Sounds
百度搜索 Walden 天涯 或 Walden 天涯在线书库 即可找到本书最新章节.
But while we are fio books, though the most seledclassid read only particular written languages, which are
themselves but dialects and provincial, we are in danger of
fetting the language which all things as speak without
metaphor, which alone is copious and standard. Much is published,
but little printed. The rays which stream through the shutter will
be no longer remembered when the shutter is wholly removed. No
method nor discipline supersede the y of being forever
on the alert. What is a course of history or philosophy, or poetry,
no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most
admirable routine of life, pared with the discipline of looking
always at what is to be seen? Will you be a reader, a student
merely, or a seer? Read your fate, see what is before you, and walk
on into futurity.
I did not read books the first summer; I hoed beans. Nay, I
often did better than this. There were times when I could not
afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work,
whether of the head or hands. I love a broad margin to my life.
Sometimes, in a summer m, having taken my aced bath, I
sat in my sunny doorway from suill noon, rapt in a revery,
amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude
and stillness, while the birds sing around or flitted noiseless
through the house, until by the sun falling in at my west window, or
the noise of some travellers wagon on the distant highway, I was
reminded of the lapse of time. I grew in those seasons like in
the night, and they were far better than any work of the hands would
have been. They were not time subtracted from my life, but so much
over and above my usual allowance. I realized what the Orientals
mean by plation and the forsaking of works. For the most
part, I minded not how the hours went. The day advanced as if to
light some work of mi was m, and lo, now it is evening,
and nothing memorable is aplished. Instead of singing like the
birds, I silently smiled at my incessant good fortune. As the
sparrow had its trill, sitting on the hickory before my door, so had
I my chuckle or suppressed warble which he might hear out of my
. My days were not days of the week, bearing the stamp of any
heathey, nor were they minced into hours and fretted by the
tig of a clock; for I lived like the Puri Indians, of whom it is
said that "for yesterday, today, and tomorrow they have only one
word, and they express the variety of meaning by pointing backward
for yesterday forward for tomorrow, and overhead for the passing
day." This was sheer idleo my fellow-townsmen, no doubt; but
if the birds and flowers had tried me by their standard, I should
not have been found wanting. A man must find his occasions in
himself, it is true. The natural day is very calm, and will hardly
reprove his indolence.
I had this adva least, in my mode of life, over those
who were obliged to look abroad for amusement, to society and the
theatre, that my life itself was bey amusement and never
ceased to be novel. It was a drama of many ses and without an
end. If we were always, indeed, getting our living, and regulating
our lives acc to the last a mode we had learned, we
should never be troubled with ennui. Follow yenius closely
enough, and it will not fail to show you a fresh prospect every
hour. Housework leasant pastime. When my floor was dirty, I
rose early, and, setting all my furniture out of doors on the grass,
bed aead making but one budget, dashed water on the floor,
and sprinkled white sand from the pond on it, and then with a broom
scrubbed it and white; and by the time the villagers had
broken their fast the m sun had dried my house suffitly to
allow me to move in again, and my meditations were almost
ued. It leasant to see my whole household effects out
on the grass, making a little pile like a gypsys pack, and my
three-legged table, from which I did not remove the books and pen
and ink, standing amid the pines and hickories. They seemed glad to
get out t<dfn></dfn>hemselves, and as if unwilling to be brought in. I was
sometimes tempted to stret awning over them and take my seat
there. It was worth the while to see the sun shine ohings,
ahe free wind blow on them; so much more iing most
familiar objects look out of doors than in the house. A bird sits
on the <mark>?</mark>bough, life-everlasting grows uhe table, and
blackberry vines run round its legs; pine es, chestnut burs, and
strawberry leaves are strewn about. It looked as if this was the
way these forms came to be transferred to our furniture, to tables,
chairs, aeads -- because they oood in their midst.
My house was on the side of a hill, immediately on the edge of
the larger wood, in the midst of a young forest of pitch pines and
hickories, and half a dozen rods from the pond, to which a narrow
footpath led down the hill. In my front yard grew the strawberry,
blackberry, and life-everlasting, johnswort and goldenrod, shrub
oaks and sand cherry, blueberry and groundnut<bdo>.</bdo>. he end of May,
the sand cherry (Cerasus pumila) adorhe sides of the path with
its delicate flowers arranged in umbels drically about its
short stems, which last, in the fall, weighed down with goodsized
and handsome cherries, fell over ihs like rays on every side.
