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《Walden》
Contents
1. Ey
2. Where I Lived, aails> What I Lived For
3. Reading
4. Sounds
5. Solitude
6. Visitors
7. The Bean-Field
8. The Village
9. The Ponds
10..9９lｉｂ? Baker Farm
11. Higher Laws
12. Brute Neighbors
13. House-Warming
14. Inhabitants and Winter Visitors
15..s pulse. What shall I learn of
beans or beans of me? I cherish them, I hoe them, early and late I
have ao them; and this is my days 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 ae. My enemies are worms, cool days,
and most of all woodchucks. The last have nibbled for me a quarter
of an acre . But what right had I to oust johnswort and the
rest, and break up their a 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 ses stamped on
my memory. And now to-night my flute has waked the echoes over that
very water. The piill 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 presend influence is seen in these bean leaves,
blades, and potato vines.
I planted about two acres and a half of upland; and as it was
only about fifteen years sihe 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 aination had
aly dwelt here and planted 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 m 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, pag 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 encing 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 he worst form of idleness. It has a
stant and imperishable moral, and to the scholar it yields a
classic result. A very agricola laboriosus was I to travellers
bouward through Lin and Wayland to nobody knows where;
they sitting at their ease in gigs, with elbows on knees, and reins
loosely hanging ioons; 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 freat distan
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 ent
than was meant for his ear: "Beans so late! peas so late!" -- for I
tio plant when others had begun to hoe -- the ministerial
husbandman had not suspected it. ", my boy, for fodder;
for fodder." "Does he live there?" asks the black bo 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 reends 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 pared 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. ans
report. And, by the way, who estimates the value of the crop which
nature yields iill 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 ss grows a rid various crop only
unreaped by man. Mine was, as it were, the eg liween
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 Rans des Vaches for them.
Near at hand, upoopmost spray of a birch, sings the brown
thrasher -- or red mavis, as some love to call him -- all the
m, glad of your society, that would find out another farmers
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 , and so it was
safe from suemies as he. You may wonder what his rigmarole,
his amateur Paganini performances oring or oy, have
to do with your planting, a 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 unicled nations who in primeval years
lived uhese 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 ret cultivators
of the soil. When my hoe tinkled against the stohat music
echoed to the woods and the sky, and was an apao 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 goo 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 heavens 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, a a seamless cope
remained; small imps that fill the air and lay their eggs on the
ground on bare sand or rocks oops 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 cirg high in the sky,
alternately s and desding, approag, 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 por..ary. When I paused to lean on my hoe, these sounds and
sights I heard and saw anywhere in the roart of the
inexhaustible eai which the try offers.
On gala days the town fires its great guns, which echo like
popguns to these woods, and some waifs of martial music occasionally
pee 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 itg
and disease in the horizon, as if some eruption would break out
there sooher scarlatina or ker-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 somebodys bees had swarmed, and that the
neighbors, acc tils advice, by a faint tintinnabulum
upon the most sonorous of their domestic utensils, were endeav
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 khat 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 turo my
hoeing again I was filled with an inexpressible fidence, and
pursued my labor cheerfully with a calm trust iure.
When there were several bands of musis, 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 Mexi 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 aalestine, and
reminded me of a march of crusaders in the horizon, with a slight
tantivy and tremulous motion of the elm tree tops which 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 differen it.
It was a singular experiehat long acquaintance which I
cultivated with beans, what with planting, and hoeing, and
harvesting, and threshing, and pig over and selling them -- the
last was the hardest of all -- I might add eating, for I did taste.
I was determio know beans. When they were growing, I used to
hoe from five oclo the m till noon, and only spent
the rest of the day about other affairs. sider the intimate and
curious acquaintanakes with various kinds of weeds -- it
will bear some iteration in the at, for there was no little
iteration in the labor -- disturbing their delicate anizations so
ruthlessly, and making suvidious distins with his hoe,
levelling whole ranks of one species, and sedulously cultivating
another. Thats Roman wormwood -- thats pigweed -- thats sorrel
-- thats piper-grass -- have at him, chop him up, turn his roots
upward to the sun, do him have a fibre in the shade, if you
do hell turn himself t other side up and be as green as a leek in
two days. A long war, not with es, but with weeds, those
Trojans who had sun and rain and dews on their side. Daily the
beans saw me e 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 -- wavior, that towered a whole foot above
his crowding rades, fell before my on and rolled in the dust.
Those summer days whie of my poraries devoted to the
fis in Boston or Rome, and others to plation 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
ed, whether they mean pe or voting, and exged them
for rice; but, perce, 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, tioo long,
might have bee 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 aid for it in the end, "there being in truth," as
Evelyn says, "no post or laetation whatsoever parable to this
tinual motioination, and turning of the mould with the
spade." "The earth," he adds elsewhere, "especially if fresh, has a
certain magism 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 suceous to this
improvement." Moreover, this being one of those "worn-out and
exhausted lay fields whijoy their sabbath," had perce, 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 plaihat Mr. an
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+
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+
My ine atrem familias vendacem, non emacem esse
oportet), from
Nine bushels and twelve quarts of beans sold.99lｉｂ? .. $16.94
Five"large potatoes ..................... 2.50
Nine"small .............................. 2.25
Grass ........................................... 1.00
Stalks .......................................... 0.75
-------
In all .................................... $23.44
Leaving a peiary profit,
as I have elsewhere said, of .............. $ 8.71+
This is the result of my experien raising beans: Plant the
all 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 vacies by
planting anew. Then look out for woodchucks, if it is an exposed
place, for they will nibble off the earliest tender leaves almost
as they go; and again, when the young tendrils make their
appearahey have notice of it, and will shear them off with
both buds and young pods, sitti 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 with so mudustry another summer, but
such seeds, if the seed is not lost, as siy, truth,
simplicity, faith, innoce, 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 ihey were the seeds of those virtues,
were wormeaten or had lost their vitality, and so did not e up.
only men will only be brave as their fathers were brave, or
timid. This geion is very sure to plant and beans each
nerecisely as the Indians did turies ago and taught the
first settlers to do, as if there were a fate in it. I saw an old
maher day, to my astonishment, making the holes with a hoe
for the seveime at least, and not for himself to lie down
in! But why should not the New Englary 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 ourselves
so much about our beans for seed, and not be ed at all about
a new geion of men? We should really be fed and cheered if
whe a man we were sure to see that some of the qualities
which I have named, which rize more than those other
produs, but which are for the most part broadcast and floating
in the air, had taken root and grown in him. Here es 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 gress help to distribute them over all the land. We
should and upon ceremony with siy. 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 tha, like swallows alighted and
walking on the ground:--
"And as he spake, his wings would now and then
Spread, as he meant to fly, then close again --"
so that we should suspect that we might be versing 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, tnize any generosity in man
or Nature, to share any unmixed and heroic joy.
A 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
erely. We have ival, nor procession, nor ceremony,
not excepting our cattle-shows and so-called Thanksgivings, by which
the farmer expresses a sense of the saess of his calling, or is
reminded of its sacred in. It is the premium and the feast
which tempt him. He sacrifiot to Ceres and the Terrestrial
Jove, but to the infernal Plutus rather. By avarid
selfishness, and a grovelling habit, from whione of us is free,
arding 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 mea 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 acc
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 tet that the sun looks on our cultivated
fields and on the prairies and forests without distin. They
all refled 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 be of his light and
heat with a corresponding trust and magnanimity. What though I
value the seed of these beans, and harvest that in the fall of the
year? This broad field which I have looked at so long looks not to
me as the principal cultivator, but away from me to influences more
genial to it, which water and make it green. These beans have
results which are not harvested by me. Do they not grow for
woodchucks partly? The ear of wheat (in Latin spica, obsoletely
speca, from spe, hope) should not be the only hope of the
husbandman; its kernel rain (granum from gerendo, bearing) is
not all that it bears. How, then, 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 paratively whether the
fields fill the farmers barns. The true husbandman will cease from
ay, as the squirrels ma no 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
sacrifig in his mind not only his first but his last fruits also.
The Village
After hoeing, or perhaps reading and writing, in the forenoon, I
usually bathed again in the pond, swimming across one of its coves
for a stint, and washed the dust of labor from my person, or
smoothed out the last wrinkle which study had made, and for the
afternoon was absolutely free. Every day or two I strolled to the
village to hear some of the gossip which is incessantly going on
there, circulatiher from mouth to mouth, or from neer to
neer, and which, taken in homoeopathic doses, was really as
refreshing in its way as the rustle of leaves and the peeping of
frogs. As I walked in the woods to see the birds and squirrels, so
I walked in the village to see the men and boys; instead of the wind
among the pines I heard the carts rattle. In one dire from my
house there was a y of muskrats in the river meadows; uhe
grove of elms and buttonwoods iher 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 neighbors
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 o Redding & panys on State Street, they
kept nuts and raisins, or salt and meal and roceries. Some
have such a vast appetite for the former odity, that is, the
news, and such sound digestive ans, that they sit forever in
public avenues without stirring, a simmer and whisper
through them like the Etesian winds, or as if inhaliher, it
only produg numbness and insensibility to pain -- otherwise it
would often be painful to bear -- without affeg the
sciousness. 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 ined forward and their
eyes glang along the lihis 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 only 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 maery, they kept a bell, a
big gun, and a fire-e ve places; and the houses
were sed as to make the most of mankind, in lanes and
fronting one another, so that every traveller had to run the
gau, and every man, woman, and child might get a lick at him.
Of course, those who were stationed o the head of the line,
where they could most see and be seen, and have the first blow at
him, pa.９９lｉb.
id the highest prices for their places; and the few
straggling inhabitants iskirts, where long gaps in the line
began to occur, and the travel藏书网ler 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 jewellers; and others by
the hair or the feet or the skirts, as the barber, the shoemaker,
or the tailor. Besides, there was a still more terrible standing
invitation to call at every one of these houses, and pany
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 reeo those who run the
gau, 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, a 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 aced to make an irruption into some houses,
where I was well eained, and after learning the kernels and
very last sieveful of news -- what had subsided, the prospects of
eace, 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,
a 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 lain sailing. I had
many a genial thought by the fire "as I sailed." I was never
cast away nor distressed in aher, though I entered some
severe storms. It is darker in the woods, even in on nights,
than most suppose. I frequently had to look up at the opening
betweerees 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 knowion of particular trees
which I felt with my hands, passiween two pines for instance,
not more thaeen inches apart, in the midst of the woods,
invariably, in the darkest night. Sometimes, after ing 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 siep 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 ced to stay into
evening, and it proved a dark night, I was obliged to duct him to
the cart-path in the rear of the house, and then point out to him
the dire 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 m, by which time,
as there had been several heavy showers in the meanwhile, and the
leaves were very wet, they were dreo 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 iskirts, having e to town
a-shopping in their wagons, have been obliged to put up for the
night; alemen and ladies making a call have gone half a mile
out of their way, feeling the sidewalk only with their feet, and not
knowing wheurned. It is a surprising and memorable, as well
as valuable experieo be lost in the woods any time. Often in
a snow-storm, even by day, one will e out upon a well-known road
a find it impossible to tell which way leads to the village.
Though he knows that he has travelled it a thousand times, he ot
reize a feature in it, but it is as strao him as if it were
a road in Siberia. By night, of course, the perplexity is
infinitely great藏书网
er. In our most trivial walks, we are stantly,
though unsciously, steering like pilots by certain well-known
beas and headlands, and if we go beyond our usual course we still
carry in our minds the bearing of some neighb cape; and not
till we are pletely lost, or turned round -- for a man needs only
to be turned round oh his eyes shut in this world to be lost
-- do reciate the vastness and strangeness of nature. Every
man has to learn the points of pass again as often as be awakes,
whether from sleep or any abstra. 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 infient of our
relations.
Oernoohe end of the first summer, when I went to
the village to get a shoe from the cobblers, I was seized and put
into jail, because, as I have elsewhere related, I did not pay a tax
to, he 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 , strain 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 day, obtained my mended shoe, auro the woods in
season to get my dinner of huckleberries on Fair Haven Hill. I was
never molested by any person but those who represehe State. I
had no loor 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 fall I spent a fht in the woods of Maine. A 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 rospect I had of a supper. Yet, though many people of
every class came this way to the pond, I suffered no serious
invenience 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 vihat if all meo live as simply as I
then did, thieving and robbery would be unknown. These take place
only in unities where some have got more than is suffit
while others have not enough. The Popes Homers would soo
properly distributed.
"Nec bella fuerunt,
Faginus astabat dum scyphus ante dapes."
"Nor wars did men molest,
When only bee 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 on
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
sihey grew ohree hills. The ambrosial and essential
part of the fruit is lost with the bloom which is rubbed off in the
market cart, and they beere provender. As long as Eternal
Justice reigns, not one i huckleberry be transported
thither from the trys hills.
