because the ice was found
not to keep so well as was expected, containing more air than usual,
or for some other reason, it never got to market. This heap, made in
the winter of '46-7 and estimated to contain ten thousand tons, was
finally covered with hay and boards; and though it was unroofed the
following July, and a part of it carried off, the rest remaining
exposed to the sun, it stood over that summer and the next winter, and
was not quite melted till September, 1848. Thus the pond recovered the
greater part.
Like the water, the Walden ice, seen near at hand, has a green tint,
but at a distance is beautifully blue, and you can easily tell it from
the white ice of the river, or the merely greenish ice of some ponds,
a quarter of a mile off. Sometimes one of those great cakes slips from
the ice-man's sled into the village street, and lies there for a week
like a great emerald, an object of interest to all passers. I have
noticed that a portion of Walden which in the state of water was green
will often, when frozen, appear from the same point of view blue. So
the hollows about this pond will, sometimes, in the winter, be filled
with a greenish water somewhat like its own, but the next day will
have frozen blue. Perhaps the blue color of water and ice is due to
the light and air they contain, and the most transparent is the
bluest. Ice is an interesting subject for contemplation. They told me
that they had some in the ice-houses at Fresh Pond five years old
which was as good as ever. Why is it that a bucket of water soon
becomes putrid, but frozen remains sweet forever? It is commonly said
that this is the difference between the affections and the intellect.
Thus for sixteen days I saw from my window a hundred men at work
like busy husbandmen, with teams and horses and apparently all the
implements of farming, such a picture as we see on the first page of
the almanac; and as often as I looked out I was reminded of the fable
of the lark and the reapers, or the parable of the sower, and the
like; and now they are all gone, and in thirty days more, probably, I
shall look from the same window on the pure sea-green Walden water
there, reflecting the clouds and the trees, and sending up its
evaporations in solitude, and no traces will appear that a man has
ever stood there. Perhaps I shall hear a solitary loon laugh as he
dives and plumes himself, or shall see a lonely fisher in his boat,
like a floating leaf, beholding his form reflected in the waves, where
lately a hundred men securely labored.
Thus it appears that the sweltering inhabitants of Charleston and
New Orleans, of Madras and Bombay and Calcutta, drink at my well. In
the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal
philosophy of the Bhagvat-Geeta, since whose composition years of the
gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and
its literature seem puny and trivial; and I doubt if that philosophy
is not to be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is
its sublimity from our conceptions. I lay down the book and go to my
well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Bramin, priest
of Brahma and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the
Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his
crust and water jug. I meet his servant come to draw water for his
master, and our buckets as it were grate together in the same well.
The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges.
With favoring winds it is wafted past the site of the fabulous islands
of Atlantis and the Hesperides, makes the periplus of Hanno, and,
floating by Ternate and Tidore and the mouth of the Persian Gulf,
melts in the tropic gales of the Indian seas, and is landed in ports
of which Alexander only heard the names.
SPRING:
======
THE OPENING of large tracts by the ice-cutters commonly causes a
pond to break up earlier; for the water, agitated by the wind, even in
cold weather, wears away the surrounding ice. But such was not the
effect on Walden that year, for she had soon got a thick new garment
to take the place of the old. This pond never breaks up so soon as the
others in this neighborhood, on account both of its greater depth and
its having no stream passing through it to melt or wear away the ice.
I never knew it to open in the course of a winter, not excepting that
Of '52-3, which gave the ponds so severe a trial. It commonly opens
about the first of April, a week or ten days later than Flint's Pond
and Fair Haven, beginning to melt on the north side and in the
shallower parts where it began to freeze. It indicates better than any
water hereabouts the absolute progress of the season, being least
affected by transient changes of temperature. A severe cold of it few
days duration in March may very much retard the opening of the former
ponds, while the temperature of Walden increases almost
uninterruptedly. A thermometer thrust into the middle of Walden on the
6th of March, 1847, stood at 32', or freezing point; near the shore at
33'; in the middle of Flint's Pond, the same day, at 32 1/2'; at a
dozen rods from the shore, in shallow water, under ice a foot thick,
at 36'. This difference of three and it half degrees between the
temperature of the deep water and the shallow in the latter pond, and
the fact that a great proportion of it is comparatively shallow, show
why it should break up so much sooner than Walden. The ice in the
shallowest part was at this time several inches thinner than in the
middle. In midwinter the middle had been the warmest and the ice
thinnest there. So, also, every one who has waded about the shores of
the pond in summer must have perceived how much warmer the water is
close to the shore, where only three or four inches deep, than a
little distance out, and on the surface where it is deep, than near
the bottom. In spring the sun not only exerts an influence through the
increased temperature of the air and earth, but its heat passes
through ice a foot or more thick, and is reflected from the bottom in
shallow water, and so also warms the water and melts the under side of
the ice, at the same time that it is melting it more directly above,
making it uneven, and causing the air bubbles which it contains to
extend themselves upward and downward until it is completely
honeycombed, and at last disappears suddenly in a single spring rain.
Ice has its grain as well as wood, and when a cake begins to rot or
"comb," that is, assume the appearance of honeycomb, whatever may be
its position, the air cells are at right angles with what was the
water surface. Where there is a rock or a log rising near to the
surface the ice over it is much thinner, and is frequently quite
dissolved by this reflected heat; and I have been told that in the
experiment at Cambridge to freeze water in a shallow wooden pond,
though the cold air circulated underneath, and so had access to both
sides, the reflection of the sun from the bottom more than
counterbalanced this advantage. When a warm rain in the middle of the
winter melts off the snow ice from Walden, and leaves a hard dark or
transparent ice on the middle, there will be a strip of rotten though
thicker white ice, a rod or more wide, about the shores, created by
this reflected heat. Also, as I have said, the bubbles themselves
within the ice operate as burning-glasses to melt the ice beneath.
