House-Warming
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In October I went a-graping to the river meadows, and loadedmyself with clusters more precious for their beauty and fragrance
than for food. There, too, I admired, though I did not gather, the
berries, small waxen gems, pendants of the meadow grass, pearly
and red, which the farmer plucks with an ugly rake, leaving the
smooth meadow in a snarl, heedlessly measuring them by the bushel
and the dollar only, and sells the spoils of the meads to Boston and
New York; destio be jammed, to satisfy the tastes of lovers of
Nature there. So butchers rake the tongues of bison out of the
prairie grass, regardless of the torn and drooping plant. The
barberrys brilliant fruit was likewise food for my eyes merely; but
I collected a small store of wild apples for coddling, which the
proprietor and travellers had overlooked. Whenuts were ripe
I laid up half a bushel for winter. It was very exg at that
season to roam the then boundless chestnut woods of Lin -- they
now sleep their long sleep uhe railroad -- with a bag on my
shoulder, and a stick to open burs with in my hand, for I did not
always wait for the frost, amid the rustling of leaves and the loud
reproofs of the red squirrels and the jays, whose half-ed nuts
I sometimes stole, for the burs which they had selected were sure to
tain sound ones. Occasionally I climbed and shook the trees.
They grew also behind my house, and one large tree, which almost
overshadowed it, was, when in flower, a bouquet which sted the
whole neighborhood, but the squirrels and the jays got most of its
fruit; the last ing in flocks early in the m and pig
the nuts out of the burs before they fell, I relinquished these
trees to them and visited the more distant woods posed wholly of
chestnut. These nuts, as far as they went, were a good substitute
for bread. Many other substitutes might, perhaps, be found.
Digging one day for fishworms, I discovered the ground-nut (Apios
tuberosa) on its string, the potato of the abines, a sort of
fabulous fruit, which I had begun to doubt if I had ever dug and
eaten in childhood, as I had told, and had not dreamed it. I had
often since seen its crumpled red velvety blossom supported by the
stems of other plants without knowing it to be the same.
Cultivation has well-nigh extermi. It has a sweetish taste,
much like that of a frost-bitten potato, and I found it better
boiled than roasted. This tuber seemed like a faint promise of
Nature to rear her own children ahem simply here at some
future period. In these days of fatted cattle and waving
grain-fields this humble root, which was ohe totem of an Indian
tribe, is quite fotten, or known only by its fl vine; but
let wild Nature reign here once more, and the tender and luxurious
English grains will probably disappear before a myriad of foes, and
without the care of man the ay carry back even the last seed
of to the great field of the Indians God in the southwest,
whence he is said to have brought it; but the now almost
exterminated ground-nut will perhaps revive and flourish in spite of
frosts and wildness, prove itself indigenous, and resume its a
importand dignity as the diet of the huribe. Some Indian
Ceres or Minerva must have been the ior aower of it; and
when the reign of poetry ences here, its leaves and string of
nuts may be represented on our works of art.
Already, by the first of September, I had seen two or three
small maples turned scarlet across the pond, beh where the white
stems of three aspens diverged, at the point of a promontory,
the water. Ah, many a tale their color told! And gradually from
week to week the character of each tree came out, and it admired
itself reflected in the smooth mirror of the lake. Each m the
manager of this gallery substituted some new picture, distinguished
by more brilliant or harmonious c, for the old upon the
walls.
The s came by thousands to my lodge in October, as to winter
quarters, aled on my windows within and on the walls
overhead, sometimes deterring visitors from entering. Each m,
when they were numbed with cold, I swept some of them out, but I did
not trouble myself much to get rid of them; I eve plimented
by their regarding my house as a desirable shelter. They never
molested me seriously, though they bedded with me; and they
gradually disappeared, into what crevices I do not know, avoiding
winter and unspeakable cold.
Like the s, before I finally went into winter quarters in
November, I used to resort to the northeast side of Walden, which
the sun, reflected from the pitch pine woods and the stony shore,
made the fireside of the pond; it is so much pleasanter and
wholesomer to be warmed by the sun while you be, than by an
artificial fire. I thus warmed myself by the still glowing embers
which the summer, like a departed hunter, had left.
