ss Sas ae RY DAVID THOREAU WALDEN OR LIFE IN THE WOODS BY HENRY DAVID THOREAU EDITED WITH INTRODUCTION AND NOTES BY BYRON REES ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH WILLIAMS COLLEGE **T long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove, and am still on their trail. Many are the travellers I have spoken concerning them, describing their tracks and what calls they answered to. I have met one or two who had heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud, and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them themselves.”’ New Bork THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1910 All rights reserved Copyriaut, 1910, By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. Set up and electrotyped. Published February, rgro, Norwood JBress J. 3. Cushing Co. — Berwick & Smith Co. Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. ©01.A259259 oa N THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK « BOSTON + CHICAGO ATLANTA + SAN FRANCISCO MACMILLAN & CO., Limitep LONDON + POMBAY + CALCUTTA MELBOURNE THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Lrtp. 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His father, John Thoreau, the son of a John Thoreau of the island of Jersey who emigrated to America about 1773, was a skilful pencil-maker in Concord. The mother was Cynthia Dunbar, daughter of a minister, a quick-witted, handsome woman who sang well and talked even better ; it was from her, rather than from the half-French father, that Henry derived his intellectual alertness and energy. The Concord of the “twenties” was a quiet, unspoiled New England village, one of those sterling communities whence, during the last century, came so much that has made the history of the intellectual life in Massachusetts notable and fine. It was a place of winding streams and shady roads, of woodland and meadow and hill and pond — such a region as one would fix upon as the fitting and con- genial environment of the boy who was to be the author of Walden. There is nothing grand or striking about the locality ; the far-travelled, indefatigable tourist often finds it “tame” and “commonplace.” Walden Pond is pretty, but not extraordinary; there are in Massachusetts hun- dreds of ponds as attractive. Fairhaven Bay, Brister’s Hill, Baker’s Farm, the Virginia road, Well-meadow, . Mill Brook, all owe their interest to the associations of literature, rather than to any unusual qualities of their own. The country is pleasing, pretty, restful, but that ix Xil INTRODUCTION ishment clashed with those of the persons in authority. He wisely forsook the teacher’s desk and entered upon a life of varied activity,— at times of picturesque and joyous inactivity. For a while he stayed at Emerson’s house; he surveyed; he made pencils; he lectured; he lived in a hut at Walden Pond; he tramped about, looking at the world with clear eyes. Sometimes he played with children, or wrote in his Journal, or talked with passers-by, prefer- ably strong, acrid characters whose originality appealed to him; always, whatever the occupation of the moment, bent upon developing his own nature, upon living his own life, and conveying through his pen to others some intima- tion of the vision that he saw. It isnot difficult for us to picture to ourselves the Thoreau of these years, for his contemporaries have given us many descriptionsof him. Mr. Frank Sanborn, one of his biogra- phers, met him in 1855, and this is the note in which he recorded his impression : — ‘““To-night we had a call from Mr. Thoreau, who came at eight and stayed till ten. He talked about Latin and Greek — which he thought ought to be studied — and about other things. In his tones and gestures he seemed to me to imitate Emerson, so that it was annoying to listen to him, though he said many good things. He looks like Emerson, too, — coarser, but with something of that serenity and sagacity which E. has. Thoreau looks eminently sagacious — like a sort of wise, wild beast. He dresses plainly, wears a beard in his throat, and has a brown complexion.” In another place Mr. Sanborn adds : — “ He is a little under size, with a huge Emersonian nose, bluish gray eyes, brown hair, and a ruddy, weather- beaten face, which reminds me of some shrewd and honest INTRODUCTION X1ll animal’s — some _ retired philosophical woodchuck or magnanimous fox. He dresses very plainly, wears his collar turned over like Mr. Emerson, and often an old dress-coat, broad in the skirts, and by no means a fit.” Ellery Channing, author of Thoreau, the Poet-Natural- ist, devotes attention to the face : — “His face, once seen, could not be forgotten. The features were quite marked: the nose aquiline, or very Roman, like one of the portraits of Cesar (more like a beak, as was said) ; large overhanging brows above the deep-set blue eyes — blue in certain lights, and in others gray — eyes expressive of all shades of feeling, but never weak or near-sighted; the forehead not unusually broad or high, full of concentrated energy of purpose; the mouth with prominent lips, pursed up with meaning and thought when silent, and giving out when open a stream of the most varied and unusual and instructive sayings. His whole figure had an active earnestness, as if he had no moment to waste. Even in the boat he had a wary, transitory air, his eyes on the outlook — perhaps there might be ducks, or the Blondin turtle, or an otter, or sparrow.” Emerson characteristically combines external descrip- tion with indications of manner and conversation when afield: ‘He knew how to sit immovable, a part of the rock he rested on, until the bird, the reptile, the fish, which had retired from him, should come back and resume its habits, nay, moved by curiosity, should come to him and watch him. “Tt was a pleasure and a privilege to walk with him. He knew the country like a fox or a bird, and passed through it as freely by paths of his own. He knew every track in the snow or on the ground, and what crea- Xvi INTRODUCTION But the communistic type of life failed to appeal to him. He saw in it a grave danger, the loss of independence, the strangling grip of unavoidable companionship ; com- munism, he felt, menaced individuality. He therefore turned to another possible solution of the problem. We are in error if we suppose that there was much of the hermit in Thoreau even during the two years of his life at Walden. He never intended actually to break off relations with his fellows. He was no misanthrope, no Diogenes. ‘‘Every day or two I strolled to the village to hear some of the gossip which is incessantly going on there, circulating either from mouth to mouth, or from newspaper to newspaper, and which, taken in homeopathic doses, was really as refreshing in its way as the rustle of leaves and the peeping of frogs.”’ The withdrawal to the hut did not destroy his love of conversation, or of the society of congenial men and women, and he was quite as frequent a visitor at sympathetic firesides as before he entered upon his novel life. _ It is easy for the public to fall into the error of augment- ing the interest of a personality by distortion. Thoreau as a cold, misanthropic hermit, for some reason seems more impressive to the average reader than the real Thoreau. James Lane Allen makes his ‘‘Adam Moss” say, ‘“ Every- thing that I can find of his (Thoreau’s) is as pure and cold and lonely as a wild cedar of the mountain rocks, standing far above its smokeless valley and hushed white river.” And yet we know that this “‘ wild cedar” was the favorite of children, and that he loved them passionately. Some of the biographers quote the contemporary of Thoreau who said, ‘‘I love Henry, but I cannot like him; and as for taking his arm I should as soon think of taking the arm of an elm tree,” and yet it was this ‘‘elm tree’ whose affec- INTRODUCTION XVil tion for his brother is one of the most beautiful of things — an unselfish affection that made him yield to John Thoreau the woman whom he himself loved. ‘He is as yet a somewhat bare hill which the warm gales of spring have not visited,” wrote Margaret Fuller, but it was Thoreau who sympathetically and manfully spoke out in defence of John Brown. ‘Trees and hills are doubtless at times ex- cellent metaphors, but they do not invariably suggest all the truth. Thoreau, then, was not the cold, remote man that he is sometimes pictured; he was no unfeeling stoic. The student who lives with his books for a time finds that in his temperament there was little of ‘‘crabbed age,”’ much of impulsive, full-blooded “youth.” ‘There is a lot of the boy in him,” said a friend, and the title is not altogether inappropriate. In New England, certainly, the boy who likes to be alone at times, who finds the woods and fields more interesting than games, who gets a kind of joy out of eluding the eyes and escaping the thoughts of other boys, is not unknown, and this phase of boyishness in Thoreau persisted throughout his life. He seems, too, to delight in shocking people. He ‘“‘talks big” for the sheer fun of it. ‘I would not run round the corner to see the world blow up,” he says grandiloquently. ‘After which statement,’’ remarks Mr. Bradford Torrey, ‘the reader whose bump of incuriosity is less highly developed may console himself by remembering that when a powder mill blew up in the next town, Thoreau, hearing the noise, ran downstairs, jumped into a wagon, and drove post-haste to the scene of the disaster.” ‘I trust you realize,” he writes to a correspondent, ‘‘ what an exaggerator I am — that I lay myself out to exaggerate.” It is the boy in him that ‘would brag as lustily as Chanticleer in the XX INTRODUCTION after considerable difficulty, he secured its publication, but it did not sell, and nothing is more in keeping with the nature of the man than his courageous banter at the outcome, when the unsalable copies were returned to him :— ‘The wares are sent to me at last, and I have an oppor- tunity to examine my purchase. They are something more substantial than fame, as my back knows, which has borne them up two flights of stairs to a place similar to that to which they trace their origin. Of the remaining two hundred ninety and odd, seventy-five were given away, the rest sold. I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself. Is it not well that the author should behold the fruits of his labor? My works are piled up in my chamber, half as high as my head, my opera omnia.” Much of Walden, too, was written at the Pond, for many passages incorporated in it are from the Journal which he was already keeping with the greatest regularity. Walden was published in 1854, but his other books, such as Hz- cursions (1863), The Maine Woods (1864), Cape Cod (1865) , ‘A Yankee in Canada (1866), Early Spring in Massachu- setts (1881), Summer (1884), Winter (1888), Autumn (1892), were made up by relatives or friends from articles that had appeared in Putnam’s Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, The Dial, and other periodicals, or from selections from the voluminous Journal. In 1906 the superb “ Manu- script Edition” of Thoreau appeared and, as it contained the Journal, placed at the disposal of the reader practically all that he wrote. Not all of Thoreau’s sentences are “as durable as a Roman aqueduct”; not all his books, it may be, will be read with pleasure a hundred years from to-day, but INTRODUCTION Xxi some of them will be cherished indefinitely. Not only Walden, but Cape Cod certainly and possibly the Week will have their admirers so long as American literature endures. In spite of incoherence, of unseemly paradox, of crass egotism, his work, “‘veined,”’ as it is, ‘‘with pure gold,” commands, and will continue to command, the affection of thoughtful readers. And there are adequate reasons for this. There is in them the appeal of deep seriousness; they are the product of a man “‘at grips with things.”’ To Thoreau life is fraught with problems, with problems demanding a man’s best, most energetic consideration. Artificiality, affectation, false values, con- formity, superstition — these things trammel the free upstanding soul of man. A true Romanticist, he would eall us ‘“‘back to Nature,’’ would free us from all that en- cumbers and degrades. He can reach us only through the printed page and his conception of the function of books is therefore exacting. ‘Books, not which afford us a cowering enjoyment, but in which each thought is of un- usual daring; such as an idle man cannot read, and a timid one would not be entertained by, which even make us dangerous to existing institutions — such I call good books.”” It was to the creation of such books that Thoreau devoted the best that was in him. In spite of the carelessness in details that Thoreau sometimes shows, he was deeply impressed with the magni- tude of the responsibility as an artist that the author assumes. Writing is with him a great art, worthy of all labor, of all tension of mind and heart. His love of con- centration in diction and his zeal for entire fidelity in exposition appear in a letter to a friend : — “Let me suggest a theme for you — to state to yourse’’ precisely and completely what that walk over the mountains XX1V INTRODUCTION and doggerel, and one finds him gravely printing such things as, ““What’s the railroad to me? I never go to see Where it ends.” Though the name of Thoreau invariably suggests nature and the observation of natural phenomena, Thoreau’s reputation will not rest upon his work as a naturalist. He was not a scientist in the modern sense, though he possessed many of the qualifications of the scientist. He had the keen eye, for example, as is suggested by the anecdote of the arrowhead. ‘‘I do not see where you find your Indian arrowheads,” a friend who was walking with him remarked. ‘‘Here is one,” was the quick reply, as he picked one up and handed it to his companion. “Thoreau had a pair of eyes,” says Holmes, “which, like those of the Indian deity, could see the smallest emmet on the blackest stone in the darkest night, — or come nearer to seeing it than those of most mortals.” But the scientist of high order must be able not only to see, but to see patiently and continuously, and to correct his observa- tions by one another, and to draw his conclusions with- out hyperbole. The boyish desire to see things others had not seen led Thoreau sometimes to deceive himself, and with him many a bird and beast passed, at least for a time, under a false name. “ Poet-naturalist,’”’ his friend Channing called Thoreau, and we are justified in stressing the first member of the epithet, for his relation to Nature is that of one who seeks . to live in her benign presence, who finds in her not material for classification, but a person for comfortable companion- ship, a guide to higher human living, and a constant inspira- tion to noble thought, From the natural phenomenon INTRODUCTION XXV he is ever springing an arch that reaches into the eternities. That which is visible and ponderable suggests that which transcends experience. The response of the plant to the rain reminds him of the growth of the soul : — “A single gentle rain makes the grass many shades greener. So our prospects brighten on the influx of better thoughts. We should be blessed if we lived in the present always, and took advantage of every acci- dent that befell us, like the grass which confesses the influence of the slightest dew that falls on it; and did not spend our time in atoning for the neglect of past opportunities, which we call doing our duty. We loiter in winter while it is already spring. In a pleasant spring morning all men’s sins are forgiven. Such a day is a truce to vice. While such a sun holds out to burn, the vilest sinner may return. Through our own recovered innocence we discern the innocence of our neighbors. You may have known your neighbor yesterday for a thief, a drunkard, or a sensualist, and merely pitied or despised him, and despaired of the world; but the sun shines bright and warm this first spring morning, recreating ° the world, and you meet him at some serene work, and see how his exhausted and debauched veins expand with still joy and bless the new day, feel the spring influence with the innocence of infancy, and all his faults are forgotten. There is not only an atmosphere of good-will about him, but even a savor of holiness groping for expression, blindly and ineffectually perhaps, like a new-born instinct, and for a short hour the south hillside echoes to no vulgar jest. You see some innocent fair shoots preparing to burst from his gnarled rind and try another year’s life, tender and fresh as the youngest plant. Even he has entered into the joy of his Lord. Why the jailer does not XXVHi INTRODUCTION duty to stand, foursquare and unflinching, in his defence, and such championship is superfluous “only as glory is superfluous, or a bit of red ribbon that a man would die” to win.” In spite of much that is unlovely and repellent, Thoreau makes his appeal to us and is an invaluable force in our modern life. The tendency, perhaps now stronger than ever before, is toward uniformity. Men find it easy to go in crowds; few dare to differ from their fellows, to be themselves, to live their own lives. ‘‘The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity! I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moon- light amid the mountains. Idonot wish togo below now.” “Tf a man does not keep pace with his companions, per- haps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music that he hears however measured or far away.”’ Thoreau has made it a little easier for the man of to-day to ignore the worship of “ Britannia of the Market- place, the Goddess of Getting On,” for him to “settle accounts with his mind,” to achieve a vision that reaches bevond his immediate surroundings. President Jordan tells of meeting in Wisconsin a certain Barney Mullins who had known Henry Thoreau in Concord. Said Mullins, ‘‘Mr. Thoreau was a land-surveyor in Con- cord. I knew him well. He hada way of his own, and he didn’t care naught about money ; but if there was ever a gentleman alive, he was one.” A ‘“ way of his own,” indifferent to ‘“‘money,” a “gentleman” — such was the impression he made. ‘As free and erect a mind as | INTRODUCTION XX1X have met,” says Emerson, and he adds, “ His soul was made for the noblest society; he had in a short life exhausted the capabilities of this world; wherever there is knowledge, wherever there is virtue, wherever there is beauty, he will find a home.” BIBLIOGRAPHY The standard edition of Thoreau is the “‘ Manuscript Edition” (Boston, 1906). Though this is the only edition containing the Journal, Thoreau’s other books are con- veniently accessible in the well-known “ Riverside Edition.” For biographical details the student should use : — Thoreau, the Poet-Naturalist, William Ellery Channing (Boston, 1873; reissued in 1902). Thoreau: His Infe and Aims. A Study, A. H. Japp (London, 1878). Tife of Henry David Thoreau, Henry 8. Salt (London, 1896, ‘‘Great Writers Series ’’). Henry D. Thoreau, Frank B. Sanborn (Boston, 1882). If Emerson’s edition of Thoreau’s Letters to Various Persons is consulted, the stoical impression of Thoreau derived should be corrected by the reading of Familiar Letters of Henry D. Thoreau, Frank B. Sanborn (Boston, 1894). As a guide to the great wealth of critical and miscella- neous material that has grown up about the name of Thoreau, Mr. Francis H. Allen’s A Bibliography of Henry David Thoreau is invaluable (Boston, 1908). WALDEN WALDEN ECONOMY WHEN I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts,° and earned my living by the labor of my hands only. I lived s there two years® and two months. At present I am a sojourner in civilized life again. I should not obtrude my affairs so much on the notice of my:readers if very particular inquiries had not been made by my townsmen concerning my mode of life, which ro some would call impertinent, though they do not appear to me at all impertinent, but, considering the circumstances, very natural and pertinent. Some have asked what I got to eat; if I did not feel lonesome; if I was not afraid; and the like. Others have been curious to learn what 15 portion of my income I devoted to charitable purposes ; and some, who have large families, how many poor chil- dren I maintained. I will therefore ask those of my readers who feel no particular interest in me to pardon me if I undertake to answer some of these questions in this 20 book. In most books, the J, or first person, is omitted ; in this it will be retained; that, in respect to egotism, is the main difference.° We commonly do not remember B 1 2 i WALDEN that it is, after all, always the first person that is speak- ing. I should not talk so much about myself° if there were anybody else whom I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my ex- 5 perience. Moreover, I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men’s lives; some such account as he would send to his kindred from a distant land; for if he has lived sincerely, it must have ro been in a distant land to me. Perhaps these pages are more particularly addressed to poor students. As for the rest of my readers, they will accept such portions as apply to them. I trust that none will stretch the seams in put- ting on the coat, for it may do good service to him whom rs it fits. I would fain say something, not so much concerning the Chinese and Sandwich Islanders as you° who read these pages, who are said to livein New England; some- thing about your condition, especially your outward con- 20 dition or circumstances in this world, in this town, what it is, whether it is necessary that it be as bad as it is, whether it cannot be improved as well as not. I have travelled a good deal in Concord; and everywhere, in shops, and offices, and fields, the inhabitants have ap- 25 peared to me to be doing penance in a thousand remark- able ways. What I have heard of Bramins sitting exposed to four fires° and looking in the face of the sun; or hang- ing suspended, with their heads downward, over flames; or looking at the heavens over their shoulders “until it 30 becomes impossible for them to resume their natural posi- tion, while from the twist of the neck nothing but liquids can pass into the stomach ;”’ or dwelling, chained for life, at the foot of a tree; or measuring with their bodies, like ECONOMY 3 caterpillars, the breadth of vast empires; or standing on one leg on the tops of pillars — even these forms of con- scious penance are hardly more incredible and astonishing than the scenes which I daily witness. The twelve labors of Hercules® were trifling in comparison with those which 5 my neighbors have undertaken ; for they were only twelve, and had an end; but I could never see that these men slew or captured any monster or finished any labor. They have no friend Iolas° to burn with a hot iron the root of the hydra’s head, but as soon as one head is crushed, two 10 spring up. I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these° are more easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture and 15 suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in. Who made them serfs of the soil? Why should they eat their sixty acres, when a man is condemned to eat only his peck of dirt°? Why should they begin digging their graves as 20 soon as they are born? They have got to live a man’s life, pushing all these things before them; and get onas well as they can. How many a poor immortal soul have I met well-nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn 25 seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean® stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage,° mow- ing, pasture, and wood-lot! The portionless, who struggle with no such unnecessary inherited encumbrances, find it labor enough to subdue and cultivate a few cubic feet of 30 flesh. But men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon ploughed into the soil for compost. By 4 WALDEN a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are em- ployed, as it says in an old book,° laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It is a fool’s life,.as they will find when they 5 get to the end of it, if not before. It is said that Deucalion and Pyrrha® created men by throwing stones over their heads behind them :— Inde genus® durum sumus, experiensque laborum, Et documenta damus qua simus origine nati. to Or, as Raleigh rhymes it in his sonorous way, — “‘From thence our kind hard-hearted is, enduring pain and care, Approving that our bodies of a stony nature are.” So much for a blind obedience to a blundering oracle, 15 throwing the stones over their heads behind them, and not seeing where they fell. Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious® cares and superfluously coarse la- zobors of life, that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them. Their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy and tremble too much for that. Actually, the laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men; 25 his labor would be depreciated in the market. He has no time to be anything but a machine. How can he remember well his ignorance — which his growth requires —who has so often to use his knowledge? We should feed and clothe him gratuitously sometimes, and recruit 30him with our cordials, before we judge of him. The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. ECONOMY 5 Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another thus tenderly. Some of you, we all know, are poor, find it hard to live, are sometimes, as it were, gasping for breath. I have no doubt that some of you who read this book are un- 5 able to pay for all the dinners which you have actually eaten, or for the coats and shoes which are fast wearing or are already worn out, and have come to this page to spend borrowed or stolen time, robbing your creditors of an hour. It is very evident what mean and sneaking 10 lives many of you live, for my sight has been whetted by experience; always on the limits, trying to get into business and trying to get out of debt, a very ancient slough, called by the Latins es alienum, another’s brass, for some of their coins were made of brass; still living, and dying, and buried by this other’s brass; always promising to pay, promising to pay to-morrow, and dying to-day, insolvent; seeking to curry favor, to get custom, by how many modes, only not state-prison offences; lying, flattering, voting, contracting yourselves into a nutshell of civility, or dilating into an atmosphere of thin and vaporous generosity, that you may persuade your neighbor to let you make his shoes, or his hat, or his coat, or his carriage, or import his groceries for him; making yourselves sick, that you may lay up something 25 against a sick day, something to be tucked away in an old chest, or in a stocking behind the plastering, or, more safely, in the brick bank; no matter where, no matter how much or how little. I sometimes wonder that we can be so frivolous, I 30 may almost say, as to attend to the gross but somewhat foreign form of servitude called Negro Slavery,° there are so many keen and subtle masters that enslave both Lal 5 Nd ° 6 WALDEN north and south. It is hard to have a southern over- seer; it is worse to have a northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself. Talk of a divinity in man! Look at the teamster on the highway, 5 wending to market by day or night; does any divinity stir within him? His highest duty to fodder and water his horses! What is his destiny to him compared with the shipping interests? Does not he drive for Squire Make-a-stir°? How godlike, how immortal, is he? ‘See 10 how he cowers and sneaks, how vaguely all the day he fears, not being immortal nor divine, but the slave and prisoner of his own opinion of himself, a fame won by his own deeds. Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of 15 himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate. Self-emancipation even in the West Indian provinces of the fancy and imagination — what Wilber- force® is there to bring that about? Think, also, of the ladies of the land weaving toilet cushions against 20 the last day, not to betray too green° an interest in their fates! As if you could kill time without injuring eternity. The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From 25the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for 30 this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things. When we consider what, to use the words of the cate- chism, is the chie: end of man,° and what are-the true ECONOMY 7 necessaries and means of life, it appears as if men had - deliberately chosen the common mode of living because they preferred it to any other. Yet they honestly think there is no choice left. But alert and healthy natures remember that the sun rose clear. It is never too late to give up our prejudices. No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof. What everybody echoes or in silence passes by as true to-day may turn out to be falsehood to-morrow, mere smoke of opinion, which some had trusted for a cloud that would sprinkle fertilizing rain on their fields. What old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new. Old people did not know enough once, perchance, to fetch fresh fuel to keep the fire a-going; new people put a little dry wood under a pot,° and are whirled round the globe with the speed of birds, in a way to kill old people, as the phrase is. Age is no better,° hardly so well, qualified for an in- structor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost. One may almost doubt if the wisest man has learned anything of absolute value by living. Practically, the old have no very important advice to give the young, their own experience has been so partial, and their lives have been such miserable failures, for private reasons, as they must believe, and it may be that they have some faith left which belies that experience, and they are only less young than they were. I have lived some thirty years° on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my sen- iors. They have told me nothing, and probably cannot tell me any thing, to the purpose. Here is life, an experi- ment to a great extent untried by me; but it does not avail me that they have tried it. If I have any experience 5 Lal 5) iS) ° 30 8 WALDEN which I think valuable, I am sure to reflect that this my Mentors® said nothing about. One farmer says to me, ‘‘ You cannot live on vegetable® food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with;” 5 and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vege- table-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plough along in spite of every obstacle. Some things are really ro necessaries of life in some circles, the most helpless and diseased, which in others are luxuries merely, and in others still are entirely unknown. The whole ground of human life seems to some to have been gone over by their predecessors, both the heights 15 and the valleys, and all things to have been cared for. According to Evelyn,° ‘the wise Solomon prescribed ordinances for the very distances of trees; and the Roman pretors® have decided how often you may go into your neighbor’s land to gather the acorns which fall on it with- 20 out trespass, and what share belongs to that neighbor.” Hippocrates° has even left directions how we should cut our nails; that is, even with the ends of the fingers, neither shorter nor longer. Undoubtedly the very tedium and ennui which presume to have exhausted the variety 25 and the joys of life areasoldas Adam. But man’s capac- ities have never been measured; nor are we to judge of what he can do by any precedents, so little has been tried. Whatever have been thy failures hitherto, “be not afflicted, my child, for who shall assign to thee what 30 thou hast left undone?” We might try our lives by a thousand simple tests; as, for instance, that the same sun which ripens my beans illumines at once a system of earths like ours. If I had ECONOMY 9 remembered this it would have prevented some mistakes. This was not the light in which I hoed them. The stars are the apexes of what wonderful triangles! What dis- tant and different beings in the various mansions of the universe are contemplating the same one at the same mo- ment! Nature and human life are as various as our several constitutions. Who shall say what prospect life offers to another? Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant? We should live in all the ages of the world in an hour; ay, in allthe worlds of the ages. History, Poetry, Mythology !— I know of no reading of another’s experience so Biateing and informing as this would be. The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well? You may say the wisest thing you can, old man — you who have lived seventy years, not without honor of a kind —I hear an irresistible voice which invites me away from all that. One generation abandons the enterprises of another like stranded vessels. I think that we may safely trust a good deal more than we do. We may waive just so much care of our- selves as we honestly bestow elsewhere. Nature is as well adapted to our weakness as to our strength. The inces- sant anxiety and strain of some is a well-nigh incurable form of disease. We are made to exaggerate the impor- tance of what work we do; and yet how much is not done by us! or, what if we had been taken sick? How vigilant we are! determined not to live by faith if we can avoid it; all the day long on the alert, at night we unwillingly say our prayers and commit ourselves to uncertainties. 5 Lal 5 & ° 30 10 WALDEN So thoroughly and sincerely are we compelled to live, reverencing our life, and denying the possibility of change. This is the only way, we say; but there are as many ways as there can be drawn radii from one centre. All 5 change is a miracle to contemplate; but it is a miracle ~ which is taking place every instant. Confucius® said, “To know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.” When one man has reduced a fact of the imagination to to be a fact to his understanding, I foresee that ail men will at length establish their lives on that basis. Let us consider for a moment what most of the trouble and anxiety which I have referred to is about, and how much it is necessary that we be troubled, or, at least, 15 careful. It would be some advantage to live a primitive and frontier life, though in the midst of an outward civil- ization, if only to learn what are the gross necessaries of life and what methods have been taken to obtain them ; or even to look over the old day-books of the merchants, 20to see what it was that men most commonly bought at the stores, what they stored, that is, what are the grossest groceries.