I tasted them out of pliment to Nature, though they were scarcely
palatable. The sumach (Rhus glabra) grew luxuriantly about the
house, pushing up through the emba which I had made, and
growing five or six feet the first season. Its broad pinnate
tropical leaf leasant though strao look on. The large
buds, suddenly pushing out late in the spring from dry sticks which
had seemed to be dead, developed themselves as by magito
graceful green and tender boughs, an in diameter; and
sometimes, as I sat at my window, so heedlessly did they grow and
tax their weak joints, I heard a fresh and tender bough suddenly
fall like a fan to the ground, when there was not a breath of air
stirring, broken off by its ow. In August, the large masses
of berries, which, when in flower, had attracted many wild bees,
gradually assumed their bright velvety crimson hue, and by their
weight agai down and broke the tender limbs.
As I sit at my window this summer afternoon, hawks are cirg
about my clearing; the tantivy of wild pigeons, flying by two and
threes athwart my view, or perg restless on the white pine
boughs behind my house, gives a voice to the air; a fish hawk
dimples the glassy surface of the pond and brings up a fish; a mink
steals out of the marsh before my door and seizes a frog by the
shore; the sedge is bending uhe weight of the reed-birds
flitting hither and thither; and for the last half-hour I have heard
the rattle of railroad cars, now dying away and then reviving like
the beat of a partridge, veying travellers from Boston to the
try. For I did not live so out of the world as that boy who, as
I hear, ut out to a farmer in the east part of the town, but
ere long ran away and came home again, quite down at the heel and
homesick. He had never seen such a dull and out-of-the-lace;
the f<samp></samp>olks were all gone off; why, you couldnt evehe
whistle! I doubt if there is such a pla Massachusetts now:--
"In truth, our village has bee a butt
For one of those fleet railroad shafts, and oer
Our peaceful plain its soothing sound is -- cord."
The Fitchburg Railroad touches the pond about a hundred rods
south of where I dwell. I usually go to the village along its
causeway, and am, as it were, related to society by this link. The
men on the freight trains, who go over the whole length of the road,
bow to me as to an old acquaintahey pass me so often, and
apparently they take me for an employee; and so I am. I too would
fairack-repairer somewhere in the orbit of the earth.
The whistle of the lootive pees my woods summer and
winter, sounding like the scream of a hawk sailing over some
farmers yard, inf me that maless city merts are
arriving within the circle of the town, or adventurous try
traders from the other side. As they e under one horizon, they
shout their warning to get off the track to the other, heard
sometimes through the circles of two towns. Here e your
groceries, try; your rations, trymen! Nor is there any man
so indepe on his farm that he say them nay. And heres
your pay for them! screams the trymans whistle; timber like
long battering-rams going twenty miles an hainst the citys
walls, and chairs enough to seat all the weary and heavy-laden that
dwell within them. With such huge and lumbering civility the
try hands a chair to the city. All the Indian huckleberry hills
are stripped, all the berry meadows are raked into the city. Up
es the cotton, dowhe woven cloth; up es the silk, down
goes the woollen; up e the books, but dowhe wit that
writes them.
When I meet the eh its train of cars moving off with
plaary motion -- or, rather, like a et, for the beholder knows
not if with that velocity and with that dire it will ever
revisit this system, sis orbit does not look like a returning
curve -- with its steam cloud like a bareaming behind in
golden and silver wreaths, like many a downy cloud which I have
seen, high in the heavens, unfolding its masses to the light -- as
if this traveling demigod, this cloud-peller, would ere long take
the su sky for the livery of his train; when I hear the iron
horse make the hills echo with his snort like thunder, shaking the
earth with his feet, and breathing fire and smoke from his nostrils
(what kind of winged horse or fiery dragon they will put into the
new Mythology I dont know), it seems as if the earth had got a race
now worthy to inhabit it. If all were as it seems, and men made the
elements their servants for noble ends! If the cloud that hangs
over the engihe perspiration of heroic deeds, or as
benefit as that which floats over the farmers fields, then the
elements and Nature herself would cheerfully apany men on their
errands aheir escort.
I watch the passage of the m cars with the same feeling
that I do the rising of the sun, which is hardly mular.