The phenomena of the year take place every day in a pond on a
small scale. Every morning, generally speaking, the shallow water is
being warmed more rapidly than the deep, though it may not be made so
warm after all, and every evening it is being cooled more rapidly
until the morning, The day is an epitome of the year. The night is the
winter, the morning and evening are the spring and fall, and the noon
is the summer. The cracking and booming of the ice indicate a change
of temperature. One pleasant morning after a cold night, February
24th, 1850, having gone to Flint's Pond to spend the day, I noticed
with surprise, that when I struck the ice with the head of my axe, it
resounded like a gong for many rods around, or as if I had struck on a
tight drum-head. The pond began to boom about an hour after sunrise,
when it felt the influence of the sun's rays slanted upon it from over
the hills; it stretched itself and yawned like a waking man with a
gradually increasing tumult, which was kept up three or four hours. It
took a short siesta at noon, and boomed once more toward night, as the
sun was withdrawing his influence. In the right stage of the weather a
pond fires its evening gun with great regularity. But in the middle of
the day, being full of cracks, and the air also being less elastic, it
had completely lost its resonance, and probably fishes and muskrats
could not then have been stunned by a blow on it. The fishermen say
that the "thundering of the pond" scares the fishes and prevents their
biting. The pond does not thunder every evening, and I cannot tell
surely when to expect its thundering; but though I may perceive no
difference in the weather, it does. Who would have suspected so large
and cold and thick-skinned a thing to be so sensitive? Yet it has its
law to which it thunders obedience when it should as surely as the
buds expand in the spring. The earth is all alive and covered with
papillae. The largest pond is as sensitive to atmospheric changes as
the globule of mercury in its tube.
One attraction in coming to the woods to live was that I should have
leisure and opportunity to see the Spring come in. The ice in the pond
at length begins to be honeycombed, and I can set my heel in it as I
walk. Fogs and rains and warmer suns are gradually melting the snow;
the days have grown sensibly longer; and I see how I shall get through
the winter without adding to my woodpile, for large fires are no
longer necessary. I am on the alert for the first signs of spring, to
hear the chance note of some arriving bird, or the striped squirrel's
chirp, for his stores must be now nearly exhausted, or see the
woodchuck venture out of his winter quarters. On the 13th of March,
after I had heard the bluebird, song sparrow, and red-wing, the ice
was still nearly a foot thick. As the weather grew warmer it was not
sensibly worn away by the water, nor broken up and floated off as in
rivers, but, though it was completely melted for half a rod in width
about the shore, the middle was merely honeycombed and saturated with
water, so that you could put your foot through it when six inches
thick; but by the next day evening, perhaps, after a warm rain
followed by fog, it would have wholly disappeared, all gone off with
the fog, spirited away. One year I went across the middle only five
days before it disappeared entirely. In 1845 Walden was first
completely open on the 1st of April; in '46, the 25th of March; in
'47, the 8th of April; in '51, the 28th of March; in '52, the 18th of
April; in '53, the 23d of March; in '54, about the 7th of April.
Every incident connected with the breaking up of the rivers and
ponds and the settling of the weather is particularly interesting to
us who live in a climate of so great extremes. When the warmer days
come, they who dwell near the river hear the ice crack at night with a
startling whoop as loud as artillery, as if its icy fetters were rent
from end to end, and within a few days see it rapidly going out. So
the alligator comes out of the mud with quakings of the earth. One
old man, who has been a close observer of Nature, and seems as
thoroughly wise in regard to all her operations as if she had been put
upon the stocks when he was a boy, and he had helped to lay her keel-
who has come to his growth, and can hardly acquire more of natural
lore if he should live to the age of Methuselah- told me- and I was
surprised to hear him express wonder at any of Nature's operations,
for I thought that there were no secrets between them- that one spring
day he took his gun and boat, and thought that he would have a little
sport with the ducks. There was ice still on the meadows, but it was
all gone out of the river, and he dropped down without obstruction
from Sudbury, where he lived, to Fair Haven Pond, which he found,
unexpectedly, covered for the most part with a firm field of ice. It
was a warm day, and he was surprised to see so great a body of ice
remaining. Not seeing any ducks, he hid his boat on the north or back
side of an island in the pond, and then concealed himself in the
bushes on the south side, to await them. The ice was melted for three
or four rods from the shore, and there was a smooth and warm sheet of
water, with a muddy bottom, such as the ducks love, within, and he
thought it likely that some would be along pretty soon. After he had
lain still there about an hour he heard a low and seemingly very
distant sound, but singularly grand and impressive, unlike anything he
had ever heard, gradually swelling and increasing as if it would have
a universal and memorable ending, a sullen rush and roar, which seemed
to him all at once like the sound of a vast body of fowl coming in to
settle there, and, seizing his gun, he started up in haste and
excited; but he found, to his surprise, that the whole body of the ice
had started while he lay there, and drifted in to the shore, and the
sound he had heard was made by its edge grating on the shore- at first
gently nibbled and crumbled off, but at length heaving up and
scattering its wrecks along the island to a considerable height before
it came to a standstill.
At length the sun's rays have attained the right angle, and warm
winds blow up mist and rain and melt the snowbanks, and the sun,
dispersing the mist, smiles on a checkered landscape of russet and
white smoking with incense, through which the traveller picks his way
from islet to islet, cheered by the music of a thousand tinkling rills
and rivulets whose veins are filled with the blood of winter which
they are bearing off.
Few phenomena gave me more delight than to observe the forms which
thawing sand and clay assume in flowing down the sides of a deep cut
on the railroad through which I passed on my way to the village, a
phenomenon not very common on so large a scale, though the number of
freshly exposed banks of the right material must have been greatly
multiplied since railroads were invented. The material was sand of
every degree of fineness and of various rich colors, commonly mixed
with a little clay. When the frost comes out in the spring, and even
in a thawing day in the winter, the sand begins to flow down the
slopes like lava, sometimes bursting out through the snow and
overflowing it where no sand was to be seen before. Innumerable little
streams overlap and interlace one with another, exhibiting a sort of
hybrid product, which obeys half way the law of currents, and half way
that of vegetation. As it flows it takes the forms of sappy leaves or
vines, making heaps of pulpy sprays a foot or more in depth, and
resembling, as you look down on them, the laciniated, lobed, and
imbricated thalluses of some lichens; or you are reminded of coral, of
leopard's paws or birds' feet, of brains or lungs or bowels, and
excrements of all kinds. It is a truly grotesque vegetation, whose
forms and color we see imitated in bronze, a sort of architectural
foliage more ancient and typical than acanthus, chiccory, ivy, vine,
or any vegetable leaves; destined perhaps, under some circumstances,
to become a puzzle to future geologists. The whole cut impressed me as
if it were a cave with its stalactites laid open to the light. The
various shades of the sand are singularly rich and agreeable,
embracing the different iron colors, brown, gray, yellowish, and
reddish. When the flowing mass reaches the drain at the foot of the
bank it spreads out flatter into strands, the separate streams losing
their semicylindrical 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 call
trace the original forms of vegetation; till at length, in the water
itself, they are converted into banks, like those formed off the
mouths of rivers, and the forms of vegetation are lost in the ripple-
marks on the bottom.