When I came to build my ey I studied masonry. My bricks,
being sed-hand ones, required to be ed with a trowel, so
that I learned more than usual of the qualities of bricks and
trowels. The mortar on them was fifty years old, and was said to be
still growing harder; but this is one of those sayings which men
love to repeat whether they are true or not. Such sayings
themselves grow harder and adhere more firmly with age, and it would
take many blows with a trowel to an old wiseacre of them.
Many of the villages of Mesopotamia are built of sed-hand bricks
of a very good quality, obtained from the ruins of Babylon, and the
t on them is older and probably harder still. However that may
be, I was struck by the peculiar toughness of the steel which bore
so many violent blows without being worn out. As my bricks had been
in a ey before, though I did not read the name of
Nebuezzar on them, I picked out its many fireplace bricks as I
could find, to save work and waste, and I filled the spaces between
the bricks about the fireplace with stones from the pond shore, and
also made my mortar with the white sand from the same place. I
lingered most about the fireplace, as the most vital part of the
house. Indeed, I worked so deliberately, that though I e
the ground in the m, a course of bricks raised a few inches
above the floor served for my pillow at night; yet I did not get a
stiff neck for it that I remember; my stiff neck is of older date.
I took a poet to board for a fht about those times, which
caused me to be put to it for room. He brought h<big>藏书网</big>is own knife,
though I had two, and we used to scour them by thrusting them into
the earth. He shared with me the labors of cooking. I leased
to see my work rising so square and solid by degrees, and reflected,
that, if it proceeded slowly, it was calculated to endure a long
time. The ey is to some extent an indepe structure,
standing on the ground, and rising through the house to the heavens;
even after the house is bur still stands sometimes, and its
importand independence are apparent. This was toward the end
of summer. It was now November.
The north wind had already begun to cool the pond, though it
took many weeks of steady blowing to aplish it, it is so deep.
When I began to have a fire at evening, before I plastered my house,
the ey carried smoke particularly well, because of the numer<dfn></dfn>ous
ks between the boards. Yet I passed some cheerful evenings in
that cool and airy apartment, surrounded by the rough brown boards
full of knots, and rafters with the bark on high overhead. My house
never pleased my eye so much after it lastered, though I was
obliged to fess that it was more fortable. Should not every
apartment in which man dwells be lofty enough to create some
obscurity overhead, where flickering shadolay at evening
about the rafters? These forms are mreeable to the fand
imagination than fresco paintings or other the most expensive
furniture. I now first began to inhabit my house, I may say, when I
began to use it for warmth as well as shelter. I had got a couple
of old fire-dogs to keep the wood from the hearth, and it did me
good to see the soot form on the back of the ey which I had
built, and I poked the fire with mht and more satisfa
than usual. My dwelling was small, and I could hardly eain an
echo in it; but it seemed larger for being a single apartment and
remote from neighbors. All the attras of a house were
trated in one room; it was kit, chamber, parlor, and
keeping-room; and whatever satisfa parent or child, master or
servant, derive from living in a house, I e all. Cato
says, the master of a family (patremfamilias) must have in his
rustic villa "cellam oleariam, vinariam, dolia multa, uti lubeat
caritatem expectare, et rei, et virtuti, et gloriae erit," that is,
"an oil and wine cellar, many casks, so that it may be pleasant to
expect hard times; it will be for his advantage, and virtue, and
glory." I had in my cellar a firkin of potatoes, about two quarts
of peas with the weevil in them, and on my shelf a little rice, a
jug of molasses, and of rye and Indian meal a peck each.