Their train of clouds stretg far behind and rising higher and
higher, going to heaven while the cars are going to Boston, ceals
the sun for a minute and casts my distant field into the shade, a
celestial train beside which the petty train of cars which hugs the
earth is but the barb of the spear. The stabler of the iron horse
early this winter m by the light of the stars amid the
mountains, to fodder and harness his steed. Fire, too, was awakened
thus early to put the vital heat in him a him off. If the
enterprise were as i as it is early! If the snow lies deep,
they strap on his snowshoes, and, with the giant plow, plow a furrow
from the mountains to the seaboard, in which the cars, like a
following drill-barrow, sprinkle all the restless men and floating
merdise in the try for seed. All day the fire-steed flies
over the try, stopping only that his master may rest, and I am
awakened by his tramp and defiant snort at midnight, when in some
remote glen in the woods he fronts the elements incased in id
snow; and he will reach his stall only with the m star, to
start once more on his travels without rest or slumber. Or
perce, at evening, I hear him in his stable blowing off the
superfluous energy <tt>.9９lib?t>of the day, that he may calm his nerves and cool
his liver and brain for a few hours of iron slumber. If the
enterprise were as heroid anding as it is protracted and
unwearied!
Far through unfrequented woods on the fines of towns, where
only the hunter peed by day, in the darkest night dart
these bright saloons without the knowledge of their inhabitants;
this moment stopping at some brilliant station-house in town or
city, where a social crowd is gathered, the in the Dismal
S, sg the owl and fox. The startings and arrivals of the
cars are now the epochs in the village day. They go and e with
such regularity and precision, and their whistle be heard so
far, that the farmers set their clocks by them, and thus one
well-ducted institutiulates a whole try. Have not men
improved somewhat in punctuality sihe railroad was ied?
Do they not talk and think faster in the depot than they did in the
stage-office? There is somethirifying imosphere of
the former place. I have been asto the miracles it has
wrought; that some of my neighbors, who, I should have prophesied,
once for all, would never get to Boston by so prompt a veyance,
are on hand when the bell rings. To do things "railroad fashion" is
now the byword; and it is worth the while to be warned so often and
so sincerely by any power to get off its track. There is no
stopping to read the riot a over the heads of the mob,
in this case. We have structed a fate, an Atropos, that never
turns aside. (Let that be the name of yine.) Men are
advertised that at a certain hour and mihese bolts will be
shot toarticular points of the pass; yet it interferes with
no mans business, and the children go to school oher track.
We live the steadier for it. We are all educated thus to be sons of
Tell. The air is full of invisible bolts. Every path but your own
is the path of fate. Keep on your own track, then.
What reends ere is its enterprise and bravery.
It does not clasp its hands and pray to Jupiter. I see these men
every day go about their business with more or less ce and
tent, doing more even than they suspect, and perce better
employed than they could have sciously devised. I am less
affected by their heroism who stood up for half an hour in the front
li Buena Vista, than by the steady and cheerful valor of the
men who inhabit the snowplow for their winter quarters; who have not
merely the three-o-clo-the-m ce, which Bonaparte
thought was the rarest, but whose ce does not go to rest so
early, who go to sleep only wheorm sleeps or the sinews of
their iron steed are frozen. On this m of the Great Snow,
perce, which is still raging and chilling mens blood, I bear
the muffled tone of their engine bell from out the fog bank of their
chilled breath, whinouhat the cars are ing, without
long delay, notwithstanding the veto of a New England northeast
snow-storm, and I behold the plowmen covered with snow and rime,
their heads peering, above the mould-board which is turning down
other than daisies and the s of field mice, like bowlders of the
Sierra Nevada, that occupy an outside pla the universe.
erce is uedly fident and serene, alert,
adventurous, and unwearied. It is very natural in its methods
withal, far more so than many fantastiterprises aimental
experiments, and hes singular success. I am refreshed and
expanded when the freight train rattles past me, and I smell the
stores which go dispensing their odors all the way from Long Wharf
to Lake Champlain, reminding me of fn parts, of coral reefs,
and Indian os, and tropical climes, and the extent of the globe.