The whole bank, which is from twenty to forty feet high, is
sometimes overlaid with a mass of this kind of foliage, or sandy
rupture, for a quarter of a mile on one or both sides, the produce of
one spring day. What makes this sand foliage remarkable is its
springing into existence thus suddenly. When I see on the one side the
inert bank- for the sun acts on one side first- and on the other this
luxuriant foliage, the creation of an hour, I am affected as if in a
peculiar sense I stood in the laboratory of the Artist who made the
world and me- had come to where he was still at work, sporting on this
bank, and with excess of energy strewing his fresh designs about. I
feel as if I were nearer to the vitals of the globe, for this sandy
overflow is something such a foliaceous mass as the vitals of the
animal body. You find thus in the very sands an anticipation of the
vegetable leaf. No wonder that the earth expresses itself outwardly in
leaves, it so labors with the idea inwardly. The atoms have already
learned this law, and are pregnant by it. The overhanging leaf sees
here its prototype. Internally, whether in the globe or animal body,
it is a moist thick lobe, a word especially applicable to the liver
and lungs and the leaves of fat (leibo, labor, lapsus, to flow or slip
downward, a lapsing; lobos, globus, lobe, globe; also lap, flap, and
many other words); externally a dry thin leaf, even as the f and v are
a pressed and dried b. The radicals of lobe are lb, the soft mass of
the b (single-lobed, or B, double-lobed), with the liquid l behind it
pressing it forward. In globe, glb, the guttural g adds to the meaning
the capacity of the throat. The feathers and wings of birds are still
drier and thinner leaves. Thus, also, you pass from the lumpish grub
in the earth to the airy and fluttering butterfly. The very globe
continually transcends and translates itself, and becomes winged in
its orbit. Even ice begins with delicate crystal leaves, as if it had
flowed into moulds which the fronds of waterplants have impressed on
the watery mirror. The whole tree itself is but one leaf, and rivers
are still vaster leaves whose pulp is intervening earth, and towns and
cities are the ova of insects in their axils.
When the sun withdraws the sand ceases to flow, but in the morning
the streams will start once more and branch and branch again into a
myriad of others. You here see perchance how blood-vessels are formed.
If you look closely you observe that first there pushes forward from
the thawing mass a stream of softened sand with a drop-like point,
like the ball of the finger, feeling its way slowly and blindly
downward, until at last with more heat and moisture, as the sun gets
higher, the most fluid portion, in its effort to obey the law to which
the most inert also yields, separates from the latter and forms for
itself a meandering channel or artery within that, in which is seen a
little silvery stream glancing like lightning from one stage of pulpy
leaves or branches to another, and ever and anon swallowed up in the
sand. It is wonderful how rapidly yet perfectly the sand organizes
itself as it flows, using the best material its mass affords to form
the sharp edges of its channel. Such are the sources of rivers. In the
silicious matter which the water deposits is perhaps the bony system,
and in the still finer soil and organic matter the fleshy fibre or
cellular tissue. What is man but a mass of thawing clay? The ball of
the human finger is but a drop congealed. The fingers and toes flow to
their extent from the thawing mass of the body. Who knows what the
human body would expand and flow out to under a more genial heaven? Is
not the hand a spreading palm leaf with its lobes and veins? The ear
may be regarded, fancifully, as a lichen, Umbilicaria, on the side of
the head, with its lobe or drop. The lip-labium, from labor (?)- laps
or lapses from the sides of the cavernous mouth. The nose is a
manifest congealed drop or stalactite. The chin is a still larger
drop, the confluent dripping of the face. The cheeks are a slide from
the brows into the valley of the face, opposed and diffused by the
cheek bones. Each rounded lobe of the vegetable leaf, too, is a thick
and now loitering drop, larger or smaller; the lobes are the fingers
of the leaf; and as many lobes as it has, in so many directions it
tends to flow, and more heat or other genial influences would have
caused it to flow yet farther.
Thus it seemed that this one hillside illustrated the principle of
all the operations of Nature. The Maker of this earth but patented a
leaf. What Champollion will decipher this hieroglyphic for us, that we
may turn over a new leaf at last? This phenomenon is more exhilarating
to me than the luxuriance and fertility of vineyards. True, it is
somewhat excrementitious in its character, and there is no end to the
heaps of liver, lights, and bowels, as if the globe were turned wrong
side outward; but this suggests at least that Nature has some bowels,
and there again is mother of humanity. This is the frost coming out of
the ground; this is Spring. It precedes the green and flowery spring,
as mythology precedes regular poetry. I know of nothing more purgative
of winter fumes and indigestions. It convinces me that Earth is still
in her swaddling-clothes, and stretches forth baby fingers on every
side. Fresh curls spring from the baldest brow. There is nothing
inorganic. These foliaceous heaps lie along the bank like the slag of
a furnace, showing that Nature is "in full blast" within. The earth is
not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the
leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly,
but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and
fruit- not a fossil earth, but a living earth; compared with whose
great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic.
Its throes will heave our exuviae from their graves. You may melt your
metals and cast them into the most beautiful moulds you can; they will
never excite me like the forms which this molten earth flows out into.
And not only it, but the institutions upon it are plastic like clay in
the hands of the potter.
Ere long, not only on these banks, but on every hill and plain and
in every hollow, the frost comes out of the ground like a dormant
quadruped from its burrow, and seeks the sea with music, or migrates
to other climes in clouds. Thaw with his gentle persuasion is more
powerful than Thor with his hammer. The one melts, the other but
breaks in pieces.
When the ground was partially bare of snow, and a few warm days
had dried its surface somewhat, it was pleasant to compare the first
tender signs of the infant year just peeping forth with the stately
beauty of the withered vegetation which had withstood the winter-life-
everlasting, goldenrods, pinweeds, and graceful wild grasses, more
obvious and interesting frequently than in summer even, as if their
beauty was not ripe till then; even cotton-grass, cat-tails, mulleins,
johnswort, hardhack, meadowsweet, and other strong-stemmed plants,
those unexhausted granaries which entertain the earliest birds- decent
weeds, at least, which widowed Nature wears. I am particularly
attracted by the arching and sheaf- like top of the wool-grass; it
brings back the summer to our winter memories, and is among the forms
which art loves to copy, and which, in the vegetable kingdom, have the
same relation to types already in the mind of man that astronomy has.