° For the improvements of ages have had but little influence on the essential laws of man’s existence ; as our skeletons, probably, are not to be distinguished from 25 those of our ancestors. By the words, necessary of life, I mean whatever, of all that man obtains by his own exertions, has been from the first, or from long use has become, so important to human life that few, if any, whether from savageness, or 3° poverty, or philosophy, ever attempt to do without it. To many creatures there is in this sense but one necessary of life, Food. To the bison of the prairie it is a few inches of palatable grass, with water to drink; unless he seeks ECONOMY 11 the shelter of the forest or the mountain’s shadow. None of the brute creation requires more than Food and Shelter. The necessaries of life for man in this climate may, accu- rately enough, be distributed under the several heads of Food, Shelter, Clothing, and Fuel; for not till we haves secured these are we prepared to entertain the true prob- lems of life with freedom and a prospect of success. Man has invented, not only houses, but clothes and cooked food; and possibly from the accidental discovery of the warmth of fire, and the consequent use of it, at first a luxury, arose the present necessity to sit by it. We observe cats and dogs acquiring the same second nature. By proper Shelter and Clothing we legitimately retain our own internal heat; but with an excess of these, or of Fuel, that is, with an external heat greater than our own internal, may not cookery properly be said to begin? Darwin,° the naturalist, says of the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego,° that while his own party, who were well clothed and sitting close to a fire, were far from too warm, these naked savages, who were farther off, were observed, to his great surprise, ‘‘to be streaming with perspiration at undergoing such a roasting.” So, we are told, the New Hollander°® goes naked with impunity, while the Kuropean shivers in his clothes. Is it impossible to com- bine the hardiness of these savages with the intellectual- ness of the civilized man? According to Liebig,? man’s body is a stove, and food the fuel which keeps up the internal combustion in the lungs. In cold weather we eat more, in warm less. The animal heat is the result of a slow combustion, and disease and death take place when this is too rapid; or, for want of fuel or from some defect in the draught, the fire goes out. Of course, the vital heat is not to be confounded with fire; but so much to ° dS 5 30° 12 WALDEN for analogy. It appears, therefore, from the above list, that the expression, animal life, is nearly synonymous with the expression, animal heat; for while Food may be regarded as the Fuel which keeps up the fire within us — 5 and Fuel serves only to prepare that Food or to increase the warmth of our bodies by addition from without — Shelter and Clothing also serve only to retain the heat thus generated and absorbed. The grand necessity, then, for our bodies, is to keep towarm, to keep the vital heat in us. What pains we accordingly take, not only with our Food, and Cloth- ing, and Shelter but with our beds, which are our night- clothes, robbing the nests and breasts of birds to prepare this shelter within a shelter, as the mole has its bed of 15 grass and leaves at the end of its burrow! The poor man is wont to complain that this is a cold world; and to cold, no less physical than social, we refer directly a great part of our ails. The summer, in some climates, makes possible to man a sort of Elysian® life. Fuel, except to 20 cook his Food, is then unnecessary; the sun is his fire, and many of the fruits are sufficiently cooked by its rays; while Food generally is more various, and more easily obtained, and Clothing and Shelter are wholly or half unnecessary. At the present day, and in this country, 25as I find by my own experience, a few implements, a knife, an axe, a spade, a wheel-barrow, etc., and for the studious, lamplight, stationery, and access to a few books, rank next to necessaries, and can all be obtained at a trifling cost. Yet some, not wise, go to the other 30 side of the globe, to barbarous and unhealthy regions, and devote themselves to trade for ten or twenty years, in order that they may live —that is, keep comfortably warm — and die in New England at last. The luxuriously ECONOMY 13 rich are not simply kept comfortably warm, but unnatu- rally hot; as I implied before, they are cooked, of course & la mode. Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hin- drances to the elevation of mankind. With respect to luxuries and comforts, the wisest have ever lived a more simple and meagre life than the poor. The ancient philoso- phers, Chinese, Hindoo, Persian, and Greek, were a class than which none has been poorer in outward riches, none so rich in inward. We know not much about them. It is remarkable that we know so much of them as we do. The same is true of the more modern reformers and bene- factors of their race. None can be an impartial and wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary poverty. Of a life of luxury the fruit is luxury, whether in agriculture, or com- merce, or literature, or art. There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet it is admirable to profess because it was once admirable to live. To bea philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the prob- lems of life, not only theoretically, but practically. The success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly. They make shift to live merely by conformity, practically as their fathers did, and are in no sense the progenitors of a nobler race of men. But why do men degenerate ever? What makes families run out? What is the nature of the luxury which enervates and destroys nations? Are we sure that there is none of it in vur own lives? The philosopher is ir 5 pfe) T5 20 3° 14 WALDEN advance of his age even in the outward form of his life. He is not fed, sheltered, clothed, warmed, like his con- temporaries. How can a man be a philosopher and not maintain his vital heat by better methods than other men? s When a man is warmed by the several modes which I have described, what does he want next? Surely not more warmth of the same kind, as more and richer food, larger and more splendid houses, finer and more abundant clothing, more numerous, incessant, and hotter fires, and 1o the like. When he has obtained those things which are necessary to life, there is another alternative than to obtain the superfluities; and that is, to adventure on life now, his vacation from humbler toil having commenced. The soil, it appears, is suited to the seed, for it has sent 15 its radicle° downward, and it may now send its shoot upward also with confidence. Why has man rooted himself thus firmly in the earth, but that he may rise in the same proportion into the heavens above? — for the nobler plants are valued for the fruit they bear at 20 last in the air and light, far from the ground, and are not treated like the humbler esculents,° which, though they may be biennials,° are cultivated only till they have perfected their root,-and often cut down at top for this purpose, so that most would not know them in their 25 flowering season. I do not mean to prescribe rules to strong and valiant natures, who will mind their own affairs whether in heaven or hell, and perchance build more magnificently and spend more lavishly than the richest, without ever impoverishing 30 themselves, not knowing how they live — if, indeed, there are any such, as has been dreamed; nor to those who find their encouragement and inspiration in precisely the wesent_condition of things, and cherish it with the ECONOMY 15 fondness and enthusiasm of lovers — and, to some ex- tent, I reckon myself in this number; I do not speak to those who are well employed, in whatever circumstances, and they know whether they are well employed or not; but mainly to the mass of men who are discontented, 5 and idly complaining of the hardness of their lot or of the times, when they might improve them. There are some who complain most energetically and inconsolably of any, because they are, as they say, doing their duty. I also have in my mind that seemingly wealthy, but most 10 terribly impoverished class of all, who have accumulated dross, but know not how to use it, or get rid of it, and thus have forged their own golden or silver fetters. If I should attempt to tell how I have desired to spend is my life in past years, it would probably surprise those of my readers who are somewhat acquainted with its actual history; it would certainly astonish those who know nothing about it. I will only hint at some of the enter- prises which I have cherished. 20 In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick® too; to stand-on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line. You will pardon some 25 obscurities, for there are more secrets in my trade than in most men’s, and yet not voluntarily kept, but inseparable from its very nature. I would gladly tell all that I know about it and never paint ‘“‘ No Admittance” on my gate. I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle- 30 dove, and am still on their trail.° Many are the travellers I have spoken concerning them, describing their tracks and what calls they answered to, I have met one or two 16 WALDEN who had heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud, and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them themselves. s To anticipate, not the sunrise and the dawn merely, but, if possible, Nature herself! How many mornings, summer and winter, before yet any neighbor was stirring about his business, have I been about mine! No doubt, many of my townsmen have met me returning from this ro enterprise, farmers starting for Boston in the twilight, or woodchoppers going to their work. It is true, I never assisted the sun materially in his rising, but, doubt not, it was of the last importance only to be present at it. So many autumn, ay, and winter days, spent out- rs side the town, trying to hear what was in the wind, to hear and carry it express! I well-nigh sunk all my capital in it, and lost my own breath into the bargain, running in the face of it. If it had concerned either of the political parties, depend upon it, it would have appeared in 20 the Gazette with the earliest intelligence. At other times watching from the observatory of some cliff or tree, to telegraph any new arrival; or waiting at evening on the hill-tops for the sky to fall, that I might catch something, though I never caught much, and that, manna-wise,° 25 would dissolve again in the sun. For a long time I was reporter to a journal,° of no very wide circulation, whose editor has never yet seen fit to print the bulk of my contributions, and, as is too common with writers, I got only my labor for my pains. However, 30 in this case my pains were their own reward. For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snow storms and rain storms, and did my duty faith- fully; surveyor,° if not of highways, then of forest paths ECONOMY 17 and all across-lot routes, keeping them open, and ravines bridged and passable at all seasons, where the public heel had testified to their utility. I have looked after the wild stock of the town, which give a faithful herdsman a good deal of trouble by leaping 5 fences; and I have had aneye to the unfrequented nooks and corners of the farm; though I did not always know whether Jonas or Solomon worked in a particular field to- day; that was none of my business. I have watered the red huckleberry, the sand cherry and the nettle tree, 10 the red pine and the black ash, the white grape and the yellow violet, which might have withered else in dry seasons. In short, I went on thus for a long time, I may say it without boasting, faithfully minding my business, 15 till it became more and more evident that my towns- men would not after all admit me into the list of town officers, nor make my place a sinecure® with a moderate allowance. My accounts, which I can swear to have kept faithfully, I have, indeed, never got audited, still less 20 accepted, still less paid and settled. However, I have not set my heart on that. Not long since, a strolling Indian went to sell baskets at the house of a swell known lawyer in my neighborhood. “Do you wish to buy any baskets?” he asked. ‘No, 25 we do not want any,” wasthereply. ‘‘What!”’ exclaimed the Indian as he went out the gate, “do you mean to starve us?” Having seen his industrious white neighbors so well off — that the lawyer had only to weave arguments, and by some magic wealth and standing followed, he had 30 said to himself: I will go into business; I will weave baskets; it is a thing which I can do. Thinking that when he had made the baskets he would have done his c 18 WALDEN part, and then it would be the white man’s to buy them. He had not discovered that it was necessary for him to make it worth the other’s while to buy them, or at least make him think that it was so, or to make something else 5 which it would be worth his while to buy. I too had woven a kind of basket of a delicate texture, but I had not made it worth any one’s while to buy them. Yet not the less, in my case, did I think it worth my while to weave them, and instead of studying how to make it worth men’s ro While to buy my baskets I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them. The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind. Why should we exaggerate any one kind at the expense of the others? Finding that my fellow-citizens were not likely to offer 15 me any room in the court-house, or any curacy or living anywhere else, but I° must shift for myself, I turned my face more exclusively than ever to the woods, where I was better known. I determined to go into business at once, and not wait to acquire the usual capital, using such 20 Slender means as I had already got. My purpose in going to Walden Pond was not to live cheaply nor to live dearly there, but to transact some private business with the fewest obstacles; to be hindered from accomplishing which for want of a little common sense, a little enterprise and 2s business talent, appeared not so sad as foolish. I have always endeavored to acquire strict business habits; they are indispensable to every man. If your trade is with the Celestial Empire, then some small count- ing-house on the coast, in some Salem harbor, will be fix- 30 ture enough. You will export such articles as the country affords, purely native products, much ice and pine timber and a little granite, always in native bottoms.° These will be good ventures. To oversee all the details yourself ECONOMY 19 in person; to be at once pilot and captain, and owner and underwriter; to buy and sell and keep the accounts; to read every letter received, and write or read every letter sent; to superintend the discharge of imports night and day; to be upon many parts of the coast almost at the same time — often the richest freight will be discharged upon a Jersey shore; to be your own telegraph, un- 5 weariedly sweeping the horizon, speaking all passing: vessels bound coastwise; to keep up a steady despatch of commodities, for the supply of such a distant and exorbi- tant market ; to keep yourself informed of the state of the markets, prospects of war and peace everywhere, and an- ticipate the tendencies of trade and civilization — taking advantage of the results of all exploring expeditions, using new passages and all improvements in navigation; charts to be studied, the position of reefs and new lights and buoys to be ascertained, and ever, and ever, the logarith- mic tables to be corrected, for by the error of some calcu- lator the vessel often splits upon a rock that should have reached a friendly pier"—there is the untold fate of La Pérouse°; universal science to be kept pace with, studying the lives of all great discoverers and navigators, great adventurers and merchants, from Hanno° and the Phcenicians down to our day ; in fine, account of stock to be taken from time to time, to know how you stand. It isa _ labor to task the faculties of a man — such problems of profit and loss, of interest, of tare and tret, and gauging® of all kinds in it, as demand a universal knowledge. I have thought that Walden Pond would be a good place for business, not solely on account of the railroad or the ice trade; it offers advantages which it may not be good policy to divulge; it is a good post and a good founda- tion. No Neva? marshes to be filled; though you must 30 20 WALDEN everywhere build on piles of your own driving. It is said that a flood-tide, with a westerly wind, and ice in the Neva, would sweep St. Petersburg from the face of the earth. As this business was to be entered into without the 5 usual capital, it may not be easy to conjecture where those means, that will still be indispensable to every such under- taking, were to be obtained. As for Clothing,° to come at once to the practical part of the question, perhaps we are led oftener by the love of novelty, and a regard for the ro opinions of men, in procuring it, than by a true utility. Let him who has work to do recollect that the object of clothing is, first, to retain the vital heat, and secondly, in this state of society, to cover nakedness, and he may judge how much of any necessary or important work 15may be accomplished without adding to his wardrobe. Kings and queens who wear a suit but once, though made by some tailor or dressmaker to their majesties, cannot know the comfort of wearing a suit that fits. They are no better than wooden horses to hang the clean clothes 200n. Every day our garments become more assimilated to ourselves, receiving the impress of the wearer’s char- acter, until we hesitate to lay them aside, without such delay and medical appliances and some such solemnity even as our bodies. No man ever stood the lower in my 25 estimation for having a patch in his clothes; yet I am sure that there is greater anxiety, commonly, to have fashionable, or at least, clean and unpatched clothes, than to have a sound conscience. But even if the rent is not mended, perhaps the worst vice betrayed is im- 30 providence. I sometimes try my acquaintances by such tests as this: who could wear a patch, or two extra seams only, over the knee? Most behave as if they be- lieved that their prospects for life would be ruined if they ECONOMY a | should do it. It would be easier for them to hobble down to town with a broken leg than with a broken pantaloon. Often if an accident happens to a gentleman’s legs, they can be mended; but if a similar accident happens to the legs of his pantaloons, there is no help for it; for he con- 5 siders, not what is truly respectable, but what is respected. We know but few men, a great many coats and breeches. Dress a scare-crow in your last shift, you standing shift- less by, who would not soonest salute the scare-crow ? Passing a cornfield the other day, close by a hat and coat 10 on a stake, I recognized the owner of the farm. He was only a little more weather-beaten than when I saw him last. Ihave heard of a dog that barked at every stranger who approached his master’s premises with clothes on, but was easily quieted by a naked thief.. It is an inter- 15 esting question how far men would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes. Could you, in such a case, tell surely of any company of civilized men, which belonged to the most respected class? When Madam Pfeiffer,° in her adventurous travels round the 20 - world, from east to west, had got so near home as Asiatic Russia, she says that she felt the necessity of wearing other than a travelling dress, when she went to meet the authorities, for she ““‘was now in a civilized coun- try, where . . . people are judged of by their clothes.” 2. Even in our democratic New England towns, the ac- cidental possession of wealth, and its manifestation in dress and equipage alone, obtain for the possessor almost universal respect. But they who yield such respect, numerous as they are, are so far heathen, and need to 30 have a missionary sent to them. Besides, clothes intro- duced sewing, a kind of work which you may call endless ; a woman’s dress, at least, is never done. 22 WALDEN A man who has at length found something to do will not need to get a new suit to do it in; for him the old will do, that has lain dusty in the garret for an indeterminate period. Old shoes will serve a hero longer than they have 5 served his valet —if a hero ever has a valet — bare feet are older than shoes, and he can make them do. Only they who go to soirées and legislative halls must have new coats, coats to change as often as the man changes in them. But if my jacket and trousers, my hat and ro shoes, are fit to worship God in, they will do; will they not? Who ever saw his old clothes —his old coat — actually worn out, resolved into its primitive elements, so that it was not a deed of charity to bestow it on some poor boy, by him perchance to be bestowed on some poorer 1s Still, or shall we say richer, who could do with less? I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made to fit? If you have any enterprise before you, try it in your old 20 Clothes. All men want,° not something to do with, but something to do, or rather, something to be. Perhaps we should never procure a new suit, however ragged or dirty the old, until we have so conducted, so enterprised or sailed in some way, that we feel like new men in the old, 2s and that to retain it would be like keeping new wine in old bottles. Our moulting season, like that of the fowls, must be a crisis in our lives. The loon retires to solitary _ ponds to spend it. Thus also the snake casts its slough, and the caterpillar its wormy coat, by an internal indus- 30 try and expansion; for clothes are but our outmost cuticle and mortal coil. Otherwise we shall be found sailing under false colors, and be inevitably cashiered® at last by our own opinion, as well as that of mankind. ECONOMY 2a We don garment after garment, as if we grew like exogenous plants by addition without. Our outside and often thin and fanciful clothes are our epidermis or false skin, which partakes not of our life, and may be stripped off here and there without fatal injury; our thicker gar- ments, constantly worn, are our cellular integument, or cortex®; but our shirts are our liber or true bark, which cannot be removed without girdling and so destroying the man. I believe that all races at some seasons wear some- thing equivalent to.the shirt. It is desirable that a man be clad so simply that he can lay his hands on himself in the dark, and that he live in all respects so compactly and preparedly that, if an enemy take the town, he can, like the old philosopher, walk out the gate empty-handed without anxiety. While one thick garment is, for most 15 purposes, as good as three thin ones, and cheap clothing can be obtained at prices really to suit customers; while a thick coat can be bought for five dollars, which will last as many years, thick pantaloons for two dollars, cowhide boots for a dollar and a half a pair, a summer hat 20 for a quarter of a dollar, and a winter cap for sixty-two and a half cents, or a better be made at home at a nominal cost, where is he so poor that, clad in such a suit, of his own earning, there will not be found wise men to do him reverence ? 25 When I ask for a garment of a particular form, my tailoress tells me gravely, ‘They do not make them so now,” not emphasizing the ‘‘They ”’ at all, as if she quoted an authority as impersonal as the Fates,° and I find it dificult to get made what I want, simply because she 30 cannot believe that I mean what I say, that I am so rash. When I hear this oracular sentence, I am for a moment absorbed in thought, emphasizing to myself each word wn al ie) 24 - WALDEN separately that I may come at the meaning of it, that I may find out by what degree of consanguinity They are related to me, and what authority they may have in an affair which affects me so nearly; and, finally, I am in- 5 clined to answer her with equal mystery, and without any more emphasis of the “they”: “It is true, they did not make them so recently, but they do now.”” Of what use this measuring of me if she does not measure my character, but only the breadth of my shoulders, as it ro were a peg to hang the coat on? We worship not the Graces,° nor the Parce,° but Fashion. She spins and weaves and cuts with full authority. The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveller’s cap, and all the monkeys ‘in America do the same. I sometimes despair of getting rsany thing quite simple and honest done in this world by the help of men. They would have to be passed through a powerful press first, to squeeze their old notions out of them, so that they would not soon get upon their legs again, and then there would be some one in the com- 20 pany with a maggot in his head, hatched from an egg deposited there nobody knows when, for not even fire kills these things, and you would have lost your labor. Nevertheless, we will not forget that some Egyptian wheat° was handed down to us by a mummy. 2s On the whole, I think that it cannot be maintained that dressing’ has in this or any country risen to the dignity of an art. At present.men make shift to wear what they can get. Like shipwrecked sailors, they put on what they can find on the beach, and at a little distance, 30 whether of space or time, laugh at each other’s masquerade. Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new. We are amused at beholding the costume of Henry VIII, or Queen Elizabeth, as much ECONOMY 25 as if it was that of the King and Queen of the Cannibal Islands. All costume of a man is pitiful or grotesque. It is only the serious eye peering from and the sincere life passed within it, which restrain laughter and conse- crate the costume of any people. Let Harlequin be taken with a fit of the colic and his trappings will have to serve that mood too. When the soldier is hit by a cannon ball, rags are as becoming-as purple. The childish and savage taste of men and women for new patterns keeps how many shaking and squinting through kaleidoscopes that they may discover the partic- ular figure which this generation requires to-day. The manufacturers have learned that this taste is merely 5 10 whimsical. Of two patterns which differ only by a few ~ threads more or less of a particular color, the one will be sold readily, the other lie on the shelf, though it frequently happens that after the lapse of a season the latter becomes the most fashionable.° Comparatively, tattooing is not the hideous custom which it is called. It is not barbarous merely because the printing is skin-deep and unalterable. I cannot believe that our factory system is the best mode by which men may get clothing. The condi- tion of the operatives is becoming every day more like that of the English; and it cannot be wondered at, since, as far as I have heard or observed, the principal object is, not that mankind may be well and honestly clad, but, unquestionably, that the corporations may be enriched. In the long run, men hit only what they aim at. There- fore, though they should fail immediately, they had better aim at something high. As for a Shelter, I will not deny that this is now a necessary of life, though there are instances of men hay- N 5 3° 26 WALDEN ing done without it for long periods in colder countries than this. Samuel Laing® says that ‘‘The Laplander in his skin dress, and in a skin bag which he puts over his head and shoulders, will sleep night after night on 5 the snow — in a degree of cold which would extinguish the life of one exposed to it in any woolen clothing.” He had seen them asleep thus. Yet he adds, ‘‘ They are not hardier than other people.”’ But, probably, man did not live long on the earth without discovering the ro convenience which there is in a house, the domestic® comforts, which phrase may have originally ignified the satisfactions of the house more than of the family; though these must be extremely partial and occasional in those climates where the house is associated in our 15 thoughts with winter or the rainy season chiefly, and two- thirds of the year, except for a parasol, is unnecessary. In our climate, in the summer, it was formerly almost solely a covering at night. In the Indian gazettes® a wigwam was the symbol of a day’s march, and a row of 20 them cut or painted on the bark of a tree signified that so many times they had camped. Man was not made so large limbed and robust but that he must seek to narrow his world, and wall in a space such as fitted him. He was at first bare and out of doors; but though this was pleasant 25 enough in serene and warm weather, by daylight, the rainy season and the winter, to say nothing of the torrid sun, would perhaps have nipped his race in the bud if he had not made haste to clothe himself with the shelter of a house. Adam and Eve, accordirg to the fable, wore the 30 bower before other clothes. Man wanted a home, a place of warmth, or comfort, first of physical warmth, then the warmth of the affections. We may imagine a time when, in the infancy of the ECONOMY rare human race, some enterprising mortal crept into a hollow in a rock for shelter. Every child begins the world again, to some extent, and loves to stay out-doors, even in wet and cold. It plays house, as well as horse, having an instinct for it. Who does not remember the interest with 5 which, when young, he looked at shelving rocks, or any approach to a cave? It was the natural yearning of that portion of our most primitive ancestor which still survived in us. From the cave we have advanced to roofs of palm leaves, of bark and boughs, of linen woven and 10 stretched, of grass and straw, of boards and _ shingles, of stones and tiles. At last, we know not what it is to live in the open air, and our lives are domestic in more senses than we think. From the hearth to the field is a great distance. It would be well, perhaps, if we were tors spend more of our days and nights without any obstruc- tion between us and the celestial bodies, if the poet did not speak so much from under a roof, or the saint dwell there so long. Birds do not sing in caves, nor do doves cherish their innocence in dovecots. 20 However, if one designs to construct a dwelling house, it behooves him to exercise a little Yankee shrewdness, lest after all he find himself in a workhouse, a labyrinth without a clew, a museum, an almshouse, a prison, or a splendid mausoleum instead. Consider first how slight 25 a shelter is absolutely necessary. I have seen Penob- scot Indians,° in this town, living in tents of thin cotton cloth, while the snow was nearly a foot deep around them, and I thought that they would be glad to have it deeper to keep out the wind. Formerly, when how to get my 30 living honestly, with freedom left for my proper pur- suits, was a question which vexed me even more than it does now, for unfortunately I am become somewhat 28 WALDEN callous, I used to see a large box by the railroad, six feet long by three wide, in which the laborers locked up their tools at night, and it suggested to me that every man who was hard pushed might get such a one for a dollar, 5 and having bored a few auger holes in it, to admit the air at least, get into it when it rained and at night, and hook down the lid, and so have freedom in his love, and in his soul be free. This did not appear the worst, nor by any means a despicable alternative. You could sit up as ro late as you pleased, and, whenever you got up, go abroad without any landlord or houselord dogging you for rent. Many a man is harassed to death to pay the rent of a larger and more luxurious box who would not. have frozen to death in such a box as this. I am far from jesting. 15 Economy is a subject which admits of being treated with levity, -but it cannot so be disposed of. A comfortable house for a rude and hardy race, that lived mostly out of doors, was once made here almost entirely of such materials as Nature furnished ready to their hands. Gookin,° 20 who was superintendent of the Indians subject to the Massachusetts Colony, writing in. 1674, says, “The best of their houses are covered very neatly, tight and warm, with barks of trees, slipped from their bodies at those seasons when the sap is up, and made into great flakes, 2s with pressure of weighty timber, when they are green. : The meaner sort are covered with mats which they make of a kind of bulrush, and are also indifferently tight and warm, but not so good as the former. ... Some I have seen, sixty or a hundred feet long and thirty feet 3obroad.... I have often lodged in their wigwams, and found them as warm as the best English houses.”’ He adds, that they were commonly carpeted and lined within with well-wrought embroidered mats, and were fur- - ECONOMY . 29 nished with various utensils. The Indians had advanced so far as to regulate the effect of the wind by a mat sus- pended over the hole in the roof and moved by a string. Such a lodge was in the first instance constructed in a day or two at most, and taken down and put up in a few hours; 5 and every family owned one, or its® apartment in one. In the savage state every family owns a shelter as good as the best, and sufficient for its coarser and simpler wants; but I think that I speak within bounds when I say that, though the birds of the air have their nests, and the foxes 10 their holes, and the savages their wigwams, in modern civilized society not more than one half the families own a shelter. In the large towns and cities, where civiliza- tion especially prevails, the number of those who own a shelter is a very small fraction of the whole. The rest 15 pay an annual tax for this outside garment of all, become indispensable summer and winter, which would buy a village of Indian wigwams, but now helps to keep them poor as long as they live. I do not mean to insist here on the disadvantage of hiring compared with owning, but it 20 is evident that the savage owns his shelter because it costs so little, while the civilized man hires his commonly because he cannot afford to own it; nor can he, in the long run, any better afford to hire. But, answers one, by merely paying this tax the poor civilized man secures 25 an abode which is a palace compared with the savage’s. An annual rent of from twenty-five to a hundred dollars, these are the country rates, entitles him to the benefit of the improvements of centuries, spacious apartments, clean paint and paper, Rumford fireplace,° back plaster- 30 ing, Venetian blinds,° copper pump, spring lock, a commo- dious cellar, and many other things. But how happens it that he who is said to enjoy these things is so commonly 30 WALDEN a poor civilized man, while the savage, who has them not, is rich as a savage? ~ If it is asserted that civilization is a real advance in the condition of man — and I think that it is, though only the wise improve their advantages — 5 it must be shown that it has produced better dwellings without making them more costly; and the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run. An average house in this neighborhood costs perhaps ro eight hundred dollars, and to lay up this sum will take from ten to fifteen years of the laborer’s life, even if he is not encumbered with a family — estimating the pecuniary value of every man’s labor at one dollar a day, for if some receive more, others receive less —so that he must have 15 spent more than half his life commonly before his wigwam will be earned. If we suppose him to pay a rent instead, this is but a doubtful choice of evils. Would the savage have been wise to exchange his wigwam for a palace on these terms ? 