Occasionally, after my hoeing was done for the day, I joined
some impatient panion who had been fishing on the pond since
m, as silent and motionless as a duck or a floating leaf, and,
after practising various kinds of philosophy, had cluded
only, by the time I arrived, that he beloo the a
sect of obites. There was one older man, an excellent fisher
and skilled in all kinds of woodcraft, who leased to look upon
my house as a buildied for the venience of fishermen; and
I was equally pleased whe in my doorway te his
lines. On 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 only the case, I had o uh, I used
to raise the echoes by striking with a paddle on the side of my
boat, filling the surrounding woods with cirg 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, h around me,
and the moon travelling over the ribbed bottom, which was strewed
with the wrecks of the forest. Formerly I had e to this pond
adventurously, from time to time, in dark summer nights, with a
panion, and, making a fire close to the waters 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, ing
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 returo the woods, and, partly with a view
to the days 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 perd shiners,
dimpling the surface with their tails in the moonlight, and
unig by a long flaxen lih mysterious noal 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 uain
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 wao vast and ogonal
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 cast my line upward into the air, as well as downward
into this element, which was scarcely more dehus I caught two
fishes as it were with one hook.
The sery of Walden is on a humble scale, and, though very
beautiful, does not approach to grandeur, nor it much
one who has not long freque 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
tains about sixty-one and a half acres; a perennial spring in the
midst of pine and oak woods, without any visible i 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 a 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 cord
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 ge 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 sider 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 tihe shore where you 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 greehe shore. Some have referred
this to the refle 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 al
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 refle, I have
dised a matchless and indescribable light blue, such as watered
or geable silks and sword blades suggest, more cerulean than the
sky itself, alternating with the inal dark green on the opposite
sides of the waves, which last appeared but muddy in parison. 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 ohing 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 roduces a
monstrous effect, making fit studies for a Michael Angelo.
The water is so transparent that the bottom easily be
dised at the depth of twenty-five or thirty feet. Paddling over
it, you may see, ma beh 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 subsistehere. Once, in the winter,
many years ago, when I had been cutting holes through the i
order to catch pickerel, as I stepped ashore I tossed my axe ba
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 ered gently swaying
to and fro with the pulse of the pond; and there it might have stood
ered swaying till in the course of time the hated off,
if I had not disturbed it. Making another hole directly over it
with an ice chisel which I had, and cutting down the lo 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 posed 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 itle meadows retly
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 and bright like the element
they grow in. The stoend a rod or two into the water, and
thetom 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 oher pond just like this, White Pond, in Nine Acre
er, about two and a half miles westerly; but, though I am
acquainted with most of the ponds within a dozen miles of this
tre I do not know a third of this pure and well-like character.
Successive nations perce have drank at, admired, and fathomed
it, and passed away, and still its water is green and pellucid as
ever. Not an iting spring! Perhaps on that spring m
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
apanied 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. Eve had eo 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 cord wears in her et.
Yet perce the first who came to this well have left some
trace of their footsteps. I have been surprised to detect
encirg the pond, even where a thick wood has just been cut down
on the shore, a narrow shelf-like path ieep hillside,
alternately rising and falling, approag and reg from the
waters edge, as old probably as the raan here, worn by the
feet of abinal hunters, and still from time to time unwittingly
trodden by the present octs of the land. This is particularly
distinct to oanding 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 ored 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 eriod, nobody knows, though, as usual, many pretend to
know. It is only higher in the winter and lower in the summer,
though not corresponding to the general wet and dryness. I
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, oher hand, my friends used to listen
with incredulity when I told them, that a few years later I was
aced 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 verted 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 seve; ahe water shed
by the surrounding hills is insignifit 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 aplishment. I have observed one rise
and a part of two falls, and I expect that a dozen or fifteen years
hehe water will again be as low as I have ever known it.
Flints Pond, a mile eastward, allowing for the disturbance
occasioned by its is and outlets, and the smaller intermediate
ponds also, sympathize with Walden, aly attaiheir
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 sihe 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
est wheer is lowest. On the side of the po my
house a row of pitch pines, fiftee high, has been killed and
tipped over as if by a lever, and thus a stop put to their
enents; and their size indicates how many years have elapsed
sihe 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 ot hold it by right of possession. These are the lips of
the lake, on whio beard grows. It licks its chaps from time to
time. Wheer 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 ier, 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
only produo fruit, bear an abundant crop uhese
circumstances.
Some have been puzzled to tell how the shore became sularly
paved. My townsmen have all heard the tradition -- the oldest
people tell me that they heard it in their youth -- that aly
the Indians were holding a po 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 stoes, though this vice is one
of which the Indians were never guilty, and while they were thus
ehe hill shook and suddenly sank, and only one old squaw,
named Walden, escaped, and from her the pond was named. It has been
jectured that when the hill shook these stones rolled down its
side and became the present shore. It is very certain, at any rate,
that ohere was no pond here, and now there is one; and this
Indian fable does not in any respect flict with the at of
that a 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 poieadily downward, and
he cluded to dig a well here. As for the stones, many still
think that they are hardly to be ated for by the a 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
he 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 inally 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, iown. 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 oclo
the afternoon till noon the day, the sixth of March, 1846, the
thermometer having been up to 65x or 70x some of the time, owing
partly to the sun on the roof, was 42x, 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 45x, 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 bees so warm
as most water which is exposed to the sun, on at of its depth.
In the warmest weather I usually placed a pailful in my cellar,
where it became cool in the night, and remained s 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
p９9lib?
the thick bark f
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 stru a
vein of gold, deep into the earth. But only 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
woodchoppers kindlings, when he has a camp in the woods. On 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
ey, that I was awake.--
Light-winged Smoke, Icarian bird,
Melting thy pinions in thy upward flight,
Lark without song, and messenger of dawn,
Cirg above the hamlets as thy ;
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 inse 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
returhree or four hours afterward, it would be still alive and
glowing. My house was y though I was gone. It was as if I
had left a cheerful housekeeper behind. It was I and Fire that
lived there; and only my housekeeper proved trustworthy. One
day, however, as I litting 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 ainguished 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 ed in my cellar, nibbling every third potato, and
making a snug bed even there of some hair left after plastering and
of broer; for even the wildest animals love fort 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 ing
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 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
fis. 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 respeor 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, reater snow would put a period to mans
existen the globe.
The winter I used a small cooking-stove for ey, 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 fotten, 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
sted the house, but it cealed the fire, and I felt as if I had
lost a panion. You always see a fa the fire. The
laborer, looking into it at evening, purifies his thoughts of the
dross ahiness which they have accumulated during the day.
But I could no longer sit and look into the fire, and the perti
words of a poet recurred to me with new force.--
"Never, bright flame, may be deo me
Thy dear, life imaging, close sympathy.
What but my hopes shot upward eer sht?
What but my fortunes sunk so low in night?
Why art thou banished from our hearth and hall,
Thou who art weled and beloved by all?
Was thy existehen too fanciful
For our lifes on light, who are so dull?
Did thy bright gleam mysterious verse hold
With our genial 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 pact 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 gohrough the wind blew the oak leaves into my tracks, where
they lodged, and by abs the rays of the sued 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 jure
up the former octs of these woods. Within the memory of many
of my towhe 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 remembrahe pines would
scrape both sides of a chaise at once, and women and children who
were pelled to go this way to Lin alone and on foot did it
with fear, and often ran a good part of the distahough mainly
but a humble route to neighb villages, or for the woodmans
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 s 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 Bristers Hill.
East of my bean-field, across the road, lived Cato Ingraham,
slave of Dun Ingraham, Esquire, gentleman, of cord village,
who built his slave a house, and gave him permission to live in
Walden Woods; -- Cato, not Utisis, but cordiensis. Some say
that he was a Guinea Negro. There are a few who remember his little
patch among the walnuts, which he let grow up till he should be old
ahem; but a younger and whiter speculatot them at last.
He too, however, occupies an equally narrow house at present.
Catos half-obliterated cellar-hole still remains, though known to
few, being cealed 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 er of my field, still o town,
Zilpha, a colored woman, had her little house, where she spun linen
for the townsfolk, making the Walden Wo 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 Bristers 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 Lin
burying-ground, a little on one side, he unmarked graves of
some British grenadiers who fell ireat from cord --
where he is styled "Sippio Brister" -- Scipio Afrius 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 i way of inf 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 cord 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 Bristers Hill, but was long
since killed out by pitch pines, excepting a few stumps, whose old
roots furnish still the wild stoany a thrifty village tree.
Nearer yet to town, you e to Breeds location, oher
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 promi 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 es 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 indistind dubious
tradition says that oavern stood; the well the same, which
tempered the travellers beverage and refreshed his steed. Here
then men saluted one another, and heard a..nd told the news, a
their ways again.
Breeds 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, oion night, if I do not mistake.
I lived on the edge of the village then, and had just lost myself
over Davenants "Go," that wihat I labored with a
lethargy -- which, by the way, I never knew whether tard as a
family plaint, having an uncle who goes to sleep shaving himself,
and is obliged to sprout potatoes in a cellar Sundays, in order to
keep awake ahe Sabbath, or as the sequeny attempt
to read Chalmers colle 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. "Its Bakers barn," cried one. "It is the an
place," affirmed another. And then fresh sparks went up above the
wood, as if the roof fell in, and we all shouted "cord to the
rescue!" Wagons shot past with furious speed and crushing loads,
bearing, perce, among the rest, the agent of the Insurance
pany, who was bound to go however far; and ever and anon the
engiinkled 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, rejeg the
evidence of our senses, until at a turn in the road we heard the
crag 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 cluded to let it burn, it was sone and so
worthless. So we stood round ine, jostled one another,
expressed our ses through speaking-trumpets, or in lower tone
referred to the great flagrations which the world has witnessed,
including Bass 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 oo another
flood. We finally retreated without doing any mischief -- returned
to sleep and "Go." But as for "Go," I would except
that passage in the preface about wit being the souls powder --
"but most of mankind are strao wit, as Indians are to
powder."
It ced 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 ied in this burning, lying on his
stomad looking over the cellar wall at the still smouldering
ders beh, muttering to himself, as is his wont. He had been
w 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, cealed betweeones,
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 fasteo the heavy end -- all that he could now g to --
to vince me that it was no on "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 Lin.
Farther in the woods than any of these, where the road
approaches o the pond, Wymater squatted, and
furnished his townsmen with earthenware, a desdants to
succeed him. her were they ri 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 forms
sake, as I have read in his ats, 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 ing Wyman the younger. He had
long ago bought a potters wheel of him, and wished to know what had
bee of him. I had read of the potters clay and wheel in
Scripture, but it had never occurred to me that the pots we use were
not such as had e down unbroken from those days, rown on
trees like gourds somewhere, and I leased 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 h coil enough), who occupied
Wymans te -- 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 ain. His trade here was that of a
ditcher. Napoleoo 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 Bristers Hill shortly
after I came to the woods, so that I have not remembered him as a
neighbor. Before his house ulled down, when his rades
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 fessed to me that, though he had heard of
Bristers Spring, he had never seen it; and soiled cards, kings of
diamonds, spades, as, were scattered over the floor. One
black chi which the administrator could not catch, black as
night and as silent, not even croaking, awaiting Reynard, still went
to roost in the 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 stuy 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 ittens
would he want more.
Now only a dent in the earth marks the site of these dwellings,
with buried cellar stones, and strawberries, raspberries,
thimble-berries, hazel-bushes, and sumachs growing in the sunny
sward there; some pitch pine narled oak occupies what was the
ey nook, and a sweet-sted 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
uhe sod, when the last of the race departed. What a sorrowful
act must that be -- the c up of wells! t 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 learn of their clusions 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 geion after the door and
lintel and the sill are gone, unfolding its sweet-sted flowers
each spring, to be plucked by the musing traveller; planted and
tended once by childrens hands, in front-yard plots -- now standing
by wallsides iired 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 stu 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 mans garden and
orchard, aheir story faintly to the lone wanderer a
half-tury 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 cord keeps its ground? Were there no natural advantages --
no water privileges, forsooth? Ay, the deep Walden Pond and cool
Bristers Spring -- privilege to drink long ahy 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, -parg, linen-spinning, and pottery
business have thrived here, making the wildero blossom like
the rose, and a numerous posterity have ied the land of their
fathers? The sterile soil would at least have been proof against a
low-land degeneracy. Alas! how little does the memory of these
human inhabitants enhahe 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 oe of a more a
city, whose materials are ruins, whose gardeeries. The soil
is blanched and accursed there, and before that bees necessary
the earth itself will be destroyed. With such reminisces 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 fht
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 settlers family in
the town of Sutton, in this State, whose cottage was pletely
covered by the great snow of 1717 when he was absent, and an Indian
found it only by the hole which the eys breath made in the
drift, and so relieved the family. But no friendly Indian ed
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 ss 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 ss, t>e
from the ground, as it appeared the 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 betwees. For a
week of eveher I took exactly the same number of steps, and of
the same length, ing and going, stepping deliberately and with
the precision of a pair of dividers in my owracks -- to such
routihe winter reduces us -- yet often they were filled with
heavens own blue. But her 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 appoi with a beech
tree, or a yellow birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines;
when the id snow causing their limbs to droop, and so
sharpening their tops, had ged the pines into fir trees; wading
to the tops of the highest hills 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 goo winter quarters.
Oernoon I amused myself by watg 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 ched the snow with my
feet, but could not plainly see me. When I made most noise he would
stretch out his neck, a his neck feathers, and open his eyes
wide; but their lids soon fell again, and he began to nod. I too
felt a slumberous influeer watg 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 endeav to realize me,
vague objeote 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 ued breadth, I
could not hear th藏书网e 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 entered 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 turo it the other also. Nor was it
much better by the carriage road from Bristers Hill. For I came to
town still, like a friendly Indian, when the tents 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 rabbits traor 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 s 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 ced to be at home, I heard the g 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 frostead of
a professown, 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, brag 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
oy.