It is an antique style, older than Greek or Egyptian. Many of the
phenomena of Winter are suggestive of an inexpressible tenderness and
fragile delicacy. We are accustomed to hear this king described as a
rude and boisterous tyrant; but with the gentleness of a lover he
adorns the tresses of Summer.
At the approach of spring the red squirrels got under my house,
two at a time, directly under my feet as I sat reading or writing, and
kept up the queerest chuckling and chirruping and vocal pirouetting
and gurgling sounds that ever were heard; and when I stamped they only
chirruped the louder, as if past all fear and respect in their mad
pranks, defying humanity to stop them. No, you don't- chickaree-
chickaree. They were wholly deaf to my arguments, or failed to
perceive their force, and fell into a strain of invective that was
irresistible.
The first sparrow of spring! The year beginning with younger hope
than ever! The faint silvery warblings heard over the partially bare
and moist fields from the bluebird, the song sparrow, and the
red-wing, as if the last flakes of winter tinkled as they fell! What
at such a time are histories, chronologies, traditions, and all
written revelations? The brooks sing carols and glees to the spring.
The marsh hawk, sailing low over the meadow, is already seeking the
first slimy life that awakes. The sinking sound of melting snow is
heard in all dells, and the ice dissolves apace in the ponds. The
grass flames up on the hillsides like a spring fire- "et primitus
oritur herba imbribus primoribus evocata"- as if the earth sent forth
an inward heat to greet the returning sun; not yellow but green is the
color of its flame;- the symbol of perpetual youth, the grass-blade,
like a long green ribbon, streams from the sod into the summer,
checked indeed by the frost, but anon pushing on again, lifting its
spear of last year's hay with the fresh life below. It grows as
steadily as the rill oozes out of the ground. It is almost identical
with that, for in the growing days of June, when the rills are dry,
the grass-blades are their channels, and from year to year the herds
drink at this perennial green stream, and the mower draws from it
betimes their winter supply. So our human life but dies down to its
root, and still puts forth its green blade to eternity.
Walden is melting apace. There is a canal two rods wide along the
northerly and westerly sides, and wider still at the east end. A great
field of ice has cracked off from the main body. I hear a song sparrow
singing from the bushes on the shore- olit, olit, olit- chip, chip,
chip, che char- che wiss, wiss, wiss. He too is helping to crack it.
How handsome the great sweeping curves in the edge of the ice,
answering somewhat to those of the shore, but more regular! It is
unusually hard, owing to the recent severe but transient cold, and all
watered or waved like a palace floor. But the wind slides eastward
over its opaque surface in vain, till it reaches the living surface
beyond. It is glorious to behold this ribbon of water sparkling in the
sun, the bare face of the pond full of glee and youth, as if it spoke
the joy of the fishes within it, and of the sands on its shore- a
silvery sheen as from the scales of a leuciscus, as it were all one
active fish. Such is the contrast between winter and spring. Walden
was dead and is alive again. But this spring it broke up more
steadily, as I have said.
The change from storm and winter to serene and mild weather, from
dark and sluggish hours to bright and elastic ones, is a memorable
crisis which all things proclaim. It is seemingly instantaneous at
last. Suddenly an influx of light filled my house, though the evening
was at hand, and the clouds of winter still overhung it, and the eaves
were dripping with sleety rain. I looked out the window, and lo! where
yesterday was cold gray ice there lay the transparent pond already
calm and full of hope as in a summer evening, reflecting a summer
evening sky in its bosom, though none was visible overhead, as if it
had intelligence with some remote horizon. I heard a robin in the
distance, the first I had heard for many a thousand years, methought,
whose note I shall not forget for many a thousand more- the same sweet
and powerful song as of yore. O the evening robin, at the end of a New
England summer day! If I could ever find the twig he sits upon! I mean
he; I mean the twig. This at least is not the Turdus migratorius. The
pitch pines and shrub oaks about my house, which had so long drooped,
suddenly resumed their several characters, looked brighter, greener,
and more erect and alive, as if effectually cleansed and restored by
the rain. I knew that it would not rain any more. You may tell by
looking at any twig of the forest, ay, at your very wood-pile, whether
its winter is past or not. As it grew darker, I was startled by the
honking of geese flying low over the woods, like weary travellers
getting in late from Southern lakes, and indulging at last in
unrestrained complaint and mutual consolation. Standing at my door, I
could bear the rush of their wings; when, driving toward my house,
they suddenly spied my light, and with hushed clamor wheeled and
settled in the pond. So I came in, and shut the door, and passed my
first spring night in the woods.
In the morning I watched the geese from the door through the mist,
sailing in the middle of the pond, fifty rods off, so large and
tumultuous that Walden appeared like an artificial pond for their
amusement. But when I stood on the shore they at once rose up with a
great flapping of wings at the signal of their commander, and when
they had got into rank circled about over my head, twenty-nine of
them, and then steered straight to Canada, with a regular honk from
the leader at intervals, trusting to break their fast in muddier
pools. A "plump" of ducks rose at the same time and took the route to
the north in the wake of their noisier cousins.
For a week I heard the circling, groping clangor of some solitary
goose in the foggy mornings, seeking its companion, and still peopling
the woods with the sound of a larger life than they could sustain. In
April the pigeons were seen again flying express in small flocks, and
in due time I heard the martins twittering over my clearing, though it
had not seemed that the township contained so many that it could
afford me any, and I fancied that they were peculiarly of the ancient
race that dwelt in hollow trees ere white men came. In almost all
climes the tortoise and the frog are among the precursors and heralds
of this season, and birds fly with song and glancing plumage, and
plants spring and bloom, and winds blow, to correct this slight
oscillation of the poles and preserve the equilibrium of nature.
As every season seems best to us in its turn, so the coming in of
spring is like the creation of Cosmos out of Chaos and the realization
of the Golden Age.
"Eurus ad Auroram Nabathaeaque regna recessit,
Persidaque, et radiis juga subdita matutinis."
"The East-Wind withdrew to Aurora and the Nabathean kingdom,
And the Persian, and the ridges placed under the morning rays.
Man was born. Whether that Artificer of things,
The origin of a better world, made him from the divine seed;
Or the earth, being recent and lately sundered from the high
Ether, retained some seeds of cognate heaven."