20 It may be guessed that I reduce almost the whole ad- vantage of holding this superfluous property as a fund in store against the future, so far as the individual is concerned, mainly to the defraying of funeral expenses. But perhaps a man is not required to bury himself. Nevertheless 25 this points to an important distinction between the civil- ized man and the savage; and, no doubt, they have designs on us for our benefit, in making the life of a civil- ized people an institution, in which the life of the individual is to a great extent absorbed, in order to preserve and 30 perfect that of the race. But I wish to show at what a sacrifice this advantage is at present obtained, and to suggest that we may possibly so live as to secure all the advantage without suffering any of the disadvantage. ECONOMY ol What mean ye® by saying that the poor ye have always with you, or that the fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge? ‘““As I live, saith the Lord God, ye shall not have occa- sion any more to use this proverb in Israel.” “Behold all souls are mine; as the soul of the father, so also the soul of the son is mine; the soul that sinneth it shall die.” When I consider my neighbors, the farmers of Concord, who are at least as well off as the other classes, I find that 10 for the most part they have been toiling twenty, thirty, or forty years, that they may become the real owners of their farms, which commonly they have inherited with encumbrances, or else bought with hired money, — and we may regard one-third of that toil as the cost of their 15 houses, — but commonly they have not paid for them yet. It is true, the encumbrances sometimes outweigh the value of the farm, so that the farm itself becomes one great encumbrance, and still a man is found to inherit it, being well acquainted with it, as he says. On applying to the 20 assessors, I am surprised to learn that they cannot at-once name a dozen in the town who own their farms free and clear. If you would know the history of these homesteads, inquire at the bank where they are mortgaged. The man who has actually paid for his farm with labor on it is 25 so rare that every neighbor can point to him. I doubt if there are three such men in Concord. What has been said of the merchants, that a very large majority, even ninety-seven in a hundred, are sure to fail, is equally true of the farmers. With regard to the merchants, how- 30 ever, one of them says pertinently that a great part of their failures are not genuine pecuniary failures, but merely failures to fulfil their engagements, because it is 32 WALDEN inconvenient ; that is, it is the moral character that breaks down. But this puts an infinitely worse face on the matter, and suggests, beside, that probably not even the other three succeed in saving their souls, but are per- 5 chance bankrupt in a worse sense than they who fail honestly. Bankruptcy and repudiation are the spring- boards from which much of our civilization vaults and turns its somersets, but the savage stands on the unelastic plank of famine. Yet the Middesex Cattle Show goes 10 Off here with éclat° annually, as if all the joints of the agricultural machine were suent.° The farmer is endeavoring to solve the problem of a livelihood by a formula more complicated than the problem itself. To get his shoestrings he speculates in herds of 15 cattle. With consummate skill he has set his trap with a hair springe® to catch comfort and independence, and then, as he turned away, got his own leg into it. This is the reason he is poor; and for a similar reason we are all poor in respect to a thousand savage comforts, though 20 Surrounded by luxuries. As Chapman® sings, — ““The false society of men — —for earthly greatness All heavenly comforts rarefies to air.”’ And when the farmer has got his house, he may not be 25 the richer but the poorer for it, and it be° the house that has got him. As I understand it, that was a valid objec- tion urged by Momus° against the house which Minerva® made, that she “‘had not made it movable, by which means a bad neighborhood might be avoided;” and it 30 may still be urged, for our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed in them; and the bad neighborhood to be avoided is our ECONOMY 30 own scurvy selves. I know one or two families, at least, in this town, who, for nearly a generation, have been wishing to sell their houses in the outskirts and move into the village, but have not been able to accomplish it, and only death will set them free. 5 Granted that the majority are able at last either to own or hire the modern house with all its improvements. While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them. It has created palaces, but it was not so easy to create 10 noblemen and kings. And 7f the civilized man’s purswits are no worthier than the savage’s, of he 1s employed the greater part of his life in obtaining gross necessaries and comforts merely, why should he have a better dwelling than the former ? But how do the poor minority fare? Perhaps it wills be found, that just in proportion as some have been placed in outward circumstances above the savage, others have been degraded below him. The luxury of one class is counterbalanced by the indigence of another. On the one side is the palace, on the other are the almhouse and 20 “silent poor.”? The myriads who built the pyramids to be the tombs of the Pharaohs were fed on garlic, and it may be were not decently buried themselves. The mason who finishes the cornice of the palace returns at night perchance to a hut not so good as a wigwam. It is a25 mistake to suppose that, in a country where the usual evidences of civilization exist, the condition of a very large body of the inhabitants may not be as degraded as that of savages. I refer to the degraded poor, not now to the degraded rich. To know this I should not need to 30 look farther than the shanties which everywhere border our railroads, that last improvement® in civilization; where I see in my daily walks human beings living in os 34 WALDEN sties, and all winter with an open door, for the sake of light, without any visible, often imaginable, wood pile, and the° forms of both old and young are permanently contracted by the long habit of shrinking from cold and 5 misery, and the development of all their limbs and faculties is checked. It certainly is fair to look at that class by whose labor the works which distinguish this generation are accomplished. Such too, to a greater or less extent, is the condition of the operatives of every denomination roin England, which is the great workhouse of the world. Or I could refer you to Ireland, which is marked as one of the white or enlightened spots on the map. Contrast the physical condition of the Irish with that of the North American Indian, or the South Sea Islander, or any other 15 savage race before it was degraded by contact with the civilized man. Yet I have no doubt that that people’s rulers are as wise as the average of civilized rulers. Their condition only proves what squalidness may consist with civilization. I hardly need refer now to the laborers in 20 our Southern States who produce the staple exports of this country, and are themselves a staple production of the South. But to confine myself to those who are said to be in moderate circumstances. Most men appear never to have considered what a 2s house is, and are actually though needlessly poor all their lives because they think that they must have such a one as their neighbors have. As if one were to wear any sort of coat which the tailor might cut out for him, or, gradually leaving off palmleaf hat or cap of woodchuck 30 skin, complain of hard times because he could not afford to buy him a crown! It is possible to invent a house still more convenient and luxurious than we have, which yet all would admit that man could not afford to pay for. ECONOMY 3D Shall we always study to obtain more of these things, and not sometimes to be content with less? Shall the respect- able citizen thus gravely teach, by precept and example, the necessity of the young man’s providing a certain number of superfluous glow-shoes,? and umbrellas, and 5 empty guest chambers for empty guests, before he dies? Why should not our furniture be as simple as the Arab’s or the Indian’s? When I think of the benefactors of the race, whom we have apotheosized as messengers from heaven, bearers of divine gifts to man, I do not 10 see in my mind any retinue at their heels, any car-load of fashionable furniture. Or what if I were to allow — would it not be a singular allowance? — that our furniture should be more complex than the Arab’s, in proportion as we are morally and intellectually his superiors! At 1s present our houses are cluttered and defiled with it, and a good housewife would sweep out the greater part into the dust hole, and not leave her morning’s work undone. Morning work! By the blushes of Aurora® and the music of Memnon,° what should be man’s morning 20 work in this world? I had three pieces of limestone on my desk, but I was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily, when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still, and I threw them out the window in disgust. How, then, could I have a furnished house? 25 I would rather sit in the open air, for no dust gathers on the grass, unless where man has broken ground. It is the luxurious and dissipated who set the fashions which the herd so diligently follow. The traveller who stops at the best houses, so called, soon discovers this, 30 for the publicans presume him to be a Sardanapalus,° and if he resigned himself to their tender mercies he would soon be completely emasculated. I think that in the 36 WALDEN ~ railroad car we are inclined to spend more on luxury than on safety and convenience, and it threatens without attaining these to become no better than a modern drawing-room, with its divans, and ottomans, and sun- 5 shades, and a hundred other Oriental things, which we are taking west with us, invented for the ladies of the harem and the effeminate natives of the Celestial Empire, which Jonathan® should be ashamed to know the names of. I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself, 1o than be crowded on a velvet cushion. I would rather - ride on earth in an ox cart with a free circulation, than go to heaven in the fancy car of an excursion train and breathe a malaria all the way. The very simplicity and nakedness of man’s life in 15 the primitive ages imply this advantage at least, that they left him still but a sojourner in nature. When he was refreshed with food and sleep he contemplated his journey again. He dwelt, as it were, in a tent in this world, and was either threading the valleys, or crossing the 20 plains, or climbing the mountain tops. But lo! men have become the tools of their tools. The man who indepen- dently plucked the fruits when he was hungry is become a farmer; and he who stood under a tree for shelter, a house- keeper. We now no longer camp as for a night, but have 25 settled down on earth and forgotten heaven. We have adopted Christianity merely as an improved method of agri-culture.° We have built for this world a family mansion, and for the next a family tomb. The best works of art are the expression of man’s struggle to free 30 himself from this condition, but the effect of our art is merely to make this low state comfortable and that higher state to be forgotten There is actually no place in this village for a work of fine art, if any had come down to us, ECONOMY ol to stand, for our lives, our houses and streets, furnish no proper pedestal for it. There is not a nail to hang a picture on, nor a shelf to receive the bust of a hero or a saint. When I consider how our houses are built and paid for, or not paid for, and their internal economy managed and 5 sustained, I wonder that the floor does not give way under the visitor while he is admiring the gewgaws upon the mantel-piece, and let him through into the cellar, to some solid and honest though earthy foundation. I cannot but perceive that this so-called rich and refined life is a 10 thing jumped at, and I do not get on in the enjoyment of the fine arts which adorn it, my attention being wholly occupied with the jump; for I remember that the greatest genuine leap, due to human muscles alone, on record, is that of certain wandering Arabs, who are said to have 15 cleared twenty-five feet on level ground. Without facti- tious® support, man is sure to come to earth again beyond that distance. The first question which I am tempted to put to the proprietor of such great impropriety is, Who bolsters you? Are you one of the ninety-seven who fail, 20 or the three who succeed? Answer me these questions, and then perhaps I may look at your bawbles and find them ornamental. The cart before the horse is neither beautiful nor useful. Before we can adorn our houses - with beautiful objects the walls must be stripped, and our 25 lives must be stripped, and housekeeping and beautiful living be laid for a foundation: now, a taste for the beauti- ful is most cultivated out of doors, where there is no house and no housekeeper. Old Johnson,° in his ‘“‘Wonder-Working Providence,”’’ 30 speaking of the first settlers of this town, with whom he was contemporary, tells us that “they burrow themselves in the earth for their first shelter under some hillside, and, 38 WALDEN casting the soil aloft upon timber, they make a smoky fire against the earth, at the highest side.” They did not “provide them houses,”’ says he, ‘‘till the earth, by the Lord’s blessing, brought forth bread to feed them,” and s the first year’s crop was so light that “they were forced to cut their bread very thin for a long season.” The secre- tary of the Province of New Netherland,° writing in Dutch, in 1650, for the information of those who wished to take up land there, states more particularly, that ‘those in New to Netherland, and especially in New England, who have no means to build farm houses at first according to their wishes, dig a square pit in the ground, cellar fashion, six or seven feet deep, as long and as broad as they think proper, case the earth inside with wood all round the wall, and line 15 the wood with the bark of trees or something else to prevent the caving in of the earth; floor this cellar with plank, and wainscot it overhead for a ceiling, raise a roof of spars clear up, and cover the spars with bark or green sods, so that they can live dry and warm in these houses with their 20 entire families for two, three, and four years, it being under- stood that partitions are run through those cellars which are adapted to the size of the family. The wealthy and principal men in New England, in the beginning - of the colonies, commenced their first dwelling houses 2sin this fashion for two reasons; firstly, in order not to waste time in building, and not to want food the next season; secondly, in order not to discourage poor laboring people whom they brought over in numbers from Father- land. In the course of three or four years, when the 30 country became adapted to agriculture, they built them- selves handsome houses, spending on them several thou- sands.” In this course which our ancestors took there was ECONOMY 39 a show of prudence at least, as if their principle were to satisfy the more pressing wants first. But are the more pressing wants satisfied now? When I think of acquiring for myself one of our luxurious dwellings, I am deterred, for, so to speak, the country is not yet adapted 5 to human culture, and we are still forced to cut our spiritual bread far thinner than our forefathers did their wheaten. Not that all architectural ornament is to be neglected even in the rudest periods; but let our houses first be lined with beauty, where they come in contact 10 with our lives, like the tenement of the shellfish, and not overlaid with it. But, alas! I have been inside one or two of them,.and know what they are lined with. Though we are not so degenerate but that we might possibly live in a cave or a wigwam or wear skins to-day, 15 it certainly is better to accept the advantages, though so dearly bought, which the invention and industry of man- kind offer. In such a neighborhood as this, boards and shingles, lime and bricks, are cheaper and more easily obtained than suitable caves, or whole logs, or bark in 20 sufficient quantities, or even well-tempered clay or flat stones. I speak understandingly on this subject, for I have made myself acquainted with it both theoretically and practically. With a little more wit we might use these materials so as to become richer than the richest now 25 are, and make our civilization a blessing. The civilized man is a more experienced and wiser savage. But to make haste to my own experiment. Near the end of March, 1845, I borrowed an axe and went down to the woods by Walden Pond, nearest to 30 where I intended to build my house, and began to cut down some tall arrowy white pines, still in their youth, for timber. It is difficult to begin without borrowing, but 40 WALDEN perhaps it is the most generous course thus to permit your fellow-men to have an interest in your enterprise. The owner® of the axe, as he released his hold on it, said that it was the apple of his eye; but I returned it sharper than 5 I received it. It was a pleasant hillside where I worked, covered with pine woods, through which I looked out on the pond, and a small open field in the woods where pines and hickories were springing up. The ice in the pond was not yet dissolved, though there were some open spaces, roand it was all dark colored and saturated with water. There were some slight flurries of snow during the days that I worked there; but for the most part when I came out on to the railroad, on my way home, its yellow sand heap stretched away gleaming in the hazy atmosphere, rs and the rails shone in the spring sun, and I heard the lark and pewee and other birds already come to commence - another year with us. They were pleasant spring days, in which the winter of man’s discontent® was thawing as well as the earth, and the life that had lain torpid 20 began to stretch itself. One day, when my axe had come off and I had cut a green hickory for a wedge, driving it with a stone, and had placed the whole to soak in a pond hole in order to swell the wood, I saw a striped snake run into the water, and he lay on the bottom, apparently 25 without inconvenience, as long as I stayed there, or more than a quarter of an hour; perhaps because he had not fairly come out of the torpid state. It appeared to me that for a like reason men remain in their present low and primitive condition; but if they should feel the influence 30 of the spring of springs arousing them, they would of neces- sity rise to a higher and more ethereal life. I had pre- viously seen the snakes in frosty mornings in my path with portions of their bodies still numb and inflexible, ECONOMY 41 waiting for the sun to thaw them. On the Ist of April it rained and melted the ice, and in the early part of the day, which was very foggy, I heard a stray goose groping about over the pond and cackling as if lost, or like the spirit of the fog. 5 So I went on for some days cutting and hewing timber, and also studs and rafters, all with my narrow axe, not having many communicable or scholar-like thoughts, singing to myself, — Men say they know many things, 10 But lo! they have taken wings— The arts and sciences, And a thousand appliances; The wind that blows Is all that any body knows. 8 I hewed the main timbers six inches square, most of the studs on two sides only, and the rafters and floor timbers on one side, leaving the rest of the bark on, so that they were just as straight and much stronger than sawed ones. Eachstick was carefully mortised or tenoned?® 20 by its stump, for I had borrowed other tools by this time. My days in the woods were not very long ones; yet I usually carried my dinner of bread and butter, and read the newspaper in which it was wrapped, at noon, sitting amid the green pine boughs which I had cut off, and to my 25 bread was imparted some of their fragrance, for my hands | were covered with a thick coat of pitch. Before I had done I was more the friend than the foe of the pine tree, though I had cut: down some of them, having become better acquainted with it. Sometimes a rambler in the 30 wood was attracted by the sound of my axe, and we chatted pleasantly over the chips which I had made. By the middle of April, for I made no haste in my work, 42 WALDEN but rather made the most of it, my house was framed and ready for the raising. I had already bought the shanty of James Collins, an Irishman who worked on the Fitchburg Railroad, for boards. James Collins’ shanty 5 was considered an uncommonly fine one. When I called to see it he was not at home. I walked about the outside, at first unobserved from within, the window wasso deep and high. It was of small dimensions, with a peaked cottage roof, and not much else to be seen, the dirt being raised 10 five feet all around as if it were a compost heap. The roof was the soundest part, though a good deal warped and made brittle by the sun. Doorsill there was none, but a perennial passage for the hens under the door board. Mrs. C. came to the door and asked me to view it from the 1s inside. The hens were driven in by my approach. It was dark, and had a dirt floor for the most part, dank, clammy, and aguish, only here a board and there a board which would not bear removal. She lighted a lamp to show me the inside of the roof and the walls, and also 20 that the board floor extended under the bed, warning me not to step into the cellar, a sort of dust hole two feet deep. In her own words, they were ‘‘ good boards over- head, good boards all around, and a good window,” — of two whole squares originally, only the cat had passed out 25 that way lately. There was a stove, a bed, and a place to sit, an infant in the house where it was born, a silk parasol, gilt-framed looking-glass, and a patent new coffee-mill nailed to an oak sapling, all told. The bargain was soon concluded, for James had in the meanwhile returned. I 30 to pay four dollars and twenty-five cents to-night, he to vacate at five to-morrow morning, selling to nobody else meanwhile: I to take possession at six. It were well, he said, to be there early, and anticipate certain indistinct ECONOMY 43 but wholly unjust claims on the score of ground rent and fuel. This he assured me was the only encumbrance. At six I passed him and his family on the road. One large bundle held their all, — bed, coffee-mill, looking-glass, hens, — all but the cat, she took to the woods and became 5 a wild cat, and, as I learned afterward, trod in a trap set for woodchucks, and so became a dead cat at last. I took down this dwelling the same morning, drawing the nails, and removed it to the pond side by small cart- loads, spreading the boards on the grass there to bleach and warp back again in the sun> One early thrush gave me a note or two as I drove along the woodland path. I was informed treacherously by a young Patrick that neighbor Seeley, an Irishman, in the intervals of the carting, trans- ferred the still tolerable, straight, and drivable nails, staples, and spikes to his pocket, and then stood when I came back to pass the time of day, and look freshly up, unconcerned, with spring thoughts, at the devastation; there being a dearth of work, as he said. He was there to represent spectatordom, and help make this seemingly in- significant event one with the removal of the gods of Troy. I dug my cellar in the side of a hill sloping to the south, where a woodchuck had formerly dug his burrow, down through sumach and blackberry roots, and the lowest stain of vegetation, six feet square by seven deep, to a fine sand where potatoes would not freeze in any winter. The sides were left shelving, and not stoned; but the sun having never shone on them, the sand still keeps its place. It was but two hours’ work. I took particular pleasure in this breaking of ground, for in almost all latitudes men dig into the earth for an equable temperature. Under the most splendid house in the city is still to be found the cellar where they store their roots as of old, and 44 WALDEN long after the superstructure has disappeared posterity remark its dent in the earth. The house is still but a sort of porch at the entrance of a burrow. At length, in the beginning of May, with the help 5 of some of my acquaintances, rather to improve so good an occasion for neighborliness than from any necessity, I set up the frame of my house. No man was ever more honored in the character of his raisers° than I. They are destined, I trust, to assist at the raising of loftier ro structures one day. I began to occupy my house on the Ath of July,° as soon as it was boarded and roofed, for the boards were carefully feather-edged and lapped, so that it was perfectly impervious to rain; but before boarding, I laid the foundation of a chimney at one end, bringing 15 two cartloads of stones up the hill from the pond in my arms. I built the chimney after my hoeing in the fall, before a fire became necessary for warmth, doing my cook- ing in the meanwhile out of doors on the ground, early in the morning; which mode [I still think is in some respects 20 more convenient and agreeable than the usual one. When it stormed before my bread was baked, I fixed a few boards over the fire, and sat under them to watch my loaf, and passed some pleasant hoursin that way. In those days, when my hands were much employed, I read but little, 25 but the least scraps of paper which lay on the ground, my holder, or tablecloth, afforded me as much entertainment, in fact, answered the same purpose as the Iliad. It would be worth the while to build still more deliber- ately than I did, considering, for instance, what founda- 30 tion a door, a window, a cellar, a garret, have in the nature of man, and perchance never raising any superstructure until we have found a better reason for it than our tem- ECONOMY 45 poral necessities even. There is some of the same fitness in a man’s building his own house that there is in a bird’s building its own nest. Who knows but if men constructed their dwellings with their own hands, and provided food for themselves and families simply and honestly enough, the poetic faculty would be universally developed, as birds universally sing when they are so engaged? But alas! we do like cowbirds and cuckoos, which lay their eggs in nests which other birds have built, and cheer no traveller with their chattering and unmusical notes. Shall we forever resign the pleasure of construction to the carpenter? What does architecture amount to in the experience of the mass of men? I never in all my walks came across a man engaged in so simple and natural an occupation as building his house. We belong to the community. It is not the tailor alone who is the ninth part® of a man; it is as much the preacher, and the mer- chant, and the farmer. Where is this division of labor to end? and what object does it finally serve? No doubt another may also think for me; but it is not therefore desirable that he should do so to the exclusion of my thinking for myself. True, there are architects so called in this country, and I have heard of one at least possessed with the idea of making architectural ornaments have a core of truth, a necessity, and hence a beauty, as if it were a revelation to him. All very well perhaps from his point of view, but only a little better than the common dilettantism. A sentimental reformer in architecture, he began at the cornice, not at the foundation. It was only how to put a core of truth within the ornaments, that every sugar plum in fact might have an almond or caraway seed in it, — though I hold that almonds are most wholesome without 5 T5 Ny 5 3° 4G WALDEN the sugar,— and not how the inhabitant, the indweller, might build truly within and without, and let the orna- ments take care of themselves. What reasonable man ever supposed that ornaments were something outward 5 and in the skin merely, — that the tortoise got his spotted shell, or the shellfish its mother-o’-pearl tints, by such a contract as the inhabitants of Broadway their Trinity Church°? But a man has no more to do with the style of architecture of his house than a tortoise with that 10 of its shell: nor need the soldier be so idle as to try to paint the precise color of his virtue on his standard. The enemy will find it out. He may turn pale when the trial comes. This’ man seemed to me to lean over the cornice, and timidly whisper his half truth to the rude 15 occupants, who really knew it better than he. What of architectural beauty I now see, I know has gradually grown from within outward, out of the necessities and character of the indweller, who is the only builder, — out of some unconscious truthfulness, and nobleness, with- 20 out ever a thought for the appearance; and whatever additional beauty of this kind is destined to be produced will be preceded by a like unconscious beauty of life.° The most interesting dwellings in this country, as the painter knows, are the most unpretending, humble log 25huts and cottages of the poor commonly; it is the life of the inhabitants whose shells they are, and not any peculiarity in their surfaces merely, which makes them picturesque; and equally interesting will be the citizen’s suburban box, when his life shall be as simple and as 30 agreeable to the imagination, and there is as little strain- ing after effect in the style of his dwelling. A great proportion of architectural ornaments are literally hollow, and a September gale would strip them off, like borrowed ECONOMY AT plumes, without injury to the substantials. They can do without architecture who have no olives nor wines in the cellar. What if an equal ado were made about the ornaments of style in literature, and the architects of our bibles spent as much time about their cornices as the 5 architects of our churches do? So are made the belles- lettres and the beaux-arts and their professors. Much it concerns a man, forsooth, how a few sticks are slanted over him or under him, and what colors are daubed upon his box. It would signify somewhat, if, in any earnest ro sense, he slanted them and daubed it ; but the spirit having departed out of the tenant, it is of a piece with construct- ing his own coffin — the architecture of the grave, and - “carpenter” is but another name for “coffin-maker.” One man says, in his despair or indifference to life, take 15 up a handful of the earth at your feet, and paint your house that color. Is he thinking of his last and narrow house? Toss up a copper for it as well. What an abun- dance of leisure he must have! Why do you take up a handful of dirt? Better paint your house your own com- 2° plexion; let it turn pale or blush for you. An enterprise to improve the style of cottage architecture! When you have got my ornaments ready I will wear them. Before winter, I built a chimney, and shingled the sides of my house, which were already impervious to rain, 25 with imperfect and sappy shingles made of the first slice of the log, whose edges I was obliged to straighten with a plane. I have thus a tight shingled and plastered house, ten feet wide by fifteen long, and eight-feet posts, with a 30 garret and a closet, a large window on each side, two trap doors, one door at the end, and a brick fireplace opposite. The exact cost of my house, paying the usual price for 48 WALDEN such materials as I used, but not counting the work, all of which was done by myself, was as follows; and I give the details because very few are able to tell exactly what their houses cost, and fewer still, if any, the separate 5 cost of the various materials which compose them : — Boards. : y 034, mostly shanty boards. Refuse shingles forroofandsides. 400 Laths. . 125 Two second-hand windows with glass 2 43 1o One thousand old brick . . . . 400 Two casksoflime. . . . . . 240 That washigh. Hain .\ ~ a ate af) OSL. More than dees Mantle-tree iron . . . . . . O15 Nails. 6.03) ~. SPE VT. ae 15 Hinges and screws lee san Sods ei | Aelia PUMA iar eek Teed 3 mice we ne Chalke earns os Pat Mis) Oe : a ransportavion =". 4) iP 6.o Ne 40} : pe ita Bee Arya sy. test! hes sot eid estas 20 These are all the materials excepting the timber, stones, and sand, which I claimed by squatter’s right. I have also a small wood-shed adjoining, made chiefly of the stuff which was left after building the house. I intend to build me a house which will surpass any on 25 the main street in Concord in grandeur and luxury, as soon as it pleases me as much and will cost me no more than my present one. I thus found that the student who wishes for a shelter can obtain one for a lifetime at an expense not greater 3° than the rent which he now pays annually. If I seem to boast more than is becoming, my excuse is that I brag for humanity rather than for myself; and my short- comings and inconsistencies do not affect the truth of my statement. Notwithstanding much cant and hypocrisy, ECONOMY 49 — chaff which I find it difficult to separate from my wheat, but for which I am as sorry as any man, — I will breathe freely and stretch myself in this respect, it is such a relief to both the moral and physical system; and I am resolved that I will not through humility become the devil’s attornéy. I will endeavor to speak a good word for the truth. At Cambridge College° the mere rent of a student’s room, which is only a little larger than my own, is thirty dollars each year, though the corporation had the advantage of building thirty-two side by side and under one roof, and the occupant suffers the inconvenience of many and noisy neighbors,° and perhaps a residence in the fourth story. I cannot but think that if we had more true wisdom in these respects, not only less educa- tion would be needed, because, forsooth, more would already have been acquired, but the pecuniary expense of getting an education would in a great measure vanish. 