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    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 stea<big></big>dily 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

    p<s></s>ond, needs only bury a pail of water a few feet deep in the shade

    of his camp to be indepe of the luxury of ice.

    There have been caught in Walden pickerel, one weighing seven

    pounds -- to say nothing of another which carried off a reel with

    great velocity, which the fisherman safely set down at eight pounds

    because he did not see him -- perd pouts, some of each weighing

    over two pounds, shiners, chivins or roach (Leuciscus pulchellus), a

    very few breams, and a couple of eels, one weighing four pounds -- I

    am thus particular because the weight of a fish is only its only

    title to fame, and these are the only eels I have heard of here; --

    also, I have a faint recolle of a little fish some five inches

    long, with silvery sides and a greenish back, somewhat dace-like in

    its character, which I mention here chiefly to link my facts to

    fable.  heless, this pond is not very fertile in fish.  Its

    pickerel, though not abundant, are its chief boast.  I have seen at

    oime lying on the ice pickerel of at least three different

    kinds: a long and shallow oeel-colored, most like those caught

    in the river; a bright golden kind, with greenish refles and

    remarkably deep, which is the most on here; and another,

    golden-colored, and shaped like the last, but peppered on the sides

    with small dark brown or black spots, intermixed with a few faint

    blood-red ones, very much like a trout.  The specifiame

    reticulatus would not apply to this; it should be guttatus rather.

    These are all very firm fish, and weigh more than their size

    promises.  The shiners, pouts, and perch also, and indeed all the

    fishes whihabit this pond, are much er, handsomer, and

    firmer-fleshed than those in the river and most other ponds, as the

    water is purer, and they  easily be distinguished from them.

    Probably many ichthyologists would make new varieties of some of

    them.  There are also a  race s and tortoises, and a few

    mussels in it; muskrats and minks leave their traces about it, and

    occasionally a travelling mud-turtle visits it.  Sometimes, when I

    pushed off my boat in the m, I disturbed a great mud-turtle

    which had secreted himself uhe boat in the night.  Ducks and

    geese frequent it in the spring and fall, the white-bellied swallows

    (Hirundo bicolor) skim over it, and the peetweets (Totanus

    macularius) &quot;teeter&quot; along its stony shores all summer.  I have

    sometimes disturbed a fish hawk sitting on a white pine over the

    water; but I doubt if it is ever profaned by the wind of a gull,

    like Fair Haven.  At most, it tolerates one annual loon.  These are

    all the animals of sequence which frequent it now.

    You may see from a boat, in calm weather, he sandy

    eastern shore, where the water is eight or te deep, and also

    in some other parts of the pond, some circular heaps half a dozen

    feet in diameter by a foot i, sisting of small stones

    less than a hens egg in size, where all around is bare sand.  At

    first you wonder if the Indians could have formed them on the ice

    for any purpose, and so, when the ice melted, they sank to the

    bottom; but they are tular and some of them plainly too fresh

    for that.  They are similar to those found in rivers; but as there

    are no suckers nor lampreys here, I know not by what fish they could

    be made.  Perhaps they are the s of the chivin.  These lend a

    pleasing mystery to the bottom.

    The shore is irregular enough not to be monotonous.  I have in

    my mihe western, ied with deep bays, the bolder

    northern, and the beautifully scalloped southern shore, where

    successive capes overlap each other and suggest unexplored coves

    between.  The forest has never so good a setting, nor is so

    distinctly beautiful, as when seen from the middle of a small lake

    amid hills which rise from the waters edge; for the water in which

    it is reflected not only makes the best fround in such a case,

    but, with its winding shore, the most natural and agreeable boundary

    to it.  There is no rawness nor imperfe in its edge there, as

    where the axe has cleared a part, or a cultivated field abuts on it.

    The trees have ample room to expand oer side, and each

    sends forth its most vigorous bran that dire.  There

    Nature has woven a natural selvage, and the eye rises by just

    gradations from the low shrubs of the shore to the highest trees.

    There are few traans hand to be seen.  The water laves the

    shore as it did a thousand years ago.

    A lake is the landscapes most beautiful and expressive feature.

    It is earths eye; looking into which the beholder measures the

    depth of his own nature.  The fluviatile trees he shore are

    the slender eyelashes which fri, and the wooded hills and

    cliffs around are its ing brows.