A single gentle rain makes the grass many shades greener. So our
prospects brighten on the influx of better thoughts. We should be
blessed if we lived in the present always, and took advantage of every
accident that befell us, like the grass which confesses the influence
of the slightest dew that falls on it; and did not spend our time in
atoning for the neglect of past opportunities, which we call doing our
duty. We loiter in winter while it is already spring. In a pleasant
spring morning all men's sins are forgiven. Such a day is a truce to
vice. While such a sun holds out to burn, the vilest sinner may
return. Through our own recovered innocence we discern the innocence
of our neighbors. You may have known your neighbor yesterday for a
thief, a drunkard, or a sensualist, and merely pitied or despised him,
and despaired of the world; but the sun shines bright and warm this
first spring morning, re-creating the world, and you meet him at some
serene work, and see how it is exhausted and debauched veins expand
with still joy and bless the new day, feel the spring influence with
the innocence of infancy, and all his faults are forgotten. There is
not only an atmosphere of good will about him, but even a savor of
holiness groping for expression, blindly and ineffectually perhaps,
like a new-born instinct, and for a short hour the south hillside
echoes to no vulgar jest. You see some innocent fair shoots preparing
to burst from his gnarled rind and try another year's life, tender and
fresh as the youngest plant. Even he has entered into the joy of his
Lord. Why the jailer does not leave open his prison doors- why the
judge does not dismis his case- why the preacher does not dismiss his
congregation! It is because they do not obey the hint which God gives
them, nor accept the pardon which he freely offers to all.
"A return to goodness produced each day in the tranquil and
beneficent breath of the morning, causes that in respect to the love
of virtue and the hatred of vice, one approaches a little the
primitive nature of man, as the sprouts of the forest which has been
felled. In like manner the evil which one does in the interval of a
day prevents the germs of virtues which began to spring up again from
developing themselves and destroys them.
"After the germs of virtue have thus been prevented many times
from developing themselves, then the beneficent breath of evening does
not suffice to preserve them. As soon as the breath of evening does
not suffice longer to preserve them, then the nature of man does not
differ much from that of the brute. Men seeing the nature of this man
like that of the brute, think that he has never possessed the innate
faculty of reason. Are those the true and natural sentiments of man?"
"The Golden Age was first created, which without any avenger
Spontaneously without law cherished fidelity and rectitude.
Punishment and fear were not; nor were threatening words read
On suspended brass; nor did the suppliant crowd fear
The words of their judge; but were safe without an avenger.
Not yet the pine felled on its mountains had descended
To the liquid waves that it might see a foreign world,
And mortals knew no shores but their own.
There was eternal spring, and placid zephyrs with warm
Blasts soothed the flowers born without seed."
On the 29th of April, as I was fishing from the bank of the river
near the Nine-Acre-Corner bridge, standing on the quaking grass and
willow roots, where the muskrats lurk, I heard a singular rattling
sound, somewhat like that of the sticks which boys play with their
fingers, when, looking up, I observed a very slight and graceful hawk,
like a nighthawk, alternately soaring like a ripple and tumbling a rod
or two over and over, showing the under side of its wings, which
gleamed like a satin ribbon in the sun, or like the pearly inside of a
shell. This sight reminded me of falconry and what nobleness and
poetry are associated with that sport. The merlin it seemed to me it
might be called: but I care not for its name. It was the most ethereal
flight I had ever witnessed. It did not simply flutter like a
butterfly, nor soar like the larger hawks, but it sported with proud
reliance in the fields of air; mounting again and again with its
strange chuckle, it repeated its free and beautiful fall, turning over
and over like a kite, and then recovering from its lofty tumbling, as
if it had never set its foot on terra firma. It appeared to have no
companion in the universe-sporting there alone- and to need none but
the morning and the ether with which it played. It was not lonely, but
made all the earth lonely beneath it. Where was the parent which
hatched it, its kindred, and its father in the heavens? The tenant of
the air, it seemed related to the earth but by an egg hatched some
time in the crevice of a crag;- or was its native nest made in the
angle of a cloud, woven of the rainbow's trimmings and the sunset sky,
and lined with some soft midsummer haze caught up from earth? Its eyry
now some cliffy cloud.
Beside this I got a rare mess of golden and silver and bright
cupreous fishes, which looked like a string of jewels. Ah! I have
penetrated to those meadows on the morning of many a first spring day,
jumping from hummock to hummock, from willow root to willow root, when
the wild river valley and the woods were bathed in so pure and bright
a light as would have waked the dead, if they had been slumbering in
their graves, as some suppose. There needs no stronger proof of
immortality. All things must live in such a light. O Death, where was
thy sting? O Grave, where was thy victory, then?
Our village life would stagnate if it were not for the unexplored
forests and meadows which surround it. We need the tonic of wildness-
to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-hen
lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to smell the whispering sedge
where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the
mink crawls with its belly close to the ground. At the same time that
we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all
things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely
wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can
never have enough of nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of
inexhaustible vigor, vast and titanic features, the sea-coast with its
wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the
thunder-cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces
freshets. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some
life pasturing freely where we never wander. We are cheered when we
observe the vulture feeding on the carrion which disgusts and
disheartens us, and deriving health and strength from the repast.
There was a dead horse in the hollow by the path to my house, which
compelled me sometimes to go out of my way, especially in the night
when the air was heavy, but the assurance it gave me of the strong
appetite and inviolable health of Nature was my compensation for this.
I love to see that Nature is so rife with life that myriads can be
afforded to be sacrificed and suffered to prey on one another; that
tender organizations can be so serenely squashed out of existence like
pulp-tadpoles which herons gobble up, and tortoises and toads run over
in the road; and that sometimes it has rained flesh and blood! With
the liability to accident, we must see how little account is to be
made of it. The impression made on a wise man is that of universal
innocence. Poison is not poisonous after all, nor are any wounds
fatal. Compassion is a very untenable ground. It must be expeditious.
Its pleadings will not bear to be stereotyped.
Early in May, the oaks, hickories, maples, and other trees, just
putting out amidst the pine woods around the pond, imparted a
brightness like sunshine to the landscape, especially in cloudy days,
as if the sun were breaking through mists and shining faintly on the
hillsides here and there. On the third or fourth of May I saw a loon
in the pond, and during the first week of the month I heard the
whip-poor-will, the brown thrasher, the veery, the wood pewee, the
chewink, and other birds. I had heard the wood thrush long before. The
phoebe had already come once more and looked in at my door and window,
to see if my house was cavern-like enough for her, sustaining herself
on humming winds with clinched talons, as if she held by the air,
while she surveyed the premises. The sulphur-like pollen of the pitch
pine soon covered the pond and the stones and rotten wood along the
shore, so that you could have collected a barrelful. This is the
"sulphur showers" we bear of. Even in Calidas' drama of Sacontala, we
read of "rills dyed yellow with the golden dust of the lotus." And so
the seasons went rolling on into summer, as one rambles into higher
and higher grass.