5 Io Those conveniences which the student requires at Cam- - bridge or elsewhere cost him or somebody else ten times as great a sacrifice of life as they would with proper management on both sides. Those things for which the most money is demanded are never the things which the student most wants. Tuition, for instance, is an impor- tant item in the term bill, while for the far more valuable education which he gets by associating with the most cultivated of his contemporaries no charge is made. The mode of founding a college is, commonly, to get up a sub- scription of dollars and cents, and then following blindly the principles of a division of labor to its extreme, a prin- ciple which should never be followed but with circum- 30 spection, — to call in a contractor who makes this a sub- ject of speculation, and he employs Irishmen or other operatives actually to lay the foundations, while the stu- E 50 WALDEN dents that are to be are said to be fitting themselves for it ; and for these oversights successive generations have to pay. I think that it would be better than this, for the students, or those who desire to be benefited by it, even to lay the s foundation themselves. The student who secures his coveted leisure and retirement by systematically shirking any labor necessary to man obtains but an ignoble and unprofitable leisure, defrauding himself of the experience which alone can make leisure fruitful. ‘‘ But,” says one, 10 ‘‘you do not mean that the students should go to work with their hands instead of their heads?” I do not mean that exactly, but I mean something which he might think a good deal like that; I mean that they should not play life, or study it merely, while the community supports rs them at this expensive game, but earnestly live it from beginning to end. How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living? Methinks ’ this would exercise their minds as much as mathematics. If I wished a boy to know something about the arts and 20 sciences, for instance, I would not pursue the common course, which is merely to send him into the neighbor- hood of some professor, where anything is professed and practised but the art of life;—to survey the world through a telescope, or a microscope, and never with his 25 natural eye; to study chemistry, and not learn how his bread is made, or mechanics, and not learn how it is earned; to discover new satellites to Neptune, and not detect the motes in his eyes, or to what vagabond he is a satellite himself; or to be devoured by the monsters that 30 swarm all around him, while contemplating the monsters in a drop of vinegar. Which would have advanced the most at the end of a month, — the boy who had made his own jackknife from the ore which he had dug and ECONOMY 51 smelted, reading as much as would be necessary for this — or the boy who had attended the lectures on metallurgy at the Institute° in the meanwhile, and had received a Rogers’ penknife from his father? Which would be most likely to cut his fingers? ... To my astonishment I was informed on leaving college that I had studied naviga- tion! — why, if I had taken one turn down the harbor I should have known more about it. Even the poor student studies and is taught only political economy, while that economy of living which is synonymous with philos- ophy is not even sincerely professed in our colleges. The consequence is, that while he is reading Adam Smith,° Ri- cardo,° and Say,° he runs his father in debt irretrievably. As with our colleges, so with a hundred “modern im- provements”; there is an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance. The devil goes on exact- ing compound interest to the last for his early share and numerous succeeding investments in them. Our inven- tions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our atten- tion from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. Hither is in such a predicament as the man who was earnest to be introduced to a distinguished deaf woman, but when he was presented, and one end of her ear trumpet was put into his hand, had nothing to say. As if the main object were to talk fast and not to talk sensibly. We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, 5 Lal ° 30 52 WALDEN flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide® has the whooping cough. After all, the man whose horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most impor- tant messages; he is not an evangelist, nor does he come s round eating locusts and wild honey. I doubt if Flying Childers® ever carried a peck of corn to mill. One says to me, “I wonder that you do not lay up money ; you love to travel; you might take the cars and go to Fitchburg to-day and see the country.” But I am 10 Wiser than that. I have learned that the swiftest traveller is he that goes afoot. I say to my friend, Suppose we try who will get there first. The distance is thirty miles; the fare ninety cents. That is almost a day’s wages. JI remember when wages were sixty cents a day 15 for laborers on this very road. Well, I start now on foot, and get there before night; I have travelled at that rate by the week together. You will in the meanwhile have earned your fare, and arrive there some time to-morrow, or possibly this evening, if you are lucky enough to get 20 a job in season. Instead of going to Fitchburg, you will be working here the greater part of the day. And so, if the railroad reached round the world, I think that I should keep ahead of you; and as for seeing the country and getting experience of that kind, I should have to cut your 2s acquaintance altogether. Such is the universal law, which no man can ever outwit, and with regard to the railroad even we may say it is as broad as it is long. To make a railroad round the world available to all mankind is equivalent to grading the whole 30 surface of the planet. Men have an indistinct notion that if they keep up this activity of joint stocks and spades long enough all will at length ride somewhere, in next to no time, and for nothing; but though a crowd rushes to the ECONOMY 53 depot, and the conductor shouts “ All aboard!” when the smoke is blown away and the vapor condensed, it will be perceived that a few are riding, but the rest are run over, — and it will be called, and will be, “‘A melancholy acci- dent.”” No doubt they can ride at last who shall have 5 earned their fare, that is, if they survive so long, but they will probably have lost their elasticity and desire to travel by that time. This spending of the best part of one’s life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it, reminds me of the Eng- 10 lishman who went to India to make a fortune first, in order that he might return to England and live the life of a poet. He should have gone up garret at once. “What!” exclaim a million Irishmen starting up from all the shanties in the land, “‘is not this railroad which we 15 have built a good thing?” Yes, I answer, comparatively good, that is, you might have done worse; but I wish, as you are brothers of mine,° that you could have spent your time better than digging in this dirt. Before I had finished my house, wishing to earn ten 20 or twelve dollars by some honest and agreeable method, in order to meet my unusual expenses, I planted about two acres and a half of light and sandy soil near it chiefly with beans, but also a small part with potatoes, corn, peas, and turnips. The whole lot contains eleven acres, mostly 25. growing up in pines and hickories, and was sold the pre- ceding season for eight dollars and eight cents an acre. One farmer said that it was “good for nothing but to raise cheeping squirrels on.” JI put no manure whatever on this land, not being the owner, but merely a squatter and not 30 expecting to cultivate so much again, and I did not quite hoe it all once. I got out several cords of stumps in 54 WALDEN ploughing, which supplied me with fuel for a long time, and left small circles of virgin mould, easily distinguishable through the summer by the greater luxuriance of the beans there. The dead and for the most part unmerchantable s wood behind my house, and the driftwood from the pond, have supplied the remainder of my fuel. I was obliged to hire a team and a man for the ploughing, though T held the plough myself. My farm outgoes for the first sea- son were, for implements, seed, work, etc., $14.724. The ro seed corn was given me. This never costs anything to speak of, unless you plant more than enough. I got twelve bushels of beans, and eighteen bushels of potatoes, besides some peas and sweet corn. The yellow corn and turnips were too late to come to anything. My whole income from 15 the farm was $23 44 Deducting the outgoes. . . . 14724 Mherefane lefh | s..-4.4 113." chiviees 2p BOs beside produce consumed and on hand at the time this estimate was made of the value of $4.50, — the amount on 20 hand much more than balancing a little grass which I did not raise. All things considered, that is, considering the importance of a man’s soul and of to-day, notwithstanding the short time occupied by my experiment, nay, partly even because of its transient character, I believe that that 25 was doing better than any farmer in Concord did that year. The next year I did better still, for I spaded up all the land which I required, about a third of an acre, and I learned from the experience of both years, not being in the least awed by many celebrated works on husbandry, 30 Arthur Young® among the rest, that if one would live sim- ply and eat only the crop which he raised, and raise no ECONOMY 55 more than he ate, and not exchange it for an insufficient quantity of more luxurious and expensive things, he would need to cultivate only a few rods of ground, and that it would be cheaper to spade up that than to use oxen to plough it, and to select a fresh spot from time to time than 5 to manure the old, and he could do all his necessary farm work as it were with his left hand at odd hours in the summer; and thus he would not be tied to an ox, or horse, or cow, or pig, as at present. I desire to speak impartially on this point, and as one not interested in the success or 10 failure of the present economical and social arrangements. I was more independent than any farmer in Concord, for I was not anchored to a house or farm, but could follow the bent of my genius, which is a very crooked one, every moment. Beside being better off than they already, 15 if my house had been burned or my crops had failed I should have been nearly as well off as before. I am wont to think that men are not so much the keepers of herds as herds are the keepers of men, the former are so much the freer. Men and oxen exchange work; but if we 20 consider necessary work only, the oxen will be seen to have greatly the advantage, their farm is so much the larger. Man does some of his part of the exchange work in his six weeks of haying, and it is no boy’s play. Certainly no nation that lived simply in all respects, that is, no nation 25 of philosophers, would commit so great a blunder as to use the labor of animals. True, there never was and is not likely soon to be a nation of philosophers, nor am I certain it is desirable there should be. However, J should never have broken a horse or bull and taken him to board for 30 any work he might do for me, for fear I should become a horse-man or a herds-man merely ; and if society seems to be the gainer by so doing, are we certain that what is one 56 WALDEN man’s gain is not another’s loss, and that the stable-boy has equal cause with his master to be satisfied? Granted that some public works would not have been constructed without this aid, and let man share the glory of such with 5 the ox and horse; does it follow that he could not have accomplished works yet more worthy of himself in that case? When men begin to do, not merely unnecessary or artistic, but luxurious and idle work, with their assistance, it is inevitable that a few do all the exchange work with the ro oxen, or, in other words, become the slaves of the strongest. Man thus not only works for the animal within him, but, for a symbol of this, he works for the animal without him. Though we have many substantial houses of brick or stone, the prosperity of the farmer is still measured by the degree 15 to which the barn overshadows the house. This town is said to have the largest houses for oxen, cows, and horses hereabouts, and it isnot behindhand in its public buildings ; but there are very few halls for free worship or free speech in this county. It should not be by their architecture, 20 but why not even by their power of abstract thought, that nations should seek to. commemorate themselves? How much more admirable the Bhagvat-Geeta° than all the ruins of the East! Towers and temples are the luxury of princes. A simple and independent mind does not toil 25 at the bidding of any prince. Genius is not a retainer to any emperor, nor is its material silver, or gold, or marble, except to a trifling extent. To what end, pray, is so much stone hammered. In Arcadia,° when I was there, I did not see any hammering stone. Nations are 30 possessed with an insane ambition to perpetuate the memory of themselves by the amount of hammered stone they leave. What if equal pains were taken to smooth and polish their manners? One piece of good sense would be Lad ECONOMY 57 more memorable than a monument as high as the moon. I love better to see stones in place. The grandeur of Thebes was a vulgar grandeur. More sensible is a rod of stone wall that bounds an honest man’s field than a hun- dred-gated Thebes that has wandered farther from the true 5 end of life. The religion and civilization which are barbaric and heathenish build splendid temples ; but what vou might call Christianity does not. Most of the stone a nation hammers goes toward its tomb only. It buries itself alive. As for the Pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them 10 so much as the fact that so many men could be found de- graded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs. I might possibly invent some excuse 15 for them and him, but I have no time for it. As for the religion and love of art of the builders, it is much the same all the world over, whether the building be an Egyptian temple or the United States Bank. It costs more than it comes to. The mainspring is vanity, assisted by the love 20 of garlic and bread and butter. Mr. Balcom, a promising young architect, designs it on the back of his Vitruvius,° with hard pencil and ruler, and the job is let out to Dobson & Sons, stone-cutters. When the thirty centuries begin to look down on it, mankind begins to look up at it. As for 25 your high towers and monuments, there was a crazy fellow once in this town who undertook to dig through to China, and he got so far that, as he said, he heard the Chinese pots and kettles rattle; but I think that I shall not go out of my way to admire the hole which he made. Many are 30 concerned about the monuments of the West and the East, —to know who built them. For my part, I should like to know who in those days did not build them, — who 58 WALDEN were above such trifling. But to proceed with my statis- ties. By surveying, carpentry, and day-labor of various other kinds in the village in the meanwhile, for I have as many 5 trades as fingers, I had earned $13.34. The expense of food for eight months, namely, from July 4th to March 1st, the time when these estimates were made, though I lived there more than two years, —not counting potatoes, a little green corn, and some peas, which I had raised, nor 1o considering the value of what was on hand at the last date, was Tece.. See le doe Molasses . . . 173 Cheapest form of the saccharine. Ryewunealiy f.\.. 1) irO4e 15 Indian meal . . O99% Cheaper than rye. Borie. SM bee tone Costs more than Indian meal, Flour. . . . 088 both money and trouble. > SEE ie a a a bk =e ke Vigo Oe ae 0 65 = ZOUS DPLEB, ys isc-a iGo aa Dried apple . . 0 22 So Sweet potatoes . 010 ee One pumpkin . 006 mae One watermelon 0 02 a 2s i ys ee ee 0 03 Yes, I did eat $8.74, all told; but I should not thus unblushingly publish my guilt, if I did not know that most of my readers were equally guilty with myself, and that their deeds would look no better in print. The next year 30 | sometimes caught a mess of fish for my dinner, and once I went so far as to slaughter a woodchuck which ravaged my beanfield, — effect his transmigration, as a Tartar would say, —and devour him, partly for experiment’s sake; but though it afforded me a momentary enjoyment, 35 notwithstanding a musky flavor, I saw that the longest ECONOMY 59 use would not make that a good practice, however it might seem to have your woodchucks ready dressed by the village butcher. Clothing and some incidental expenses within the same dates, though little can be inferred from this item, 5 Benaunied to $8 403 Oil and some household utensils . . . 200 So that all the pecuniary outgoes, excepting for washing and mending, which for the most part were done out of the 10 house, and their bills have not yet been received, — and these are all and more than all the ways by which money necessarily goes out in this part of the world, — were Ie es an ee a go ke ee Farm, one year Shy Pe AURA ae Sa tee gs om ene 15 Food, eight months . HOS FDEP 8 74 Clothing, &e., eight months ... . 8 402 Chl acc., eight MIOMES hl eral) nd eel 23 2 00 ME ee ie a a, Ye) tae | Lae ee I address myself now to those of my readers who have a liv- 20 ing to get. And to meet this I have for farm produce sold $23 44 Harmed by, day labor sos .c.u7't We We Pocus (18184 OMEN tere Rk se en oe We ee 3S OG LO which subtracted from the sum of the outgoes leaves 25 a balance of $25.212 on the one side, — this being very nearly the means with which I started, and the measure of expenses to be incurred, — and on the other, beside the _ leisure and independence and health thus secured, a com- fortable house for me as long as I choose to occupy it. 30 These statistics, however accidental and _ therefore 60 3 WALDEN uninstructive they may appear, as they have a certain completeness, have a certain value also. Nothing was given me of which I have not rendered some account. It appears from the above estimate that my food alone 5 cost me in money about twenty-seven cents a week. It was, for nearly two years after this, rye and Indian meal _without yeast, potatoes, rice, a very little salt pork, molasses, and salt, and my drink, water. It was fit that I should live on rice, mainly, who loved so well the philosophy 10 Of India.° To meet the objections of some inveterate cavillers, I may as well state, that if I dined out occasion- ally, as I always had done, and I trust shall have oppor- tunities to do again, it was frequently to the detriment of my domestic arrangements. But the dining out, being, 15 aS I have stated, a constant element, does not in the least affect a comparative statement like this. I learned from my two years’ experience that it would cost incredibly little trouble to obtain one’s necessary food, even in this latitude; that a man may use as simple 20 a diet as the animals, and yet retain health and strength. I have made a satisfactory dinner, satisfactory on several accounts, simply off a dish of purslane (Portulaca oleracea) which I gathered in my cornfield, boiled and salted. I give the Latin on account of the savoriness of the trivial name. 25 And pray what more can a reasonable man desire, in peace- ful times, in ordinary noons, than a sufficient number of ears of green sweet-corn boiled, with the addition of salt ? Even the little variety which I used was a yielding to the demands of appetite, and not of health. Yet men have 30 come to such a pass that they frequently starve, not for want of necessaries, but for want of luxuries; and I know a good woman who thinks that her son lost his life be- cause he took to drinking water only. ECONOMY 61 The reader will perceive that I am treating the subject rather from an economic than a dietetic point of view, and he will not venture to put my abstemiousness to the test unless he has a well-stocked larder. Bread I at first made of pure Indian meal and salt, s genuine hoe-cakes, which I baked before my fire out of doors on a shingle or the end of a stick of timber sawed off in building my house; but it was wont to get smoked and to have a piny flavor. I tried flour also; but have at last found a mixture of rye and Indian meal most convenient 10 and agreeable. In cold weather it was no little amusement to bake several small loaves of this in succession, tending and turning them as carefully as an Egyptian his hatching eggs. They were a real cereal fruit which I ripened, and they had to my senses a fragrance like that of other noble 1s fruits, which I kept in as long as possible by wrapping them incloths. Imadea study of the ancient and indispensable art of breadmaking, consulting such authorities as offered, going back to the primitive days and first invention of the unleavened kind, when from the wildness of nuts and 20 meats men first reached the mildness and refinement of this diet, and travelling gradually down in my studies through that accidental souring of the dough which, it is supposed, taught the leavening process, and through the various fermentations thereafter, till I came to “good, 25 sweet, wholesome bread,”’ the staff of life. Leaven, which some deem the soul of bread, the spiritus which fills its cellular tissue, which is religiously preserved like the vestal fire, — some precious bottle-full, I suppose, first brought over in the Mayflower, did the business for America, 30 and its influence is still rising, swelling, spreading, in _ cerealian® billows over the land, — this seed I regularly and faithfully procured from the village, till at length one 62 WALDEN morning I forgot the rules, and scalded my yeast; by which accident I discovered that even this was not indis- pensable, — for my discoveries were not by the synthetic but analytic process, — and I have gladly omitted it since, 5 though most housewives earnestly assured me that safe and wholesome bread without yeast might not be, and elderly people prophesied a speedy decay of the vital forces. Yet I find it not to be an essential ingredient, and after going without it for a year am still in the land of the living; and 1o | am glad to escape the trivialness of carrying a bottle-full in my pocket, which would sometimes pop and discharge its contents to my discomfiture. It is simpler and more respectable to omit it. Man is an animal who more than any other can adapt himself to all climates and circum- 15 stances. Neither did I put any sal soda, or other acid or alkali, into my bread. It would seem that I made it ac- cording to the recipe which Marcus Porcius Cato gave about two centuries before Christ. ‘‘ Panem depsticium sic facito. Manus mortariumque bene lavato. Farinam in mortarium 20 indito, aque paulatim addito, subigitoque pulchre. Ubi bene subegeris, defingito, coquitoque sub testu.”’? Which I take to mean — ‘‘Make kneaded bread thus. Wash your hands and trough well. Put the meal into the trough, add water gradually, and knead it thoroughly. When you 2s have kneaded it well, mould it, and bake it under a cover,”’ that is, in a baking-kettle. Not a word about leaven. But I did not always use this staff of life. At one time, owing to the emptiness of my purse, I saw none of it for more than a month. 30 Every New Englander might easily raise all his own breadstuffs in this land of rye and Indian corn, and not depend on distant and fluctuating markets for them. Yet so far are we from simplicity and independence that, ECONOMY 63 in Concord, fresh and sweet meal is rarely sold in the shops, and hominy and corn in a still coarser form are hardly used by any. For the most part the farmer gives to his cattle and hogs the grain of his own producing, and buys flour, which is at least no more wholesome, at a greater 5 cost, at the store. I saw that I could easily raise my bushel or two of rye and Indian corn, for the former will grow on the poorest land, and the latter does not require the best, and grind them in a hand-mill, and so do without rice and pork; and if I must have some concentrated sweet, I 10 found by experiment that I could make a very good mo- lasses either of pumpkins or beets, and I knew that I needed only to set out a few maples to obtain it more easily still, and whilethese were growing I could use various substitutes beside those which I have named. ‘‘For,”’ as the fore- 15 fathers sang, — “we can make liquor to sweeten our lips, Of pumpkins and parsnips and walnut-tree chips.” ° Finally, as for salt, that grossest of groceries,° to obtain this might be a fit occasion for a visit to the seashore, 20 or, if I did without it altogether, I should probably drink the less water. I do not learnthat the Indians ever troubled themselves to go after it. Thus I could avoid all trade and barter, so far as my food was concerned, and having a shelter already, it 25 would only remain to get clothing and fuel. The panta- loons which I now wear were woven in a farmer’s family, — thank Heaven there is so much virtue still in man; for I think the fall from the farmer to the operative as great and memorable as that from the man to the farmer ; — and in 30 a new country fuel isan encumbrance. As for a habitat, if I were not permitted still to squat, I might purchase one 64 WALDEN acre at the same price for which the land I cultivated was sold — namely, eight dollars and eight cents. But as it was, I considered that I enhanced the value of the land by squatting on it. 5 There is a certain class of unbelievers who sometimes ask me such questions as, if I think that I can live on vegetable food alone; and to strike at the root of the matter at once, — for the root is faith, — Iam accustomed to answer such, that I can live on board nails. If they ro cannot understand that, they cannot understand much that I have to say. For my part, I am glad to hear of experiments of this kind being tried; as that a young man tried for a fortnight to live on hard, raw corn on the ear, using his teeth for all mortar.° The squirrel tribe tried 15 the same and succeeded. The human race is interested in these experiments, though a few old women who are incapacitated for them, or who own their thirds in mills, may be alarmed. My furniture, part of which I made myself, and the 2zorest cost me nothing of which I have not rendered an account, consisted of a bed, a table, a desk, three chairs, a looking-glass three inches in diameter, a pair of tongs and andirons, a kettle, a skillet, and a frying-pan, a dipper, a wash-bowl, two knives and forks, three plates, one cup, 25 one spoon, a jug for oil, a jug for molasses, and a japanned lamp. None is so poor that he need sit on a pumpkin. That is shiftlessness. There is a plenty of such chairs as I like best in the village garrets to be had for taking them away. Furniture! Thank God, I can sit and I can stand 30 Without the aid of a furniture warehouse. What man but a philosopher would not be ashamed to see his furni- ture packed in a cart and going up country exposed to the ECONOMY 65 light of heaven and the eyes of men, a beggarly account of empty boxes? That is Spaulding’s® furniture. I could never tell from inspecting such a load whether it belonged to a so-called rich man or a poor one; the owner always seemed poverty-stricken. Indeed, the more you have of such things the poorer you are. Each load looks as if it 5 contained the contents of a dozen shanties ; and if one shanty is poor, this is a dozen times as poor. Pray, for what do we move ever but to get rid of our furniture, our exuvie ; ° at last to go from this world to another newly furnished, and leave this to be burned? It is the same as if all these traps 10 were buckled to a man’s belt, and he could not move over the rough country where our lines are cast without dragging them, — dragging his trap. He was a lucky fox® that left his tail in the trap. The muskrat will gnaw his third leg off to be free. No wonder man has lost his 15 elasticity. How often he is at a dead set. ‘‘Sir, if I may be so bold, what do you mean by a dead set?” If you are a seer, whenever you meet a man you will see all that he owns, ay, and much that he pretends to dis- own, behind him, even to his kitchen furniture and all the 20 trumpery which he saves and will not burn, and he will appear to be harnessed to it and making what headway he can. I think that the man is at a dead set who has got through a knot hole or gateway where his sledge load of furniture cannot follow him. I cannot but feel compassion 25 when I hear some trig,° compact-looking man, seemingly free, all girded and ready, speak of his “furniture,” as whether it is insured or not. ‘‘ But what shall I do with my furniture?” My gay butterfly is entangled in a spider’s web then. Even those who seem for a long while 30 not to have any, if you inquire more narrowly you will find have some stored in somebody’s barn. I look upon F 66 WALDEN England to-day as an old gentleman who is travelling with a great deal of baggage, trumpery which has accumulated from long housekeeping, which he has not the courage to burn; great trunk, little trunk, bandbox, and bundle. Throw away the first three at least. It would surpass the 5 powers of a well man nowadays to take up his bed and walk, and I should certainly advise a sick one to lay down hisbedandrun. WhenI have met an immigrant tottering under a bundle which contained his all —- looking like an enormous wen which had grown out of the nape of his 1o neck — IJ have pitied him, not because that was his all, but because he had all that to carry. If I have got to drag my | trap, I will take care that it be a light one and do not nip meina vital part. But perchance it would be wisest never to put one’s paw into it. 15 1 would observe, by the way, that it costs me nothing for curtains, for I have no gazers to shut out but the sun and moon, and I am willing that they should lookin. The moon will not sour milk nor taint meat of mine, nor will the sun injure my furniture or fade my carpet, and if he is 20 Sometimes too warm a friend, I find it still better economy to retreat behind some curtain which nature has provided, than to add a single item to the details of housekeeping. A lady once offered me a mat, but as I had no room to spare within the house, nor time to spare within or without to 25 shake it, I declined it, preferring to wipe my feet on the sod before my door. It is best to avoid the beginnings of evil. Not long since I was present at the auction of a deacon’s effects, for his life had not been ineffectual ; — “The evil° that men do lives after them.”’ 30 As usual, a great proportion was trumpery, which had begun to accumulate in his father’s day. Among the ECONOMY 67 rest was a dried tapeworm. And now, after lying half a century in his garret and other dust holes, these things were not burned ; instead of a bonfire, or purifying destruc- tion of them, there was an auction, or increasing of them. The neighbors eagerly collected to view them, bought them 5 all, and carefully transported them to their garrets and dust holes, to lie there till their estates are settled, when they will start again. When a man dies he kicks the dust. The customs of some savage nations might, perchance, be profitably imitated by us, for they at least ge through 10 the semblance of casting their slough annually ; they have the idea of the thing, whether they have the reality or not. Would it not be well if we were to celebrate such a ‘‘ busk,”’ or ‘‘feast of first fruits,’ as Bartram® describes to have been the custom of the Mucclasse Indians? ‘“‘When a town 1s celebrates the busk,”’ says he, ‘‘ having previously provided themselves with new clothes, new pots, new pans, and other household utensils and furniture, they collect all their worn-out clothes and other despicable things, sweep and cleanse their houses, squares, and the whole town, of 20 their filth, which with all the remaining grain and other old provisions they cast together into one common heap, and consume it with fire. After having taken medicine, and fasted for three days, all the fire in the town is ex- tinguished. During this fast they abstain from the gratifi- 25 cation of every appetite and passion whatever. A general amnesty is proclaimed; all malefactors may return to their town.”’ — “On the fourth morning the high priest, by rubbing dry wood together, produces new fire in the public square, 3c from whence every habitation in the town is supplied with the new and pure flame.” - Then they feast on the new corn and fruits and dance 68 WALDEN and sing for three days, ‘‘and the four following days they receive visits and rejoice with their friends from neigh- boring towns who have in like manner purified and pre- pared themselves.”’ 5 The Mexicans?® also practised a similar purification at the end of every fifty-two years, in the belief that it was time for the world to come to an end. I have scarcely heard of a truer sacrament, that is as the dictionary defines it, “outward and visible sign of an ro inward and spiritual grace,” than this, and I have no doubt that they were originally inspired directly from Heaven to do thus, though they have no biblical record of the revelation.° For more than five years I maintained myself thus rs solely by the labor of my hands, and I found, that -by working about six weeks in a year, I could meet all the expenses of living. The whole of my winters, as well as most of my summers, I had free and clear for study. I have thoroughly tried school-keeping, and found that my 20 expenses were in proportion, or rather out of proportion, to my income, for I was obliged to dress and train, not to say think and believe, accordingly, and I lost my time into the bargain. As I did not teach for the good of my fellow- men, but simply for a livelihood, this was a failure. I 25 have tried trade; but I found that it would take ten years to get under way in that, and that then I should probably be on my way to the devil. I was actually afraid that I might by that time be doing what is called a good business. When formerly I was looking about to see what I could do. 30 for a living, some sad experience in conforming to the wishes of friends being fresh in my mind to tax my ingenu- ity, I thought ‘often and seriously of picking huckle- ECONOMY 69 berries; that surely I could do, and its small profits might suffice, — for my greatest skill has been to want but little, — so little capital it required, so little distraction from my wonted moods, I foolishly thought. While my acquaintances went unhesitatingly into trade or the pro- s fessions, I contemplated this occupation as most like theirs ; ranging the hills all summer to pick the berries which came in my way, and thereafter carelessly dispose of them; so, to keep the flocks of Admetus.° I also dreamed that I might gather the wild herbs, or carry evergreens to such 10 villagers as loved to be reminded of the woods, even to the city, by hay-cart loads. But I have since learned that trade curses everything it handles; and though you trade in messages from Heaven, the whole curse of - trade attaches to the business. I5 As I preferred some things to others, and especially valued my freedom, as I could fare hard and yet succeed well, I did not wish to spend my time in earning rich car- pets or other fine furniture, or delicate cookery, or a house in the Grecian or the Gothic style just yet. If there are 20 any to whom it is no interruption to acquire these things, and who know how to use them when acquired, I relin- quish to them the pursuit. Some are ‘“‘industrious,”’ and appear to love labor for its own sake, or perhaps because it keeps them out of worse mischief; to such I have at 25 present nothing to say. Those who would not know what to do with more leisure than they now enjoy, I might ad- vise to work twice as hard as they do, — work till they pay for themselves, and get their free papers. For my- self I found that the occupation of a day-laborer was the 30 most independent of any, especially as it required only thirty or forty daysina year tosupport one. The laborer’s day ends with the going down of the sun, and he is then 70 WALDEN free to devote himself to his chosen pursuit, independent of his labor; but his employer, who speculates from month to month, has no respite from one end of the year to the other. 5 Inshort, I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to maintain one’s self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely; as the pursuits of the simpler nations are still the sports of the more artificial. It is not necessary that a man should earn 10 his living by the sweat of his brow, unless he sweats easier than I do. One young man of my acquaintance, who has inherited some acres, told me that he thought he should live as I did, if he had the means. I would not have any one adopt my rs mode of living? on any account; for, beside that before he has fairly learned it I may have found out another for myself, I desire that there may be as many different per- sons in the world as possible; but I would have each one be very careful to find out and pursue his own way, 2zoand not his father’s or his mother’s or his neighbor’s instead. The youth may build or plant or sail, only let him not be hindered from doing that which he tells me he would like todo. It is by amathematical point only that we are wise, as the sailor or the fugitive slave keeps 25 the polestar in his eye; but that is sufficient guidance for all our life. We may not arrive at our port within a cal- culable period, but we would preserve the true course. Undoubtedly, in this case, what is true for one is truer still for a thousand, as the large house is not proportion- 30 ally more expensive than a small one, since one roof may cover, one cellar underlie, and one wall separate several apartments. But for my part, I preferred the solitary dwelling. Moreover, it will commonly be cheaper ECONOMY fat to build the whole yourself than to convince another of the advantage of the common wall; and when you have done this, the common partition, to be much cheaper, must be a thin one, and that other may prove a bad neigh- bor, and also not keep his side in repair. The only co- 5 operation which is commonly possible is exceedingly partial and superficial; and what little true co-operation there is, is as if it were not, being a harmony inaudible tomen. If a man has faith he will co-operate with equal faith everywhere; if he has not faith, he will continue ro to live like the rest of the world, whatever company he is joined to. To co-operate, in the highest as well as the lowest sense, means to get our living together. I heard it proposed lately that two young men should travel to- gether over the world, the one without money, earning his 15 means as he went, before the mast and behind the plough, the other carrying a bill of exchange in his pocket. It was easy to see that they could not long be companions or co-operate, since one would not operate at all. They would part at the first interesting crisis in their adven- 20 tures. Above all, as I have implied, the man who goes alone can start to-day; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready, and it may be a long time before they get off. But all this is very selfish, I have heard some of my 2s townsmen say. I confess that I have hitherto indulged very little in philanthropic enterprises. I have made some sacrifices to a sense of duty, and among others have sacrificed this pleasure also. There are those who have used all their arts to persuade me to undertake the support 30 of some poor family in the town; and if I had nothing to do, —for the devil finds employment for the idle, — I 72 WALDEN might try my hand at some such pastime as that. How- ever, when I have thought to indulge myself in this respect, and lay their Heaven under an obligation by maintaining certain poor persons in all respects as comfortably as I 5 maintain myself, and have even ventured so far as to make them the offer, they have one and all unhesitatingly preferred to remain poor. While my townsmen and women are devoted in so many ways to the good of their fellows, I trust that one at least may be spared to other ro and less humane pursuits. You must have a genius for charity as well as for any thing else. As for Doing-good, that is one of the professions which are full. Moreover, I have tried it fairly, and, strange as it may seem, am satisfied that it does not agree with my constitution. 