The one who came from farthest to my lodge, through deepest
snows and most dismal tempests, oet. A farmer, a hunter, a
soldier, a reporter, even a philosopher, may be daunted; but nothing
deter a poet, for he is actuated by pure love. Who predict
his ings 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 aed in parison. At suitable intervals there
were regular salutes of laughter, which might have been referred
indifferently to the last-uttered or the forth-i. We made
many a "bran new" theory of life over a thin dish of gruel, which
bihe advantages of viviality with the clear-headedness
which philosophy requires.
I should not fet that during my last wi the pond there
was another wele visitor, who at oime 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 -- ecticut gave him to the
world -- he peddled first her wares, afterwards, as he declares, his
brains. These he peddles still, prompting God and disgrag 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 ure in the present. But though
paratively disregarded now, when his day es, laws unsuspected
by most will take effect, and masters of families and rulers will
e to him for advice.
"How blind that ot 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 mens bodies, the God
of whom they are but defaced and leaning mos. With his
hospitable intellect he embraces children, beggars, insane, and
scholars, aertains the thought of all, adding to it only
some breadth and elegance. I think that he should keep a
caravansary on the worlds highway, where philosophers of all
nations might put up, and on his sign should be printed,
"Eai for man, but not for his beast. Enter ye that have
leisure and a quiet mind, who early seek the right road." He is
perhaps the sa man and has the fewest crotchets of any I ce
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 enhahe beauty of the landscape. A
blue-robed man, whose fittest roof is the overarg sky which
reflects his serenity. I do not see how he ever die; Nature
ot spare him.
Having eae shingles of thought well dried, we sat and
whittled them, trying our knives, and admiring the clear yellowish
grain of the pumpkin pine. We waded so gently and reverently, or we
pulled together so smoothly, that the fishes of thought were not
scared from the stream, nor feared any angler on the bank, but came
a grandly, like the clouds which float through the western
sky, and the mother-o-pearl flocks whietimes 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 Lreat Expecter!
to verse with whom was a New England Nights Eai. 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 hoounds weight there was
above the atmospheric pressure on every circular inch; it opes
seams so that they had to be calked with much dulhereafter to
stop the sequent leak; -- but I had enough of that kind of oakum
already picked.
There was oher 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 es. 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 approag 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 Flints Pond,
after it was covered with snow, though I had often paddled about and
skated over it, it was so uedly wide and se that I
could think of nothing but Baffins Bay. The Lin hills rose up
arou the extremity of a snowy plain, in which I did not
remember to have stood before; and the fishermen, at an
ierminable 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 mies. I took this course when I went to lecture in
Lin 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 y of muskrats dwelt, and raised their s 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 fio 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, 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 frozeh 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 ated somewhat like how der do; or
sometimes hoo, hoo only. One night in the beginning of winter,
before the pond froze over, about nine oclock, 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 odore
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, respo regular
intervals to the goose, as if determio expose and disgrace this
intruder from Hudsons Bay by exhibiting a greater pass and
volume of voi a native, and boo-hoo him out of cord horizon.
What do you mean by alarming the citadel at this time of night
secrated to me? Do you think I am ever caught napping at su
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. A, if you had a
discriminating ear, there were in it the elements of a cord such
as these plains never saw nor heard.
I also heard the whooping of the i the pond, my great
bed-fellow in that part of cord, as if it were restless in its
bed and would fain turn over, were troubled with flatulend had
dreams; or I was waked by the crag of the ground by the frost,
as if some one had driven a team against my door, and in the m
would find a cra 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 ame, barking
raggedly and demoniacally like forest dogs, as if lab with some
ay, or seeking expression, struggling fht and to be dogs
ht and run freely ireets; for if we take the ages into
our at, 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 o my window, attracted by my light, barked
a vulpine curse at me, and thereated.
Usually the red squirrel (Sciurus Hudsonius) waked me in the
dawn, c 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藏书网 threw out half a bushel of ears of sweet , which had
not got ripe, on to the snow-crust by my door, and was amused by
watg the motions of the various animals which were baited by it.
Iwilight and the night the rabbits came regularly and made a
hearty meal. All day long the red squirrels came a, and
afforded me mutertai 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
inceivable 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 dang girl -- wasting more time in delay and
circumspe 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 iop of a young pitch pine, winding
up his clod 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 , aing a suitable ear, frisk about
in the same uain trigorical way to the topmost stiy
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 ao the ground, when he would look over at it with a
ludicrous expression of uainty, as if suspeg that it had
life, with a mind not.9９lib. made up whether to get it again, or a new one,
or be off; now thinking of , 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,
siderably bigger than himself, and skilfully balang 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, scratg 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
determio 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 piree forty or fifty
rods distant, and I would afterwards find the cobs strewn about the
woods in various dires.
At length the jays arrive, whose discordant screams were heard
long before, as they were warily making their approa eighth of
a mile off, and in a stealthy and sneaking mahey 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 disge
it, and spend an hour in the endeavor to crack it by repeated blows
with their bills. They were maly 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, pig up
the crumbs the squirrels had dropped, flew to the wig and,
plag them uheir claws, hammered away at them with their
little bills, as if it were an i in the bark, till they were
suffitly reduced for their slehroats. A little flock of
these titmice came daily to pick a dinner out of my woodpile, or the
crumbs at my door, with faint flitting lisping notes, like the
tinkling of icicles in the grass, or else with sprightly day day
day, or more rarely, in spring-like days, a wiry summery phe-be
from the woodside. They were so familiar that at length one
alighted on an armful of wood which I was carrying in, and pecked at
the sticks without fear. I once had a sparrow alight upon my
shoulder for a moment while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I
felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstahan 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 way.
When the ground was not yet quite covered, and agaihe
end of winter, when the snow was melted on my south hillside and
about my wood-pile, the partridges came out of the woods m 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, whies 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
cealed for a day or two." I used to start them in the open land
also, where they had e out of the woods at suo "bud" the
wild apple trees. They will e regularly every evening to
particular trees, where the ing sportsman lies in wait for them,
and the distant orchards he woods suffer thus not a little. I
am glad that the partridge gets fed, at any rate. It is Natures
own bird which lives on buds and diet drink.
In dark winter ms, or in short winter afternoons, I
sometimes heard a pack of hounds threading all the woods with
hounding cry and yelp, uo resist the instinct of the chase,
and the note of the hunting-horn at intervals, proving that man was
in the rear. The wo again, a 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
frozeh he would be safe, or if be would run in a straight line
away no foxhound could overtake him; but, havi his pursuers
far behind, he stops to rest and listen till they e 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 st. A huold me that he once saw a fox
pursued by hounds burst out on to Waldehe ice was covered
with shallow puddles, run part way across, and theurn to the
same shore. Ere long the hounds arrived, but here they lost the
st. Sometimes a pack hunting by themselves would pass my door,
and circle round my house, and yelp and hound witharding 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 ret 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
questioerrupted 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 e to bathe
in Walden once every year wheer was warmest, and at such
times looked in upoold me that many years ago he took his gun
oernoon a out for a cruise in Walden Wood; and as he
walked the Wayland road he heard the cry of hounds approag, 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 at, and
disappeared again in the woods. Late iernoon, as he was
resting ihick 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 wo sounding
nearer and nearer, now from Well Meadow, now from the Baker Farm.
For a long time he stood still and listeo their music, so sweet
to a hunters ear, when suddenly the fox appeared, threading the
solemn aisles with an easy c pace, whose sound was cealed
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 ered listening, with his back to the
hunter. For a moment passioraihe latters arm; but
that was a short-lived mood, and as quick as thought follow
thought his piece was levelled, and whang! -- the fox, rolling over
the rock, lay dead on the ground. The huill kept his place
and listeo the hounds. Still on they came, and now the near
woods resouhrough 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 hunte9９ｌｉb.r came
forward and stood in their midst, and the mystery was solved. They
waited in silence while he skihe fox, then followed the brush
a while, and at length turned off into the woods again. That
evening a Weston squire came to the cord hunters cottage to
inquire for his hounds, and told how for a week they had been
hunting on their own at from Weston woods. The cord hunter
told him what he knew and offered him the skin; but the other
deed it aed. He did not find his hounds that night,
but the day learhat 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 m.
The hunter who told me this could remember one Sam Nutting, who
used to hunt bears on Fair Haven Ledges, and exge their skins
for rum in cord village; who told him, even, that he had seen a
moose there. Nutting had a famous foxhound named Burgoyne -- he
pronou Bugine -- which my informant used to borrow. In the
"Wast Book" of an old trader of this toas also a captain,
town-clerk, and representative, I find the followiry. 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+"; 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 preserv.es
the horns of the last deer that was killed in this viity, 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 oo four inches
in diameter, which had been gnawed by mice the previous winter -- a
Nian 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 pletely
girdled; but after another winter such were without exception dead.
It is remarkable that a single mouse should thus be allowed a whole
piree for its dinner, gnawing round instead of up and down it;
but perhaps it is necessary in order to thirees, which are
wont to grow up densely.
The hares (Lepus Amerius) were very familiar. One had her
form under my house all winter, separated from me only by the
fl, and she startled me each m 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 e round my
door at dusk to nibble the potats which I had thrown out,
and were so nearly the color of the ground that they could hardly be
distinguished when still. Sometimes iwilight I alternately
lost and recovered sight of oting 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 oed my pity. One
evening o 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, st tail and slender paws. It
looked as if Nature no longer taihe breed of nobler bloods,
but stood on her last toes. Its large eyes appeared young and
uhy, almost dropsical. I took a step, and lo, away it scud
with aic spring over the snow-crust, straightening its body
and its limbs into graceful length, and soon put the forest between
me and itself -- the wild free venison, asserting its vigor and the
dignity of Nature. Not without reason was its slenderness. Such
then was its nature. (Lepus, levipes, light-foot, some think.)
What is a try without rabbits and partridges? They are
among the most simple and indigenous animal products; a and
venerable families known to antiquity as to modern times; of the
very hue and substance of Nature, 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 cealment, and they beore numerous
than ever. That must be a poor try ihat does not support
a hare. Our woods teem with them both, and around every s may
be seen the partridge or rabbit walk, beset with twiggy fences and
horse-hair snares, whie 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 endeav 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 plate
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 es to reveal to us this great
work, which extends from earth even into the plains of the ether."
Then to my m 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 wihe liquid
and trembling surface of the pond, which was so sensitive to every
breath, and reflected every light and shadow, bees solid to the
depth of a foot or a foot and a half, so that it will support the
heaviest teams, and perce 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 bees
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 m, while all things are crisp with frost, men
e with fishing-reels and slender lunch, a down their fine
lihrough the snowy field to take pickerel and perch; wild men,
who instinctively follow other fashions and trust other authorities
thaownsmen, and by their goings and ings stitch towns
together in parts where else they would be ripped. They sit a
their lun 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 sulted with books, and know and tell much less
than they have dohe 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 sihe ground froze, and so he caught
them. His life itself passes deeper in nature thaudies of
the naturalist pee; himself a subject for the naturalist. The
latter raises the moss and bark gently with his knife in search of
is; 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 sht 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 ks in the scale of being are filled.
When I strolled around the pond in misty weather I was sometimes
amused by the primitive mode whie ruder fisherman had adopted.
He would perhaps have placed alder branches over the narrow holes in
the ice, which were four or five rods apart and an equal distance
from the shore, and having fastehe end of the lio 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 sn to the streets,
even to the woods, fn as Arabia to our cord life. They
possess a quite dazzling and transdey 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, nray 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 beh the rattling
teams and chaises and tinkling sleighs that travel the Walden road,
this great gold and emerald fish swims. I never ced to see its
kind in any market; it would be the osure of all eyes there.
Easily, with a few vulsive 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 pass and and sounding lihere 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 itomlessness of a pond without
taking the trouble to sound it. I have visited two suless
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, perce with watery eyes into the bargain,
and driven to hasty clusions by the fear of catg cold in
their breasts, have seen vast holes "into which a load of hay might
be driven," if there were anybody to drive it, the undoubted source
of the Styx arao 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 assure my readers that
Walden has a reasonably tight bottom at a not unreasohough
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
wheohe bottom, by having to pull so much harder
before the water got underh 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
be spared by the imagination. What if all ponds were shallow?
Would it not rea the minds of men? I am thankful that this
pond was made deep and pure for a symbol. While men believe in the
infinite some ponds will be thought to be bottomless.
A factory-owner, hearing what depth I had found, thought that it
could not be true, for, judging from his acquaintah 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 se through its tre 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 ih," and about fifty miles long, surrounded by
mountains, observes, "If we could have seen it immediately after the
diluvian crash, or whatever vulsion of nature occasio,
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, ly these
proportions to Walden, which, as we have seen, appears already in a
vertical se only like a shallow plate, it will appear four
times as shallow. So much for the increased horrors of the chasm of
Loch Fyne wheied. No doubt many a smiling valley with its
stretg fields 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 vihe unsuspeg
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 ceal
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 lise, dives deeper
and soars higher than Nature goes. So, probably, the depth of the
o will be found to be very insiderable pared with its
breadth.