I feel more like a citizen of the world at the sight of the
palm-leaf which will cover so many flaxen New England heads the
summer, the Manilla hemp and cout husks, the old junk, gunny
bags, scrap iron, and rusty nails. This carload of torn sails is
more legible and iing now than if they should be wrought into
paper and printed books. Who write so graphically the history
of the storms they have weathered as these rents have dohey
are proof-sheets whieed no corre. Here goes lumber from
the Maine woods, which did not go out to sea in the last freshet,
risen four dollars ohousand because of what did go out or was
split up; pine, spruce, cedar -- first, sed, third, and fourth
qualities, so lately all of one quality, to wave over the bear, and
moose, and caribou. rolls Thomaston lime, a prime lot, which
will get far among the hills before it gets slacked. These rags in
bales, of all hues and qualities, the lowest dition to which
cotton and linen desd, the final result of dress -- of patterns
which are now no longer cried up, unless it be in Milwaukee, as
those splendid articles, English, Freneri prints,
ginghams, muslic., gathered from all quarters both of fashion
and poverty, going to bee paper of one color or a few shades
only, on which, forsooth, will be written tales of real life, high
and low, and founded on fact! This closed car smells of salt fish,
the strong New England and ercial st, reminding me of the
Grand Banks and the fisheries. Who has not seen a salt fish,
thhly cured for this world, so that nothing spoil it, and
putting, the perseverance of the saints to the blush? with which you
may sweep or pave the streets, and split your kindlings, and the
teamster shelter himself and his lading against sun, wind, and rain
behind it -- and the trader, as a cord trader once did, hang it
up by his door for a sign when he ences business, until at last
his oldest er ot tell surely whether it be animal,
vegetable, or mineral, a shall be as pure as a snowflake,
and if it be put into a pot and boiled, will e out an excellent
dun-fish for a Saturdays dinner. Spanish hides, with the
tails still preserving their twist and the angle of elevation they
had when the oxen that wore them were careering over the pampas of
the Spanish Main -- a type of all obstinacy, and eving how almost
hopeless and incurable are all stitutional vices. I fess,
that practically speaking, when I have learned a mans real
disposition, I have no hopes of ging it for the better or worse
in this state of existence. As the Orientals say, "A curs tail may
be warmed, and pressed, and bound round with ligatures, and after a
twelve years labor bestowed upon it, still it will retain its
natural form." The only effectual cure for suveteracies as
these tails exhibit is to make glue of them, which I believe is what
is usually doh them, and then they will stay put and stick.
Here is a hogshead of molasses or of brandy directed to John Smith,
Cuttingsville, Vermont, some trader among the Green Mountains, who
imports for the farmers near his clearing, and now perce stands
over his bulkhead and thinks of the last arrivals on the coast, how
they may affect the price for him, telling his ers this
moment, as he has told them twenty times before this m, that
he expects some by the rain of prime quality. It is
advertised itingsville Times.
While these things go up other things e down. Warned by the
whizzing sound, I look up from my book and see some tall pine, hewn
on far northern hills, which has wis way over the Green
Mountains and the ecticut, shot like an arrow through the
township within ten minutes, and scarother eye beholds it;
going
"to be the mast
Of some great ammiral."
And hark! here es the cattle-train bearing the cattle of a
thousand hills, sheepcots, stables, and cow-yards in the air,
drovers with their sticks, and shepherd boys in the midst of their
flocks, all but the mountain pastures, whirled along like leaves
blown from the mountains by the September gales. The air is filled
with the bleating of calves and sheep, and the hustling of oxen, as
if a pastoral valley were going by. When the old bell-wether at the
head rattles his bell, the mountains do indeed skip like rams and
the little hills like lambs. A carload of drovers, too, in the
midst, on a level with their droves now, their vocation gone, but
still ging to their useless sticks as their badge of office.
But their dogs, where are they? It is a stampede to them; they are
quite thrown out; they have lost the st. Methinks I hear them
barking behind the Peterboro Hills, or panting up the western slope
of the Green Mountains. They will not be in at the death. Their
vocation, too, is goheir fidelity and sagacity are below par
now. They will slink back to their kennels in disgrace, or
perce run wild and strike a league with the wolf and the fox.
So is your pastoral life whirled past and away. But the bell rings,
and I must get off the trad let the cars go by;--
Whats the railroad to me?
I never go to see
Where it ends.
It fills a few hollows,
And makes banks for the swallows,
It sets the sand a-blowing,
And the blackberries a-growing,
but I cross it like a cart-path in the woods. I will not have my
eyes put out and my ears spoiled by its smoke and steam and hissing.
Now that the cars are gone by and all the restless world with
them, and the fishes in the pond no longer feel their rumbling, I am
more alohan ever. For the rest of the long afternoon, perhaps,
my meditations are interrupted only by the faint rattle of a
carriage or team along the distant highway.