    Standing on the smooth sandy beach at the east end of the pond,

    in a calm September afternoon, when a slight haze makes the opposite

    shore-line indistinct, I have seen whence came the expression, &quot;the

    glassy surface of a lake.&quot;  When you i your head, it looks like

    a thread of fi gossamer stretched across the valley, and

    gleaming against the distant pine woods, separating oratum of

    the atmosphere from another.  You would think that you could walk

    dry u to the opposite hills, and that the swallows which skim

    ht per it.  Ihey sometimes dive below this

    line, as it were by mistake, and are undeceived.  As you look over

    the poward you are obliged to employ both your hands to

    defend your eyes against the reflected as well as the true sun, for

    they are equally bright; and if, betweewo, you survey its

    surface critically, it is literally as smooth as glass, except where

    the skater is, at equal intervals scattered over its whole

    extent, by their motions in the sun produce the fi imaginable

    sparkle on it, or, perce, a duck plumes itself, or, as I have

    said, a swallow skims so low as to touch it.  It may be that in the

    distance a fish describes an arc of three or four feet in the air,

    and there is one bright flash where it emerges, and another where it

    strikes the water; sometimes the whole silvery arc is revealed; or

    here and there, perhaps, is a thistle-down floating on its surface,

    which the fishes dart at and so dimple it again.  It is like molten

    glass cooled but not gealed, and the few motes in it are pure and

    beautiful like the imperfes in glass.  You may ofte a

    yet smoother and darker water, separated from the rest as if by an

    invisible cobweb, boom of the water nymphs, resting on it.  From a

    hilltop you  see a fish leap in almost any part; for not a

    pickerel or shiner picks an i from this smooth surface but it

    maly disturbs the equilibrium of the whole lake.  It is

    wonderful with what elaboratehis simple fact is advertised --

    this pise murder will out -- and from my distant perch I

    distinguish the cirg undulations when they are half a dozen rods

    in diameter.  You  eve a water-bug (Gyrinus) ceaselessly

    progressing over the smooth surface a quarter of a mile off; for

    they furrow the water slightly, making a spicuous ripple bounded

    by two diverging lines, but the skaters glide over it without

    rippling it perceptibly.  When the surface is siderably agitated

    there are no skaters nor water-bugs on it, but apparently, in calm

    days, they leave their havens and adventurously glide forth from the

    shore by short impulses till they pletely cover it.  It is a

    soothing employment, on one of those fine days in the fall when all

    the warmth of the sun is fully appreciated, to sit on a stump on

    such a height as this, overlooking the pond, and study the dimpling

    circles which are incessantly inscribed on its otherwise invisible

    surface amid the reflected skies and trees.  Over this great expanse

    there is no disturba it is thus at once gently smoothed away

    and assuaged, as, when a vase of water is jarred, the trembling

    circles seek the shore and all is smooth again.  Not a fish  leap

    or an i fall on the pond but it is thus reported in cirg

    dimples, in lines of beauty, as it were the stant welling up of

    its fountain, the gentle pulsing of its life, the heaving of its

    breast.  The thrills of joy and thrills of pain are

    undistinguishable.  How peaceful the phenomena of the lake!  Again

    the works of man shine as in the spring.  Ay, every leaf and twig

    and stone and cobweb sparkles now at mid-afternoon as when covered

    with dew in a spring m.  Every motion of an oar or an i

    produces a flash of light; and if an oar falls, how sweet the echo!

    In such a day, iember or October, Walden is a perfect

    forest mirror, set round with stones as precious to my eye as if

    fewer or rarer.  Nothing so fair, so pure, and at the same time so

    large, as a lake, perce, lies on the surface of the earth.  Sky

    water.  It needs no fence.  Nations e and go without defiling it.

    It is a mirror whio stone  crack, whose quicksilver will

    never wear off, whose gilding Nature tinually repairs; no storms,

    no dust,  dim its surface ever fresh; -- a mirror in which all

    impurity preseo it sinks, swept and dusted by the suns hazy

    brush -- this the light dust-cloth -- which retains no breath that

    is breathed on it, but sends its own to float as clouds high above

    its surface, and be reflected in its bosom still.

    A field of water betrays the spirit that is in the air.  It is

    tinually receiving new life and motion from above.  It is

    intermediate in its nature between land and sky.  On land only the

    grass and trees wave, but the water itself is rippled by the wind.