As I souhrough the ice I could determihe 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, he
middle, I could calculate the variation for eae hundred feet in
any dire beforehand within three or four inches. Some are
aced to speak of deep and dangerous holes even in quiet sandy
ponds like this, but the effect of water uhese circumstances
is to level all inequalities. The regularity of the bottom and its
ity to the shores and the range of the neighb hills were
so perfect that a distant promontory betrayed itself in the
soundings quite across the pond, and its dire could be
determined by the opposite shore. Cape bees bar, and
plain shoal, and valley and ge deep water and el.
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 ce. Having noticed that the number
indig the greatest depth arently in the tre of the
map, I laid a rule on the map lengthwise, and thehwise, 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 frular, and the extreme length and breadth were
got by measuring into the coves; and I said to myself, Who knows but
this hint would duct to the deepest part of the o 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 teo be an expansion of water within
the land not only horizontally but vertically, and to form a basin
or indepe pond, the dire of the tes 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
pared with its length, the water over the bar was deeper pared
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 the outlines of a
surfad the character of its shores alone, I made a plan of
White Pond, which tains about forty-one acres, and, like this,
has no island in it, nor any visible i or outlet; and as the
line of greatest breadth fell very he line of least breadth,
where two opposite capes approached each other and two opposite bays
receded, I veo 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 dire to which I had ined, 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
plicated.
If we knew all the laws of Nature, we should need only one fact,
or the description of oual 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 fusion or
irregularity in Nature, but by norance of essential elements
in the calculation. Our notions of law and harmony are only
fio those instances which we detect; but the harmony which
results from a far greater number of seemingly flig, but
really curring, 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 whe or bored through it is not prehended in its
entireness.
What I have observed of the pond is rue ihics. 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 lihrough the length and breadth of the aggregate of a
mans particular daily behaviors and waves of life into his coves
and is, 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 adjat try or circumstao infer his depth and
cealed bottom. If he is surrounded by mountainous circumstances,
an Achillean shore, whose peaks overshadow and are reflected in his
bosom, they suggest a correspondih in him. But a low and
smooth shore proves him shallow on that side. In our bodies, a bold
projeg brow falls off to and indicates a correspondih of
thought. Also there is a bar across the entrance of our every cove,
or particular ination; each is our harbor for a season, in which
we are detained and partially land-locked. These inations are
not whimsical usually, but their form, size, and dire are
determined by the promontories of the shore, the a 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 ination
in the shore in which a thought was harbored bees an individual
lake, cut off from the o, whereihought secures its own
ditions -- ges, perhaps, from salt to fresh, bees a sweet
sea, dead sea, or a marsh. At the advent of eadividual into
this life, may we not suppose that such a bar has risen to the
surfaewhere? It is true, we are such poor navigators that our
thoughts, for the most part, stand off and on upon a harborless
coast, are versant only with the bights of the bays of poesy, or
steer for the public ports of entry, and go into the dry docks of
sce, where they merely refit for this world, and no natural
currents cur to individualize them.
As for the i 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
stag them up there, not being thiough to lie side by side
with the rest; and the cutters thus discovered that the ice over a
small space was two or three ihihan elsewhere, which
made them think that there was an ihere. 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 neighb meadow, pushing
me out on a cake of ice to see it. It was a small cavity uen
feet of water; but I think that I warrant the pond not to need
s till they find a worse leak than that. One has suggested,
that if such a "leach-hole" should be found, its e with the
meadow, if aed, might be proved by veying some, colored
powder or sawdust to the mouth of the hole, and then putting a
strainer over the spring in the meadow, which would cate of
the particles carried through by the current.
While I was surveying, the ice, which was sixteen ihick,
undulated under a slight wind like water. It is well known that a
level ot 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 dete 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 ider a deep snow which had sunk it thus far; but the
water began immediately to run into these holes, and tio
run for two days ireams, which wore away the i every
side, and tributed 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 itom 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 spiders web, what you may call ice rosettes, produced by the
els worn by the water flowing from all sides to a tre.
Sometimes, also, when the ice was covered with shallow puddles, I
saw a double shadow of myself, oanding on the head of the
other, one on the ice, the other orees or hillside.
While yet it is cold January, and snow and ice are thid
solid, the prudent landlord es 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 . He cuts and saws the solid pond,
unroofs the house of fishes, and carts off their very element and
air, held fast by s and stakes like corded wood, through the
fav 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 underh.
In the winter of 46-7 there came a hundred men of Hyperborean
extra swoop down on to our pond one m, 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 e to sow a crop of winter rye, or some other kind of grain
retly introduced from Id. As I saw no manure, I judged that
they meant to skim the land, as I had dohinking the soil was
deep and had lain fallow long enough. They said that a gentleman
farmer, who was behind the ses, wao double his money,
which, as I uood, amouo half a million already; but in
order to cover eae of his dollars with another, he took off the
only coat, ay, the skin itself, of Walden Pond in the midst of a
hard winter. They went to work at once, plowing, barrowing,
rolling, furrowing, in admirable order, as if they were bent on
making this a model farm; but when I was looking sharp to see what
kind of seed they dropped into the furrow, a gang of fellows by my
side suddenly began to hook up the virgin mould itself, with a
peculiar jerk, 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
cutti in a bog. So they came a every day, with a
peculiar shriek from the lootive, from and to some point of the
pions, 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 cra 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 aowledged 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 blod 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 desigo 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 Wihat 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 t of this would reach its
destination, and that two or three per t 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, taining more air than
usual, or for some other reason, it never got to market. This heap,
made in the winter of 46-7 aimated to taihousand
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
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 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-mans sled into the village street, and
lies there for a week like a great emerald, an object of io
all passers. I have noticed that a portion of Walden whi 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 day will have frozen blue. Perhaps the
blue color of water and ice is due to the light and air they
tain, and the most transparent is the bluest. Ice is an
iing subject for plation. 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 bees putrid,
but frozen remains sweet forever? It is only said that this is
the differeween the affes 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 almanad 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, refleg 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 m I bathe my intelle the stupendous and
ogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat-Geeta, since whose position
years of the gods have elapsed, and in parison 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 sublimi?ty from our ceptions. 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 e 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 fav 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 iropic
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 only 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 effe Walden that year, for she had soon got a thiew
garment to take the place of the old. This pond never breaks up so
soon as the others in this neighborhood, on at both of its
greater depth and its having no stream passing through it to melt or
wear away the ice. I never k to open in the course of a
winter, not excepting that of 52-3, which gave the ponds so severe
a trial. It only opens about the first of April, a week or ten
days later than Flints 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, bei affected by tra ges of
temperature. A severe cold of a few days duration in March may very
much retard the opening of the former ponds, while the temperature
of Walden increases almost uninterruptedly. A thermometer thrust
into the middle of Walden oh of March, 1847, stood at 32x,
or freezing point; he shore at 33x; in the middle of Flints
Pond, the same day, at 32+x; at a dozen rods from the shore, in
shallow water, under ice a foot thick, at 36x. This difference of
three and a half degrees betweeemperature of the deep water
and the shallow iter pond, and the fact that a great
proportion of it is paratively shallow, show why it should break
up so much soohan Walden. The i the shallowest part was
at this time several ihihan in the middle. In
midwihe middle had been the warmest and the ice thi
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 dista, and on the surface where it is deep, than near
the bottom. In spring the sun not os an influehrough
the increased temperature of the air ah, 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 as 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 tains to extend themselves upward and downward until it is
pletely honeybed, 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 "b," that is, assume the appearance of
honeyb, 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 risio 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 underh, and
so had access to both sides, the refle of the sun from the
bottom more than terbalahis 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 i 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 beh.
The phenomena of the year take place every day in a pond on a
small scale. Every m, 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 m. The day is aome of the year. The
night is the wihe m and evening are the spring and
fall, and the noon is the summer. The crag and booming of the
idicate a ge of temperature. One pleasant m after a
cold night, February 24th, 1850, having goo Flints 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 stru a tight drum-head. The pond began
to boom about an hour after sunrise, when it felt the influence of
the suns 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 pletely 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 ot tell surely when to expect its thundering; but though I
may perceive no differen the weather, it does. Who would have
suspected se 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 ges as the globule of mercury in its
tube.
Ora in ing to the woods to live was that I should
have leisure and opportunity to see the Spring e in. The i
the pond at length begins to be honeybed, and I set my heel
in it as I walk. Fogs and rains and warmer suns are gradually
melting the snow; the days have grown sensibly longer; and I see how
I shall get through the winter without adding to my wood-pile, for
large fires are no longer necessary. I am on the alert for the
first signs of spring, to hear the ote of some arriving
bird, or the striped squirrels chirp, for his stores must be now
nearly exhausted, or see the woodchuck ve of his winter
quarters. Oh 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 pletely melted for half a rod in width about the shore, the
middle was merely honeybed and saturated with water, so that you
could put your foot through it when six ihick; but by the
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 pletely 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 i ected with the breaking up of the rivers and
ponds and the settling of the weather is particularly iing to
us who live in a climate of so great extremes. When the warmer days
e, they who dwell he 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 es out of the mud with quakings of the
earth. One old man, who has been a close observer of Nature, and
seems as thhly wise in regard to all her operations as if she
had been put upoocks when he was a boy, and he had helped to
lay her keel -- who has e to his growth, and 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 wo any of
Natures operations, for I thought that there were s
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 go of the river, and
he dropped down without obstru from Sudbury, where he lived, to
Fair Haven Pond, which he found, uedly, 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 cealed 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, ahought 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 ing in to
settle there, and, seizing his guarted 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 siderable height
before it came to a standstill.
At length the suns rays have attaihe right angle, and warm
winds blow up mist and rain ahe snowbanks, and the sun,
dispersing the mist, smiles on a checkered landscape of russet and
white smoking with inse, 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 on on se a scale, though
the number of freshly exposed banks of the right material must have
been g?ly multiplied since railroads were ied. The material
was sand of every degree of fineness and of various rich colors,
only mixed with a little clay. When the frost es out in the
spring, and even in a thawing day in the wihe 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 interlae 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 ih, and resembling, as you look down ohe
laiated, lobed, and imbricated thalluses of some lis; or you
are reminded of coral, of leopards 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 a and typical
than athus, chiccory, ivy, vine, or aable leaves;
destined perhaps, under some circumstao bee 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 rid agreeable, embrag the different
iron colors, brown, gray, yellowish, and reddish. When the flowing
mass reaches the drain at the foot of the bank it spreads out
flatter into strands, the separate streams losing their
semi-drical form and gradually being more flat and broad,
running together as they are more moist, till they form an almost
flat sand, still variously aifully shaded, but in which you
trace the inal forms of vegetation; till at length, in the
water itself, they are verted into banks, like those formed off
the mouths of rivers, and the forms of vegetation are lost in the
ripple marks otom.
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 iehus suddenly. When I see on the one side
the i 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 e to where he was still at work,
sp on this bank, and with excess of energy strewing his fresh
designs about. I feel as if I were o the vitals of the
globe, for this sandy overflow is something such a foliaass
as the vitals of the animal body. You find thus in the very sands
an anticipation of the vegetable leaf. No wohat the earth
expresses itself outwardly in leaves, it so labors with the idea
inwardly. The atoms have already learhis law, and are pregnant
by it. The ing 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 (jnai, labor, lapsus, to flow or slip downward, a lapsing;
jiais, 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 sti?99liｂ.ll drier and thinner leaves. Thus, also, you pass from the
lumpish grub in the earth to the airy and fluttering butterfly. The
very globe tinually transds and translates itself, and bees
winged in its orbit. Even ice begins with delicate crystal leaves,
as if it had flowed into moulds which the fronds of lants have
impressed oery 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 is in their axils.
When the sun withdraws the sand ceases to flow, but in the
m the streams will start once more and brand branch again
into a myriad of others. You here see perce 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 sus higher, the most fluid portion, in its effort to obey
the law to which the most i also yields, separates from the
latter and forms for itself a meandering el or artery within
that, in which is seen a little silvery stream glang like
lightning from oage of pulpy leaves or brao another, and
ever and anon swallowed up in the sand. It is wonderful hoidly
yet perfectly the sand aself as it flows, using the best
material its mass affords to form the sharp edges of its el.
Such are the sources of rivers. In the siliatter which the
water deposits is perhaps the bony system, and iill finer
soil and anic 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 gealed. 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 menial heaven? Is not the
hand a spreading palm leaf with its lobes and veins? The ear may be
regarded, fancifully, as a li, umbilicaria, on the side of the99lｉb?
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
ma gealed drop or stalactite. The is a still larger
drop, the fluent 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
thid now l drop, larger or smaller; the lobes are the
fingers of the leaf; and as many lobes as it has, in so many
dires it tends to flow, and more heat or enial
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 luxuriand fertility of
vineyards. True, it is somewhat excrementitious in its character,
and there is o 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 ing 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
iions. It vinces 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
inanic. 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; pared with whose great tral 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 ; they will never excite me
like the forms which this molteh 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 es 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 os, the
other but breaks in pieces.