Thus was my first year's life in the woods completed; and the second
year was similar to it. I finally left Walden September 6th, 1847.
CONCLUSION:
==========
TO THE sick the doctors wisely recommend a change of air and
scenery. Thank Heaven, here is not all the world. The buckeye does not
grow in New England, and the mockingbird is rarely heard here. The
wild goose is more of a cosmopolite than we; he breaks his fast in
Canada, takes a luncheon in the Ohio, and plumes himself for the night
in a southern bayou. Even the bison, to some extent, keeps pace with
the seasons cropping the pastures of the Colorado only till a greener
and sweeter grass awaits him by the Yellowstone. Yet we think that if
rail fences are pulled down, and stone walls piled up on our farms,
bounds are henceforth set to our lives and our fates decided. If you
are chosen town clerk, forsooth, you cannot go to Tierra del Fuego
this summer: but you may go to the land of infernal fire nevertheless.
The universe is wider than our views of it.
Yet we should oftener look over the tafferel of our craft, like
curious passengers, and not make the voyage like stupid sailors
picking oakum. The other side of the globe is but the home of our
correspondent. Our voyaging is only great-circle sailing, and the
doctors prescribe for diseases of the skin merely. One hastens to
southern Africa to chase the giraffe; but surely that is not the game
he would be after. How long, pray, would a man hunt giraffes if he
could? Snipes and woodcocks also may afford rare sport; but I trust it
would be nobler game to shoot one's self.
"Direct your eye right inward, and you'll find
A thousand regions in your mind
Yet undiscovered. Travel them, and be
Expert in home-cosmography."
What does Africa- what does the West stand for? Is not our own
interior white on the chart? black though it may prove, like the
coast, when discovered. Is it the source of the Nile, or the Niger, or
the Mississippi, or a Northwest Passage around this continent, that we
would find? Are these the problems which most concern mankind? Is
Franklin the only man who is lost, that his wife should be so earnest
to find him? Does Mr. Grinnell know where he himself is? Be rather the
Mungo Park, the Lewis and Clark and Frobisher, of your own streams and
oceans; explore your own higher latitudes- with shiploads of preserved
meats to support you, if they be necessary; and pile the empty cans
sky-high for a sign. Were preserved meats invented to preserve meat
merely? Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within
you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought. Every man is
the lord of a realm beside which the earthly empire of the Czar is but
a petty state, a hummock left by the ice. Yet some can be patriotic
who have no self-respect, and sacrifice the greater to the less. They
love the soil which makes their graves, but have no sympathy with the
spirit which may still animate their clay. Patriotism is a maggot in
their heads. What was the meaning of that South-Sea Exploring
Expedition, with all its parade and expense, but an indirect
recognition of the fact that there are continents and seas in the
moral world to which every man is an isthmus or an inlet, yet
unexplored by him, but that it is easier to sail many thousand miles
through cold and storm and cannibals, in a government ship, with five
hundred men and boys to assist one, than it is to explore the private
seal the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one's being alone.
"Erret, et extremos alter scrutetur Iberos.
Plus habet hic vitae, plus habet ille viae."
Let them wander and scrutinize the outlandish Australians.
I have more of God, they more of the road.
It is not worth the while to go round the world to count the cats in
Zanzibar. Yet do this even till you can do better, and you may perhaps
find some "Symmes' Hole" by which to get at the inside at last.
England and France, Spain and Portugal, Gold Coast and Slave Coast,
all front on this private sea; but no bark from them has ventured out
of sight of land, though it is without doubt the direct way to India.
If you would learn to speak all tongues and conform to the customs of
all nations, if you would travel farther than all travellers, be
naturalized in all climes, and cause the Sphinx to dash her bead
against a stone, even obey the precept of the old philosopher, and
Explore thyself. Herein are demanded the eye and the nerve. Only the
defeated and deserters go to the wars, cowards that run away and
enlist. Start now on that farthest western way, which does not pause
at the Mississippi or the Pacific, nor conduct toward a wornout China
or Japan, but leads on direct, a tangent to this sphere, summer and
winter, day and night, sun down, moon down, and at last earth down
too.
It is said that Mirabeau took to highway robbery "to ascertain
what degree of resolution was necessary in order to place one's self
in formal opposition to the most sacred laws of society." He declared
that "a soldier who fights in the ranks does not require half so much
courage as a foot-pad"- "that honor and religion have never stood in
the way of a well-considered and a firm resolve." This was manly, as
the world goes; and yet it was idle, if not desperate. A saner man
would have found himself often enough "in formal opposition" to what
are deemed "the most sacred laws of society," through obedience to yet
more sacred laws, and so have tested his resolution without going out
of his way. It is not for a man to put himself in such an attitude to
society, but to maintain himself in whatever attitude he find himself
through obedience to the laws of his being, which will never be one of
opposition to a just government, if he should chance to meet with
such.
I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it
seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not
spare any more time for that one. It is remarkable how easily and
insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track
for ourselves. I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path
from my door to the pond-side; and though it is Eve or six years since
I trod it, it is still quite distinct. It is true, I fear, that others
may have fallen into it, and so helped to keep it open. The surface of
the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the
paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the
Highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity!
I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the
mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the
moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now.
I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances
confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the
life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in
common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible
boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to
establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be
expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he
will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion
as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less
complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor
weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work
need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the
foundations under them.
It is a ridiculous demand which England and America make, that you
shall speak so that they can understand you. Neither men nor
toadstools grow so. As if that were important, and there were not
enough to understand you without them. As if Nature could support but
one order of understandings, could not sustain birds as well as
quadrupeds, flying as well as creeping things, and hush and whoa,
which Bright can understand, were the best English. As if there were
safety in stupidity alone. I fear chiefly lest my expression may not
be extra-vagant enough, may not wander far enough beyond the narrow
limits of my daily experience, so as to be adequate to the truth of
which I have been convinced. Extra vagance! it depends on how you are
yarded. The migrating buffalo, which seeks new pastures in another
latitude, is not extravagant like the cow which kicks over the pail,
leaps the cowyard fence, and runs after her calf, in milking time. I
desire to speak somewhere without bounds; like a man in a waking
moment, to men in their waking moments; for I am convinced that I
cannot exaggerate enough even to lay the foundation of a true
expression. Who that has heard a strain of music feared then lest he
should speak extravagantly any more forever? In view of the future or
possible, we should live quite laxly and undefined in front our
outlines dim and misty on that side; as our shadows reveal an
insensible perspiration toward the sun. The volatile truth of our
words should continually betray the inadequacy of the residual
statement. Their truth is instantly translated; its literal monument
alone remains. The words which express our faith and piety are not
definite; yet they are significant and fragrant like frankincense to
superior natures.