    I see where the breeze dashes across it by the streaks or flakes of

    light.  It is remarkable that we  look down on its surface.  We

    shall, perhaps, look down thus on the surface of air at length, and

    mark where a still subtler spirit sweeps over it.

    The skaters and water-bugs finally disappear iter part

    of October, when the severe frosts have e; and then and in

    November, usually, in a calm day, there is absolutely nothing to

    ripple the surface.  One November afternoon, in the calm at the end

    of a rain-storm of several days duration, when the sky was still

    pletely overcast and the air was full of mist, I observed that

    the pond was remarkably smooth, so that it was difficult to

    distinguish its surface; though it no longer reflected the bright

    tints of October, but the sombre November colors of the surrounding

    hills.  Though I passed over it as gently as possible, the slight

    undulations produced by my boat extended almost as far as I could

    see, and gave a ribbed appearao the refles.  But, as I was

    looking over the surface, I saw here and there at a distance a faint

    glimmer, as if some skater is which had escaped the frosts

    might be collected there, or, perce, the surface, being so

    smooth, betrayed where a spring welled up from the bottom.  Paddling

    gently to one of these places, I was surprised to find myself

    surrounded by myriads of small perch, about five inches long, of a

    rich bronze color in the green water, sp there, and stantly

    rising to the surfad dimpling it, sometimes leaving bubbles on

    it.  In such transparent and seemingly bottomless water, refleg

    the clouds, I seemed to be floating through the air as in a balloon,

    and their swimming impressed me as a kind of flight or h, as

    if they were a pact flock of birds passing just beh my level

    on the right or left, their fins, like sails, set all around them.

    There were many such schools in the pond, apparently improving the

    short season before winter would draw an icy shutter over their

    broad skylight, sometimes giving to the surfa appearance as if

    a slight breeze struck it, or a few rain-drops fell there.  When I

    approached carelessly and alarmed them, they made a sudden splash

    and rippling with their tails, as if one had struck the water with a

    brushy bough, and instantly te in the depths.  At length

    the wind rose, the mist increased, and the waves began to run, and

    the perch leaped much higher than before, half out of water, a

    hundred black points, three inches long, at once above the surface.

    Even as late as the fifth of December, one year, I saw some dimples

    on the surface, and thinking it was going to rain hard immediately,

    the air being fun of mist, I made haste to take my place at the oars

    and row homeward; already the rain seemed rapidly increasing, though

    I felt none on my cheek, and I anticipated a thh soaking.  But

    suddenly the dimples ceased, for they were produced by the perch,

    which the noise of my oars had seared into the depths, and I saw

    their schools dimly disappearing; so I spent a dry afternoon after

    all.

    An old man who used to frequent this pond nearly sixty years

    ago, when it was dark with surrounding forests, tells me that in

    those days he sometimes saw it all alive with ducks and other

    water-fowl, and that there were many eagles about it.  He came here

    a-fishing, and used an old log oe which he found on the shore.

    It was made of two white pine logs dug out and piogether, and

    was cut off square at the ends.  It was very clumsy, but lasted a

    great many years before it became water-logged and perhaps sank to

    the bottom.  He did not know whose it was; it beloo the pond.

    He used to make a cable for his anchor of strips of hickory bark

    tied together.  An old man, a potter, who lived by the pond before

    the Revolution, told him ohat there was an iro at the

    bottom, and that he had seen it.  Sometimes it would e floating

    up to the shore; but when you went toward it, it would go bato

    deep water and disappear.  I leased to hear of the old log

    oe, which took the place of an Indian one of the same material

    but mraceful stru, which perce had first been a

    tree on the bank, and then, as it were, fell into the water, to

    float there feion, the most proper vessel for the lake.

    I remember that when I first looked into these depths there were

    many large trunks to be seen indistinctly lying otom, which

    had either been blown over formerly, or left on the ice at the last

    cutting, when wood was cheaper; but now they have mostly

    disappeared.