Sometimes, on Sundays, I heard the bells, the Lin, A,
Bedford, or cord bell, when the wind was favorable, a faint,
sweet, and, as it were, natural melody, worth imp into the
wilderness. At a suffit distance over the woods this sound
acquires a certain vibratory hum, as if the pine needles in the
horizohe strings of a harp which it swept. All sound heard
at the greatest possible distance produces one and the same effect,
a vibration of the universal lyre, just as the intervening
atmosphere makes a distant ridge of earth iing to our eyes by
the azure tint it imparts to it. There came to me in this case a
melody which the air had strained, and which had versed with
every leaf and needle of the wood, that portion of the sound which
the elements had taken up and modulated and echoed from vale to
vale. The echo is, to some extent, an inal sound, and therein
is the magid charm of it. It is not merely a repetition of what
was worth repeating in the bell, but partly the voice of the wood;
the same trivial words and notes sung by a wood-nymph.
At evening, the distant lowing of some cow in the horizon beyond
the woods sounded sweet and melodious, and at first I would mistake
it for the voices of certain minstrels by whom I was sometimes
serenaded, who might be straying over hill and dale; but soon I was
not unpleasantly disappointed when it rolonged into the cheap
and natural music of the cow. I do not mean to be satirical, but to
express my appreciation of those youths singing, when I state that
I perceived clearly that it was akin to the music of the cow, and
they were at length oiculation of Nature.
Regularly at half-past seven, in one part of the summer, after
the evening train had gone by, the whip-poor-wills ted their
vespers for half an hour, sitting on a stump by my door, or upon the
ridge-pole of the house. They would begin to sing almost with as
much precision as a clock, within five minutes of a particular time,
referred to the setting of the sun, every evening. I had a rare
opportunity to bee acquainted with their habits. Sometimes I
heard four or five at on different parts of the wood, by
act one a bar behind another, and so near me that I
distinguished not only the cluck after eaote, but often that
singular buzzing sound like a fly in a spiders web, only
proportionally louder. Sometimes one would circle round and round
me in the woods a few feet distant as if tethered by a string, when
probably I was near its eggs. They sang at intervals throughout the
night, and were again as musical as ever just before and about dawn.
When other birds are still, the screech owls take up the strain,
like m women their a u-lu-lu. Their dismal scream is
truly Ben Jonsonian. Wise midnight hags! It is no ho and blunt
tu-whit tu-who of the poets, but, without jesting, a most solemn
graveyard ditty, the mutual solations of suicide lovers
remembering the pangs and the delights of supernal love in the
infernal groves. Yet I love to hear their wailing, their doleful
resporilled along the woodside; reminding me sometimes of
musid singing birds; as if it were the dark and tearful side of
music, the regrets and sighs that would fain be sung. They are the
spirits, the low spirits and melancholy forebodings, of fallen souls
that on human shape night-walked the earth and did the deeds of
darkness, now expiating their sins with their wailing hymns or
threnodies in the sery of their transgressions. They give me a
new sense of the variety and capacity of that nature which is our
on dwelling. Oh-o-o-o-o that I never had been bor-r-r-r-n!
sighs one on this side of the pond, and circles with the
restlessness of despair to some new per the gray oaks. Then --
that I never had been bor-r-r-r-n! echoes another on the farther
side with tremulous siy, and -- bor-r-r-r-n! es faintly
from far in the Lin woods.
I was also serenaded by a hooting owl. Near at hand you could
fancy it the most melancholy sound in Nature, as if she meant by
this to stereotype and make perma in her choir the dying moans
of a human being -- some poor weak reliortality who has left
hope behind, and howls like an animal, yet with human sobs, on
entering the dark valley, made more awful by a certain gurgling
melodiousness -- I find myself beginning with the letters gl when I
try to imitate it -- expressive of a mind which has reached the
gelatinous, mildewy stage in the mortification of all healthy and
ceous thought. It reminded me of ghouls and idiots and insane
howlings. But now one answers from far woods in a strain made
really melodious by distance -- Hoo hoo hoo, hoorer hoo; and indeed
for the most part it suggested only pleasing associations, whether
heard by day ht, summer or winter.
I rejoice that there are owls. Let them do the idiotid
maniacal hooting for men. It is a sound admirably suited to ss
and twilight woods whio day illustrates, suggesting a vast and
undeveloped nature which men have nnized. They represent
the stark twilight and unsatisfied thoughts which all have. All day
the sun has shone on the surface of some savage s, where the
single spruce stands hung with usnea lis, and small hawks
circulate above, and the chickadee lisps amid the evergreens, and
the partridge and rabbit skulk beh; but now a more dismal and
fitting day dawns, and a different race of creatures awakes to
express the meaning of Nature there.