When the ground artially bare of snow, and a few warm days
had dried its surfaewhat, it leasant to pare 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 iing frequently than in summer
even, as if their beauty was not ripe till then; even cotton-grass,
cat-tails, mulleins, johnswort, hard-hack, meadow-sweet, and other
strong-stemmed plants, those unexhausted granaries whitertain
the earliest birds -- det weeds, at least, which widowed Nature
wears. I am particularly attracted by the arg 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 yptian. Many of the phenomena of Winter are
suggestive of an inexpressible tenderness and fragile delicacy. We
are aced 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,
a up the queerest chug 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
respe their mad pranks, defying humanity to stop them. No, you
dont -- chickaree -- chickaree. They were wholly deaf to my
arguments, or failed to perceive their force, and fell into a strain
of iive that was irresistible.
The first sparrow of spring! The year beginning with younger
hope than ever! The faint silvery warblin..gs heard over the
partially bare and moist fields from the bluebird, the song sparrow,
and the red-wing, as if the last flakes of wiinkled as they
fell! What at such a time are histories, ologies, 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 apa
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 years 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
els, 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 al two rods wide along
the northerly aerly 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
mular! It is unusually hard, owing to the ret severe but
tra cold, and all watered or waved like a palace floor. But
the wind slides eastward over its opaque surfa 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 oive fish. Such is the
trast between winter and spring. Walden was dead and is alive
again. But this spring it broke up more steadily, as I have said.
The ge from storm and wio serene and mild weather,
from dark and sluggish hours tht aies, 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 wiill
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, refleg a summer evening sky in its bosom, though none
was visible overhead, as if it had intelligeh some remote
horizon. I heard a robin in the distahe first I had heard for
many a thousand years, methought, whose note I shall not fet 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 meawig.
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
ered alive, as if effectually sed aored by the
rain. I khat 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 urained plaint and mutual solation. 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 aled in the pond. So I came in, and shut the
door, and passed my first spring night in the woods.
In the m I watched the geese from the door through the
mist, sailing in the middle of the pond, fifty rods off, se
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 ander, and
when they had got into rank circled about over my head, twenty-nine
of them, and then steered straight to ada, 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 cirg, groping gor of some
solitary goose in the foggy ms, seeking its panion, 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 iime I heard the martins twittering over
my clearing, though it had not seemed that the township tained so
many that it could afford me any, and I fahat they were
peculiarly of the a 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 glang 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 ing in
of spring is like the creation of os 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 uhe m rays.
. . . . . . .
Man was born. Whether that Artificer of things,
The in of a better world, made him from the divine seed;
Or the earth, bei and lately sundered from the high
Ether, retained some seeds of ate 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 act that befell us, like the grass which fesses the
influence of the slightest dew that falls on it; and did not spend
our time in atoning for the of past opportunities, which we
call doing our duty. We loiter in winter while it is already
spring. In a pleasant spring m all mens sins are fiven.
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 innoce
we dis the innoce 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 m, recreating the
world, and you meet him at some serene work, and see how it is
exhausted and debauched veins expand with still joy and bless the
new day, feel the spring influeh the innoce of infancy,
and all his faults are fotten. There is not only an atmosphere
of good will about him, but even a savor of holiness groping for
expression, blindly and iually perhaps, like a new-born
instinct, and for a short hour the south hill-side echoes to no
vulgar jest. You see some i fair shoots preparing to burst
from his gnarled rind and try another years life, tender and fresh
as the you 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 gregation! 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 iranquil and
benefit breath of the m, 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 mahe evil whie does ierval of a
day prevents the germs of virtues which began t up again
from developing themselves aroys them.
"After the germs of virtue have thus beeed many times
from developing themselves, then the benefit breath of evening
does not suffice to preserve them. As soon as the breath of evening
does not suffice loo preserve them, theure 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 ses of man?"
"The Golden Age was first created, which without any avenger
Spontaneously without law cherished fidelity aude.
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 desded
To the liquid waves that it might see a fn 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."
Oh of April, as I was fishing from the bank of the
river he Nine-Acre-er 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 s 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 falry 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 relian 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
rec from its lofty tumbling, as if it had never set its foot
on terra firma. It appeared to have no panion in the universe --
sp there alone -- and to need the m and the
ether with which it played. It was not lonely, but made all the
earth lonely beh 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 made in the angle of a
cloud, woven of the rainbows trimmings and the su 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
peed to those meadows on the m of many a first spring
day, jumping from hummomock, 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 he tonic
of wildness -- to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and
the meadow-hen lurk, ahe booming of the so smell the
whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl
builds her , and the mink crawls with its belly close to the
ground. At the same time that we are earo 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 ever 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 deg trees, the
thunder-cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces
freshets. We o 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 derivih and strength from the repast.
There was a dead horse in the hollow by the path to my house, which
pelled me sometimes to go out of my way, especially in the night
when the air was heavy, but the assura gave me of the strong
appetite and inviolable health of Nature was my pensation for
this. I love to see that Nature is so rife with life that myriads
be afforded to be sacrificed and suffered to prey on one
ahat tender anizations 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 act, we must see
how little at is to be made of it. The impression made on a
wise man is that of universal innoce. Poison is not poisonous
after all, nor are any wounds fatal. passion 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 sunshio the landscape, especially in cloudy
days, as if the sun were breaking through mists and shining faintly
on the hillsides here and there. Ohird 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 e once more and looked in at
my door and window, to see if my house was cavern-like enough for
her, sustaining herself on humming wings with ched 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 Satala, we read of "rills dyed yellow
with the golden dust of the lotus." And so the seaso rolling
on into summer, as one rambles into higher and higher grass.
Thus was my first years life in the woods pleted; and the
sed year was similar to it. I finally left Waldeember 6th,
1847.
Conclusion
To the sick the doctors wisely reend a ge of air and
sery. Thank Heaven, here is not all the world. The buckeye does
not grow in New England, and the mogbird is rarely heard here.
The wild goose is more of a opolite than we; he breaks his fast
in ada, takes a lun 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 heh set to our lives and our
fates decided. If you are chosen town clerk, forsooth, you ot
go to Tierra del Fuego this summer: but you may go to the land of
infernal fire heless. 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
pig oakum. The other side of the globe is but the home of our
correspo. 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 name to shoot ones self.--
"Direct your eye right inward, and youll find
A thousand regions in your mind
Yet undiscovered. Travel them, and be
Expert in home-ography."
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 ti,
that we would find? Are these the problems which most
mankind? Is Franklin the only man who is lost, that his wife should
be so earo 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 os; explore your own higher latitudes --
with shiploads of preserved meats to support you, if they be
necessary; and pile the empty s sky-high for a sign. Were
preserved meats ied to preserve meat merely? Nay, be a
bus to whole new tis and worlds within you, opening new
els, 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 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
Expl Expedition, with all its parade and expense, but an
i reition of the fact that there are tis and seas
in the moral world to which every man is an isthmus or an i, yet
unexplored by him, but that it is easier to sail many thousand miles
through cold and storm and ibals, in a gover ship, with
five hundred men and boys to assist ohan it is to explore the
private sea, the Atlantid Pacific O of ones being alone.
"Erret, et extremos alter scrutetur Iberos.
Plus habet hic vitae, plus habet ille viae."
Let them wander and scrutihe outlandish Aus..tralians.
I have more of God, they more of the road.
It is not worth the while to go round the world to t the cats in
Zanzibar. Yet do this even till you do better, and you may
perhaps find some "Symmes Hole" by which to get at the i
last. England and France, Spain and Pal, 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
to the s of all nations, if you would travel farther than all
travellers, be naturalized in all climes, and cause the Sphinx to
dash her head against a stone, evehe precept of the old
philosopher, and Explore thyself. Herein are demahe eye and
the nerve. Only the defeated aers 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 Pacifior duct
toward a wornout a or Japan, but leads on direct, a tao
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 plaes 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 ce as a footpad" -- "that honor and religion have
ood in the way of a well-sidered and a firm resolve."
This was manly, as the woes; a 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 obedieo 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 su attitude to society, but to maintain
himself in whatever attitude he find himself through obedieo
the laws of his being, which will never be one of opposition to a
just gover, if he should eet with such.
I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps
it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not
spare any more time for that one. It is remarkable how easily and
insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track
for ourselves. I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a
path from my door to the pond-side; and though it is five or six
years sirod 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 ity! I did not wish to take a 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 learhis, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances
fidently in the dire of his dreams, and endeavors to live
the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success
ued in on 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 lise of a higher order of
beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the
universe will appear less plex, 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 uhem.
It is a ridiculous demand whigland and America make, that
you shall speak so that they uand you. her men nor
toadstools grow so. As if that were important, and there were not
enough to uand you without them. As if Nature could support
but one order of uandings, could not sustain birds as well as
quadrupeds, flying as well as creeping things, and hush and whoa,
which Bright uand, were the best English. As if there
were safety in stupidity alone. I fear chiefly lest my expression
may not be extravagant 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 vinced. Extra vaga depends on
how you are yarded. The migrating buffalo, which seeks new pastures
in another latitude, is ravagant 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
vihat I ot exaggerate enough even to lay the foundation
of a true expression. Who that has heard a strain of music feared
the 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 tinually betray the inadequacy of the
residual statement. Their truth is instantly translated; its
literal mo alone remains. The words which express our faith
and piety are not definite; yet they are signifit and fragrant
like frankinse to superior natures.
Why level downward to our dullest perception always, and praise
that as on sehe o sense is the sense of men
asleep, which they express by sn. Sometimes we are ined to
class those who are ond-a-half-witted with the half-witted,
because reciate only a third part of their wit. Some would
find fault with the m 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
doe of the Vedas"; but in this part of the world it is
sidered a ground for plaint if a mans writings admit of more
thaerpretation. 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 attaio 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 ers
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 Ameris, and moderns
generally, are intellectual dwarfs pared with the as, 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 ? 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
panions, 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 dition
of things which we were made for is not yet, what were ay
which we substitute? We will not be shipwrecked on a vain
reality. Shall we with pai 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 iy of Kouroo who was disposed to
strive after perfe. One day it came into his mind to make a
staff. Having sidered that in an imperfect work time is an
ingredient, but into a perfect work time does er, he said to
himself, It shall be perfe 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 aed 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 promise with
Time, Time kept out of his way, and only sighed at a distance
because he could not overe him. Before he had found a sto
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 dahars was at an end, and
with the point of the stick he wrote the name of the last of that
ra the sand, and then resumed his work. By the time he had
smoothed and polished the staff Kalpa was no lohe 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 mentiohings? When the finishing stroke ut to
his work, it suddenly expanded before the eyes of the astonished
artist into the fairest of all the creations of Brahma. He had made
a new system in making a staff, a world with full and fair
proportions; in which, though the old cities and dynasties had
passed away, fairer and mlorious 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 stillation from the brain of Brahma to fall on and inflame
the tinder of a mortal brain. The material ure, and his art
ure; how could the result be other than wonderful?
No face which we 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 ihread before they
take the first stitch." His panions prayer is fotten.
However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it
and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks
poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults
even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps
have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poorhouse.
The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the almshouse as
brightly as from the rich mans abode; the snow melts before its
door as early in the spring. I do not see but a quiet mind may live
as tentedly there, and have as cheering thoughts, as in a palace.
The towns poor seem to me often to live the most indepe 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 supp
themselves by disho means, which should be more disreputable.
Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble
yourself much to get hings, whether clothes or friends. Turn
the old; return to them. Things do not ge; we ge. Sell
your clothes and keep your thoughts. God will see that you do not
want society. If I were fio a er 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 take away its general, and put it in
disorder; from the man the most abjed vulgar one ot take
away his thought." Do not seek so anxiously to be developed, to
subject yourself to many influeo 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 remihat 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 ye by poverty, if you ot buy books and
neers, for instance, you are but fio the most
signifit and vital experiences; you are pelled to deal with
the material which yields the most sugar and the most starch. It is
life he 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 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 position was
poured a little alloy of bell-metal. Often, in the repose of my
mid-day, there reaches my ears a fused tintinnabulum from
without. It is the noise of my poraries. My neighbors tell
me of their adventures with famous gentlemen and ladies, what
notabilities they met at the diable; but I am no more
ied in such things than in the tents of the Daily Times.
The i and the versation are about e 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 Geia or of Massachusetts, all tra and
fleeting phenomena, till I am ready to leap from their court-yard
like the Mameluke bey. I delight to e to my bearings -- not walk
in procession with pomp and parade, in a spicuous place, but to
walk even with the Builder of the universe, if I may -- not to live
in this restless, nervous, bustling, trivial eenth tury, but
stand or sit thoughtfully while it goes by. What are men
celebrating? They are all on a ittee ements, and
hourly expect a speech from somebody. God is only the president of
the day, aer 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
, and that on whio power resist me. It affords me no
satisfa to erce t 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
s before him had a hard bottom. The boy replied that it had.
But presently the travellers 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 quids of
society; but he is an old boy that knows it. Only what is thought,
said, or do a certain rare ce 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, a me feel for the furring. Do not depend on the
putty. Drive a nail home and ch it so faithfully that you
wake up in the night and think of your work with satisfa -- a
work at which you would not be ashamed to ihe Muse. So will
help you God, and so only. Every nail driven should be as another
rivet in the mae of the universe, you carrying on the work.