    When I first paddled a boat on Walden, it was pletely

    surrounded by thid lofty pine and oak woods, and in some of its

    coves grape-vines had ruhe trees he water and formed

    bowers under which a boat could pass.  The hills whi its

    shores are so steep, and the woods on them were then so high, that,

    as you looked down from the west end, it had the appearance of an

    amphitheatre for some land of sylvaacle.  I have spent many

    an hour, when I was younger, floating over its surface as the zephyr

    willed, having paddled my boat to the middle, and lying on my back

    across the seats, in a summer forenoon, dreaming awake, until I was

    aroused by the boat toug the sand, and I arose to see what shore

    my fates had impelled me to; days when idleness was the most

    attractive and productive industry.  Many a forenoon have I stolen

    areferring to spend thus the most valued part of the day; for

    I was rich, if not in money, in sunny hours and summer days, and

    spent them lavishly; nor dret that I did not waste more of

    them in the workshop or the teachers desk.  But since I left those

    shores the woodchoppers have still further laid them waste, and now

    for many a year there will be no more rambling through the aisles of

    the wood, with occasional vistas through which you see the water.

    My Muse may be excused if she is silent heh.  How  you

    expect the birds to sing when their groves are cut down?

    Now the trunks of trees otom, and the old log oe,

    and the dark surrounding woods, are gone, and the villagers, who

    scarcely know where it lies, instead of going to the pond to bathe

    or drink, are thinking t its water, which should be as sacred

    as the Ga least, to the village in a pipe, to wash their

    dishes with! -- to earn their Walden by the turning of a cock or

    drawing of a plug!  That devilish Iron Horse, whose ear-rending

    neigh is heard throughout the town, has muddied the Boiling Spring

    with his foot, a is that has browsed off all the woods on

    Walden shore, that Trojan horse, with a thousand men in his belly,

    introduced by merary Greeks!  Where is the trys champ<mark></mark>ion,

    the Moore of Moore Hill, to meet him at the Deep Cut and thrust an

    avenging laween the ribs of the bloated pest?

    heless, of all the characters I have known, perhaps Walden

    wears best, a preserves its purity.  Many men have been

    likeo it, but few deserve that honor.  Though the woodchoppers

    have laid bare first this shore and then that, and the Irish have

    built their sties by it, and the railroad has infringed on its

    border, and the ice-men have skimmed it o is itself

    unged, the same water which my youthful eyes fell on; all the

    ge is in me.  It has not acquired one perma wrier

    all its ripples.  It is perennially young, and I may stand and see a

    swallow dip apparently to pi i from its surface as of

    yore.  It struck me again tonight, as if I had not seen it almost

    daily for more thay years -- Why, here is Walden, the same

    woodland lake that I discovered so many years ago; where a forest

    was cut down last winter another is springing up by its shore as

    lustily as ever; the same thought is welling up to its surface that

    was then; it is the same liquid joy and happio itself and its

    Maker, ay, and it may be to me.  It is the work of a brave man

    surely, in whom there was no guile!  He rouhis water with his

    hand, deepened and clarified it in his thought, and in his will

    bequeathed it to cord.  I see by its face that it is visited by

    the same refle; and I  almost say, Walden, is it you?

    It is no dream of mine,

    To or a line;

    I ot e o God and Heaven

    Than I live to Walden even.

    I am its stony shore,

    And the breeze that passes oer;

    In the hollow of my hand

    Are its water and its sand,

    And its deepest resort

    Lies high in my thought.

    The cars never pause to look at it; yet I fancy that the

    engineers and firemen and brakemen, and those passengers who have a

    season ticket a often, are better men for the sight.  The

    engineer does not fet at night, or his nature does not, that he

    has beheld this vision of serenity and purity o least during

    the day.  Though seen but o helps to wash out State Street

    and the engines soot.  One proposes that it be called &quot;Gods Drop.&quot;

    I have said that Walden has no visible i nor outlet, but it

    is on the one hand distantly and ily related to Flints Pond,

    which is more elevated, by a  of small ponds ing from that

    quarter, and oher directly and maly to cord River,

    which is lower, by a similar  of ponds through whi some

    eological period it may have flowed, and by a little digging,

    which God forbid, it  be made to flow thither again.  If by

    living thus reserved and austere, like a hermit in the woods, so

    long, it has acquired such wonderful purity, who would nret

    that the paratively impure waters of Flints Pond should be

    mingled with it, or itself should ever go to waste its sweetness in

    the o wave?