Late in the evening I heard the distant rumbling of wagons over
bridges -- a sound heard farther than almost any other at night --
the baying of dogs, and sometimes again the lowing of some
dissolate cow in a distant barn-yard. In the mean-while all the
sh with the trump of bullfrogs, the sturdy spirits of
a wine-bibbers and wassailers, still uant, trying to
sing a cat their Stygian lake -- if the Walden nymphs will
pardon the parison, for though there are almost no weeds, there
are frogs there -- who would fain keep up the hilarious rules of
their old festal tables, though their voices have waxed hoarse and
solemnly grave, mog at mirth, and the wine has lost its flavor,
and bee only liquor to distend their paunches, and sweet
intoxication never es to drown the memory of the past, but mere
saturation and waterloggedness and distention. The most aldermanic,
with his upon a heart-leaf, which serves for a napkin to his
drooling chaps, uhis northern shore quaffs a deep draught of
the once sed water, and passes round the cup with the
ejaculation tr-r-r-oonk, tr-r-r--oonk, tr-r-r-oonk! and straightway
es over the water from some distant cove the same password
repeated, where the in seniority and girth has gulped down to
his mark; and when this observance has made the circuit of the
shores, then ejaculates the master of ceremonies, with satisfa,
tr-r-r-oonk! and ea his turs the same down to the least
distended, leakiest, and flabbiest pauhat there be no
mistake; and then the howl goes round again and again, until the sun
disperses the m mist, and only the patriarch is not uhe
pond, but vainly bellowing troonk from time to time, and pausing for
a reply.
I am not sure that I ever heard the sound of cock-crowing from
my clearing, and I thought that it might be worth the while to keep
a cockerel for his music merely, as a singing bird. The note of
this once wild Indian pheasant is certainly the most remarkable of
any birds, and if they could be naturalized without being
domesticated, it would soon bee the most famous sound in our
woods, surpassing the gor of the goose and the hooting of the
owl; and then imagihe cag of the hens to fill the pauses
when their lords clarioed! No wohat man added this
bird to his tame stock -- to say nothing of the eggs and drumsticks.
To walk in a winter m in a wood where these birds abounded,
their native woods, ahe wild cockerels crow orees,
clear and shrill for miles over the resoundih, drowning the
feebler notes of other birds -- think of it! It would put nations
on the alert. Who would not be early to rise, and rise earlier and
earlier every successive day of his life, till he became unspeakably
healthy, wealthy, and wise? This fn birds note is celebrated
by the poets of all tries along with the notes of their native
songsters. All climates agree with brave ticleer. He is more
indigenous even thaives. His health is ever good, his
lungs are sound, his spirits never flag. Even the sailor on the
Atlantid Pacific is awakened by his voice; but its shrill sound
never roused me from my slumbers. I kept her dog, cat, cow,
pig, nor hens, so that you would have said there was a deficy of
domestic sounds; her the , nor the spinning-wheel, nor even
the singing of the kettle, nor the hissing of the urn, nor children
g, to fort one. An old-fashioned man would have lost his
senses or died of ennui before this. Not even rats in the wall, for
they were starved out, or rather were never baited in -- only
squirrels on the roof and uhe floor, a whip-poor-will on the
ridge-pole, a blue jay screamih the window, a hare or
woodchuder the house, a screech owl or a cat owl behind it, a
flock of wild geese or a laughing loon on the pond, and a fox to
bark in the night. Not even a lark or an oriole, those mild
plantation birds, ever visited my clearing. No cockerels to crow
nor hens to cackle in the yard. No yard! but unfenature
reag up to your very sills. A young forest growing up under
your meadows, and wild sumachs and blackberry vines breaking through
into your cellar; sturdy pitch pines rubbing and creaking against
the shingles for want of room, their roots reag quite uhe
house. Instead of a scuttle or a blind blown off in the gale -- a
piree snapped off or torn up by the roots behind your house for
fuel. Instead of no path to the front-yard gate in the Great Snow
-- no gate -- no front-yard -- and no path to the civilized world.
百度搜索 Walden 天涯 或 Walden 天涯在线书库 即可找到本书最新章节.