I sometimes dream of a larger and more populous house, standing
in a golden age, of enduring materials, and without gingerbread
work, which shall still sist of only one room, a vast, rude,
substantial, primitive hall, without ceiling or plastering, with
bare rafters and purlins supp a sort of lower heaven over
ones head -- useful to keep off rain and snow, where the king and
queen posts stand out to receive your homage, when you have done
revereo the prostrate Saturn of an older dynasty on stepping
over the sill; a cavernous house, wherein you must reach up a torch
upon a pole to see the roof; where some may live in the fireplace,
some in the recess of a window, and some oles, some at one end
of the hall, some at another, and some aloft on rafters with the
spiders, if they choose; a house which you have got into when you
have opehe outside door, and the ceremony is over; where the
weary traveller may wash, a, and verse, and sleep, without
further journey; such a shelter as you would be glad to rea a
tempestuous night, taining all the essentials of a house, and
nothing for house-keeping; where you see all the treasures of
the house at one view, and everything hangs upon its peg, that a man
should use; at o, pantry, parlor, chamber, storehouse,
and garret; where you see so necessary a thing, as a barrel or a
ladder, so ve a thing as a cupboard, ahe pot boil,
and pay your respects to the fire that cooks your dinner, and the
oven that bakes your bread, and the necessary furniture and utensils
are the chief ors; where the washing is not put out, nor the
fire, nor the mistress, and perhaps you are sometimes requested to
move from off the trap-door, when the cook would desd into the
cellar, and so learher the ground is solid or hollow beh
you without stamping. A house whose inside is as open and ma
as a birds , and you ot go in at the front door and out at
the back without seeing some of its inhabitants; where to be a guest
is to be presented with the freedom of the house, and not to be
carefully excluded from sevehs of it, shut up in a particular
cell, and told to make yourself at home there -- in solitary
fi. Nowadays the host does not admit you to his hearth,
but has got the mason to build one for yourself somewhere in his
alley, and hospitality is the art of keeping you at the greatest
distahere is as much secrecy about the cooking as if he had a
design to poison you. I am aware that I have been on many a mans
premises, and might have been legally ordered off, but I am not
aware that I have been in many mens houses. I might visit in my
old clothes a king and queen who lived simply in such a house as I
have described, if I were going their way; but bag out of a
modern palace will be all that I shall desire to learn, if ever I am
caught in one.
It would seem as if the very language of our parlors would lose
all its nerve and degee into palaver wholly, our lives pass at
such remoteness from its symbols, and its metaphors and tropes are
necessarily so far fetched, through slides and dumb-waiters, as it
were; in other words, the parlor is so far from the kit and
workshop. The dinner even is only the parable of a dinner,
only. As if only the savage dwelt near enough to Nature and
Truth to borrow a trope from them. How the scholar, who dwells
away in the North West Territory or the Isle of Man, tell what is
parliamentary i?
However, only one or two of my guests were ever bold enough to
stay a a hasty-pudding with me; but when they saw that crisis
approag they beat a hasty retreat rather, as if it would shake
the house to its foundations. heless, it stood through a
great many hasty-puddings.
I did not plaster till it was freeziher. I brought over
some whiter and er sand for this purpose from the opposite
shore of the pond in a boat, a sort of veyance which would have
tempted me to go much farther if necessary. My house had in the
meanwhile been shingled down to the ground on every side. In
lathing I leased to be able to send home eaail with a
single blow of the hammer, and it was my ambition to trahe
plaster from the board to the wall ly and rapidly. I remembered
the story of a ceited fellow, who, in fine clothes, was wont to
lounge about the village once, giving advice to workmen. Venturing
one day to substitute deeds for words, he turned up his cuffs,
seized a plasterers board, and having loaded his trowel without
mishap, with a plat look toward the lathing overhead, made a
bold gesture thitherward; and straightway, to his plete
disfiture, received the whole tents in his ruffled bosom. I
admired ahe ey and venience of plastering, which so
effectually shuts out the cold and takes a handsome finish, and I
learhe various casualties to which the plasterer is liable. I
was surprised to see how thirsty the bricks were which drank up all
the moisture in my plaster before I had smoothed it, and how many
pailfuls of water it takes to christen a new hearth. I had the
previous winter made a small quantity of lime by burning the shells
of the Unio fluviatilis, which our river affords, for the sake of
the experiment; so that I knew where my materials came from. I
might have got good limestohin a mile or two and bur
myself, if I had cared to do so.