    Flints, or Sandy Pond, in Lin, reatest lake and inland

    sea, lies about a mile east of Walden.  It is much larger, being

    said to tain one hundred and y-seven acres, and is more

    fertile in fish; but it is<bdi></bdi> paratively shallow, and not remarkably

    pure.  A walk through the woods thither was often my recreation.  It

    was worth the while, if only to feel the wind blow on your cheek

    freely, ahe waves run, and remember the life of mariners.  I

    went a-chestnutting there in the fall, on windy days, whes

    were dropping into the water and were washed to my feet; and one

    day, as I crept along its sedgy shore, the fresh spray blowing in my

    face, I came upon the mouldering wreck of a boat, the sides gone,

    and hardly more than the impression of its flat bottom left amid the

    rushes; yet its model was sharply defined, as if it were a large

    decayed pad, with its veins.  It was as impressive a wreck as one

    could imagine on the seashore, and had as good a moral.  It is by

    this time mere vegetable mould and undistinguishable pond shore,

    through which rushes and flags have pushed up.  I used to admire the

    ripple marks on the sandy bottom, at the north end of this pond,

    made firm and hard to the feet of the wader by the pressure of the

    water, and the rushes which grew in Indian file, in waving lines,

    corresponding to these marks, rank behind rank, as if the waves had

    plahem.  There also I have found, in siderable quantities,

    curious balls, posed apparently of fine grass or roots, of

    pipewort perhaps, from half an inch to four inches in diameter, and

    perfectly spherical.  These wash bad forth in shallow water on

    a sandy bottom, and are sometimes cast on the shore.  They are

    either solid grass, or have a little sand in the middle.  At first

    you would say that they were formed by the a of the waves, like

    a pebble; yet the smallest are made of equally coarse materials,

    half an inch long, and they are produced only at one season of the

    year.  Moreover, the waves, I suspect, do not so much struct as

    wear down a material which has already acquired sistency.  They

    preserve their form when dry for an indefinite period.

    Flints Pond!  Such is the poverty of our nomenclature.  What

    right had the un and stupid farmer, whose farm abutted on this

    sky water, whose shores he has ruthlessly laid bare, to give his

    o it?  Some skin-flint, who loved better the refleg

    surface of a dollar, or a bright t, in which he could see his own

    brazen face; wharded even the wild ducks which settled in it as

    trespassers; his fingers grown into crooked and bony talons from the

    long habit of grasping harpy-like; -- so it is not named for me.  I

    go not there to see him nor to hear of him; who never saw it, who

    never bathed in it, who never loved it, who never protected it, who

    never spoke a good word for it, nor thanked God that He had made it.

    Rather let it be named from the fishes that swim in it, the wild

    fowl or quadrupeds which frequent it, the wild flowers which grow by

    its shores, or some wild man or child the thread of whose history is

    interwoven with its own; not from him who could show no title to it

    but the deed which a like-minded neighbislature gave him --

    him who thought only of its money value; whose presence perce

    cursed all the shores; who exhausted the land around it, and would

    fain have exhausted the waters within it; whretted only that it

    was not English hay or berry meadow -- there was nothing to

    redeem it, forsooth, in his eyes -- and would have drained and sold

    it for the mud at its bottom.  It did not turn his mill, and it was

    no privilege to him to behold it.  I respeot his labors, his

    farm where everything has its price, who would carry the landscape,

    who would carry his God, to market, if he could get anything for

    him; who goes to market for his god as it is; on whose farm nothing

    grows free, whose fields bear no crops, whose meadows no flowers,

    whose trees no fruits, but dollars; who loves not the beauty of his

    fruits, whose fruits are not ripe for him till they are turo

    dollars.  Give me the poverty that enjoys true wealth.  Farmers are

    respectable and iing to me in proportion as they are poor --

    poor farmers.  A model farm! where the house stands like a fungus in

    a muckheap, chambers for men horses, oxen, and swine, sed and

    unsed, all tiguous to one another!  Stocked with men!  A

    great grease-spot, redolent of manures and buttermilk!  Under a high

    state of cultivation, being manured with the hearts and brains of

    men!  As if you were to raise your potatoes in the churchyard!  Such

    is a model farm.

    No, no; if the fairest features of the landscape are to be named

    after mehem be the  and worthiest men alone.  Let our

    lakes receive as true  least as the Icarian Sea, where

    &quot;still the shore&quot; a &quot;brave attempt resounds.&quot;

    Goose Pond, of small extent, is on my way to Flints; Fair

    Haven, an expansion of cord River, said to tain some seventy

    acres, is a mile southwest; and White Pond, of about forty acres, is

    a mile and a half beyond Fair Haven.  This is my lake try.