Rather than love, than mohan fame, give me truth. I sat
at a table where were rich food and wine in abundance, and
obsequious attendance, but siy 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
mlorious vintage, which they had not got, and could not buy.
The style, the house and grounds and "eai" pass for
nothing with me. I called on the king, but he made me wait in his
hall, and ducted 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 doer had I called on
him.
How long shall we sit in our porticoes practising idle and musty
virtues, whiy work would make imperti? As if oo
begin the day with long-suffering, and hire a man to hoe his
potatoes; and iernoon go forth to practise Christian
meekness and charity with goodness aforethought! sider the a
pride and stagnant self-plaankind. This geion
ines a little to gratulate itself on being the last of an
illustrious line; and in Boston and London and Paris and Rome,
thinking of its long dest, it speaks of its progress in art and
sd literature with satisfa. There are the Records of
the Philosophical Societies, and the public Eulogies of Great Men!
It is the good Adam plating his own virtue. "Yes, we have
done great deeds, and sung divine songs, which shall never die" --
that is, as long as we 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 cord. We are
acquainted with a mere pellicle of the globe on which we live. Most
have no..t delved six feet beh the surfaor 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 i crawling amid the
pine needles on the forest floor, and endeav to ceal 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
beor, and impart to its rae cheering information, I am
reminded of the greater Beor and Intelligehat stands over
me the human i.
There is an incessant influx of y into the world, a
we tolerate incredible dulness. I need only suggest what kind of
sermons are still listeo in the most enlightened tries.
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 ge our clothes only.
It is said that the British Empire is very large and respectable,
and that the Uates are a first-rate power. We do not
believe that a tide rises and falls behind every man which 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 e
out of the ground? The gover of the world I live in was not
framed, like that of Britain, in after-dinner versations 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 aly washed, before
sce began to record its freshets. Every one has heard the story
which has gohe rounds of New England, of a strong aiful
bug which came out of the dry leaf of an old table of apple-tree
wood, which had stood in a farmers kit for sixty years, first
in ecticut, and afterward in Massachusetts -- from an egg
deposited in the living tree many years earlier still, as appeared
by ting the annual layers beyond it; which was heard gnawing out
for several weeks, hatched perce by the heat of an urn. Who
does not feel his faith in a resurre and immortality
strengthened by hearing of this? Who knows what beautiful and
winged life, whose egg has been buried fes under many
tric 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 verted into the semblance of its
well-seasoomb -- heard perawing out now for years by
the astonished family of man, as they sat round the festive board --
may uedly e forth from amidst societys 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
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 m star.
ON THE DUTY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE
I heartily accept the motto, -- "That gover is best which
gover"; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly
and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which
also I believe, -- "That gover is best which governs not at
all"; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of
gover which they will have. Gover is at best but an
expedient; but most govers are usually, and all govers are
sometimes, inexpedient. The objes which have been brought
against a standing army, and they are many ay, and deserve
to prevail, may also at last be brought against a standing
gover. The standing army is only an arm of the standing
gover. The gover itself, which is only the mode which the
people have chosen to execute their will, is equally liable to be
abused and perverted before the people act through it. Witness
the present Mexi war, the work of paratively a few individuals
using the standing gover as their tool; for, iset, the
people would not have seo this measure.
This Ameri gover -- what is it but a tradition, though a
ret one, endeav to transmit itself unimpaired to posterity,
but eastant losing some of its iy? It has not the
vitality and force of a single living man; for a single man bend
it to his will. It is a sort of wooden gun to the people
themselves. But it is not the less necessary for this; for the
people must have some plicated maery or other, and hear its
din, to satisfy that idea of gover which they have.
Govers show thus how successfully men be imposed on, even
impose on themselves, for their own advantage. It is excellent, we
must all allow. Yet this gover never of itself furthered any
enterprise, but by the alacrity with which it got out of its way.
It does not keep the try free. It does not settle the West. It
does not educate. The character i in the Ameri people has
done all that has been aplished; and it would have done somewhat
more, if the gover had not sometimes got in its way. For
gover is an expedient by which men would fain succeed in
letting one another alone; and, as has been said, when it is most
expedient, the governed are most let alone by it. Trade and
erce, if they were not made of India rubber, would never manage
to bounce over the obstacles which legislators are tinually
putting in their way; and, if oo judge these men wholly by
the effects of their as, and not partly by their iions,
they would deserve to be classed and punished with those mischievous
persons who put obstrus on the railroads.
But, to speak practically and as a citizen, uhose who
call themselves no-gover men, I ask for, not at ono
gover, but at once a better gover. Let every man make
known what kind of gover would and his respect, and that
will be oep toward obtaining it.
After all, the practical reason why, when the power is on
the hands of the people, a majority are permitted, and for a long
period tio rule, is not because they are most likely to be
in the right, nor because this seems fairest to the minority, but
because they are physically the stro. But a gover in
which the majority rule in all cases ot be based on justice,
even as far as men uand it. there not be a gover in
which majorities do not virtually decide right and wrong, but
sce? -- in which majorities decide only those questions to
which the rule of expediency is applicable? Must the citizen ever
for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his sce to the
legislator? Why has every man a sce, then? I think that we
should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to
cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only
obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what
I think right. It is truly enough said that a corporation has no
sce; but a corporation of stious men is a corporation
with a sce. Law never made men a whit more just; and, by
means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made
the agents of injustice. A on and natural result of an undue
respect for law is, that you may see a file of soldiers, el,
captain, corporal, privates, powder-monkeys, and all, marg in
admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills,
ay, against their on sense and sces, which makes it very
steep marg indeed, and produces a palpitation of the heart.
They have no doubt that it is a damnable business in which they are
ed; they are all peaceably ined. Now, what are they?
Men at all? or small movable forts and magazines, at the service of
some unscrupulous man in power? Visit the Navy Yard, and behold a
marine, such a man as an Ameri gover make, or such as it
make a man with its black arts -- a mere shadow and reminisce
of humanity, a man laid out alive and standing, and already, as one
may say, buried under arms with funeral apas, though it
may be
"Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note,
As his corse to the rampart we hurried;
Not a soldier discharged his farewell shot
Oer the grave where our hero we buried."
The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as
maes, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the
militia, jailers, stables, posse itatus, etc. In most cases
there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral
sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood ah and
stones; and wooden men perhaps be manufactured that will serve
the purpose as well. Suand no more respect than men of straw
or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses
and dogs. Yet such as these even are oeemed good
citizens. Others, as most legislators, politis, lawyers,
ministers, and office-holders, serve the state chiefly with their
heads; and, as they rarely make any moral distins, they are as
likely to serve the devil, without intending it, as God. A very
few, as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and
men, serve the state with their sces also, and so necessarily
resist it for the most part; and they are only treated as
enemies by it. A wise man will only be useful as a man, and will
not submit to be "clay," and "stop a hole to keep the wind away,"
but leave that office to his dust at least:--
"I am too high-born to be propertied,
To be a sedary at trol,
Or useful serving-man and instrument
To any sn state throughout the world."
He who gives himself eo his fellow-men appears to them
useless and selfish; but he who gives himself partially to them is
pronounced a beor and philanthropist.
How does it bee a man to behave toward this Ameri
govero-day? I ahat he ot without disgrace be
associated with it. I ot for an instant reize that
political anization as my gover which is the slaves
gover also.
All men reize the right of revolution; that is, the right to
refuse allegiao, and to resist, the gover, when its
tyranny or its inefficy are great and unendurable. But almost
all say that such is not the case now. But such was the case, they
think, in the Revolution of 75. If oo tell me that this
was a bad gover because it taxed certain fn odities
brought to its ports, it is most probable that I should not make an
ado about it, for I do without them. All maes have their
fri; and possibly this does enough good to terbalahe
evil. At any rate, it is a great evil to make a stir about it. But
when the fri es to have its mae, and oppression and
robbery are anized, I say, let us not have such a mae any
longer. In other words, when a sixth of the population of a nation
which has uaken to be the refuge of liberty are slaves, and a
whole try is unjustly overrun and quered by a fn army,
and subjected to military law, I think that it is not too soon for
ho men to rebel and revolutionize. What makes this duty the
more urgent is the fact that the try so overrun is not our own,
but ours is the invading army.
Paley, a on authority with many on moral questions, in his
chapter on the "Duty of Submission to Civil Gover," resolves
all civil obligation into expediency; and he proceeds to say that
"so long as the i of the whole society requires it, that is,
so long as the established gover ot be resisted or ged
without publiveniency, it is the will of God... that the
established gover be obeyed, and no longer.... This principle
being admitted, the justice of every particular case of resistance
is reduced to a putation of the quantity of the danger and
grievan the one side, and of the probability and expense of
redressing it oher." Of this, he says, every man shall
judge for himself. But Paley appears o have plated
those cases to which the rule of expediency does not apply, in which
a people, as well as an individual, must do justice, cost what it
may. If I have unjustly wrested a plank from a drowning man, I must
restore it to him though I drown myself. This, acc to Paley,
would be inve. But he that would save his life, in such a
case, shall lose it. This people must cease to hold slaves, and to
make war on Mexico, though it cost them their existence as a people.
In their practiations agree with Paley; but does any one
think that Massachusetts does exactly what is right at the present
crisis?
"A drab of state, a cloth-o-silver slut,
To have her train borne up, and her soul trail in the dirt."
Practically speaking, the oppos to a reform in Massachusetts are
not a huhousand politis at the South, but a hundred
thousand merts and farmers here, who are more ied in
erd agriculture than they are in humanity, and are not
prepared to do justice to the slave and to Mexico, cost what it may.
I quarrel not with far-off foes, but with those who, near at home,
co-operate with, and do the bidding of those far away, and without
whom the latter would be harmless. We are aced to say, that
the mass of men are unprepared; but improvement is slow, because the
few are not materially wiser or better than the many. It is not so
important that many should be as good as you, as that there be some
absolute goodness somewhere; for that will leaven the whole lump.
There are thousands who are in opinion opposed to slavery and to the
war, who yet in effect do nothing to put ao them; who,
esteeming themselves children of Washington and Franklin, sit down
with their hands in their pockets, and say that they know not what
to do, and do nothing; who even postpohe question of freedom to
the question of free-trade, and quietly read the prices-current
along with the latest advices from Mexico, after dinner, and, it may
be, fall asleep over them both. What is the price-current of an
ho man and patriot to-day? They hesitate, and they regret, and
sometimes they petition; but they do nothing in ear and with
effect. They will wait, well disposed, for others to remedy the
evil, that they may no longer have it tret. At most, they give
only a cheap vote, and a feeble tenand Godspeed, to the
right, as it goes by them. There are nine hundred and y-nine
patrons of virtue to one virtuous man; but it is easier to deal
with the real possessor of a thing than with the tempuardian
of it.
All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon,
with a slight moral tio it, a playing with right and wrong,
with moral questions; aing naturally apa. The
character of the voters is not staked. I cast my vote, perce,
as I think right; but I am not vitally ed that that right
should prevail. I am willing to leave it to the majority. Its
obligation, therefore, never exceeds that of expediency. Even
voting for the right is doing nothing for it. It is only expressing
to men feebly your desire that it should prevail. A wise man will
not leave the right to the mercy of or wish it to prevail
through the power of the majority. There is but little virtue in
the a of masses of men. When the majority shall at length vote
for the abolition of slavery, it will be because they are
indifferent to slavery, or because there is but little slavery left
to be abolished by their vote. They will thehe only slaves.
Only his vote hasten the abolition of slavery who asserts his
own freedom by his vote.
I hear of a vention to be held at Baltimore, or elsewhere,
for the sele of a didate for the Presidency, made up chiefly
of editors, and men olitis by profession; but I think,
what is it to any indepe, intelligent, and respectable man what
decision they may e to? Shall we not have the advantage of his
wisdom and hoy, heless? we not t upon some
indepe votes? Are there not many individuals in the try
who do not attend ventions? But no: I find that the respectable
man, so called, has immediately drifted from his position, and
despairs of his try, when his try has more reason to despair
of him. He forthwith adopts one of the didates thus selected as
the only available ohus proving that he is himself available
for any purposes of the demagogue. His vote is of no more worth
than that of any unprincipled fner or hireling native, who may
have been bought. Oh for a man who is a man, and, as my neighbor
says, has a bone in his back which you ot pass your hand
through! Our statistics are at fault: the population has been
returoe. How many mehere to a square thousand
miles in this try? Hardly one. Does not America offer any
i for men to settle here? The Ameri has dwindled into
an Odd Fellow -- one who may be known by the development of his
an ariousness, and a ma lack of intelled
cheerful self-reliance; whose first and chief , on ing
into the world, is to see that the almshouses are in good repair;
and, before yet he has lawfully dohe virile garb, to collect a
fund for the support of the widows and orphans that may be; who, in
short veo live only by the aid of the Mutual Insurance
pany, which has promised to bury him detly.