Why level downward to our dullest perception always, and praise that
as common sense? The commonest sense is the sense of men asleep, which
they express by snoring. Sometimes we are inclined to class those who
are once-and-a-half-witted with the half-witted, because we appreciate
only a third part of their wit. Some would find fault with the morning
red, if they ever got up early enough. "They pretend," as I hear,
"that the verses of Kabir have four different senses; illusion,
spirit, intellect, and the exoteric doctrine of the Vedas"; but in
this part of the world it is considered a ground for complaint if a
man's writings admit of more than one interpretation. While England
endeavors to cure the potato-rot, will not any endeavor to cure the
brain-rot, which prevails so much more widely and fatally?
I do not suppose that I have attained to obscurity, but I should
be proud if no more fatal fault were found with my pages on this score
than was found with the Walden ice. Southern customers objected to its
blue color, which is the evidence of its purity, as if it were muddy,
and preferred the Cambridge ice, which is white, but tastes of weeds.
The purity men love is like the mists which envelop the earth, and not
like the azure ether beyond.
Some are dinning in our ears that we Americans, and moderns
generally, are intellectual dwarfs compared with the ancients, or even
the Elizabethan men. But what is that to the purpose? A living dog is
better than a dead lion. Shall a man go and hang himself because he
belongs to the race of pygmies, and not be the biggest pygmy that he
can? Let every one mind his own business, and endeavor to be what he
was made.
Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such
desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his
companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let
him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away. It
is not important that he should mature as soon as an apple tree or an
oak. Shall he turn his spring into summer? If the condition of things
which we were made for is not yet, what were any reality which we can
substitute? We will not be shipwrecked on a vain reality. Shall we
with pains erect a heaven of blue glass over ourselves, though when it
is done we shall be sure to gaze still at the true ethereal heaven far
above, as if the former were not?
There was an artist in the city of Kouroo who was disposed to strive
after perfection. One day it came into his mind to make a staff.
Having considered that in an imperfect work time is an ingredient, but
into a perfect work time does not enter, he said to himself, It shall
be perfect in all respects, though I should do nothing else in my
life. He proceeded instantly to the forest for wood, being resolved
that it should not be made of unsuitable material; and as he searched
for and rejected stick after stick, his friends gradually deserted
him, for they grew old in their works and died, but he grew not older
by a moment. His singleness of purpose and resolution, and his
elevated piety, endowed him, without his knowledge, with perennial
youth. As he made no compromise with Time, Time kept out of his way,
and only sighed at a distance because he could not overcome him.
Before he had found a stock in all respects suitable the city of
Kouroo was a hoary ruin, and he sat on one of its mounds to peel the
stick. Before he had given it the proper shape the dynasty of the
Candahars was at an end, and with the point of the stick he wrote the
name of the last of that race in the sand, and then resumed his work.
By the time he had smoothed and polished the staff Kalpa was no longer
the pole-star; and ere he had put on the ferule and the head adorned
with precious stones, Brahma had awoke and slumbered many times. But
why do I stay to mention these things? When the finishing stroke was
put to his work, it suddenly expanded before the eyes of the
astonished artist into the fairest of all the creations of Brahma. He
had made a new system in making a staff, a world with fun and fair
proportions; in which, though the old cities and dynasties had passed
away, fairer and more glorious ones had taken their places. And now he
saw by the heap of shavings still fresh at his feet, that, for him and
his work, the former lapse of time had been an illusion, and that no
more time had elapsed than is required for a single scintillation from
the brain of Brahma to fall on and inflame the tinder of a mortal
brain. The material was pure, and his art was pure; how could the
result be other than wonderful?
No face which we can give to a matter will stead us so well at
last as the truth. This alone wears well. For the most part, we are
not where we are, but in a false position. Through an infinity of our
natures, we suppose a case, and put ourselves into it, and hence are
in two cases at the same time, and it is doubly difficult to get out.
In sane moments we regard only the facts, the case that is. Say what
you have to say, not what you ought. Any truth is better than
make-believe. Tom Hyde, the tinker, standing on the gallows, was asked
if he had anything to say. "Tell the tailors," said he, "to remember
to make a knot in their thread before they take the first stitch." His
companion's prayer is forgotten.
However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and
call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when
you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise.
Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant,
thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poor-house. The setting sun is
reflected from the windows of the almshouse as brightly as from the
rich man's abode; the snow melts before its door as early in the
spring. I do not see but a quiet mind may live as contentedly there,
and have as cheering thoughts, as in a palace. The town's poor seem to
me often to live the most independent lives of any. Maybe they are
simply great enough to receive without misgiving. Most think that they
are above being supported by the town; but it oftener happens that
they are not above supporting themselves by dishonest means, which
should be more disreputable. Cultivate poverty like a garden herb,
like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether
clothes or friends. Turn the old; return to them. Things do not
change; we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. God will
see that you do not want society. If I were confined to a corner of a
garret all my days, like a spider, the world would be just as large to
me while I had my thoughts about me. The philosopher said: "From an
army of three divisions one can take away its general, and put it in
disorder; from the man the most abject and vulgar one cannot take away
his thought." Do not seek so anxiously to be developed, to subject
yourself to many influences to be played on; it is all dissipation.
Humility like darkness reveals the heavenly lights. The shadows of
poverty and meanness gather around us, "and lo! creation widens to our
view." We are often reminded that if there were bestowed on us the
wealth of Croesus, our aims must still be the same, and our means
essentially the same. Moreover, if you are restricted in your range by
poverty, if you cannot buy books and newspapers, for instance, you are
but confined to the most significant and vital experiences; you are
compelled to deal with the material which yields the most sugar and
the most starch. It is life near the bone where it is sweetest. You
are defended from being a trifler. No man loses ever on a lower level
by magnanimity on a higher. Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities
only. Money is not required to buy one necessary of the soul.
I live in the angle of a leaden wall, into whose composition was
poured a little alloy of bell-metal. Often, in the repose of my
mid-day, there reaches my ears a confused tintinnabulum from without.