The pond had in the meanwhile skimmed over in the shadiest and
shallowest coves, some days or even weeks before the general
freezing. The first ice is especially iing and perfect,
being hard, dark, and transparent, and affords the best opportunity
that ever offers for examining the bottom where it is shallow; for
you lie at your length on ily an inch thick, like a skater
i on the surface of the water, and study the bottom at your
leisure, only two or three inches distant, like a picture behind a
glass, and the water is necessarily always smooth then. There are
many furrows in the sand where some creature has travelled about and
doubled on its tracks; and, for wrecks, it is strewn with the cases
of caddis-worms made of minute grains of white quartz. Perhaps
these have creased it, for you find some of their cases in the
furrows, though they are deep and broad for them to make. But the
ice itself is the objeost i, though you must improve
the earliest opportunity to study it. If you exami closely the
m after it freezes, you find that the greater part of the
bubbles, which at first appeared to be within it, are against its
under surface, and that more are tinually rising from the bottom;
while the ice is as yet paratively solid and dark, that is, you
see the water through it. These bubbles are from aieth to an
eighth of an in diameter, very clear aiful, and you see
your face reflected ihrough the ice. There may be thirty or
forty of them to a square inch. There are also already within the
iarrow oblong perpendicular bubbles about half an inch long,
sharp es with the apex upward; or oftener, if the ice is quite
fresh, minute spherical bubbles one directly above another, like a
string of beads. But these within the ice are not so numerous nor
obvious as those beh. I sometimes used to cast on stoo try
the strength of the ice, and those which broke through carried in
air with them, whied very large and spicuous white bubbles
beh. One day when I came to the same place forty-eight hours
afterward, I found that those large bubbles were still perfect,
though an inch more of ice had formed, as I could see distinctly by
the seam in the edge of a cake. But as the last two days had been
very warm, like an Indian summer, the ice was not noarent,
showing the dark green color of the water, and the bottom, but
opaque and whitish ray, and though twice as thick was hardly
strohan before, for the air bubbles had greatly expanded under
this heat and run together, and lost their regularity; they were no
longer one directly over another, but often like silvery s
poured from a bag, one overlapping another, or in thin flakes, as if
occupying slight cleavages. The beauty of the ice was gone, and it
was too late to study the bottom. Being curious to know what
position my great bubbles occupied with regard to the new ice, I
broke out a cake taining a middling sized one, and tur
bottom upward. The new ice had formed around and uhe bubble,
so that it was included betweewo ices. It was wholly in the
lower ice, but close against the upper, and was flattish, or perhaps
slightly lenticular, with a rounded edge, a quarter of an inch deep
by four inches in diameter; and I was surprised to find that
directly uhe bubble the ice was melted with great regularity
in the form of a saucer reversed, to the height of five eighths of
an in the middle, leaving a thin partition there between the
water and the bubble, hardly ah of an inch thick; and in many
places the small bubbles in this partition had burst out downward,
and probably there was no ice at all uhe largest bubbles,
which were a foot in diameter. I inferred that the infinite number
of minute bubbles which I had first seen against the under surface
of the ice were now frozen in likewise, and that each, in its
degree, had operated like a burning-glass on the ice beh to melt
and rot it. These are the little air-guns which tribute to make
the ice crad whoop.
At length the winter set in good ear, just as I had finished
plastering, and the wind began to howl around the house as if it had
not had permission to do so till then. Night after night the geese
came lumbering in the dark with a gor and a whistling of wings,
even after the ground was covered with snow, some to alight in
Walden, and some flying low over the woods toward Fair Haven, bound
for Mexico. Several times, wheurning from the village at ten
or eleven oclock at night, I heard the tread of a flock of geese,
or else ducks, on the dry leaves in the woods by a pond-hole behind
my dwelling, where they had e up to feed, and the faint honk or
quack of their leader as they hurried off. In 1845 Walden froze
entirely over for the first time on the night of the 22d of
December, Flints and other shallower ponds and the river having
been frozen ten days or more; in 46, the 16th; in 49, about the
31st; and in 50, about the 27th of December; in 52, the 5th of
January; in 53, the 31st of December. The snow had already covered
the ground sihe 25th of November, and surrounded me suddenly
with the sery of winter. I withdrew yet farther into my shell,
and endeavored to keep a bright fire both within my house and within
my breast. My employment out of doors now was to collect the dead
wood in the forest, bringing it in my hands or on my shoulders, or
sometimes trailing a dead piree under each arm to my shed. An
old forest fence which had seen its best days was a great haul for
me. I sacrificed it to Vul, for it ast serving the god
Terminus. How much more iing a is that mans supper
who has just been forth in the snow to hunt, nay, you might say,
steal, the fuel to cook it with! His bread a are sweet.