It is not a mans duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself
to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong; he may
still properly have other s to engage him; but it is his
duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no
thought longer, not to give it practically his support. If I devote
myself to other pursuits and plations, I must first see, at
least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another mans
shoulders. I must get off him first, that he may pursue his
plations too. See what gross insistency is tolerated. I
have heard some of my townsmen say, "I should like to have them
order me out to help put down an insurre of the slaves, or to
marexico; -- see if I would go"; ahese very men have
each, directly by their allegiance, and so ily, at least, by
their money, furnished a substitute. The soldier is applauded who
refuses to serve in an unjust war by those who do not refuse to
sustain the unjust gover which makes the war; is applauded by
those whose own ad authority he disregards as at naught;
as if the state were peo that degree that it hired oo
sce it while it sinned, but not to that degree that it left off
sinning for a moment. Thus, uhe name of Order and Civil
Gover, we are all made at last to pay homage to and support our
own meanness. After the first blush of sin es its indifference;
and from immoral it bees, as it were, unmoral, and not quite
unnecessary to that life which we have made.
The broadest and most prevalent error requires the most
disied virtue to sustain it. The slight reproach to which
the virtue of patriotism is only liable, the noble are most
likely to incur. Those who, while they disapprove of the character
and measures of a gover, yield to it their allegiand
support are undoubtedly its most stious supporters, and so
frequently the most serious obstacles to reform. Some are
petitioning the State to dissolve the Union, to disregard the
requisitions of the President. Why do they not dissolve it
themselves -- the unioween themselves and the State -- and
refuse to pay their quota into its treasury? Do not they stand in
the same relation to the State, that the State does to the Union?
And have not the same reasons prevehe State from resisting the
Union, which have prevehem from resisting the State?
How a maisfied to eain an opinion merely, and
enjoy it? Is there any enjoyment in it, if his opinion is that he
is aggrieved? If you are cheated out of a single dollar by your
neighbor, you do not rest satisfied with knowing that you are
cheated, or with saying that you are cheated, or even with
petitioning him to pay you your due; but you take effectual steps at
oo obtain the full amount, ahat you are never cheated
again. A from principle -- the perception and the performance
ht -- ges things aions; it is essentially
revolutionary, and does not sist wholly with anything which was.
It not only divides states and churches, it divides families; ay, it
divides the individual, separating the diabolical in him from the
divine.
Unjust laws exist; shall we be tent to obey them, or shall we
endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or
shall we trahem at once? Men generally, under such a
gover as this, think that they ought to wait until they have
persuaded the majority to alter them. They think that, if they
should resist, the remedy would be worse than the evil. But it is
the fault of the gover itself that the remedy is worse than the
evil. It makes it worse. Why is it not more apt to anticipate and
provide for reform? Why does it not cherish its wise minority? Why
does it cry a before it is hurt? Why does it not ence
its citizens to be on the alert to point out its faults, and do
better than it would have them? Why does it always crucify Christ,
and exunicate Copernicus and Luther, and pronounce Washington
and Franklin rebels?
One would think, that a deliberate and practical denial of its
authority was the only offenever plated by gover;
else, why has it not assigs defis suitable and
proportionate, penalty? If a man who has no property refuses but
oo earn nine shillings for the State, he is put in prison for a
period unlimited by any law that I know, aermined only by the
discretion of those who placed him there; but if he should steal
imes nine shillings from the State, he is sooted to
go at large again.
If the injustice is part of the necessary fri of the
mae of gover, let it go, let it go; perce it will wear
smooth -- certainly the mae will wear out. If the injustice has
a spring, or a pulley, or a rope, or a k, exclusively for
itself, then perhaps you may sider whether the remedy will not be
worse than the evil; but if it is of such a nature that it requires
you to be the agent of injustice to ahen, I say, break the
law. Let your life be a ter fri to stop the mae. What
I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to
the wrong which I n.
As for adopting the ways which the State has provided for
remedying the evil, I know not of such ways. They take too much
time, and a mans life will be gone. I have other affairs to attend
to. I came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good place
to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad. A man has not
everything to do, but something; and because he ot do
everything, it is not necessary that he should do something wrong.
It is not my busio be petitioning the Governor or the
Legislature any more than it is theirs to petition me; and if they
should not hear my petition, what should I do then? But in this
case the State has provided no way; its very stitution is the
evil. This may seem to be harsh and stubborn and unciliatory;
but it is to treat with the utmost kindness and sideration the
only spirit that appreciate or deserves it. So is an ge for
the better, like birth ah which vulse the body.
I do not hesitate to say, that those who call themselves
Abolitionists should at once effectually withdraw their support,
both in person and property, from the gover of Massachusetts,
and not wait till they stitute a majority of one, before they
suffer the right to prevail through them. I think that it is enough
if they have God on their side, without waiting for that other one.
Moreover, any man mht than his neighbors stitutes a
majority of one already.
I meet this Ameri gover, or its representative, the
State gover, directly, and face to face, once a year -- no more
-- in the person of its tax-gatherer; this is the only mode in which
a man situated as I am necessarily meets it; and it then says
distinctly, Reize me; and the simplest, the most effectual, and,
in the present posture of affairs, the indispensablest mode of
treating with it on this head, of expressing your little
satisfa with and love for it, is to deny it then. My civil
neighbor, the tax-gatherer, is the very man I have to deal with --
for it is, after all, with men and not with part that I quarrel
-- and he has voluntarily chosen to be a of the gover.
How shall he ever know well what he is and does as an officer of the
gover, or as a man, until he is obliged to sider whether he
shall treat me, his neighbor, for whom he has respect, as a neighbor
and well-disposed man, or as a maniad disturber of the peace,
and see if he get over this obstru to his neighborliness
without a ruder and more impetuous thought or speech corresponding
with his a? I know this well, that if ohousand, if one
hundred, if ten men whom I could name -- if ten ho men only --
ay, if one HO man, in this State of Massachusetts, ceasing to
hold slaves, were actually to withdraw from this copartnership, and
be locked up in the ty jail therefor, it would be the abolition
of slavery in America. For it matters not how small the beginning
may seem to be: what is once well done is done forever. But we love
better to talk about it: that we say is our mission. Reform keeps
many scores of neers in its service, but not one man. If my
esteemed neighbor, the States ambassador, who will devote his days
to the settlement of the question of human rights in the cil
Chamber, instead of being threatened with the prisons of Carolina,
were to sit down the prisoner of Massachusetts, that State which is
so anxious to foist the sin of slavery upon her sister -- though at
present she discover only an act of inhospitality to be the
ground of a quarrel with her -- the Legislature would not wholly
waive the subject the following winter.
Under a gover which imprisons any unjustly, the true place
for a just man is also a prison. The proper place to-day, the only
place which Massachusetts has provided for her freer and less
desponding spirits, is in her prisons, to be put out and locked out
of the State by her own act, as they have already put themselves out
by their principles. It is there that the fugitive slave, and the
Mexi prisoner on parole, and the Indian e to plead the wrongs
of his race, should find them; on that separate, but more free and
honorable ground, where the State places those who are not with
her, but against her -- the only house in a slave State in which a
free man abide with honor. If any think that their influence
would be lost there, and their voio longer afflict the ear of
the State, that they would not be as an enemy within its walls, they
do not know by how much truth is strohan error, nor how much
more eloquently and effectively he bat injustice who has
experienced a little in his own person. Cast your whole vote, not a
strip of paper merely, but your whole influence. A minority is
powerless while it s to the majority; it is not even a
minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole
weight. If the alternative is to keep all just men in prison, or
give up war and slavery, the State will not hesitate which to
choose. If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this
year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be
to pay them, and ehe State to it violend shed
i blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable
revolution, if any such is possible. If the tax-gatherer, or any
other public officer, asks me, as one has done, "But what shall I
do?" my answer is, "If you really wish to do anything, resign your
office." When the subject has refused allegiance, and the officer
has resigned his office, then the revolution is aplished. But
even suppose blood should flow. Is there not a sort of blood shed
when the sce is wounded? Through this wound a mans real
manhood and immortality flow out, and he bleeds to an everlasting
death. I see this blood flowing now.
I have plated the impriso of the offender, rather
than the seizure of his goods -- though both will serve the same
purpose -- because they who assert the purest right, and
sequently are most dangerous to a corrupt State, only have
not spent much time in accumulating property. To such the State
renders paratively small service, and a slight tax is wont to
appear exorbitant, particularly if they are obliged to earn it by
special labor with their hands. If there were one who lived wholly
without the use of mohe State itself would hesitate to demand
it of him. But the rich man -- not to make any invidious parison
-- is always sold to the institution which makes him rich.
Absolutely speaking, the more mohe less virtue; for money
es between a man and his objects, and obtains them for him; and
it was certainly no great virtue to obtain it. It puts to rest many
questions which he would otherwise be taxed to answer; while the
only new question which it puts is the hard but superfluous one, how
to spend it. Thus his mround is taken from under his feet.
The opportunities of living are diminished in proportion as what are
called the "means" are increased. The best thing a man do for
his culture when he is rich is to endeavor to carry out those
schemes which he eained when he oor. Christ answered the
Herodians acc to their dition. "Show me the
tribute-money," said he; -- and oook a penny out of his pocket;
-- if you use money which has the image of Caesar on it, and which
he has made current and valuable, that is, if you are men of the
State, and gladly enjoy the advantages of Caesars gover, then
pay him bae of his own when he demands it; "Reherefore
to Caesar that which is Caesars, and to God those things which are
Gods" -- leaving them no wiser than before as to which was which;
for they did not wish to know.
When I verse with the freest of my neighbors, I perceive
that, whatever they may say about the magnitude and seriousness of
the question, and their regard for the public tranquillity, the long
and the short of the matter is, that they ot spare the
prote of the existing gover, and they dread the
sequeo their property and families of disobedieo it.
For my own part, I should not like to think that I ever rely on the
prote of the State. But, if I deny the authority of the State
when it presents its tax-bill, it will soon take and waste all my
property, and so harass me and my children without end. This is
hard. This makes it impossible for a man to live holy, and at
the same time fortably in outward respects. It will not be worth
the while to accumulate property; that would be sure to go again.
You must hire or squat somewhere, and raise but a small crop, and
eat that soon. You must live within yourself, and depend upon
yourself always tucked up and ready for a start, and not have many
affairs. A man may grow ri Turkey even, if he will be in all
respects a good subject of the Turkish gover. fucius said,
"If a state is governed by the principles of reason, poverty and
misery are subjects of shame; if a state is not governed by the
principles of reason, riches and honors are the subjects of shame."
No: until I want the prote of Massachusetts to be exteo
me in some distant Southern port, where my liberty is endangered, or
until I am bent solely on building up ae at home by peaceful
enterprise, I afford to refuse allegiao Massachusetts, and
her right to my property and life. It costs me less in every sense
to incur the penalty of disobedieo the State than it would to
obey. I should feel as if I were worth less in that case.
Some years ago, the State met me in behalf of the Church, and
anded me to pay a certain sum toward the support of a clergyman
whose preag my father attended, but never I myself. "Pay," it
said, "or be locked up in the jail." I deed to pay. But,
unfortunately, another man saw fit to pay it. I did not see why the
saster should be taxed to support the priest, and not the
priest the saster: for I was not the States saster, but
I supported myself by voluntary subscription. I did not see why the
lyceum should not present its tax-bill, and have the State to back
its demand, as well as the Church. However, at the request of the
sele, I desded to make some such statement as this in
writing:-- "Know all men by these presents, that I, Henry Thoreau,
do not wish to be regarded as a member of any incorporated society
which I have not joined." This I gave to the town clerk; and he has
it. The State, having thus learhat I did not wish to be
regarded as a member of that church, has never made a like demand on
me sihough it said that it must adhere to its inal
presumption that time. If I had known how to hem, I should
then have signed off iail from all the societies which I never
signed on to; but I did not know where to find a plete list.
I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I ut into a jail
on this at, for one night; and, as I stood sidering the
walls of solid stowo or three feet thick, the door of wood and
iron, a foot thick, and the iron grating which straihe light, I
could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution
which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and boo be
locked up. I wohat it should have cluded at length that
this was the best use it could put me to, and had hought to
avail itself of my services in some way. I saw that, if there was a
wall of stoween me and my towhere was a still more
difficult oo climb or break through, before they could get to be
as free as I was. I did not for a moment feel fined, and the
walls seemed a great waste of stone and mortar. I felt as if I
alone of all my townsmen had paid my tax. They plainly did not know
how to treat me, but behaved like persons who are underbred. In
every threat and in every pliment there was a blunder; for they
thought that my c..f desire was to stand the other side of that
stone wall. I could not but smile to see how industriously they
locked the door on my meditations, which followed them out again
without let or hindrance, and they were really all that was
dangerous. As they could not reach me, they had resolved to punish
my body; just as boys, if they ot e at some person against
whom they have a spite, will abuse his dog. I saw that the State
was half-witted, that it was timid as a lone woman with her silver
spoons, and that it did not know its friends from its foes, and I
lost all my remaining respect for it, and pitied it.
Thus the State never iionally fronts a mans sense,
intellectual or moral, but only his body, his senses. It is not
armed with superior wit or hoy, but with superior physical
strength. I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own
fashion. Let us see who is the stro. What force has a
multitude? They only force me who obey a higher law than I.
They force me to bee like themselves. I do not hear of men being
forced to have this way or that by masses of men. What sort of life
were that to live? When I meet a gover which says to me, "Your
money or your life," why should I be in haste to give it my money?