It is the noise of my contemporaries. My neighbors tell me of their
adventures with famous gentlemen and ladies, what notabilities they
met at the dinner-table; but I am no more interested in such things
than in the contents of the Daily Times. The interest and the
conversation are about costume and manners chiefly; but a goose is a
goose still, dress it as you will. They tell me of California and
Texas, of England and the Indies, of the Hon. Mr.-- of Georgia or of
Massachusetts, all transient and fleeting phenomena, till I am ready
to leap from their court-yard like the Mameluke bey. I delight to come
to my bearings- not walk in procession with pomp and parade, in a
conspicuous place, but to walk even with the Builder of the universe,
if I may- not to live in this restless, nervous, bustling, trivial
Nineteenth Century, but stand or sit thoughtfully while it goes by.
What are men celebrating? They are all on a committee of arrangements,
and hourly expect a speech from somebody. God is only the president of
the day, and Webster is his orator. I love to weigh, to settle, to
gravitate toward that which most strongly and rightfully attracts me;-
not hang by the beam of the scale and try to weigh less- not suppose a
case, but take the case that is; to travel the only path I can, and
that on which no power can resist me. It affords me no satisfaction to
commerce to spring an arch before I have got a solid foundation. Let
us not play at kittly-benders. There is a solid bottom everywhere. We
read that the traveller asked the boy if the swamp before him had a
hard bottom. The boy replied that it had. But presently the
traveller's horse sank in up to the girths, and he observed to the
boy, "I thought you said that this bog had a hard bottom." "So it
has," answered the latter, "but you have not got half way to it yet."
So it is with the bogs and quicksands of society; but he is an old boy
that knows it. Only what is thought, said, or done at a certain rare
coincidence is good. I would not be one of those who will foolishly
drive a nail into mere lath and plastering; such a deed would keep me
awake nights. Give me a hammer, and let me feel for the furring. Do
not depend on the putty. Drive a nail home and clinch it so
faithfully that you can wake up in the night and think of your work
with satisfaction- a work at which you would not be ashamed to invoke
the Muse. So will help you God, and so only. Every nail driven should
be as another rivet in the machine of the universe, you carrying on
the work.
Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth. I sat at a
table where were rich food and wine in abundance, and obsequious
attendance, but sincerity and truth were not; and I went away hungry
from the inhospitable board. The hospitality was as cold as the ices.
I thought that there was no need of ice to freeze them. They talked to
me of the age of the wine and the fame of the vintage; but I thought
of an older, a newer, and purer wine, of a more glorious vintage,
which they had not got, and could not buy. The style, the house and
grounds and "entertainment" pass for nothing with me. I called on the
king, but he made me wait in his hall, and conducted like a man
incapacitated for hospitality. There was a man in my neighborhood who
lived in a hollow tree. His manners were truly regal. I should have
done better had I called on him.
How long shall we sit in our porticoes practising idle and musty
virtues, which any work would make impertinent? As if one were to
begin the day with long-suffering, and hire a man to hoe his potatoes;
and in the afternoon go forth to practise Christian meekness and
charity with goodness aforethought! Consider the China pride and
stagnant self-complacency of mankind. This generation inclines a
little to congratulate itself on being the last of an illustrious
line; and in Boston and London and Paris and Rome, thinking of its
long descent, it speaks of its progress in art and science and
literature with satisfaction. There are the Records of the
Philosophical Societies, and the public Eulogies of Great Men! It is
the good Adam contemplating his own virtue. "Yes, we have done great
deeds, and sung divine songs, which shall never die"- that is, as long
as we can remember them. The learned societies and great men of
Assyria- where are they? What youthful philosophers and
experimentalists we are! There is not one of my readers who has yet
lived a whole human life. These may be but the spring months in the
life of the race. If we have had the seven-years' itch, we have not
seen the seventeen-year locust yet in Concord. We are acquainted with
a mere pellicle of the globe on which we live. Most have not delved
six feet beneath the surface, nor leaped as many above it. We know not
where we are. Beside, we are sound asleep nearly half our time. Yet we
esteem ourselves wise, and have an established order on the surface.
Truly, we are deep thinkers, we are ambitious spirits! As I stand over
the insect crawling amid the pine needles on the forest floor, and
endeavoring to conceal itself from my sight, and ask myself why it
will cherish those humble thoughts, and bide its head from me who
might, perhaps, be its benefactor, and impart to its race some
cheering information, I am reminded of the greater Benefactor and
Intelligence that stands over me the human insect.
There is an incessant influx of novelty into the world, and yet we
tolerate incredible dulness. I need only suggest what kind of sermons
are still listened to in the most enlightened countries. There are
such words as joy and sorrow, but they are only the burden of a psalm,
sung with a nasal twang, while we believe in the ordinary and mean. We
think that we can change our clothes only. It is said that the British
Empire is very large and respectable, and that the United States are a
first-rate power. We do not believe that a tide rises and falls behind
every man which can float the British Empire like a chip, if he should
ever harbor it in his mind. Who knows what sort of seventeen-year
locust will next come out of the ground? The government of the world I
live in was not framed, like that of Britain, in after-dinner
conversations over the wine.
The life in us is like the water in the river. It may rise this year
higher than man has ever known it, and flood the parched uplands; even
this may be the eventful year, which will drown out all our muskrats.
It was not always dry land where we dwell. I see far inland the banks
which the stream anciently washed, before science began to record its
freshets. Every one has heard the story which has gone the rounds of
New England, of a strong and beautiful bug which came out of the dry
leaf of an old table of apple-tree wood, which had stood in a farmer's
kitchen for sixty years, first in Connecticut, and afterward in
Massachusetts- from an egg deposited in the living tree many years
earlier still, as appeared by counting the annual layers beyond it;
which was heard gnawing out for several weeks, hatched perchance by
the heat of an urn. Who does not feel his faith in a resurrection and
immortality strengthened by hearing of this? Who knows what beautiful
and winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under many
concentric layers of woodenness in the dead dry life of society,
deposited at first in the alburnum of the green and living tree, which
has been gradually converted into the semblance of its well-seasoned
tomb- heard perchance gnawing out now for years by the astonished
family of man, as they sat round the festive board- may unexpectedly
come forth from amidst society's most trivial and handselled
furniture, to enjoy its perfect summer life at last!
I do not say that John or Jonathan will realize all this; but such
is the character of that morrow which mere lapse of time can never
make to dawn. The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us.
Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn.
The sun is but a morning star.
THE END