    These, with cord River, are my water privileges; and night and

    day, year in year out, they grind such grist as I carry to them.

    Sihe wood-cutters, and the railroad, and I myself have

    profaned Walden, perhaps the most attractive, if not the most

    beautiful, of all our lakes, the gem of the woods, is White Pond; --

    a poor name from its onness, whether derived from the remarkable

    purity of its waters or the color of its sands.  In these as in

    other respects, however, it is a lesser twin of Walden.  They are so

    much alike that you would say they must be ected under ground.

    It has the same stony shore, and its waters are of the same hue.  As

    at Walden, in sultry dog-day weather, looking down through the woods

    on some of its bays which are not so deep but that the refle

    from the bottom tihem, its waters are of a misty bluish-green

    laucous color.  Many years since I used to go there to collect

    the sand by cartloads, to make sandpaper with, and I have tinued

    to visit it ever since.  One who frequents it proposes to call it

    Virid Lake.  Perhaps it might be called Yellow Pine Lake, from the

    following circumstance.  About fifteen years ago you could see the

    top of a pitch pine, of the kind called yellow pine hereabouts,

    though it is not a distinct species, projeg above the surfa

    deep water, many rods from the shore.  It was even supposed by some

    that the pond had sunk, and this was one of the primitive forest

    that formerly stood there.  I find that even so long ago as 1792, in

    a &quot;Topographical Description of the Town of cord,&quot; by one of its

    citizens, in the Colles of the Massachusetts Historical

    Society, the author, after speaking of Walden and White Ponds, adds,

    &quot;In the middle of the latter may be seen, wheer is very

    low, a tree which appears as if it grew in the place where it now

    stands, although the roots are fifty feet below the surface of the

    water; the top of this tree is broken off, and at that place

    measures fourteen inches in diameter.&quot;  In the spring of 49 I

    talked with the man who lives he pond in Sudbury, who told

    me that it was he who got out this tree ten or fifteen years before.

    As near as he could remember, it stood twelve or fifteen rods from

    the shore, where the water was thirty or forty feet deep.  It was in

    the winter, and he had beeing out i the forenoon, and had

    resolved that iernoon, with the aid of his neighbors, he

    would take out the old yellow pine.  He sawed a el in the ice

    toward the shore, and hauled it over and along and out on to the ice

    with oxen; but, before he had gone far in his work, he was surprised

    to find that it was wrong end upward, with the stumps of the

    branches pointing down, and the small end firmly fastened in the

    sandy bottom.  It was about a foot in diameter at the big end, and

    he had expected to get a good saw-log, but it was so rotten as to be

    fit only for fuel, if for that.  He had some of it in his shed then.

    There were marks of an axe and of woodpeckers ot.  He

    thought that it might have been a dead tree on the shore, but was

    finally blown over into the pond, and after the top had bee

    water-logged, while the butt-end was still dry and light, had

    drifted out and sunk wrong end up.  His father, eighty years old,

    could not remember when it was not there.  Several pretty large logs

    may still be seen lying otom, where, owing to the

    undulation of the surface, they look like huge water snakes in

    motion.

    This pond has rarely been profaned by a boat, for there is

    little in it to tempt a fisherman.  Instead of the white lily, which

    requires mud, or the o flag, the blue flag (Iris

    versicrows thinly in the pure water, rising from the stony

    bottom all around the shore, where it is visited by hummingbirds in

    June; and the color both of its bluish blades and its flowers and

    especially their refles, is in singular harmony with the

    glaucous water.

    White Pond and Walden are great crystals on the surface of the

    earth, Lakes of Light.  If they were permaly gealed, and

    small enough to be clutched, they would, perce, be carried off

    by slaves, like precious stoo adorn the heads of emperors; but

    being liquid, and ample, and secured to us and our successors

    forever, we disregard them, and run after the diamond of Kohinoor.

    They are too pure to have a market value; they tain no muck.  How

    much more beautiful than our lives, how much more transparent than

    our characters, are they!  We never learned meanness of them.  How

    much fairer than the pool before the farmers door, in which his

    ducks swim!  Hither the  wild ducks e.  Nature has no human

    inhabitant reciates her.  The birds with their plumage and

    their notes are in harmony with the flowers, but what youth or

    maiden spires with the wild luxuriay of Nature?  She

    flourishes most alone, far from the towns where they reside.  Talk

    of heaven! ye disgrace earth.

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