It may be in a great strait, and not know what to do: I ot help
that. It must help itself; do as I do. It is not worth the while
to snivel about it. I am not responsible for the successful w
of the maery of society. I am not the son of the engineer. I
perceive that, when an a and a chestnut fall side by side, the
one does not remaio make way for the other, but both obey
their own laws, and spring and grow and flourish as best they ,
till one, perce, overshadows aroys the other. If a plant
ot live acc to its nature, it dies; and so a man.
The night in prison was novel and iing enough. The
prisoners in their shirt-sleeves were enjoying a chat and the
evening air in the doorway, wheered. But the jailer said,
"e, boys, it is time to lock up"; and so they dispersed, and I
heard the sound of their steps returning into the holloartments.
My room-mate was introduced to me by the jailer as "a first-rate
fellow and a clever man." When the door was locked, he showed me
where to hang my hat, and how he managed matters there. The rooms
were whitewashed once a month; and this o least, was the
whitest, most simply furnished, and probably the apartment
iown. He naturally wao know where I came from, and
what brought me there; and, when I had told him, I asked him in my
turn how he came there, presuming him to be an ho man, of
course; and, as the woes, I believe he was. "Why," said he,
"they accuse me of burning a barn; but I never did it." As near as
I could discover, he had probably goo bed in a barn when drunk,
and smoked his pipe there; and so a barn was burnt. He had the
reputation of being a clever man, had been there some three months
waiting for his trial to e on, and would have to wait as much
longer; but he was quite domesticated and tented, since he got
his board for nothing, and thought that he was well treated.
He occupied one window, and I the other; and I saw that if one
stayed there long, his principal business would be to look out the
window. I had soon read all the tracts that were left there, and
examined where former prisoners had broken out, and where a grate
had been sawed off, and heard the history of the various octs
of that room; for I found that evehere was a history and a
gossip whiever circulated beyond the walls of the jail.
Probably this is the only house iown where verses are
posed, which are afterrinted in a circular form, but not
published. I was shown quite a long list of verses which were
posed by some young men who had beeed in an attempt to
escape, who avehemselves by singing them.
I pumped my fellow-prisoner as dry as I could, for fear I should
never see him again; but at length he showed me which was my bed,
a me to blow out the lamp.
It was like travelling into a far try, such as I had never
expected to behold, to lie there for one night. It seemed to me
that I never had heard the town-clock strike before, nor the evening
sounds of the village; for we slept with the windows open, which
were ihe grating. It was to see my native village in the
light of the Middle Ages, and our cord was turned into a Rhine
stream, and visions of knights and castles passed before me. They
were the voices of old burghers that I heard ireets. I was
an involuntary spectator and auditor of whatever was done and said
i of the adjat village-inn -- a wholly new and rare
experieo me. It was a closer view of my native town. I was
fairly inside of it. I never had seen its institutions before.
This is one of its peculiar institutions; for it is a shire town. I
began to prehend what its inhabitants were about.
In the m, our breakfasts were put through the hole in the
door, in small oblong-square tin pans, made to fit, and holding a
pint of chocolate, with brown bread, and an iron spoon. When they
called for the vessels again, I was green enough to return what
bread I had left; but my rade seized it, and said that I should
lay that up for lunch or dinner. Soon after he was let out to work
at haying in a neighb field, whither he went every day, and
would not be back till noon; so he bade me good-day, saying that he
doubted if he should see me again.
When I came out of prison -- for some oerfered, and paid
that tax -- I did not perceive that great ges had taken pla
the on, such as he observed who went in a youth and emerged a
t and gray-headed man; a a ge had to my eyes e
over the se -- the town, and State, and try -- greater than
any that mere time could effect. I saw yet more distinctly the
State in which I lived. I saw to what extent the people among whom
I lived could be trusted as good neighbors and friends; that their
friendship was for summer weather only; that they did not greatly
propose to dht; that they were a distinct race from me by their
prejudices and superstitions, as the amen and Malays are; that
in their sacrifices to humanity, they ran no risks, not even to
their property; that after all they were not so they
treated the thief as he had treated them, and hoped, by a certain
outward observand a few prayers, and by walking in a particular
straight though useless path from time to time, to save their souls.
This may be to judge my neighbors harshly; for I believe that many
of them are not aware that they have su institution as the jail
in their village.
It was formerly the in our village, when a poor debtor
came out of jail, for his acquaintao salute him, looking
through their fingers, which were crossed to represent the grating
of a jail window, "How do ye do?" My neighbors did not thus salute
me, but first looked at me, and then at one another, as if I had
returned from a long journey. I ut into jail as I was going to
the shoemakers to get a shoe which was mended. When I was let out
the m, I proceeded to finish my errand, and, having put
on my mended shoe, joined a huckleberry party, who were impatient to
put themselves under my duct; and in half an hour -- for the
horse was soon tackled -- was in the midst of a huckleberry field,
on one of hest hills, two miles off, and theate was
o be seen.
This is the whole history of "My Prisons."
I have never deed paying the highway tax, because I am as
desirous of being a good neighbor as I am of being a bad subject;
and as for supp schools, I am doing my part to educate my
fellow-trymen now. It is for no particular item iax-bill
that I refuse to pay it. I simply wish to refuse allegiao the
State, to withdraw and stand aloof from it effectually. I do not
care to trace the course of my dollar, if I could, till it buys a
man or a musket to shoot oh -- the dollar is i -- but I
am ed to trace the effey allegiance. In fact, I
quietly declare war with the State, after my fashion, though I will
still make what use a what advantage of her I , as is usual
in such cases.
If others pay the tax which is demanded of me, from a sympathy
with the State, they do but what they have already done in their own
case, or rather they abet injustice to a greater extent than the
State requires. If they pay the tax from a mistaken i in the
individual taxed, to save his property, or prevent his going to
jail, it is because they have not sidered wisely how far they let
their private feelings interfere with the public good.
This, then, is my position at present. But one ot be too
mu his guard in such a case, lest his a be biased by
obstinacy or an undue regard for the opinions of men. Let him see
that he does only what belongs to himself and to the hour.
I think sometimes, Why, this people mean well; they are only
ignorant; they would do better if they knehy give your
neighbors this pain to treat you as they are not ined to? But I
think, again, This is no reason why I should do as they do, or
permit others to suffer much greater pain of a different kind.
Again, I sometimes say to myself, When many millions of men, without
heat, without ill-will, without personal feeling of any kind, demand
of you a few shillings only, without the possibility, such is their
stitution, of retrag or altering their present demand, and
without the possibility, on your side, of appeal to any other
millions, why expose yourself to this overwhelming brute force? You
do not resist cold and huhe winds and the waves, thus
obstinately; you quietly submit to a thousand similar ies.
You do not put your head into the fire. But just in proportion as I
regard this as not wholly a brute force, but partly a human force,
and sider that I have relations to those millions as to so many
millions of men, and not of mere brute or inanimate things, I see
that appeal is possible, first and instantaneously, from them to the
Maker of them, and, sedly, from them to themselves. But, if I
put my head deliberately into the fire, there is no appeal to fire
or to the Maker of fire, and I have only myself to blame. If I
could vince myself that I have any right to be satisfied with men
as they are, and to treat them accly, and not acc, in
some respects, to my requisitions and expectations of what they and
I ought to be, then, like a good Mussulman and fatalist, I should
endeavor to be satisfied with things as they are, and say it is the
will of God. And, above all, there is this differeween
resisting this and a purely brute or natural force, that I
resist this with some effect; but I ot expect, like Orpheus, to
ge the nature of the rocks and trees as.
I do not wish to quarrel with any man or nation. I do not wish
to split hairs, to make fine distins, or set myself up as
better than my neighbors. I seek rather, I may say, even an excuse
for f>? to the laws of the land. I am but too ready to
to them. Indeed, I have reason to suspect myself on this
head; and each year, as the tax-gatherer es round, I find myself
disposed to review the acts and position of the general and State
ity.
"We must affect our try as our parents,
And if at any time we alienate
Our love or industry from doing it honor,
We must respect effects and teach the soul
Matter of sd religion,
And not desire of rule or be."
I believe that the State will soon be able to take all my work
of this sort out of my hands, and then I shall be er a
patriot than my fellow-trymen. Seen from a lower point of view,
the stitution, with all its faults, is very good; the law and the
courts are very respectable; even this State and this Ameri
gover are, in many respects, very admirable and rare things,
to be thankful for, such as a great many have described them; but
seen from a point of view a little higher, they are what I have
described them; seen from a higher still, and the highest, who shall
say what they are, or that they are worth looking at or thinking of
at all?
However, the gover does not me much, and I shall
bestow the fewest possible thoughts on it. It is not many moments
that I live under a gover, even in this world. If a man is
thought-free, fancy-free, imaginatiohat which is not never
for a long time appearing to be to him, unwise rulers or reformers
ot fatally interrupt him.
I know that most men think differently from myself; but those
whose lives are by professioed to the study of these or
kindred subjects, tent me as little as any. Statesmen and
legislators, standing so pletely within the institution, never
distinctly and nakedly behold it. They speak of moving society, but
have ing-place without it. They may be men of a certain
experiend discrimination, and have no doubt ied ingenious
and even useful systems, for which we sihank them; but all
their wit and usefulness lie withiain not very wide limits.
They are wont tet that the world is not governed by polid
expediency. Webster never goes behind gover, and so ot
speak with authority about it. His words are wisdom to those
legislators who plate no essential reform in the existing
gover; but for thinkers, and those who legislate for all time,
he never once gla the subject. I know of those whose serene
and wise speculations on this theme would soon reveal the limits of
his minds range and hospitality. Yet, pared with the cheap
professions of most reformers, and the still cheaper wisdom and
eloquence of politis in general, his are almost the only
sensible and valuable words, ahank Heaven for him.
paratively, he is always strong, inal, and, above all,
practical. Still, his quality is not wisdom, but prudehe
lawyers truth is not truth, but sistency or a sistent
expediency. Truth is always in harmony with herself, and is not
ed chiefly to reveal the justice that may sist with
wrong-doing. He well deserves to be called, as he has been called,
the Defender of the stitution. There are really no blows to be
given by him but defensive ones. He is not a leader, but a
follower. His leaders are the men of 87. "I have never made an
effort," he says, "and never propose to make an effort; I have never
tenanced an effort, and never mean to tenan effort, to
disturb the arra as inally made, by which the various
States came into the Union." Still thinking of the san which
the stitution gives to slavery, he says, "Because it art
of the inal pact -- let it stand." Notwithstanding his
special aess and ability, he is uo take a fact out of
its merely political relations, and behold it as it lies absolutely
to be disposed of by the intellect -- what, for insta
behooves a man to do here in America to-day with regard to slavery,
but ventures, or is driven, to make some such desperate answer as
the following, while professing to speak absolutely, and as a
private man -- from which what new and singular code of social
duties might be inferred? "The manner," says he, "in which the
govers of those States where slavery exists are tulate it
is for their own sideration, uheir responsibility to their
stituents, to the general laws of propriety, humanity, and
justice, and to God. Associations formed elsewhere, springing from
a feeling of humanity, or any other cause, have nothing whatever to
do with it. They have never received any encement from me, and
they never will."
They who know of no purer sources of truth, who have traced up
its stream no higher, stand, and wisely stand, by the Bible and the
stitution, and drink at it there with reverend humility; but
they who behold where it es trig into this lake or that
pool, gird up their loins once more, and tiheir pilgrimage
toward its fountain-head.
No man with a genius fislation has appeared in America.
They are rare in the history of the world. There are orators,
politis, and eloquent men, by the thousand; but the speaker has
not yet opened his mouth to speak who is capable of settling the
much-vexed questions of the day. We love eloquence for its own
sake, and not for any truth which it may utter, or any heroism it
may inspire. islators have not yet learhe parative
value of free-trade and of freedom, of union, and of rectitude, to a
nation. They have no genius or talent for paratively humble
questions of taxation and finance, erd manufacturers and
agriculture. If we were left solely to the wordy wit of legislators
in gress for uidance, uncorrected by the seasonable
experiend the effectual plaints of the people, America would
not loain her rank among the nations. Fhteen hundred
years, though perce I have nht to say it, the estament
has been writte where is the legislator who has wisdom and
practical talent enough to avail himself of the light which it sheds
on the sce of legislation?
The authority of gover, even such as I am willing to submit
to -- for I will cheerfully obey those who know and do better
than I, and in many things even those who her know nor do so
well -- is still an impure oo be strictly just, it must have
the san and sent of the governed. It have no pure right
over my person and property but what I cede to it. The progress
from an absolute to a limited monarchy, from a limited monarchy to a
democracy, is a progress toward a true respect for the individual.
Even the ese philosopher was wise enough tard the
individual as the basis of the empire. Is a democracy, such as we
know it, the last improvement possible in gover? Is it not
possible to take a step further towards reizing and anizing
the rights of man? There will never be a really free and
enlighteate until the State es the individual
as a higher and indepe power, from which all its own power and
authority are derived, and treats him accly. I please myself
with imagining a State at least which afford to be just to all
men, and to treat the individual with respect as a neighbor; which
even would not think it insistent with its own repose if a few
were to live aloof from it, not meddling with it, nor embraced by
it, who fulfilled all the duties of neighbors and fellow-men. A
State which bore this kind of fruit, and suffered it to drop off as
fast as it ripened, would prepare the way for a still more perfect
and glorious State, which also I have imagined, but not yet anywhere
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