There are enough fagots and waste wood of all kinds in the forests
of most of our towns to support many fires, but which at present
warm none, and, some think, hihe growth of the young wood.
There was also the driftwood of the pond. In the course of the
summer I had discovered a raft of pitch pine logs with the bark on,
piogether by the Irish when the railroad was built. This I
hauled up partly on the shore. After soaking two years and then
lying high six months it erfectly sound, though waterlogged
past drying. I amused myself one winter day with sliding this
piecemeal across the pond, nearly half a mile, skating behind with
one end of a log fiftee long on my shoulder, and the other on
the ice; or I tied several logs together with a birch withe, and
then, with a longer birch or alder which had a book at the end,
dragged them across. Though pletely waterlogged and almost as
heavy as lead, they not only burned long, but made a very hot fire;
nay, I thought that they burned better for the soaking, as if the
pitch, being fined by the water, burned longer, as in a lamp.
Gilpin, in his at of the forest borderers of England, says
that "the enents of trespassers, and the houses and fences
thus raised on the borders of the forest," were "sidered as great
nuisances by the old forest law, and were severely punished under
the name of purprestures, as tending ad terrorem ferarum -- ad
notum forestae, etc.," to the frightening of the game and the
detriment of the forest. But I was ied in the preservation
of the venison and the vert more than the hunters or woodchoppers,
and as much as though I had been the Lord Warden himself; and if any
part was burhough I bur myself by act, I grieved
with a grief that lasted longer and was more insolable than that
of the proprietors; nay, I grieved when it was cut down by the
proprietors themselves. I would that our farmers when they cut down
a forest felt some of that awe which the old Romans did when they
came to thin, or let in the light to, a secrated grove (lucum
lucare), that is, would believe that it is sacred to some god.
The Roman made an expiatory , and prayed, Whatever god or
goddess thou art to whom this grove is sacred, be propitious to me,
my family, and childrec.
It is remarkable what a value is still put upon wood even in
this age and in this new try, a value more perma and
universal than that of gold. After all our discoveries and
iions no man will go by a pile of wood. It is as precious to
us as it was to our Saxon and Norman aors. If they made their
bows of it, we make un-stocks of it. Michaux, more than thirty
years ago, says that the price of wood for fuel in New York and
Philadelphia "nearly equals, and sometimes exceeds, that of the best
wood in Paris, though this immense capital annually requires more
than three huhousand cords, and is surrouo the distance
of three hundred miles by cultivated plains." In this town the
price of wood rises almost steadily, and the only question is, how
much higher it is to be this year than it was the last. Meics
and tradesmen who e in person to the forest on no other errand,
are sure to attend the wood au, and even pay a high price for
the privilege of gleaning after the woodchopper. It is now many
years that men have resorted to the forest for fuel and the
materials of the arts: the New Englander and the New Hollahe
Parisian and the Celt, the farmer and Robin Hood, Goody Blake and
Harry Gill; in most parts of the world the prind the peasant,
the scholar and the savage, equally require still a few sticks from
the forest to warm them and cook their food. her could I do
without them.
Every man looks at his wood-pile with a kind of affe. I
love to have mine before my window, and the more chips the better to
remind me of my pleasing work. I had an old axe whiobody
claimed, with which by spells in winter days, on the sunny side of
the house, I played about the stumps which I had got out of my
bean-field. As my driver prophesied when I lowing, they warmed
me twice -- once while I litting them, and agaihey
were on the fire, so that no fuel could give out more heat. As for
the axe, I was advised to get the village blacksmith to "jump" it;
but I jumped him, and, putting a hickory helve from the woods into
it, made it do. If it was dull, it was at least hung true.
A few pieces of fat pine were a great treasure. It is
iing to remember how much of this food for fire is still
cealed in the bowels of the earth. In previous years I had often
gone prospeg over some bare hillside, where a pitch pine wood
had formerly stood, and got out the fat pine roots. They are almost
iructible. Stumps thirty or forty years old, at least, will
still be sound at the core, though the sapwood has all bee
vegetable mould, as appears by the scales of<q>９9lib?</q> 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 <var></var>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<mark></mark> 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."
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