15 Probably I should not, consciously and deliberately, for- sake my particular calling to do the good which society demands of me, to save the universe from annihilation ; and I believe that a like but infinitely greater stead- fastness elsewhere is all that now preserves it. But I 20 would not stand between any man and his genius; and to him who does this work, which I decline, with his whole heart and soul and life, I would say, Persevere, even if the world call it doing evil, as it is most likely they will. I am far from supposing that my case is a peculiar 25 one; no doubt many of my readers would make a similar defence. At doing something, —I will not engage that my neighbors shall pronounce it good, — I do not hesitate to say that I should be a capital fellow to hire; but what that is, it is for my employer to find out. What good 30 I do, in the common sense of that word, must be aside from my main path, and for the most part wholly unintended. Men say, practically, Begin where you are and such as you are, without aiming mainly to become of more worth, ECONOMY ia and with kindness aforethought go about doing good. If I were to preach at all in this strain, I should say rather, Set about being good. As if the sun should stop when he had kindled his fires up to the splendor of a moon, or a star of the sixth magnitude, and go about 5 like a Robin Goodfellow,° peeping in at every cottage window, inspiring lunatics, and tainting meats, and mak- ing darkness visible, instead of steadily increasing his genial heat and beneficence till he is of such brightness that no mortal can look him in the face, and then, and in 10 the meanwhile too, going about the world in his own orbit, doing it good, or rather, as a truer philosophy has discovered, the world going about him getting good. When Phaeton,° wishing to prove his heavenly birth by his beneficence, had the sun’s chariot but one day, and drove 15 out of the beaten track, he burned several blocks of houses in the lower streets of heaven, and scorched the surface of the earth, and dried up every spring, and made the great desert of Sahara, till at length Jupiter hurled him headlong to the earth with a thunderbolt, and the 20 sun, through grief at his death, did not shine for a year. There is no odor so bad as that which arises from good- ness tainted. It is human, it is divine, carrion. If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run 25 for my life, as from that dry and parching wind of the African deserts called the simoom, which fills the mouth and nose and ears and eyes with dust till you are suffo- cated, for fear that I should get some of his good to me, —some of its virus mingled with my blood. No, — in 30 this case I would rather suffer evil the natural way. A man is not a good man to me because he will feed me if I should be starving, or warm me if I should be freezing, or T4 WALDEN pull me out of a ditch if I should ever fall into one. I can find you a Newfoundland dog that will do as much. Philanthropy is not love for one’s fellow-man in the broadest sense. Howard° was no doubt an exceedingly 5 kind and worthy man in his way, and has his reward; but, comparatively speaking, what are a hundred Howards to us, if their philanthropy do not help ws in our best estate, when we are most worthy to be helped? I never heard of a philanthropic meeting in which it was sincerely proposed to to do any good to me, or the like of me. The Jesuits® were quite balked by those Indians who, being burned at the stake, suggested new modes of torture to their tormentors. Being superior to physical suffering, it sometimes chanced that they were superior to any con- 15 solation which the missionaries could offer; and the law to do as you would be done by fell with less persuasiveness on the ears of those, who, for their part, did not care how they were done by, who loved their enemies after a new fashion, and came very near freely forgiving them all 20 they did. Be sure that you give the poor the aid they most need, though it be your example which leaves them far behind. If you give money, spend yourself with it, and do not merely abandon it to them. We make curious 25 mistakes sometimes. Often the poor man is not so cold and hungry as he is dirty and ragged and gross. It is partly his taste, and not merely his misfortune. If you give him money, he will perhaps buy more rags with it. I was wont to pity the clumsy Irish laborers who cut ice 30 on the pond, in such mean and ragged clothes, while I shivered in my more tidy and somewhat more fashionable garments, till, one bitter cold day, one who had slipped into the water came to my house to warm him, and I ECONOMY: (5 saw him strip off three pairs of pants and two pairs of stockings ere he got down to the skin, though they were dirty and ragged enough, it is true, and that he could afford to refuse the extra garments which I offered him, he had so many intra ones. This ducking was the very thing he needed. Then I began to pity myself, and I saw that it would be a greater charity to bestow on me a flannel shirt than a whole slop-shop°® on him. There are a thou- sand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve. It is the pious slave-breeder devoting the proceeds of every tenth slave to buy a Sun- day’s liberty for the rest. Some show their kindness to the poor by employing them in their kitchens. Would they not be kinder if they employed themselves there? You boast of spending a tenth part of your income in charity ; maybe you should spend the nine tenths so, and done with it. Society recovers only a tenth part of the property then. Is this owing to the generosity of him in whose possession it is found, or to the remissness of the officers of justice ? Philanthropy is almost the only ee which is suffi- ciently appreciated by mankind. Nay, it is greatly overrated; and it is our selfishness which overrates it. A robust poor man, one sunny day here in Concord, praised a fellow-townsman to me, because, as he said, he was kind to the poor; meaning himself. The kind uncles and aunts of the race are more esteemed than its true spiritual fathers and mothers. I once heard a rever- end lecturer on England, a man of learning and intelli- gence, after enumerating her scientific, literary, and polit- 5 ES 25 30 76 ' WALDEN ical worthies, Shakespeare, Bacon, Cromwell, Milton, Newton,° and others, speak next of her Christian heroes, whom, as if his profession required it of him, he elevated to a place far above all the rest, as the greatest of the great. 5 They were Penn,° Howard,° and Mrs. Fry.°. Every one must feel the falsehood and cant of this. The last were not England’s best men and women; only, perhaps, her best philautheapists: I would not subtract any thing from ae praise that is ro due to philanthropy, but merely demand justice for all who by their lives and works are a blessing to mankind. I do not value chiefly a man’s uprightness and benevolence, which are, as it were, his stem and leaves. Those plants of whose greenness withered we make herb tea for the sick, 15 serve but a humble use, and are most employed by quacks. I want the flower and fruit of a man; that some fra- grance be wafted over from him to me, and some ripeness flavor our intercourse. His goodness must not be a partial and transitory act, but a constant superfluity, which costs 20 him nothing and of which he is unconscious. This is a charity that hides a multitude of sins. The philanthropist too often surrounds mankind with the remembrance of his own cast-off griefs as an atmosphere, and calls it sym- pathy. We should impart our courage, and not our de- 2s spair, our health and ease, and not our disease, and take care that this does not spread by contagion. From what southern plains comes up the voice of wailing? Under what latitudes reside the heathen to whom we would send light? Who is that intemperate and brutal man 30 Whom we would redeem? If anything ail a man, so that he does not perform his functions, if he have a pain in his bowels even, —for that is the seat of sympathy, — he forthwith sets about reforming — the world. Being a mi- ECONOMY we crocosm himself, he discovers, and it is a true discovery, and he is the man to make it, — that the world has been eating green apples; to his eyes, in fact, the globe itself is a great green apple, which there is danger awful to think of that the children of men will nibble before it is ripe;5 and straightway his drastic philanthropy seeks out the Esquimaux and the Patagonian, and embraces the popu- lous Indian and Chinese villages; and thus, by a few years of philanthropic activity, the powers in the mean- while using him for their own ends, no doubt, he cures ro himself of his dyspepsia, the globe acquires a faint blush on one or both of its cheeks, as if it were beginning to be ripe, and life loses its crudity and is once more sweet and wholesome to live. I never dreamed of any enormity greater than I have committed. I never knew, and never 15 shall know, a worse man than myself. I believe that what so saddens the reformer is not his sympathy with his fellows in distress, but though he be the holiest son of God, is his private ail. Let this be righted, let the spring come to him, the morning rise over 20 his couch, and he will forsake his generous companions without apology. (My excuse for not lecturing against the use of tobacco is, that I never chewed it; that is a penalty which reformed tobacco-chewers have to pay ;) though there are things enough I have chewed, which I 25 could lecture against. If you should ever be betrayed into any of these philanthropies, do not let your left hand know what your right hand does, for it is not worth know- ing. Rescue the drowning and tie your shoe-strings. Take your time, and set about some free labor. 30 Our manners have been corrupted by communication vith the saints. Our hymn-books resound with a melo- yus cursing of God and enduring him forever. One 78 WALDEN would say that even the prophets and redeemers had rather consoled the fears than confirmed the hopes of man. There is nowhere recorded a simple and irrepressible satisfaction with the gift of life, any memorable praise of 5 God. All health and success does me good, however far off and withdrawn it may appear; all disease and failure helps to make me sad and does me evil, however much sympathy it may have with me or I with it. If, then, we would indeed restore mankind by truly Indian, ro botanic, magnetic, or natural means, let us first be as simple and well as Nature ourselves, dispel the clouds which hang over our own brows, and take up a little life into our pores. Do not stay to be an overseer of the poor, but endeavor to become one of the worthies of the world. 15 I read in the Gulistan, or Flower Garden, of Sheik Sadi° of Shiraz, that ‘‘They asked a wise man, saying: Of the many celebrated trees which the Most High God has created lofty and umbrageous, they call none azad, or free, excepting the cypress, which bears no fruit: what zo mystery is there in this? - He replied: Each has its appro- priate produce, and appointed season, during the con- tinuance of which it is fresh and blooming, and during their absence dry and withered; to neither of which states is the cypress exposed, being always flourishing ; 25 and of this nature are the azads, or religious independents. — Fix not thy heart on that which is transitory; for the Dijlah,° or Tigris, will continue to flow through Bagdad after the race of caliphs is extinct: if thy hand has plenty, be liberal as the date tree; but if it affords nothing to give 30 away, be an azad, or free man, like the cypress.” COMPLEMENTAL VERSES? THE PRETENSIONS OF POVERTY “Thou dost presume too much, poor, needy wretch, To claim a station in the firmament, Because thy humble cottage, or thy tub, Nurses some lazy or pedantic virtue In the cheap sunshine or by shady springs, With roots and pot-herbs; where thy right° hand Tearing those humane passions from the mind, Upon whose stocks fair blooming virtues flourish Degradeth nature, and benumbeth sense, And, Gorgon-like, turns active men to stone. We not require the dull society Of your necessitated temperance, Or that unnatural stupidity That knows nor joy nor sorrow; nor your fore’d Falsely exalted passive fortitude Above the active. This low abject brood, That fix their seats in mediocrity, Become your servile minds; but we advance Such virtues only as admit excess, Brave, bounteous acts, regal magnificence, All-seeing prudence, magnanimity That knows no bound, and that heroic virtue For which antiquity hath left no name, But patterns only, such as Hercules, Achilles, Theseus. Back to thy loath’d cell; And when thou seest the new enlightened sphere, Study to know but what those worthies were.” T. CarREw.° 79 Io 15 20 25 WHERE I LIVED, AND WHAT I LIVED FOR At a certain season of our life we are accustomed to con- sider every spot as the possible site of a house. I have thus surveyed the country on every side within a dozen . miles of where I live. Jn imagination I have bought all 5 the farms in succession, for all were to be bought, and I knew their price. I walked over each farmer’s premises, tasted his wild apples, discoursed on husbandry with him, took his farm at his price, at any price, mortgaging it to him in my mind; even put a higher price on it, — 10 took everything but a deed of it, — took his word for his deed, for I dearly love to talk, — cultivated it, and him too to some extent, I trust, and withdrew when I had enjoyed it long enough, leaving him to carry iton. This experience entitled me to be regarded as a sort of real-estate broker 15 by my friends. Wherever I sat, there I might live, and the landscape radiated from me accordingly. What is a house but a sedes, a seat ? — better if a country seat. I discovered many a site for a house not likely to be soon improved, which some might have thought too far from 20 the village, but to my eyes the village was too far from it. Well, there I might live, I said; and there I did live, for an hour, a summer and a winter life; saw how I could let the years run off, buffet the winter through, and see the spring come in. The future inhabitants of this region, 25 wherever they may place their houses, may be sure that 80 WHERE I LIVED 81 they have been anticipated. An afternoon sufficed to lay out the land into orchard, woodlot, and pasture, and to decide what fine oaks or pines should be left to stand before the door, and whence each blasted tree could be seen to the best advantage; and then I let it lie, fallow 5 perchance, for a man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone. My imagination carried me so far that I even had the refusal of several farms, — the refusal was all I wanted, — but I never got my fingers burned by actual posses- sion. The nearest that I came to actual possession was when I bought the Hollowell° place, and had begun to sort my seeds, and collected materials with which to make a wheelbarrow to carry it on or off with®; but before the owner gave me a deed of it, his wife — every man has such 15 a wife — changed her mind and wished to keep it, and he offered me ten dollars to release him. Now (to speak the truth, I had but ten cents in the world, and it sur- passed my arithmetic to tell, if I was that man who had ten cents, or who had a farm, or ten dollars, or all to- 20 gether. However, I let him keep the ten dollars and the farm too, for I had carried it far enough; or rather, to be generous, I sold him the farm for just what I gave for it, and, as he was not a rich man, made him a present of ten dollars, and still had my ten cents, and seeds, and materials 25 for a wheelbarrow left. I found thus that I had been a rich man without any damage to my poverty. But I retained the landscape, and I have since annually carried off what it yielded without a wheelbarrow. With respect to landscapes, — 30 Lol ° “Tam monarch? of all I survey,° My right there is none to dispute.” 82 WALDEN I have frequently seen a poet withdraw, having enjoyed the most valuable part of a farm, while the crusty farmer supposed that he had got a few wild apples only. Why, the owner does not know it for many years when a poet shas put his farm in rhyme, the most admirable kind of invisible fence, has fairly impounded it, milked it, skimmed it, and got all the cream, and left the farmer only the skimmed milk. The real attractions of the Hollowell farm, to me, ro were: its complete retirement, being about two miles from the village, half a mile from the nearest neigh- bor, and separated from the highway by a broad field; its bounding on the river, which the owner said pro- tected it by its fogs from frosts in the spring, though 15 that was nothing to me; the gray color and ruinous state of the house and barn, and the dilapidated fences, which put such an interval between me and the last occupant; the hollow and lichen-covered apple trees, gnawed by rabbits, showing what kind of neighbors I 20 should have; but above all, the recollection I had of it from my earliest voyages up the river, when the house was concealed behind a dense grove of red maples, through which I heard the house-dog bark. I was in haste to buy it, before the proprietor finished getting out some 25 rocks, cutting down the hollow apple trees, and grubbing up some young birches which had sprung up in the pasture, or, in short, had made any more of his improvements. To enjoy these advantages I was ready to carry it on; like Atlas,° to take the world on my shoulders, — I never heard 30 what compensation he received for that, — and do all those things which had no other motive or excuse but that I might pay for it and be unmolested in my possession of it;. for I knew all the while that it would yield the WHERE I LIVED 83 most abundant crop of the kind I wanted if I could only afford to let it alone. But it turned out as I have said. All that I could say, then, with respect to farming on a large scale, (I have always cultivated a garden,) was, that I had had my seeds ready. Many think that seeds im- s prove with age. Ihave no doubt that time discriminates between the good and the bad: and when at last I shall plant, I shall be less likely to be disappointed. But I would say to my fellows, once for all, As long as possible live free and uncommitted.° It makes but little differ- 10 ence whether you are committed to a farm or the county jail. Old Cato,° whose ‘“‘ De Re Rustica” is my “Cultivator,’’? says, and the only translation I have seen makes sheer nonsense of the passage, ‘When you think of getting a 15 farm, turn it thus in your mind, not to buy greedily ; nor spare your pains to look at it, and do not think it enough to go around it once. The oftener you go there the more it will please you, if it is good.”” I think I shall not buy greedily, but go round and round it as long as [I live, 20 and be buried in it first, that it may please me the more at last. The present was my next experiment of this kind, which I purpose to describe more at length; for conven- lence putting the experience of two years into one. As [25 have said, I do not propose to write an ode to dejection,° but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, stand- ing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up. When first I took up my abode in the woods, that is, began to spend my nights as well as days there, which, 30 by accident, was on Independence day, or the fourth of July, 1845, my house was not finished for winter, but was merely a defence against the rain, without plastering 84. WALDEN or chimney, the walls being of rough weather-stained boards, with wide chinks, which made it cool at night. The upright white hewn studs and freshly planed door and window casings gave it a clean and airy look, especially 5 in the morning, when its timbers were saturated with dew, so that I fancied that by noon some sweet gum would exude from them. To my imagination it retained throughout the day more or less of this auroral character, reminding me of a certain house on a mountain which I had ro visited the year before. This was an airy and unplastered cabin, fit to entertain a travelling god, and where a goddess might trail her garments. The winds which passed over my dwelling were such as sweep over the ridges of moun- tains, bearing the broken strains, or celestial parts only, 15 of terrestrial music. The morning wind forever blows, the poem of creation is uninterrupted; but few are the ears that hear it. Olympus is but the outside of the earth everywhere. The only house I had been the owner of afin if 20 except a boat, was a tent, which I used occasionally when making Seti in the summer, and this is still rolled up in my garret; but the boat,° after passing from hand to hand, has gone down the stream of time. With this more substantial shelter about me, I had made some 25 progress towards settling in the world. This frame, so slightly clad, was a sort of crystallization around me, and reacted on the builder. It was suggestive somewhat as a picture in outlines. I did not need to go out doors to take the air, for the atmosphere within had lost none of its 30 freshness. It was not so much within doors as behind a door where I sat, even in the rainiest weather. The Harivansa® says, “An abode without birds is like a meat without seasoning.”” Such was not my abode, for I found WHERE I LIVED 85 myself suddenly neighbor to the birds; not by having imprisoned one, but having caged myself near them. I was not only nearer to some of those which commonly frequent the garden and the orchard, but to those wilder and more thrilling songsters of the forest which never, or rarely, serenade a villager, —the woodthrush, the veery, the scarlet tanager, the field-sparrow, the whip- poorwill, and many others. I was seated by the shore of a small pond, about a mile and a half south of the village of Concord and somewhat higher than it, in the midst of an extensive wood between that town and Lincoln, and about two miles south of that our only field known to fame, Concord Battle Ground ; but I was so low in the woods that the opposite shore, half a mile off, like the rest, covered with wood, was my most distant horizon. For the first week, whenever I looked out on the pond it impressed me like a tarn high up on the side of a mountain, its bottom far above the surface of other lakes, and, as the sun arose, I saw it throw- ing off its nightly clothing of mist, and here and there, by degrees, its soft ripples or its smooth reflecting surface was revealed, while the mists, like ghosts, were stealthily withdrawing in every direction into the woods, as at the breaking up of some nocturnal conventicle. The very dew seemed to hang upon the trees later into the day than usual, as on the sides of mountains. This small lake was of most value as a neighbor in the intervals of a gentle rain storm in August, when, both air and water being perfectly still, but the sky overcast, mid- afternoon had all the serenity of evening, and the wood- thrush sang around, and was heard from shore to shore. A lake like this is never smoother than at such a time; and the clear portion ofthe air above it being shallow and 5 H ie) 25 30 86 WALDEN darkened by clouds, the water, full of light and reflections, becomes a lower heaven itself so much the more impor- tant. From a hill top near by, where the wood had been recently cut off, there was a pleasing vista southward 5 across the pond, through a wide indentation in the hills which form the shore there, where their opposite sides sloping toward each other suggested a stream flowing out in that direction through a wooded valley, but stream there was none. That way I looked between and over the ronear green hills to some distant and higher ones in the horizon, tinged with blue. Indeed, by standing on tiptoe I could catch a glimpse of some of the peaks of the still bluer and more distant mountain ranges in the northwest, those true-blue coins from heaven’s own mint, and also 15 of some portion of the village. But in other directions, even from this point, I could not see over or beyond the woods which surrounded me. It is well to have some water in your neighborhood, to give buoyancy to and float the earth. One value even of the smallest well is, 20 that when you look into it you see that earth is not con- tinent but insular. This is as important as that it keeps butter cool. When I looked across the pond from this peak toward the Sudbury meadows, which in time of flood I distinguished elevated perhaps by a mirage in their 25 seething valley, like a coin in a basin, all the earth be- yond the pond appeared like a thin crust insulated and floated even by this small sheet of intervening water, and I was reminded that this on which I dwelt was but dry land. 30 Though the view from my door wasstill more contracted, I did not feel crowded or confined in the least. There was pasture enough for my imagination. The low shrub- oak plateau to which the opposite shore arose, stretched WHERE I LIVED 87 away toward the prairies of the West and the steppes of Tartary, affording ample room for all the roving families of men. ‘There are none happy in the world but beings who enjoy freely a vast horizon,” said Damodara, when his herds required new and larger pastures. 5 Both place and time were changed, and I dwelt nearer to those parts of the universe and to those eras in history which had most attracted me. Where I lived was as far off as many a region viewed nightly by astronomers. We are wont to imagine rare and delectable places in some 10 remote and more celestial corner of the system, behind the constellation of Cassiopeia’s Chair, far from noise and dis- turbance. I discovered that my house actually had its site in such a withdrawn, but forever new and unprofaned, part of the universe. If it were worth the while to settle in those parts near to the Pleiades or the Hyades, to Aldebaran or Altair, then I was really there, or at an equal remoteness from the life which I had left behind, dwindled and twinkling with as fine a ray to my nearest neighbor, and to be seen only in moonless nights by him. Such 20 was that part of creation where I had squatted ; — Lal 5 “There was a shepherd that did live, And held his thoughts as high As were the mounts whereon his flocks Did hourly feed him by;” 25 What should we think of the shepherd’s life if his flocks always wandered to higher pastures than his thoughts ? Every morning? was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself. I have been as sincere a worshipper 30 of Aurora as the Greeks. I got up early and bathed in the pond; that was a religious exercise, and one of the best 88 WALDEN things which I did. They say that characters were en- graven on the bathing tub of king Tching-thang to this effect: ‘‘Renew thyself completely each day; do it again and again, and forever again.”’ J can understand that. _ 5 Morning brings back theheroicages. Iwasasmuchaffected by the faint hum of'a mosquito making its invisible and unimaginable tour through my apartments at earliest dawn, when I was sitting with door and windows open, as I could be by any trumpet that ever sang of fame. ro It was Homer’s requiem; itself an Iliad and Odyssey in the air, singing its own wrath and wanderings. There was something cosmical about it; a standing advertisement, till forbidden, of the everlasting vigor and fertility of the world. The morning, which is the most memorable 15 season of the day, is the awakening hour. Then there is least somnolence in us; and for an hour, at least, some part of us awakes which slumbers all the rest of the day and night. Little is to be expected of that day, if it can be called a day, to which we are not awakened by our 20 Genius, but by the mechanical nudgings of some servitor, are not awakened by our own newly-acquired force and aspirations from within, accompanied by the undulations of celestial music, instead of factory bells, and a fragrance filling the air — to a higher life than we fell asleep from ; 25 and thus the darkness bear its fruit, and prove itself to be good, no less than the light. That man who does not be- lieve that each day contains an earlier, more sacred, and auroral hour than he has yet profaned, has despaired of life, and is pursuing a descending and darkening way. 30 After a partial cessation of his sensuous life, the soul of man, or its organs rather, are reinvigorated each day, and his Genius tries again what noble life it can make. All memorable events, I should say, transpire in morning time WHERE I LIVED 89 and in a morning atmosphere. The Vedas say, “All intelligences awake with the morning.” Poetry and art, and the fairest and most memorable of the actions of men, date from such an hour. All poets and heroes, like Memnon,? are the children of Aurora, and emit their music 5 at sunrise. To him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning. It matters not what the clocks say or the attitudes and labors of men. Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me. Moral reform is the effort to throw off 10 sleep. Why is it that men give so poor an account of their day if they have not been slumbering? They are not such poor calculators. If they had not been overcome with drowsiness they would have performed something. The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only 15 one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face? 20 We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor. 25 It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful ; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we cando. To affect the quality of the day, that 30 is the highest cf arts. Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour. If we refused, or 90 WALDEN rather used up, such paltry information as we get, the oracles would distinctly inform us how this might be done. I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and seeif I could not 5 learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so ro sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or 15 if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.? For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to 20 ‘glorify God and enjoy him forever.” Still we live meanly, like ants; though the fable tells us that we were long ago changed into men; like pygmies we fight with cranes; it is error upon error, and clout upon clout, and our best virtue has for its occasion a superfluous 25 and evitable wretchedness. Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, sim- plicity! Isay, let your affairs be as two or three, and not 30 a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail. In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one WHERE I LIVED 91 items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds. Simplify, simplify. Instead of three meals a day, if it be necessary eat but one; instead of 5 a hundred dishes, five; and reduce other things in propor- tion. Our life is like a German Confederacy,° made up of petty states, with its boundary forever fluctuating, so that even a German cannot tell you how it is bounded at any moment. The nation itself, with all its so-called internal 10 improvements, which, by the way, are all external and superficial, is just such an unwieldy and overgrown establishment, cluttered with furniture and tripped up by its own traps, ruined by luxury and heedless expense, by want of calculation and a worthy aim, as the million 15 households in the land ; and the only cure for it as for them is in a rigid economy, a stern and more than Spartan simplicity of life and elevation of purpose. It lives too fast. Men think that it is essential that the Nation have, commerce, and export ice, and talk through a tele- 20 - graph, and ride thirty miles an hour, without a doubt, whether they do or not; but whether we should live like baboons or like men, is a little uncertain. If we do not get out: sleepers, and forge rails, and devote days and nights to the work, but go to tinkering upon our lives to 25 improve them, who will build railroads? And if railroads are not built, how shall we get to heaven in season? But if we stay at home and mind our business, who will want railroads? We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us. Did you ever think what those sleepers are that under- 30 lie the railroad? Each one is a man, an Irishman, or a Yankee man. The rails are laid on them, and they are covered with sand, and the cars run smoothly over them. 92 WALDEN They are sound sleepers | assure you. And every few years a new lot is laid down and run over; so that, if some have - the pleasure of riding on a rail, others have the misfortune to be ridden upon. And when they run over a man that 5is walking in his sleep, a supernumerary sleeper in the wrong position, and wake him up, they suddenly stop the cars, and make a hue and cry about it, as if this were an exception. Iam glad to know that it takes a gang of men for every five miles to keep the sleepers down and 10 level in their beds as it is, for this is a sign that they may sometime get up again. Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? We are determined to be starved before we are hungry. Men say that a stitch in time saves nine, and so they take 15a thousand stitches to-day to save nine to-morrow. As for work, we haven’t any of any consequence. We have the Saint Vitus’ dance, and cannot possibly keep our heads still. If I should only give a few pulls at the parish bell- rope, as for a fire, that is, without setting the bell,° there 20is hardly a man on his farm in the outskirts of Concord, notwithstanding that press of engagements which was his excuse so many times this morning, nor a boy, nor a woman, I might almost say, but would forsake all and follow that sound, not mainly to save property from the flames, but, 25 if we will confess the truth, much more to see it burn, since burn it must, and we, be it known, did not set it on fire, — or to see it put out, and have a hand in it, if that is done as handsomely; yes, even if it were the parish church itself. Hardly a man takes a half hour’s nap after dinner 30 but when he wakes he holds up his head and asks, “‘ What’s the news?” as if the rest of mankind had stood his sentinels. Some give directions to be waked every half hour, doubtless for no other purpose; and then, to pay for it, they tell WHERE I LIVED 93 what they have dreamed. After a night’s sleep the news is as indispensable as the breakfast. ‘‘ Pray tell me any thing new that has happened to a man anywhere on this globe,” — and he reads it over his coffee and rolls, that a man has had his eyes gouged out this morning on the Wachito River°; never dreaming the while that he lives in the dark unfathomed mammoth cave of this world, and has but the rudiment of an eye himself. For my part, I could easily do without the post-oflice. I think that there are very few important communica- tions made through it. To speak critically, I never re- ceived more than one or two letters in my life — I wrote this some years ago — that were worth the postage. The penny-post is, commonly, an institution through which you seriously offer a man that penny for his thoughts which is too often safely offered in jest. And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we “read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steam- boat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Rail- road,° or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter, — we never need read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications? To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea. Yet not a few are greedy after this gossip. There was such a rush, as I hear, the other day at one of the offices to learn the foreign news by the last arrival, that several large squares 5 Io of plate glass belonging to the establishment were broken 30 by the pressure, — news which I seriously think a ready wit might write a twelvemonth, or ‘twelve years, before- hand with sufficient accuracy. As for Spain, for instance, 94 WALDEN if you know how to throw in Don Carlos and the Infanta and Don Pedro and Seville and Granada, from time to time in the right proportions, — they may have changed the names a little since I saw the papers,— and serve upa 5 bull-fight when other entertainments fail, it will be true to the letter, and give us as good an idea of the exact state or ruin of things in Spain as the most succinct and lucid reports under this head in the newspapers; and as for England, almost the last significant scrap of news from 10 that quarter was the revolution of 1649°; and if you have learned the history of her crops for an average year, you never need attend to that thing again, unless your specula- tions are of a merely pecuniary character. If one may judge who rarely looks into the newspapers, nothing new 15 does ever happen in foreign parts, a French revolution not excepted. What news! how much more important to know what that is which was never old! ‘‘ Kieou-he-yu (great digni- tary of the state of Wei) sent a man to Khoung-tseu to 20 know his news. Khoung-tseu caused the messenger to be seated near him, and questioned him in these terms: What is your master doing? The messenger answered with respect: My master desires to diminish the number of his faults, but he cannot come to the end of them. The 25 messenger being gone, the philosopher remarked: What a worthy messenger! What a worthy messenger!” The preacher, instead of vexing the ears of drowsy farmers on their day of rest at the end of the week, — for Sunday as the fit conclusion of an ill-spent week, and not the fresh and 30 brave beginning of a new one, — with this one other draggle- tail of a sermon, should shout with thundering voice, — “Pause! Avast! Why so seeming fast, but deadly slow?” Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest WHERE I LIVED 95 truths, while reality is fabulous. If men would steadily observe realities only, and not allow themselves to be deluded, life, to compare it with such things as we know, would be like a fairy tale and the Arabian Nights’ Enter- tainments. If we respected only what is inevitable and 5 has a right to be, music and poetry would resound along the streets. When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence, — that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality. This is10 always exhilarating and sublime. By closing the eyes and slumbering, and consenting to be deceived by shows, men establish and confirm their daily life of routine and habit everywhere, which still is built on purely illusory foundations. Children, who play life, discern its true rs law and relations more clearly°® than men, who fail to live it worthily, but who think that they are wiser by experience, that is, by failure. I have read in a Hindoo book, that “there was a king’s son, who, being expelled in infancy from his native city, was brought up by a forester, and, 20 growing up to maturity in that state, imagined himself to belong to the barbarous race with which he lived. One of his father’s ministers having discovered him, revealed to him what he was, and the misconception of his character was removed, and he knew himself to be a prince. So the 25 soul,’’ continues the Hindoo philosopher, “from the circum- stances in which it is placed, mistakes its own character, until the truth is revealed to it by some holy teacher, and then it knows itself to be Brahme.” I perceive that we in- habitants of New England live this mean life that we do 30 because our vision does not penetrate the surface of things. We think that that 7s which appears to be. If a man should walk through this town and see only the reality, 96 WALDEN where, think you, would the ‘‘Mill-dam’’® go to? If he should give us an account of the realities he beheld there, we should not recognize the place in his description. Look at a meeting-house, or a court-house, or a jail, or a 5 shop, or a dwelling-house, and say what that thing really is before a true gaze, and they would all go to pieces in your account of them. Men esteem truth remote, in the outskirts of the system, behind the farthest star, before Adam and after the last man. In eternity there is indeed rosomething true and sublime. But all these times and places and occasions are now and here. God himself cul- minates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages. And we are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the rs perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that sur- rounds us. The universe constantly and obediently an- - swers to our conceptions; whether we travel fast or slow, the track islaidforus. Let us spend our lives in conceiving them. The poet or the artist never yet had so fair and noble 20a design but some of his posterity at least could accom- plish it. Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito’s wing that falls on the rails. Let us rise early and fast, or 25 breakfast, gently and without perturbation; let company come and let company go, let the bells ring and the chil- dren cry, — determined to make a day of it. Why should we knock under and go with the stream? Let us not be upset and overwhelmed in that terrible rapid and whirl- 30 pool called a dinner, situated in the meridian shallows. Weather this danger and you are safe, for the rest of the way is down hill. With unrelaxed nerves, with morning vigor, sail by it, looking another way, tied to the mast°® like WHERE I LIVED 97 Ulysses. If the engine whistles, let it whistle till it is hoarse for its pains. If the bell rings, why should werun? We will consider what kind of music they are like. Let ussettle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, « and delusion, and appearances, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through church and state, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, 10 and say, This is, and no mistake; and then begin, having a point d’appur,° below freshet and frost and fire, a place where you might found a wall or a state, or set a lamp-post safely, or perhaps a gauge, not a Nilometer,° but a Realom- eter,° that future ages might know how deep a freshet of 15 shams and appearances had gathered from time to time. If you stand right fronting and face to face to a fact, you will see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces, as if it were a cimeter,° and feel its sweet edge dividing you through the heart and marrow, and so you will happily conclude your 20 mortal career. Be it life or death, we crave only reality. If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel cold in the extremities; if we are alive, let us go about our business. Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; 25 but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet. I have always 30 been regretting that I was not as wise° as the day I was born. The intellect is a cleaver; it discerns and rifts its way into the secret of things. I do not wish to be any H . 98 WALDEN more busy with my hands than is necessary. My head is hands and feet. I feel all my best faculties concentrated in it. My instinct tells me that my head is an organ for burrowing, as some creatures use their snout and fore-paws, sand with it I would mine and burrow my way through these hills. I think that the richest vein is somewhere hereabouts; so by the divining rod and thin rising vapors I judge; and here I will begin to mine. READING Wirt#H a little more deliberation in the choice of their pursuits, all men would perhaps become essentially stu- dents and observers, for certainly their° nature and des- tiny are interesting to allalike. In accumulating property for ourselves or our posterity, in founding a family or a5 state, or acquiring fame even, we are mortal; but in dealing with truth we are immortal, and need fear no change nor accident. The oldest Egyptian or Hindoo philosopher raised a corner of the veil from the statue of the divinity ; and still the robe remains raised, and I gaze 10 upon as fresh a glory as he did, since it was I in him that was then so bold, and it is he in me that now reviews the vision. No dust has settled on that robe; no time has elapsed since that divinity was revealed. That time which we really improve, or which is improvable, is neither past, 15 present, nor future. My residence was more favorable, not only to thought but to serious reading, than a university; and though I was beyond the range of the ordinary circulating library, IT had more than ever come within the influence of those 20 books which circulate round the world, whose sentences were first written on bark, and are now merely copied from time to time on to linen paper. Says the poet Mir Camar Uddin Mast, “‘ Being seated to run through the region of the spiritual world, I have had this advantage in 25 books. To be intoxicated by a single glass of wine; I 99 100 WALDEN have experienced this pleasure when I have drunk the liquor of the esoteric? doctrines.” I kept Homer’s Thad on my table through the summer, though I looked at his page only now and then. Incessant labor with my 5 hands, at first, for I had my house to finish and my beans to hoe at the same time, made more study impossible. Yet I sustained myself by the prospect of such reading in future. I read one or two shallow books of travel in the intervals of my. work, till that employment made me ro ashamed of myself, and I asked where it was then that J lived. The student may read Homer® or Aschylus in the Greek without danger of dissipation or luxuriousness, for it implies that he in some measure emulates their heroes, 15 and consecrates morning hours to their pages. The heroic books, even if printed in the character of our mother tongue will always be in a language dead to degenerate times; and we must laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line, conjecturing a larger sense than common 20 use permits out of what wisdom and valor and generosity we have. The modern cheap and fertile press, with all its translations, has done little to bring us nearer to the heroic writers of antiquity. They seem as solitary, and | the letter in which they are printed as rare and curious, 2sas ever. It is worth the expense of youthful days and costly hours, if you learn only some words of an ancient language, which are raised out of the trivialness of the street, to be perpetual suggestions and provocations. It is not in vain that the farmer remembers and repeats the 30 few Latin words which he has heard. Men sometimes speak as if the study of the classics would at length make way for more modern and practical studies; but the adventurous student will always study classics, in what- READING 101 ever language they may be written and however ancient they may be. For what are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man? They are the only oracles which are not decayed, and there are such answers to the most modern inquiry in them as Delphiand Dodona® never gave. We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old. To read well, that is, to read true books in the true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written. It is not enough even to be able to speak the language of that nation by which they are written, for there is a memorable interval between the spoken and the written language, the language heard and the language read. The one is commonly transitory, a sound, a tongue, a dialect merely, almost brutish, and we learn it unconsciously, like the brutes, of our mothers. The other is the maturity and experience of that; if that is our mother tongue, this is our father tongue, a reserved and select expression, too significant to be heard by the ear, which we must be born again in order to speak. The crowds of men who merely spoke the Greek and Latin tongues in the middle ages were not entitled by the accident of birth to read the words of genius written in those languages; for these were not written in that Greek or Latin which they knew, but in the select language of literature. They had not learned the noble dialects of Greece and Rome, but the very materials on which they were written were waste paper to them, and they prized instead a cheap contemporary literature. But when the several nations of Europe had acquired distinct though 5 et ° ¥5 30 102 WALDEN rude written languages of their own, sufficient for the purposes of their rising literatures, then first learning revived, and scholars were enabled to discern from that 5 remoteness the treasures of antiquity. What the Roman and Grecian multitude could not hear, after the lapse of ages a few scholars read, and a few scholars only are still reading it. However much we may admire the orator’s occasional bursts of eloquence, the noblest written words are com- ro monly as far behind or above the fleeting spoken language as the firmament with its stars is behind the clouds. There are the stars, and they who can may read them. The astronomers forever comment on and observe them. They are not exhalations like our daily colloquies and vapo- rsrous breath. What is called eloquence in the forum is commonly found to be rhetoric in the study. The orator yields to the inspiration of a transient occasion, and speaks to the mob before him, to those who can hear him ; but the writer, whose more equable life is his occasion, 20 and who would be distracted by the event and the crowd which inspired the orator, speaks to the intellect and heart of mankind, to all in any age who can understand him. No wonder that Alexander® carried the Iliad with 2s him on his expedition in a precious casket. A written word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself. It may be translated into every language, and not only be 30 read but actually breathed from all human lips ; — not be represented on canvas or in marble only, but be carved out of the breath of life itself. The symbol of an ancient man’s thought becomes a modern man’s speech. Two READING 103 thousand summers have imparted to the monuments of Grecian literature, as to her marbles, only a maturer golden and autumnal tint, for they have carried their own serene and celestial atmosphere into all lands to protect them against the corrosion of time. Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations. Books, the oldest and best, stand naturally and rightfully on the shelves of every cottage. They have no cause of their own to plead, but while they enlighten and sustain the reader his common sense will not refuse them. Their authors are a natural and irresistible aristocracy in every society, and, more than kings or emperors, exert an influence on mankind. When the illiterate and perhaps scornful trader has earned by enterprise and industry his coveted leisure and independence, and is admitted to the circles of wealth and fashion, he turns inevitably at last to those still higher but yet inaccessible circles of intellect and genius, and is sensible only of the imperfection of his culture and the vanity and insufficiency of all his riches, and further proves his good sense by the pains which he takes to secure for his children that intellectual culture whose want he so keenly feels; and thus it is that he becomes _ the founder of a family. Those who have not learned to read the ancient classics 5 15 20 in the language in which they were written must have a 25 very imperfect knowledge of the history of the human race ; for it is remarkable that no transcript of them has ever been made into any modern tongue, unless our civilization itself may be regarded as such a transcript. Homer has never yet been printed in English,° nor A%schylus, nor Vergil even, — works as refined, as solidly done, and as beautiful almost as the morning itself; for later writers, say what we will of their genius, have rarely, if ever, 30 104 WALDEN equalled the elaborate beauty and finish and the lifelong and heroic literary labors of the ancients. They only talk of forgetting them who never knew them. It will be soon enough to forget them when we have the learning sand the genius which will enable us to attend to and appreciate them. That age will be rich indeed when those relics which we call Classics, and the still olderand more than classic but even less known Scriptures of the nations, shall have still further accumulated, when the Vaticans shall ro be filled with Vedas and Zendavestas°® and Bibles, with Homers and Dantes and Shakespeares, and all the cen- turies to come shall have successively deposited their trophies in the forum of the world. By such a pile we may hope to scale heaven at last. 1s The works of the great poets have never yet been read by mankind, for only great poets can read them. They have only been read as the multitude read the stars, at most astrologically, not astronomically. Most men have learned to read to serve a paltry convenience, as 20 they have learned to cipher in order to keep accounts and not be cheated in trade; but of reading as a noble intel- lectual exercise they know little or nothing; yet this only is reading, in a high sense, not that which lulls us as a lux- ury and suffers the noble faculties to sleep the while, but | 25 what we have to stand on tiptoe to read and devote our most alert and wakeful hours to. I think that having learned our letters we should read the best that is in literature, and not be forever repeating our a b abs, and words of one syllable, in the fourth or 30 fifth classes, sitting on the lowest and foremost form® all our lives. Most men are satisfied if they read or hear read, and perchance have been convicted by the wisdom of one good book, the Bible, and for the rest of their lives READING 105 vegetate and dissipate their faculties in what is called easy reading. There is a work in several volumes in our Cir- culating Library entitled Little Reading, which I thought referred to a town® of that name which I had not been to. There are those who, like cormorants and ostriches, s ean digest all sorts of this, even after the fullest dinner of meats and vegetables, for they suffer nothing to be wasted. If others are the machines to provide this provender, they are the machines to read it. They read the nine thou- sandth tale about Zebulon and Sephronia, and how they xo loved as none had ever loved before, and neither did the course of their true love run smooth, — at any rate, how it did run and stumble, and get up againand goon! how some poor unfortunate got up on to a steeple, who had better never gone up as far as the belfry; and then, having need- 15 lessly got him up there, the happy novelist rings the bell for all the world to come together and hear, O dear! how he did get down again! For my part, I think that they had better metamorphose all such aspiring heroes of universal noveldom into man weathercocks, as they used 20 to put heroes among the constellations, and let them swing around there till they are rusty, and not come down at all to bother honest men with their pranks. The next time the novelist rings the bell I will not stir though the meeting-house burndown. ‘“TheSkip of the Tip-Toe-Hop, 25 a Romance of the Middle Ages, by the celebrated author of ‘Tittle Tol-Tan,’ to appear in monthly parts; a great rush; don’t all come together.’”’ All this they read with saucer eyes, and erect and primitive curiosity, and with unwearied gizzard, whose corrugations even yet need no 30 sharpening, just as some little four-year-old bencher his two-cent gilt-covered edition of Cinderella, — without any improvement, that I can see, in the pronunciation, or 106 WALDEN accent, or emphasis, or any more skill in extracting or in- . serting the moral. The result is dulness of sight, a stagna- tion of the vital circulations, and a general deliquium® and sloughing off of all the intellectual faculties. This 5 sort of gingerbread is baked daily and more sedulously than pure wheat or rye-and-Indian in almost every oven, and finds a surer market. The best books are not read even by those who are called good readers. What does our Concord culture roamount to? There is in this town, with a very few excep- tions, no taste for the best or for very good books even in English literature, whose words all can read and spell. Even the college-bred and so-called liberally educated men here and elsewhere have really little or no acquaint- rs ance with the English classics ; and as for the recorded wis- dom of mankind, the ancient classics and Bibles, which are accessible to all who will know of them, there are the feeblest efforts anywhere made to become acquainted with them. I know a wood-chopper, of middle age, who takes 20 a French paper, not for news as he says, for he is above that, but to “keep himself in practice,” he being a Canadian by birth ; and when J ask him what he considers the best thing he can do in this world, he says, beside this, to keep up and add to his English. This is about as much as the col- 2s lege bred generally do or aspire to do, and they take an English paper for the purpose. One who has just come from reading perhaps one of the best English books will find how many with whom he can converse about it? Or suppose he comes from reading a Greek or Latin classic 30 in the original, whose praises are familiar even to the so- called illiterate; he will find nobody at all to speak to, but must keep silence about it. Indeed, there is hardly the professor in our colleges, who, if he has mastered the READING 107 difficulties of the language, has proportionally mastered the difficulties of the wit and poetry of a Greek poet, and has any sympathy to impart to the alert and heroic reader; and as for the sacred Scriptures, or Bibles of mankind, who in this town can tell me even their titles? 5 Most men do not know that any nation but: the Hebrews have had a Scripture. A man, any man, will go consider- ably out of his way to pick up a silver dollar; but here are golden words, which the wisest men of antiquity have uttered, and whose worth the wise of every succeeding age 10 have assured us of ;—- and yet we learn to read only as far as Easy Reading, the primers and class-books, and when we leave school, the “Little Reading,” and story books, which are for boys and beginners ; and our reading, our conversation and thinking, are all on a very low level, 15 worthy only of pygmies and manikins.° I aspire to be acquainted with wiser men than this our Concord soil has produced, whose names are hardly known here. Or shall I hear the name of Plato and never read his book? As if Plato were my townsman and I never saw 20 him, — my next neighbor and I never heard him speak or attended to the wisdom of his words. But how actually is it? His Dialogues, which contain what was immortal in him, lie on the next shelf, and yet I never read them. We are under-bred, and low-lived and illiterate ; and in this 25 respect I confess I do not make any very broad distinction between the illiterateness of my townsman who cannot read at all, and the illiterateness of him who has learned to read only what is for children and feeble intellects. We should be as good as the worthies of antiquity, but partly 30 by first knowing how good they were. We are a race of tit-men,° and soar but little higher in our intellectual flights than the columns of the daily paper. 108 WALDEN It is not all books that are as dull as their readers. There are probably words addressed to our condition exactly, which, if we could really hear and understand, would be more salutary than the morning or the spring to s our lives, and possibly put a new aspect on the face of things for us. How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book. The book exists for us perchance which will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may ro find somewhere uttered. These same questions that disturb and puzzle and confound us have in their turn occurred to all the wise men; not one has been omitted ; and each has answered them, according to his ability, by his words and his life. Moreover, with wisdom we 15 Shall learn liberality. The solitary hired man on a farm in the outskirts of Concord, who has had his second birth and peculiar religious experience, and is driven as he be- lieves into silent gravity and exclusiveness by his faith, may think it is not true; but Zoroaster,° thousands of 20 years ago, travelled the same road and had the same ex- perience; but he, being wise, knew it to be universal, and treated his neighbors accordingly, and is even said to have invented and established worship among men. Let him humbly commune with Zoroaster then, and, through the 25 liberalizing influence of all the worthies, with Jesus Christ himself, and let ‘our church” go by the board. We boast that we belong to the nineteenth century and are making the most rapid strides of any nation. But consider how little this village does for its own 3z0culture. I do not wish to flatter my townsmen, nor to be flattered by them, for that will not advance either of us. We need to be provoked, — goaded like oxen, as we are, into a trot. We have a comparatively decent READING 109 system of common schools, schools for infants only; but excepting the half-starved Lyceum in the winter, and lat- terly the puny beginning of a library suggested by the state, no school for ourselves. Wespend more on almost any ar- ticle of bodily aliment or ailment than on our mental ali- ment. It is time that we had uncommon schools, that we did not leave off our education when we begin to be menand women. It is time that villages were universities, and their elder inhabitants the fellows of universities, with leisure — if they are indeed so well off — to pursue liberal studies the rest of their lives. Shall the world be confined to one Paris or one Oxford forever? Cannot students be boarded here and get a liberal education under the skies of Concord? Can we not hire some Abelard? to lecture to us? Alas! what with foddering the cattle and tending the store, we are kept from school too long, and our education is sadly neglected. In this country, the village should in some respects take the place of the nobleman of Europe. It should be the patron of the fine arts. It isrich enough. It wants only the magnanimity andrefinement. It canspend money enough on such things as farmers and traders value, but it is thought Utopian to propose spending money for things which more intelligent men know to be of far more worth. This town has spent seventeen thousand dollars on a town-house, thank fortune or politics, but probably it will not spend so much on living wit, the true meat to put into that shell, in a hundred years. The one hundred and twenty-five dollars annually subscribed for a Lyceum in the winter is better spent than 5 Io ae 20 25 any other equal sum raised in the town. If we live in the 30 nineteenth century, why should we not enjoy the advan- tages which the nineteenth century offers? Why should our life be in any respects provincial? If we will read 110 WALDEN newspapers, why not skip the gossip of Boston and take the best newspaper in the world at once ? — not be sucking the pap of “neutral family” papers, or browsing “Olive- Branches’’°® here in New England. Let the reports of 5 all the learned societies come to us, and we will see if they know any thing. Why should we leave it to Harper & Brothers and Redding & Co.° to select our reading? As the nobleman of cultivated taste surrounds himself with whatever conduces to his culture, — genius — learn- ro Ing — wit — books — paintings — statuary — music — philosophical instruments, and the like; so let the village do, — not stop short at a pedagogue, a parson, a sexton, a parish library, and three selectmen, because our pilgrim forefathers got through a cold winter once on a bleak rock 15 with these. To act collectively is according to the spirit of our institutions; and I am confident that, as our cir- cumstances are more flourishing, our means are greater than the nobleman’s. New England can hire all the wise men in the world to come and teach her, and board them zoround the while, and not be provincial at all. That is the uncommon school we want. Instead of noblemen, let us have noble villages of men. If it is necessary, omit one bridge over the river, go round a little there, and throw one arch at least over the darker gulf of ignorance which 25 surrounds us. SOUNDS But while we are confined to books, though the most select and classic, and read only particular written lan- guages, which are themselves but dialects and provincial, we are in danger of forgetting the language which all things and events speak without metaphor, which alone is 5 copiousand standard. Much is published, but little printed. The rays which stream through the shutter will be no longer remembered when the shutter is wholly removed. No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history, ro or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen? Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer? Read your fate, see what is before you, and walk r5 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 20 love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undis- turbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sang around or 25 flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling Et 112 | WALDEN in at my west window, or the noise of some traveller’s wagon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time. I grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of the hands would have s been. They were not time subtracted from my life, but so much over and above my usual allowance. I realized what the Orientals mean by. contemplation and the for- saking of works. For the most part, I minded not how the hours went. The day advanced as if to light some work 10 Of mine; it was morning, and lo, now it is evening, and nothing, memorable is accomplished. Instead of singing like the birds, I silently smiled at my incessant good fortune. As the sparrow had its trill, sitting on the hick- ory before my door, so had I my chuckle or suppressed 15 warble which he might hear out of my nest. My days were not days of the week, bearing the stamp of any heathen deity, nor were they minced into hours and fretted by the ticking of a clock®; for I lived like the Puri Indians, of whom it is said that ‘‘for yesterday, to-day, and to-morrow 20 they have only one word, and they express the variety of meaning by pointing backward for yesterday, forward for to-morrow, and overhead for the passing day.” This was sheer idleness to my fellow-townsmen, no doubt; but if the birds and flowers had tried me by their standard, I 25 should not have been found wanting. A man must find his, occasions in himself, it is true. The natural day is very calm, and will hardly reprove his indolence. I had this advantage, at least, in my mode of life, 30 over those who were obliged to look abroad for amuse- ment, to society and the theatre, that my life itself was - become my amusement and never ceased to be novel. It was a drama of many scenes and without an end. If we SOUNDS 1138 were always indeed getting our living, and regulating our lives according to the last and best mode we had learned, we should never be troubled with ennui. Follow your genius closely enough, and it will not fail to show you a fresh prospect every hour. Housework was a pleasant 5 pastime. When my floor was dirty, I rose early, and, set- ting all my furniture out of doors on the grass, bed and bedstead making but one budget, dashed water on the floor, and sprinkled white sand from the pond on it, and then with a broom scrubbed it clean and white; and by the 10 time the villagers had broken their fast the morning sun had dried my house sufficiently to allow me to move in again, and my meditations were almost uninterrupted. It was pleasant to see my whole household effects out on the grass, making a little pile like a gypsy’s pack, and my 15 three-legged table, from which I did not remove the books and pen and ink, standing amid the pines and hickories. They seemed glad to get out themselves, and asif unwilling to be brought in. I was sometimes tempted to stretch an awning over them and take my seat there. It was worth 20 the while to see the sun shine on these things, and hear the free wind blow on them; so much more interesting most familiar objects look out of doors than in the house. A bird sits on the next bough, life-everlasting grows under the table, blackberry vines run round its legs; pine cones, 25 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, tables, chairs, and bed- steads, — because they once stood in their midst. - My house was on the side of a hill, immediately on the 30 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 I 114 WALDEN my front vard grew the strawberry, blackberry, and life-everlasting, johnswort and goldenrod, shrub-oaks and sand-cherry, blueberry and ground-nut. Near the end of May, the sand-cherry (cerasus pumila) adorned the sides 5 of the path with its delicate flowers arranged in umbels cylindrically about its short stems, which last, in the fall, weighed down with good-sized and handsome cherries, fell over in wreaths like rays on every side. I tasted them out of compliment to Nature, though they were ro scarcely palatable. The sumach (rhus glabra) grew luxuriantly about the house, pushing up through the embankment which I had made, and growing five or six feet the first season. Its broad pinnate tropical leaf was pleasant though strange to look on. The large buds, 15 suddenly pushing out late in the spring from dry sticks which had seemed to be dead, developed themselves as by magic into graceful green and tender boughs, an inch in diameter; and sometimes, as I sat at my window, so heedlessly did they grow and tax their weak joints, I heard zo afresh and tender bough suddenly fall like a fan to the ground, when there was not a breath of air stirring, broken off by its own weight. In August, the large masses of berries, which, when in flower, had attracted many wild bees, gradually assumed their bright velvety crimson hue, 25and by their weight again bent down and broke the tender limbs. As I sit at my window this summer afternoon, hawks are circling about my clearing; the tantivy® of wild pigeons, flying by twos and threes athwart my view, or 30 perching restless on the white-pine boughs behind my house, gives a voice to the air; a fishhawk dimples the glassy surface of the pond and brings up a fish; a mink SOUNDS 115 steals out of the marsh before my door and seizes a frog by the shore; the sedge is bending under the weight of the reed-birds flitting hither and thither; and for the last half hour I have heard the rattle of railroad cars, now dying away and then reviving like the beat of a partridge, 5 conveying travellers from Boston to the country. For I did not live so out of the world as that boy, who, as I hear, was put out to a farmer in the east part of the town, but ere long ran away and came home again, quite down at the heel and homesick. He had never seen such aro dull and out-of-the-way place; the folks were all gone off; why, you couldn’t even hear the whistle! I doubt if there is such a place in Massachusetts now: “Tn truth, our village has become a butt For one of those fleet railroad shafts, and o’er 15 Our peaceful plain its soothing sound is — Concord !”’ The Fitchburg Railroad touches the pond about a hun- dred 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 20 go over the whole length of the road, bow to me as to an old acquaintance, they pass me so often, and apparently they take me for an employe;andsoIam. I too would fain be a track-repairer somewhere in the orbit of the earth. The whistle of the locomotive penetrates my woods 25 summer and winter, sounding like the scream of a hawk sailing over some farmer’s yard, informing me that many restless city merchants are arriving within the circle of the town, or adventurous country traders from the other side. As they come under one horizon, they shout their 30 warning to get off the track to the other, heard sometimes through the circles of two towns. Here come your gro- 116 WALDEN ceries, country; your rations, countrymen! Nor is there any man so independent on his farm that he can say them nay. And here’s your pay for them! screams the country- man’s whistle; timber like long battering-rams going 5 twenty miles an hour against the city’s walls, and chairs enough to seat all the weary and heavy laden that dwell within them. With such huge and lumbering civility the country hands a chair to the city. All the Indian huckleberry hills are stripped, all the cranberry meadows ro are raked into the city. Up comes the cotton, down goes the woven cloth ; up comes the silk, down goes the woollen ; up come the books, but down goes the wit that writes them. When I meet the engine -with its train of cars moving 15 off with planetary motion, — or, rather, like a comet, for the beholder knows not if with that velocity and with that direction it will ever revisit this system, since its orbit does not look like a returning curve, — with its steam cloud like a banner streaming behind in golden 2oand silver wreaths, like many a downy cloud which I have seen, high in the heavens, unfolding its masses to the light — as if this travelling demigod, this cloud-compeller, would ere long take the sunset sky for the livery of his train; when I hear the iron horse® make the hills echo 25 with his snort like thunder, shaking the earth with his feet, and breathing fire and smoke from his nostrils (what kind of winged horse or fiery dragon they will put into the new Mythology I don’t know), it seems as if the earth had got a race now worthy to inhabit it. If all 30 were as it seems, and men made the elements their ser- vants for noble ends! If the cloud that hangs over the engine were the perspiration of heroic deeds, or as benefi- cent as that which floats over the farmer’s fields, then SOUNDS a ia Bf the elements and Nature herself would cheerfully accom- pany men on their errands and be their escort. I watch the passage of the morning cars with the same feeling that I do the rising of the sun, which is hardly more regular. Their train of clouds stretching far be- 5 hind and rising higher and higher, going to heaven while the cars are going to Boston, conceals the sun for a minute and casts my distant field into the shade, a celestial train beside which the petty train of cars which hugs the earth is but the barb of the spear. The stabler of the 10 iron horse was up early this winter morning by the light of the stars amid the mountains, to fodder and harness his steed. Fire, too, was awakened thus early to put the vital heat in him and get him off. If the enterprise were as innocent as it is early! If the snow lies deep, 15 they strap on his snow-shoes, and with the giant plough plough a furrow from the mountains to the seaboard, in which the cars, like a following drill-barrow,° sprinkle all the restless men and floating merchandise in the country for seed. All day the fire-steed flies over the country, 20 stopping only that his master may rest, and I am awakened by his tramp and defiant snort at midnight, when in some remote glen in the woods he fronts the elements incased in ice and snow; and he will reach his stall only with the morning star, to start once more on his travels without rest 25 or slumber. Or perchance, at evening, I hear him in his stable blowing off the superfluous energy of the day, that he may calm his nerves and cool his liver and brain for a few hours of iron slumber. If the enterprise were as heroic and commanding as it is protracted and unwearied ! 30 Far through unfrequented woods on the confines of towns, where once only the hunter penetrated by day, in the darkest night dart these bright saloons without the 118 WALDEN knowledge of their inhabitants; this moment stopping at some brilliant station-house in town or city, where a social crowd is gathered, the next in the Dismal Swamp, scaring the owl and fox. The startings and arrivals of the cars 5 are now the epochs in the village day. They go and come with such regularity and precision, and their whistle can be heard so far, that the farmers set their clocks by them, and thus one well-conducted institution regulates a whole country. Have not men improved somewhat 10 in punctuality since the railroad was invented? Do they not talk and think faster in the depot than they did in the stage-ofice? There is something electrifying in the atmosphere of the former place. I have been astonished at the miracles it has wrought ; that some of my neighbors, 15 who, I should have prophesied, once for all, would never get to Boston by so prompt a conveyance, are on hand when the bell rings. To do things “railroad fashion” is now the by-word ; and it is worth the while to be warned so often and so sincerely by any power to get off its track. 20 There is no stopping to read the riot act, no firing over the heads of the mob, in this case. We have constructed a fate, an Atropos,° that never turns aside. (Let that be the name of your engine.) Men are advertised that at a certain hour and minute these bolts will be shot toward 25 particular points of the compass; yet it interferes with no man’s business, and the children go to school on the other track. We live the steadier for it. We are all educated thus to be the sons of Tell.° The air is full of invisible bolts. Every path but your own is the path of 30 fate. Keep your own track, then. What recommends commerce to me is its enterprise and bravery. It does not clasp its hands and pray to Jupiter. I see these men every day go about their busi- SOUNDS 119 ness with more or less courage and content, doing more even than they suspect, and perchance better employed than they could have consciously devised. I am less affected by their heroism who stood up for half an hour in the front line at Buena Vista,° than by the steady and 5 cheerful valor of the men who inhabit the snow-plough for their winter quarters; who have not merely the three- o’clock-in-the-morning courage, which Bonaparte thought was the rarest, but whose courage does not go to rest so early, who go to sleep only when the storm sleeps or the 10 sinews of their iron steed are frozen. On this morning of the Great Snow, perchance, which is still raging and chilling men’s blood, I hear the muffled tone of their engine bell from out the fog bank of their chilled breath, which announces that the cars are coming, without long 15 delay, notwithstanding the veto of a New England north-east snow-storm, and I behold the ploughmen covered with snow and rime, their heads peering above the mould-board which is turning down other than daisies and the nests of field-mice, like bowlders of the Sierra 20 Nevada, that occupy an outside place in the universe. Commerce is unexpectedly confident and serene, alert, adventurous, and unwearied. It is very natural in its methods withal, far more so than many fantastic enter- prises and sentimental experiments, and hence its singu- 25 lar success. I am refreshed and expanded when the freight train rattles past me, and I smell the stores which go dispensing their odors all the way from Long Wharf ° to Lake Champlain, reminding me of foreign parts, of coral reefs, and Indian oceans, and tropical climes, and the 30 extent of the globe. I feel more like a citizen of the world at the sight of the palm-leaf which will cover so many flaxen New England heads the next summer, the 120 WALDEN Manila hemp, and cocoanut husks, the old junk, gunny bags, scrap iron, and rusty nails. This car-load of torn sails is more legible and interesting now than if they should be wrought into paper and printed books. Who can 5 write so graphically the history of the storms they have weathered as these rents have done? They are proof- sheets which need no correction. Here goes lumber from the Maine woods, which did not go out to sea in the last freshet, risen four dollars on the thousand because of what 10 did go out or was split up; pine, spruce, cedar, — first, second, third, and fourth qualities, so lately all of one quality, to wave over the bear, and moose, and caribou. Next rolls Thomaston lime,° a prime lot, which will get far among the hills before it gets slacked.° These 15 rags in bales, of all hues and qualities, the lowest condi- tion to which cotton and linen descend, the final result of dress, — of patterns which are now no longer cried up, unless it be in Milwaukee, as those splendid articles, English, French, or American prints, ginghams, muslins, 20 etc., gathered from all quarters both of fashion and poverty, going to become paper of one color or a few shades only, on which forsooth will be written tales of real life, high and low, and founded on fact! This closed car smells of salt fish, the strong New England and commercial 25 scent, reminding me of the Grand Banks and the fisheries. Who has not seen a salt fish, thoroughly cured for this world, so that nothing can spoil it, and putting the perse- verance of the saints to the blush? with which you may sweep or pave the streets, and split your kindlings, and 30 the teamster shelter himself and his lading against sun, wind, and rain behind it, — and the trader, as a Concord trader once did, hang it up by his door for a sign when he commences business, until at last his oldest customer SOUNDS 121 cannot tell surely whether it be animal, vegetable, or mineral, and yet it shall be as pure as a snowflake, and if it be put into a pot and boiled, will come out an excellent dun fish° for a Saturday’s dinner. Next Spanish hides, _ with the tails still preserving their twist and the angle of 5 elevation they had when the oxen that wore them were careering over the pampas of the Spanish main,° —a type of all obstinacy, and evincing how almost hopeless and incurable are all constitutional vices. I confess that, practically speaking, when I have learned a man’s 10 real disposition, I have no hope of changing it for the better or worse in this state of existence. As the Orien- tals say, ‘A cur’s tail may be warmed, and pressed, and bound round with ligatures, and after a twelve years’ labor bestowed upon it, still it will retain its natural 15 form.” The only effectual cure for such inveteracies as ° these tails exhibit is to make glue of them, which I believe is what is usually done with them, and then they will stay put and stick. Here is a hogshead of molasses or of brandy directed to John Smith, Cuttingsville,° Vermont, some trader among the Green Mountains, who imports for the farmers near his clearing, and now perchance stands over his bulk-head and thinks of the last arrivals on the coast, how they may affect the price for him, telling his customers this moment, as he has told them 2s twenty times before this morning, that he expects some by the next train of prime quality. It is advertised in the Cuttingsville Times. While these things go up other things come down. Warned by the whizzing sound, I look up from my book 30 and see some tall pine, hewn on far northern hills, which has winged its way over the Green Mountains and the Connecticut, shot like an arrow through the township NS ie) 122 WALDEN within ten minutes, and scarce another eye beholds it ; going “to be the mast Of some great ammiral.’’° And hark! here comes the cattle-train bearing the cattle 5of a thousand hills,° sheepcots, stables, and cowyards 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 bleat- 10 ing 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 car-load of ° drovers, too, in the midst, on a level with their droves 15 now, their vocation gone, but still clinging to their useless sticks as their badge of office. But their dogs, where are they? It is a stampede to them; they are quite thrown out; they have lost the scent. Methinks I hear them barking behind the Peterboro’ Hills,° or panting up the 20 western slope of the Green Mountains. They will not be in at the death. Their vocation, too, is gone. Their fidelity and sagacity are below par now. They will slink back to their kennels in disgrace, or perchance run wild and strike a league with the wolf and the fox. So is 25 your pastoral life whirled past and away. But the bell rings, and I must get off the track and let the cars go by : — What’s the railroad to me? I never go to see Where it ends. 30 It fills a few hollows, And makes banks for the swallows, It sets the sand a-blowing, And the blackberries a-growing, SOUNDS 125 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 5 rumbling, Iam more alone than ever. For the rest of the long afternoon, perhaps, my meditations are interrupted only by the faint rattle of a carriage or team along the distant highway. Sometimes, on Sundays, I heard the bells, the Lincoln, 10 Acton, Bedford,° or Concord bell, when the wind was favorable, a faint, sweet, and, as it were, naturai melody. worth importing into the wilderness. At a sufficient distance over the woods this sound acquires a certain vibratory hum, as if the pine needles in the horizon were 15 the strings of a harp which it swept. All sound heard at the greatest possible distance produces one and the same effect, a vibration of the universal lyre, just as the inter- vening atmosphere makes a distant ridge of earth inter- esting to our eyes by the azure tint it imparts to it. There 20 came to me in this case a melody which the air had strained, and which had conversed with every leaf and needle of the wood, that portion of the sound which the elements had taken up and modulated and echoed from vale to vale. The echo is, to some extent, an original 25 sound, and therein is the magic and charm of it. It is not merely a repetition of what was worth repeating in the bell, but partly the voice of the wood; the same trivial words and notes sung by a wood-nymph. At evening, the distant lowing of some cow in the hori- 30 zon beyond the woods sounded sweet and melodious, and at first I would mistake it for the voices of certain minstrels 124. WALDEN by whom I was sometimes serenaded, who might be straying over hill and dale; but soon I was not unpleas- antly disappointed when it was prolonged into the cheap and natural music of the cow. I do not mean to be 5 satirical, but to express my appreciation of those youths’ singing, when I state that I perceived clearly that it was akin to the music of the cow, and they were at length one articulation of Nature. Regularly at half-past seven, in one part of the summer, 1o after the evening train had gone by, the whippoorwills chanted their vespers for half an hour, sitting on a stump by my door, or upon the ridgepole of the house. They would begin to sing almost with as much precision as a clock, within five minutes of a particular-time, referred 15 to the setting of the sun, every evening. I had a rare opportunity to become acquainted with their habits. Sometimes I heard four or five at once in different parts of the wood, by accident one a bar® behind another, and so near me that I distinguished not only the cluck after 20 each note, but often that singular buzzing sound like a fly in a spider’s web, only proportionally louder. Some- times one would circle round and round me in the woods a few feet distant as if tethered by a string, when probably I was nearits eggs. They sang at intervals throughout the 25 night, and were again as musical as ever just before and about dawn. When other birds are still the screech-owls take up the strain, like mourning women their ancient u-lu-lu. Their dismal scream is truly Ben Jonsonian.° Wise mid- 30 night hags! It is no honest and blunt tu-whit tu-who of the poets, but, without jesting, a most solemn grave- yard ditty, the mutual consolations of suicide lovers remembering the pangs and the delights of supernal love SOUNDS 125 in the infernal groves. Yet I love to hear their wailing, their doleful responses, trilled along the woodside; re- minding me sometimes of music and singing birds; as if it were the dark and tearful side of music, the regrets and sighs that would fain be sung. They are the spirits, the low spirits and melancholy forebodings, of fallen souls that once in human shape nightwalked the earth and did the deeds of darkness, now expiating their sins with their wailing hymns or threnodies in the scenery of their trans- gressions. They give me a new sense of variety and capacity of that nature which is our common dwelling. Oh-o-o-o that I never had been bor-r-r-r-n! sighs one on this side of the pond, and circles with the restlessness of despair to some new perch on the gray oaks. Then — that I never had been bor-r-r-n! echoes another on the farther side with tremulous sincerity, and — bor-r-r-r-n! comes faintly from far in the Lincoln woods. I was also serenaded by a hooting owl. Near at hand you could fancy it the most melancholy sound in Nature, as if she meant by this to stereotype and make permanent in her choir the dying moans of a human being, — some poor weak relic of mortality who has left hope behind, and howls like an animal, yet with human sobs, on entering the dark valley, made more awful by a certain gurgling melodiousness. I find myself beginning with the letters gl when I try to imitate it, — expressive of a mind which has reached the gelatinous mildewy stage in the mortifica- tion of all healthy and courageous thought. It reminded me of ghouls and idiots and insane howlings. But now one answers from far woods in a strain made really melodious by distance, — Hoo hoo, hoo, hoorer hoo; and indeed for the most part it suggested only pleasing asso- ciations, whether heard by day or night, summer or winter. 5 il 5 tN u 126 WALDEN i rejoice that there are owls. Let them do the idiotic and maniacal hooting for men. It is a sound admirably suited to swamps and twilight woods which no day illus- trates, suggesting a vast and undeveloped nature which 5 men have not recognized. They represent the stark twi- light and unsatisfied thoughts which all have. All day the sun has shone on the surface of some savage swamp, where the single spruce stands hung with usnea® lichens, and small hawks circulate above, and the chickadee lisps amid 10 the evergreens, and the partridge and rabbit skulk beneath ; but now a more dismal and fitting day dawns, and a dif- ferent race of creatures awakes to express the meaning of Nature there. Late in the evening I heard the distant rumbling of 15 wagons over bridges, —a sound heard farther than almost any other at night, — the baying of dogs, and sometimes again the lowing of some disconsolate cow in a distant barn-yard. In the meanwhile all the shore rang with the trump of bullfrogs, the sturdy spirits of ancient wine- 20 bibbers and wassailers, still unrepentant, trying to sing a catch in their Stygian® lake, —if the Walden nymphs will pardon the comparison, for though there are almost no weeds, there are frogs there, — who would fain keep up the hilarious rules of their old festal tables, though 25 their voices have waxed hoarse and solemnly grave, mocking at mirth, and the wine has lost its flavor, and become ‘only liquor to distend their paunches, and sweet intoxication never comes to drown the memory of the past, but mere saturation and waterloggedness and distention. 30 The most aldermanic,® with his chin upon a -heart-leaf, which serves for a napkin to his drooling chaps, under this northern shore quaffs a deep draught of the once scorned water, and passes round the cup with the ejacu- SOUNDS ey lation trr-r-r-oonk, tr-r-r-oonk, tr-r-r-oonk! and straight- way comes over the water from some distant cove the same password repeated, where the next in seniority and girth has gulped down to his mark° ; and when this observ- ance has made the circuit of the shores, then ejaculates 5 the master of ceremonies, with satisfaction, tr-r-r-oonk ! and each in his turn repeats the same down to the least distended, leakiest, and flabbiest paunched, that there be no mistake; and then the bowl goes round again and again, until the sun disperses the morning mist, and only 10 the patriarch is not under the pond, but vainly bellowing troonk from time to time, and pausing for a reply. I am not sure that I ever heard the sound of cock-crow- ing from my clearing, and I thought that it might be worth the while to keep a cockerel for his music merely, as ars singing bird. The note of this once wild Indian pheasant is certainly the most remarkable of any bird’s, and if they could be naturalized without being domesticated, it would soon become the most famous sound in our woods, surpassing the clangor of the goose and the hoot- 20 ing of the owl; and then imagine the cackling of the hens to fill the pauses when their lords’ clarions rested! No wonder that man added this bird to his tame stock,— to say nothing of the eggs, and drumsticks. To walk in a winter morning in a wood where these birds abounded, 25 their native woods, and hear the wild cockerels crow on the trees, clear and shrill for miles over the resounding earth, drowning the feeble 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 30 day of his life, till he became unspeakably healthy, wealthy, and wise°? This foreign bird’s note is celebrated by the poets of all countries along with the notes of their native 128 WALDEN songsters. All climates agree with brave Chanticleer.° He is more indigenous even than the natives. His health is ever good, his lungs are sound, his spirits never flag. Even the sailor on the Atlantic and Pacific is awakened by 5 his voice; but its shrill sound never roused me from my slumbers. I kept neither dog, cat, cow, pig, nor hens, so that you would have said there was a deficiency of domestic sounds; neither the churn, nor the spinning wheel, nor even the singing of the kettle, nor the hissing 100f the urn, nor children crying, to comfort one. An old-fashioned man would have lost his senses or died of ennui before this. Not even rats in the wall, for they were starved out, or rather were never baited in, — only squirrels on the roof and under the floor, a whippoorwill 15 on the ridgepole, a blue-jay screaming beneath the window, a hare or woodchuck under the house, a screech-owl or a cat-owl behind it, a flock of wild geese or a laughing loon on the pond, and a fox to bark in the night. Not evena lark or an oriole, those mild plantation birds, ever visited 2omy clearing. No cockerels to crow nor hens to cackle in the yard. No yard! but unfenced Nature reaching up to your very sills. A young forest growing up under your windows, and wild sumachs and blackberry vines break- ing through into your cellar; sturdy pitch-pines rubbing 2s and creaking against the shingles for want of room, their roots reaching quite under the house. Instead of a scuttle or a blind blown off in the gale, — a pine tree snapped off or torn up by the roots behind your house for fuel. In- stead of no path to the front-yard gate in the Great Snow, 30 — no gate — no front-yard, — and no path to the civil- ized world! SOLITUDE Tus is a delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense, and imbibes delight through every pore. I go and come with a strange liberty in Nature, a part of her- self. As I walk along the stony shore to the pond in my shirt-sleeves, though it is cool as well as cloudy and windy, 5 and I see nothing special to attract me, all the elements are unusually congenial to me. The bullfrogs trump to usher in the night, and the note of the whippoorwill is borne on the rippling wind from over the water. Sym- pathy with the fluttering alder and poplar leaves almost 10 takes away my breath; yet, like the lake, my serenity is rippled but not ruffled. These small waves raised by the evening wind are as remote from storm as the smooth reflecting surface. Though it is now dark, the wind still blows and roars in the wood, the waves still dash, and 15 some creatures lull the rest with their notes. The repose is never complete. The wildest animals do not repose, but seek their prey now; the fox, and skunk, and rabbit, now roam the fields and woods without fear. They are Nature’s watchmen, — links which connect the days of 20 animated life. When I return to my house I find that visitors have been there and left their cards, either a bunch of flowers, or a wreath of evergreen, or a name in pencil on a yellow walnut leaf ora chip. They who come rarely to the woods 25 take some little piece of the forest into their hands to play K 129 130 WALDEN with by the way, which they leave, either intentionally or accidentally. One has peeled a willow wand, woven it into a ring, and dropped it on my table. I could al- ways tell if visitors had called in my absence, either 5 by the bended twigs or grass, or the print of their shoes, and generally of what sex or age or quality they were by some slight trace left, as a flower dropped, or a bunch of grass plucked and thrown away, even as far off as the rail- road, half a mile distant, or by the lingering odor of a cigar 10 or pipe. Nay, I was frequently notified of the passage of a traveller along the highway sixty rods off by the scent of his pipe. There is commonly sufficient space about us. Our horizon is never quite at our elbows. The thick wood is 15 not just at our door, nor the pond, but somewhat is always clearing, familiar and worn by us, appropriated and fenced in some way, and reclaimed from Nature. For what reason have I this vast rangeand circuit, somesquare miles of unfre- quented forest, for my privacy, abandoned to me by men? 20 My nearest neighbor is a mile distant, and no house is visible from any place but the hill-tops within half a mile of my own. I have my horizon bounded by woods all to myself; a distant view of the railroad where it touches the pond on the one hand, and of the fence which skirts the 25 woodland road on the other. But for the most part it is as solitary where I live as on the prairies. It is as much Asia or Africa as New England. I have, as it were, my own sun and moon and stars, and a little world all to my- self. At night there was never a traveller passed my 30 house, or knocked at my door, more than if I were the first or last man; unless it were in the spring, when at long intervals some came from the village to fish for pouts,° — they plainly fished much more in the Walden Pond of their SOLITUDE 131 own natures, and baited their books with darkness, — but they soon retreated, usually with light baskets, and left “‘the world to darkness and to me,” ° and the black kernel of the night was never profaned by any human neighborhood. I believe that men are generally still a 5 little afraid of the dark, though the witches are all hung, and Christianity and candles have been introduced. Yet I experienced sometimes that the most sweet and tender, the most innocent and encouraging society may be found in any natural object, even for the poor misanthrope 10 and most melancholy man. There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of Nature and has his senses still. There was never yet such a storm but it was AXolian music° to a healthy and innocent ear. Nothing can rightly compel a simple and brave man to a1s5 vulgar sadness. While I enjoy the friendship of the sea- sons I trust that nothing can make life a burden to me. The gentle rain which waters my beans and keeps me in the house to-day is not drear and melancholy, but good for me too. Though it prevents my hoeing them, it is far 20 more worth than my hoeing. If it should continue so long as to cause the seeds to rot in the ground and destroy the potatoes in the lowlands, it would still be good for the grass, on the uplands, and, being good for the grass, it would be good for me. Sometimes, when I compare my- 2s self with other men, it seems as if I were more favored by the gods than they, beyond any deserts that I am conscious of; as if I had a warrant and surety at their hands which my fellows have not, and were especially guided and guarded. I do not flatter myself, but if it be 30 possible they flatter me. I have never felt lonesome, or in the least oppressed by a sense of solitude, but once, and that was a few weeks after I came to the woods, when, 132 WALDEN for an hour, I doubted if the near neighborhood of man was not essential to a serene and healthy life. To be alone was something unpleasant. But I was at the same time conscious of a slight insanity in my mood, and seemed 5 to foresee my recovery. In the midst of a gentle rain while these thoughts prevailed, I was suddenly sensible of such sweet and beneficent society in Nature, in the very pattering of the drops, and in every sound and sight around my house, an infinite and unaccountable friendliness all at 10 once like an atmosphere sustaining me, as made the fancied advantages of human neighborhood insignificant, and I have never thought of them since. Every little pine needle expanded and swelled with sympathy and be- friended me. Iwas so distinctly made aware of the pres- 15 ence of something kindred to me, even in scenes which we are accustomed to call wild and dreary, and also that the nearest of blood to me and humanest was not a person nor a villager, that I thought no place could ever be strange to me again. — 20 “Mourning untimely consumes the sad; Few are their days in the land of the living, Beautiful daughter of Toscar.”’ Some of my pleasantest hours were during the long rain- storms in the spring or fall, which confined me to the house 2s for the afternoon as well as the forenoon, soothed by their ceaseless roar and pelting ; when an early twilight ushered in a long evening in which many thoughts had time to take root and unfold themselves. In those driving northeast rains which tried the village houses so, when the maids 30 stood ready with mop and pail in front entries to keep the deluge out, I sat behind my door in my little house, which was all entry, and thoroughly enjoyed its protection. In SOLITUDE igo one heavy thunder-shower the lightning struck a large pitch-pine across the pond, making a very conspicuous and perfectly regular spiral groove from top to bottom, an inch or more deep, and four or five inches wide, as you would groove a walking-stick. I passed it again the other 5 day, and was struck with awe on looking up and beholding that mark, now more distinct than ever, where a terrific and resistless bolt came down out of the harmless sky eight years ago. Men frequently say to me, ‘I should think you would feel lonesome down there, and want to be nearer ro to folks, rainy and snowy days and nights especially.” I am tempted to reply to such, — This whole earth which we inhabit is but a point in space. How far apart, think you, dwell the two most distant inhabitants of yonder star, the breadth of whose disk cannot be appreciated by our 15 instruments? Why should I feel lonely? is not our planet in the Milky Way? This which you put seems to me not to be the most important question. What sort of space is that which separates a man from his fellows and makes him solitary? I have found that no exertion of the legs 20 ean bring two minds much nearer to one another. What do we want most to dwell near to? Not to many men surely, the depot, the post-office, the bar-room, the meeting- house, the schoolhouse, the grocery, Beacon Hill,° or the Five Points,° where men most congregate, but to the 2s perennial source of our life, whence in all our experience we have found that to issue, as the willow stands near the water and sends out its roots in that direction. This will vary with different natures, but this is the place where a wise man will dig his cellar. ... I one evening overtook 30 one of my townsmen, who has accumulated what is called ‘“‘a handsome property,’ — though I never got a fair view of it, — on the Walden road, driving a pair of cattle er 134 WALDEN to market, who inquired of me how I could bring my mind to give up so many of the comforts of life. I an- swered that I was very sure I liked it passably well; I was not joking. And so I went home to my bed, and left 5 him to pick his way through the darkness and the mud to Brighton,° — or Brighttown,— which place he would reach some time in the morning. Any prospect of awakening or coming to life to a dead man makes indifferent all times and places. The place 10 where that may occur is always the same, and indescrib- ably pleasant to all our senses. For the most part we allow only outlying and transient circumstances to make our occasions. They are, in fact, the cause of our distrac- tion. Nearest to all things is that power which fashions 15 their being. Neat to us the grandest laws are continually being executed. Nezt to us is not the workman whom we have hired, with whom we love so well to talk, but the workman whose work we are. “How vast and profound is the influence of the sub- 20 tile powers of Heaven and of Earth !”’ ‘““We seek to perceive them, and we do not see them; we seek to hear them, and we do not hear them; identified with the substance of things, they cannot be separated from them.”’ 25 ‘They cause that in all the universe men purify and sanctify their hearts, and clothe themselves in their holi- day garments to offer sacrifices and oblations to their ancestors. It is an ocean of subtile intelligences. They are everywhere, above us, on our left, on our right; they 30 environ us on all sides.” We are the subjects of an experiment which is not a little interesting to me. Can we not do without the society of our gossips a little while under these circum- SOLITUDE 135 stances, — have our own thoughts to cheer us? Confu- cius says truly, “ Virtue does not remain as an abandoned orphan; it must of necessity have neighbors.” With thinking we may be beside ourselves in a sane sense. By a conscious effort of the mind we can stand 5 aloof from actions and their consequences; and all things, good and bad, go by us like a torrent. We are not wholly involved in Nature. I may be either the driftwood in the stream, or Indra®° in the sky looking down on it. I may be affected by a theatrical exhibition; on the other hand, I 10 may not be affected by an actual event which appears to concern me much more. I only know myself as a human entity ; the scene, so to speak, of thoughts and affections ; and am sensible of a certain doubleness by which I can stand as remote from myself as from another. However 15 intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it; and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator 20 goes hisway. It wasakind of fiction, a work of the imagi- nation only, so far as he was concerned. This doubleness may easily make us poor neighbors and friends sometimes I find it wholesome to be alone® the greater part of the time. To bein company, even with the best, is soon weari- 25 some and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he 30 will. Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows. The really dili- gent student in one of the crowded hives of Cambridge 136 WALDEN College is as solitary as a dervish in the desert. The farmer can work alone in the field or the woods all day, hoeing or chopping, and not feel lonesome, because he is employed; but when he comes home at night he cannot 5 sit down in a room alone, at the mercy of his thoughts, but must be where he can “see the folks,”’ and recreate, and as he thinks remunerate, himself for his day’s solitude ; and hence he wonders how the student can sit alone in the house all night and most of the day without ennui and “‘the 1o blues”; but he does not realize that the student, though in the house, is still at work in his field, and chopping in his woods, as the farmer in his, and in turn seeks the same recreation and society that the latter does, though it may be a more condensed form of it. 15 Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other. We meet at meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are. We have had to agree on a certain set of 20 rules, called etiquette and politeness, to make this fre- quent meeting tolerable and that we need not come to open war. We meet at the post-office, and at the sociable,° and about the fireside every night; we live thick and are in each other’s way, and stumble over one another, and I 25 think that we thus lose some respect for one another. Certainly less frequency would suffice for all important and hearty communications. Consider the girls in a fac- tory, — never alone, hardly in their dreams. It would be better if there were but one inhabitant to a square 30 mile, as where I live. The value of a man is not in his skin, that we should touch him. I have heard of a man lost in the woods and dying of famine and exhaustion at the foot of a tree, whose loneliness SOLITUDE bays was relieved by the grotesque visions with which, owing to bodily weakness, his diseased imagination surrounded him, and which he believed to be real. So also, owing to bodily and mental health and strength, we may be con- tinually cheered by a like but more normal and natural 5 society, and come to know that we are never alone. I have a great deal of company in my house; especially in the morning, when nobody calls. Let me suggest a few comparisons, that some one may convey an idea of my situation. J am no more lonely than the loon in the pond 10 that laughs so loud, or than Walden Pond itself. What company has that lonely lake, I pray? And yet it has not the blue devils, but the blue angels in it, in the azure tint of its waters. The sun is alone, except in thick weather, when there sometimes appear to be two, but one is a mock 15 sun. God is alone, — but the devil, he is far from being alone; he sees a great deal of company; he is legion. Iam no more lonely than a single mullein or dandelion ina pasture, or a bean leaf, or sorrel, or a horse-fly, or a humble- bee. I am no more lonely than the Mill Brook,° or a 2o weathercock, or the north star, or the south wind, or an April shower, or a January thaw, or the first spider in a new house. I have occasional visits® in the long winter evenings, when the snow falls fast and the wind howls in the wood, from an old settler and original proprietor, who is reported to have dug Walden Pond, and stoned it, and fringed it with pine woods; who tells me stories of old time and of new eternity ; and between us we manage to pass a cheer- ful evening with social mirth and pleasant views of things, 30 even without apples or cider, — a most wise and humorous friend, whom I love much, who keeps himself more secret than ever did Goffe or Whalley® ; and though he is thought iS} 5 138 WALDEN to be dead, none can show where he is buried. An elderly dame, too, dwells in my neighborhood, invisible to most persons, in whose odorous herb garden I love to stroll some- times gathering simples° and listening to her fables ; for she s has a genius of unequalled fertility, and her memory runs back farther than mythology, and she can tell me the origi- nal of every fable, and on what fact every one is founded, for the incidents occurred when she was young. A ruddy and lusty old dame, who delights in all weathers and sea- ro sons, and is likely to outlive all her children yet. The indescribable innocence and beneficence of Nature, —of sun and wind and rain, of summer and winter, — such health, such cheer, they afford forever! and such sympathy have they ever with our race, that all Nature rs would be affected, and the sun’s brightness fade, and the winds would sigh humanely, and the clouds rain tears, and the woods shed their leaves and put on mourning in midsummer, if any man should ever for a just cause grieve. Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not 20 partly leaves and vegetable mould myself? What is the pill which will keep us well, serene, con- tented? Not my or thy great-grandfather’s, but our great-grandmother Nature’s universal, vegetable, botanic medicines, by which she has kept herself young always, 25 outlived so many old Parrs® in her day, and fed her health with their decayed fatness. For my panacea, instead of one of those quack vials of a mixture dipped from Acheron® and the Dead Sea,° which come out of those long shallow black-schooner looking wagons which we 30 sometimes see made to carry bottles, let me have a draught of undiluted morning air. Morning air! If men will not drink of this at the fountain-head of the day, why, then, we must even bottle up some and sell it in the shops, SOLITUDE 139 for the benefit of those who have lost their subscription ticket to morning time in this world. But remember, it will not keep quite till noonday even in the coolest cellar, but drive out the stopples long ere that and follow west- ward the steps of Aurora. Iam no worshipper of Hygeia,° 5 who was the daughter of that old herb-doctor A’sculapius,°? and who is represented on monuments holding a serpent in one hand, and in the other a cup out of which the ser- pent sometimes drinks; but rather of Hebe, cupbearer to Jupiter, who was the daughter of Juno and wild lettuce,° 10 and who had the power of restoring gods and men to the vigor of youth. She was probably the only thoroughly sound-conditioned, healthy, and robust young lady that ever walked the globe, and wherever she came it was spring. VISITORS I THINK that I love society as much as most, and am ready enough to fasten myself like a bloodsucker for the time to any full-blooded man that comes in my way. I am naturally no hermit, but might possibly sit out the 5 sturdiest frequenter of the bar-room, if my business called me thither. I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society. When visitors came in larger and unexpected numbers there was but the third ro chair for them all, but they generally economized the room by standing up. It is surprising how many great men and women a small house will contain. I have had twenty- five or thirty souls, with their bodies, at once, under my roof, and yet we often parted without being aware that we rs had come very near to oneanother. Many of our houses, both public and private, with their almost innumerable apartments, their huge halls and their cellars for the storage of wines and other munitions of peace, appear to me extravagantly large for their inhabitants. They are 20 S0 vast and magnificent that the latter seem to be only vermin which infest them. Iam surprised when the her- ald blows his summons before some Tremont or Astor or Middlesex House,° to see come creeping out over the piazza for all inhabitants a ridiculous mouse, which soon 25 again slinks into some hole in the pavement. One inconvenience I sometimes experienced in so small 140 VISITORS ; 141 a house, the difficulty of getting to a sufficient distance from my guest when we began to utter the big thoughts in big words. You want room for your thoughts to get into sailing trim and run a course or two before they make their port. The bullet of your thought must have over- s come its lateral and ricochet motion® and fallen into its last and steady course before it reaches the ear of the hearer, else it may plough out again through the side of his head. Also, our sentences wanted room to unfold and form their columns in the interval. Individuals, like na- 10 tions, must have suitable broad and natural boundaries, even a considerable neutral ground, between them. I have found it a singular luxury to talk across the pond to a companion on the opposite side. In my house we were so near that we could not begin to hear, — we could not speak 15 low enough to be heard; as when you throw two stones into calm water so near that they break each other’s undulations. If we are merely loquacious and loud talkers, then we can afford to stand very near together, cheek by jowl, and feel each other’s breath; but if we speak re-20 servedly and thoughtfully, we want to be farther apart, that all animal heat and moisture may have a chance toevaporate. If we would enjoy the most intimate society with that in each of us which is without, or above, being spoken to, we must not only be silent, but commonly so 25 far apart bodily that we cannot possibly hear each other’s voice in any case. Referred to this standard, speech is for the convenience of those who are hard of hearing; but there are many fine things which we cannot say if we have to shout. As the conversation began to assume a loftier 30 and grander tone, we gradually shoved our chairs farther apart till they touched the wall in opposite corners, and then commonly there was not room enough. 142 WALDEN My “best” room, however, my withdrawing room, always ready for company, on whose carpet the sun rarely fell, was the pine. wood behind my house. Thither in summer days, when distinguished guests came, I took 5 them, and a priceless domestic swept the floor and dusted the furniture and kept the things in order. If one guest came he sometimes partook of my frugal meal, and it was no interruption to conversation to be stirring a hasty-pudding, or watching the rising and 10 maturing of a loaf of bread in the ashes, in the meanwhile. But if twenty came and sat in my house there was nothing said about dinner, though there might be bread enough for two, more than if° eating were a forsaken habit; but we naturally practised abstinence; and this was never 15 felt to be an offence against hospitality, but the most proper and considerate course. The waste and decay of physical life, which so often needs repair, seemed miraculously re- tarded in such a case, and the vital vigor stood its ground. I could entertain thus a thousand as well as twenty ; and if 20 any ever went away disappointed or hungry from my house when they found me at home, they may depend upon it that I sympathized with them at least. So easy is it, though many housekeepers doubt it, to establish new and better customs in the place of the old. You need 25 not rest your reputation on the dinners you give. For my own part, I was never so effectually deterred from fre- quenting a man’s house, by any kind of Cerberus° what- ever, as by the parade one made about dining me, which I took to be a very polite and roundabout hint never to 30 trouble him so again. I think I shall never revisit those scenes. I should be proud to have for the motto of my cabin those lines of Spenser® which one of my visitors inscribed on a yellow walnut leaf for a card ; — VISITORS 143 “‘ Arrived there, the little house they fill, Ne looke for entertainment where none was; Rest is their feast, and all things at their will: The noblest mind the best contentment has.’’° When Winslow,° afterward governor of the Plymouth 5 Colony, went with a companion on a visit of ceremony to Masgsasoit on foot through the woods, and arrived tired and hungry at his lodge, they were well received by the king, but nothing was said about eating that day. When the night arrived, to quote their own words, — “He laid us on 10 the bed with himself and his wife, they at the one end and we at the other, it being only plank, laid a foot from the ground, and a thin mat upon them. Two more of his chief men, for want of room, pressed by and upon us; so that we were worse weary of our lodging than of our rs journey.” At one o’clock the next day Massasoit “brought two fishes that he had shot,’ about thrice as big as a bream; “these being boiled, there were at least forty looked for a share in them. The most ate of them. This meal only we had in two nights and a day; and had not 20 one of us bought a partridge, we had taken our journey fasting.”” Fearing that they would be lght-headed for want of food and also sleep, owing to “the savages’ barba- rous singing (for they used to sing themselves asleep),” and that they might get home while they had strength to 25 travel, they departed. As for lodging, it is true they were but poorly entertained, though what they found an in- convenience was no doubt intended for an honor; but as far as eating was concerned, I do not see how the Indians could have done better. They had nothing to eat them- 30 selves, and they were wiser than to think that apologies could supply the place of food to their guests ; so they drew their belts tighter and said nothing about it. Another time 144 WALDEN when Winslow visited them, it being a season of plenty with them, there was no deficiency in this respect. As for men, they will hardly fail one anywhere. I had more visitors while I lived in the woods than at any other 5 period of my life; I mean that I had some. I met several there under more favorable circumstances than I could anywhere else. But fewer came to see me upon trivial business. In this respect, my company was winnowed by my mere distance from town. I had withdrawn so 10 far within the great ocean of solitude, into which the rivers _ of society empty, that for the most part, so far as my needs were concerned, only the finest sediment was deposited around me. Beside, there were wafted to me evidences of unexplored and uncultivated continents on the other 15 side. Who should come to my lodge this morning but a true _ Homeric or Paphlagonian man, — he had so suitable and poetic a name that I am sorry I cannot print it here, — a Canadian,° a wood-chopper and post-maker, who can ~ 20 hole fifty posts in a day, who made his last supper on a woodchuck which his dog caught. He, too, has heard of Homer, and, ‘‘if it were not for books,” would “not know what to do rainy days,” though perhaps he has not read one wholly through for many rainy seasons. Some priest 25 who could pronounce the Greek itself taught him to read his verse in the testament in, his native parish far away ; and now I must translate to him, while he holds the book, Achilles’ reproof to Patroclus for his sad countenance. — ‘““Why are you in tears, Patroclus, like a young girl ?’”? — 30 “Or have you alone heard some news from Phthia ? They say that Mencetius lives yet, son of Actor, And Peleus lives, son of Aacus, among the Myrmidons, Either of whom having died, we should greatly grieve.’’° VISITORS 145 He says, ‘“That’s good.’’ He has a great bundle of white- oak bark under his arm for a sick man, gathered this Sunday morning. “I suppose there’s no harm in going after such a thing to-day,” says he. To him Homer was a great writer, though what his writing was about he did 5 not know. A more simple and natural man it would be hard to find. Vice and disease, which cast such a sombre moral hue over the world, seemed to have hardly any existence for him. He was about twenty-eight years old, and had left Canada and his father’s house a dozen years 1o before to work in the States, and earn money to buy a farm with at last, perhaps in his native country. He was cast in the coarsest mould; a stout but sluggish body, yet gracefully carried, with a thick sunburnt neck, dark bushy hair, and dull sleepy blue eyes, which were occasion- 15 ally lit up with expression. He wore a flat gray cloth cap, a dingy wool-colored great-coat, and cowhide boots. He was a great consumer of meat, usually carrying his dinner to his work a couple of miles past my house, — for he chopped all summer, — in a tin pail; cold meats, often 2c cold woodchucks, and coffee in a stone bottle which dangled by a string from his belt ; and sometimes he offered me a drink. He came along early, crossing my bean-field, though without anxiety or haste to get to his work, such as Yankees exhibit. He wasn’t a-going to hurt himself. 25 He didn’t care if he only earned his board. Frequently he would leave his dinner in the bushes, when his dog had caught a woodchuck by the way, and go back a mile and a half to dress it and leave it in the cellar of the house where he boarded, after deliberating first for half an hour 30 whether he could not sink it in the pond safely till nightfall, — loving to dwell long upon these themes. He would say, as he went by in the morning, ‘‘ How thick L 146 WALDEN the pigeons are! If working every day were not my trade, I could get all the meat I should want by hunting, — pigeons, woodchucks, rabbits, partridges, —by gosh®! I could get all I should want for a week in one day.” 5 He was a skilful chopper, and indulged in some flour- ishes and ornament in his art. He cut his trees level and close to the ground, that the sprouts which came up after- ward might be more vigorous and a sled might slide over the stumps; and instead of leaving a whole tree to support to his corded wood, he would pare it away to a slender stake or splinter which you could break off with your hand at last. He interested me because he was so quiet and solitary and so happy withal; a well of good humor and content- ment which overflowed at his eyes. His mirth was without 15 alloy. Sometimes I saw him at his work in the woods, felling trees, and he would greet me with a laugh of inex- pressible satisfaction, and a salutation in Canadian French, though he spoke English as well. When I approached him he would suspend his work, and with half-suppressed mirth 20 lie along the trunk of a pine which he had felled, and, peeling off the inner bark, roll it up into a ball and chew it while he laughed and talked. Such an exuberance of animal spirits had he that he sometimes tumbled down and rolled on the ground with laughter at anything which made him 25 think and tickled him. Looking around upon the trees he would exclaim, — “‘By George! I can enjoy myself well enough here chopping; I want no better sport.” Sometimes, when at leisure, he amused himself all day in the woods with a pocket pistol, firing salutes to himself 30 at regular intervals as he walked. In the winter he had a fire by which at noon he warmed his coffee in a kettle; and as he sat on a log to eat his dinner the chickadees would sometimes come round and alight on his arm and peck at VISITORS 147 the potato in his fingers; and he said that he ‘‘liked to have the little fellers about him.”’ H . In him the animal man chiefly was developed. In physical endurance and contentment he was cousin to the pine and the rock. I asked him once if he was not 5 sometimes tired at night, after working all day; and he answered, with a sincere and serious look, “‘Gorrappit, I never was tired in my life.”” But the intellectual and what is called spiritual man in him were slumbering as in an infant. He had been instructed only in that innocent to and ineffectual way in which the Catholic priests teach the aborigines, by which the pupil is never educated to the degree of consciousness, but only to the degree of trust and reverence, and a child is not made a man, but kept a child. When Nature made him, she gave him a strong body and ts contentment for his portion, and propped him on every side with reverence and reliance, that he might live out his threescore years and ten a child. He was so genuine and unsophisticated that no introduction would serve to intro- duce him, more than if you introduced a woodchuck to 20 your neighbor. He had got to find him out as you did. He would not play any part. Men paid him wages for work, and so helped to feed and clothe him; but he never exchanged .opinions with them. He was so simply and naturally humble — if he can be called humble who never 25 aspires — that humility was no distinct quality in him, nor could he conceive of it. Wiser men were demigods to him. If you told him that such a one was coming, he did as if he thought that anything so grand would expect nothing of himself, but take all the responsibility on itself, 30 and let him be forgotten still. He never heard the sound of praise. He particularly reverenced the writer and the preacher. Their performances were miracles, When I 148 WALDEN told him that I wrote considerably, he thought for a long time that it was merely the handwriting which I meant, for he could write a remarkably good hand himself. I sometimes found the name of his native parish handsomely 5 written in the snow by the highway, with the proper French accent, and knew that he had passed. I asked himif he ever wished to write his thoughts. He said that he had read and written letters for those who could not, but he never tried to write thoughts, —no, he could not, he 10 could not tell what to put first, it would kill him, and then there was spelling to be attended to at the same time! I heard that a distinguished wise man and reformer asked him if he did not want the world to be changed; but he answered with a chuckle of surprise in his Canadian 15 accent, not knowing that the question had ever been entertained before, ‘‘No, I like it well enough.” It would have suggested many things to a philosopher to have dealings with him. To a stranger he appeared to know nothing of things in general; yet I sometimes saw 201n him a man whom I had not seen before, and I did not know whether he was as wise as Shakespeare or as simply ignorant as a child, whether to suspect him of a fine poetic consciousness or of stupidity. A townsman told me that when he met him sauntering through the village 25 in his small close-fitting cap, and whistling to himself, he reminded him of a prince in disguise. His only books were an almanac and an arithmetic, in which last he was considerably expert. The former was a sort of cyclopedia to him, which he supposed to con- 30 tain an abstract of human knowledge, as indeed it does to a considerable extent. I loved to sound him on the various reforms of the day, and he never failed to look at them in the most simple and practical light. He had VISITORS 149 never heard of such things before. Could he do without factories? I asked. He had worn the home-made Ver- mont gray, he said, and that was good. Could he dispense with tea and coffee? Did this country afford any beverage beside water? He had soaked hemlock leaves in water 5 and drank it, and thought that was better than water in warm weather. When I asked him if he could do without money, he showed the convenience of money in such a way as to suggest and coincide with the most philosophical accounts of the origin of this institution, and the very 10 derivation of the word pecunia.° If an ox were his property, and he wished to get needles and thread at the store, he thought it would be inconvenient and impossible soon to go on mortgaging some portion of the creature each time to that amount. He could defend many institu- 15 tions better than any philosopher, because, in describing ' them as they concerned him, he gave the true reason for their prevalence, and speculation had not suggested to him any other. At another time, hearing Plato’s defini- tion of a man, — a biped without feathers, — and that one 20 exhibited a cock plucked and called it Plato’s man,° he thought it an important difference that the knees bent the wrong way. He would sometimes exclaim, “How I love to talk! By George, I could talk all day! 17 I asked him once, when I had not seen him for many months, if 25 he had got a new idea this summer. ‘‘Good Lord,” said he, “‘a man that has to work as I do, if he does not forget the ideas he has had, he will do well. Maybe the man you hoe with is inclined to race; then, by gorry, your mind must be there; you think of weeds.” He would some- 30 times ask me first on such occasions, if I had made any improvement. One winter day I asked him if he was always satisfied with himself, wishing to suggest a substi- 150 WALDEN tute within him for the priest without, and some higher motive for living. ‘‘Satisfied!” said he; ‘‘some men are satisfied with one thing, and some with another. One man, perhaps, if he has got enough, will be satisfied to sit 5 all day with his back to the fire and his belly to the table, by George!” Yet I never, by any manceuvring, could get him to take the spiritual view of things; the highest that he appeared to conceive of was a simple expediency, such as you might expect an animal to appreciate; and 10 this, practically, is true of most men. If I suggested any improvement in his mode of life, he merely answered, without expressing any regret, that it was too late. Yet he thoroughly believed in honesty and the like virtues. There was a certain positive originality, however 15 slight, to be detected in him, and I occasionally observed that he was thinking for himself and expressing his own opinion, a phenomenon so rare that I would any day walk ten miles to observe it, and it amounted to the re- origination of many of the institutions of society. Though 20he hesitated, and perhaps failed to express himself dis- tinctly, he always had a presentable thought behind. Yet his thinking was so primitive and immersed in his animal life, that, though more promising than a merely learned man’s, it rarely ripened to anything which can be 25reported. Hesuggested that there might be men of genius in the lowest grades of life, however permanently humble and illiterate, who take their own view always, or do not pretend to see at all; who are as bottomless even as Walden Pond was thought to be, though they may be dark and 30 muddy. Many a traveller came out of his way to see me and the inside of my house, and, as an excuse for calling, asked VISITORS 151 for a glass of water. I told them that I drank at the pond, and pointed thither, offering to lend them a dipper. Far off as I lived, I was not exempted from that annual visitation which occurs, methinks, about the first of April, when everybody is on the move; and I had my share of 5 good luck, though there were some curious specimens among my visitors. Half-witted men from the almshouse and elsewhere came to see me; but I endeavored to make them exercise all the wit they had, and make their confes- sions to me; in such cases making wit the theme of our 10 conversation; and so was compensated. Indeed, I found some of them to be wiser than the so-called overseers of the poor and selectmen of the town, and thought it was time that the tables were turned. With respect to wit, I learned that there was not much difference between the 15 half and the whole. One day, in particular, an inoffensive, simple-minded pauper, whom with others I had often seen used as fencing stuff, standing or sitting on a bushel in the fields to keep cattle and himself from straying, visited me, and expressed a wish to liveasI did. He told 20 me, with the utmost simplicity and truth, quite superior, or rather inferior, to anything that is called humility, that he was “deficient in intellect.’ These were his words. The Lord had made him so, yet he supposed the Lord cared as much for him as for another. ‘I have 2s always been so,” said he, “‘from my childhood ; I never had much mind; I was not like other children; I am weak in the head. It was the Lord’s will, I suppose.”” And there he was to prove the truth of his words. He was a meta- physical puzzle to me. I have rarely met a fellow-man 30 on such promising ground, — it was so simple and sincere and so true, all that he said. And, true enough, in propor- tion as he appeared to humble himself was he exalted. 152 WALDEN I did not know at first but it was the result of a wise policy. It seemed that from such a basis of truth and frankness as the poor weak-headed pauper had laid, our intercourse might go forward to something better than the inter- 5 course of sages. I had some guests from those not reckoned commonly among the town’s poor, but who should be; who are among the world’s poor, at any rate; guests who appeal, not to your hospitality but to your hospitalality; who ro earnestly wish to be helped, and preface their appeal with the information that they are resolved, for one thing, never to help themselves. I require of a visitor that he be not actually starving, though he may have the very best appetite in the world, however he got it. Objects of 15 charity are not guests. Men who did not know when their visit had terminated, though I went about my busi- ness again, answering them from greater and greater re- moteness. Men of almost every degree of wit called on me in the migrating season. Some who had more wits 20 than they knew what to do with; runaway slaves with plantation manners, who listened from time to time, like the fox in the fable, as if they ‘heard the hounds a-baying on their track, and looked at me beseechingly, as much as to say, — 25 “O Christian, will you send me back?” One real runaway slave, among the rest, whom I helped to forward toward the north star. Men of one idea, like a hen with one chicken, and that a duckling; men of a thousand ideas, and unkempt heads, like those hens which 30 are made to take charge of a hundred chickens, all in pur- suit of one bug, a score of them lost in every morning’s dew — and become frizzled and mangy in consequence; VISITORS 153 men of ideas instead of legs, a sort of intellectual centipede that made you crawl all over. One man proposed a book in which visitors should write their names, as at the White Mountains; but, alas! I have too good a mem- ory to make that necessary. 5 I could not but notice some of the peculiarities of my visitors. Girls and boys and young women generally seemed glad to be in the woods. They looked in the pond and at the flowers, and improved their time. Men of business, even farmers, thought only of solitude and em- ro ployment, and of the great distance at which I dwelt from something or other; and though they said that they loved a ramble in the woods occasionally, it was obvious that they did not. Restless committed° men, whose time was all taken up in getting a living or keeping 15 it; ministers who spoke of God as if they enjoyed a monop- oly of the subject, who could not bear all kinds of opin- ions; doctors, lawyers, uneasy housekeepers who pried into my cupboard and bed when I was out — how came Mrs. to know that my sheets were not as clean as 20 hers ? — young men who had ceased to be young, and had concluded that it was safest to follow the beaten track of the professions — all these generally said that it was not ’ possible to do so much good in my position. Ay! there was the rub. The old and infirm and the timid, of what- 25 ever age or sex, thought most. of sickness, and sudden accident and death; to them life seemed full of danger, — what danger is there if you don’t think of any ? —- and they thought that a prudent man would carefully select the safest position, where Dr. B. might be on hand at a 30 moment’s warning. To them the village was literally a com-munity,° a league for mutual defence, and you would suppose that they would not go a-huckleberrying 154 WALDEN without a medicine chest. The amount of it is, if a man is alive, there is always danger that he may die, though the danger must be allowed to be less in proportion as he is dead-and-alive to begin with. A man sits as many 5 risks as he runs. ' Finally, there were the self-styled reform- ers, the greatest bores of all, who thought that I was forever singing, — This is the house that I built; This is the man that lives in the house that I built; to but they did not know that the third line was,— These are the folks that worry the man That lives in the house that I built. I did not fear the hen-harriers, for I kept no chickens; but I feared the men-harriers rather. rs | had more cheering visitors than the last. Children come a-berrying, railroad men taking a Sunday morning walk in clean shirts, fishermen and hunters, poets and philosophers, in short, all honest pilgrims, who came out to the woods for freedom’s sake, and really left the 20 Village behind, I was ready to greet with, — “Welcome, Englishmen! welcome, Englishmen!” for I had had communication® with that race. THE BEAN-FIELD MEANWHILE my beans, the length of whose rows, added together, was seven miles already planted, were im- patient to be hoed, for the earliest had grown considerably before the latest were in the ground; indeed they were not easily to be put off. What was the meaning of this 5 so steady and self-respecting, this small Herculean labor, I knew not. I came to love my rows, my beans, though so many more than I wanted. They attached me to the earth, and so I got strength like Antzus.° But why should I raise them? Only Heaven knows. This was 10 my curious labor all summer, — to make this portion of the earth’s surface, which had yielded only cinquefoil, blackberries, johnswort, and the like, before, sweet wild fruits and pleasant flowers, produce instead this pulse. What shall I learn of beans or beans of me? I cherish 15 them, I hoe them, early and late I have an eye to them; and this is my day’s work. It is a fine broad leaf to look on. My auxiliaries are the dews and rains which water this dry soil, and what fertility is in the soil itself, which for the most part is lean and effete.° My enemies are 20 worms, cool days, and most of all woodchucks. The last have nibbled for me a quarter of an acre clean. But what right had I to oust johnswort and the rest, and break up their ancient herb garden? Soon, however, the remaining beans will be too tough for them, and go 25 forward to meet new foes. 155 156 WALDEN When I was four years old, as I well remember, I was brought from Boston to this my native town, through these very woods and this field, to the pond. It is one of the oldest scenes stamped on my memory. And now 5 to-night my flute® has waked the echoes over that very water. The pines still stand here older than I; or, if some have fallen, I have cooked my supper with their stumps, and a new growth is rising all around, preparing another aspect for new infant eyes. Almost the same ro Johnswort springs from the same perennial root in this pasture, and even I have at length helped to clothe that fabulous landscape of my infant dreams, and one of the results of my presence and influence is seen in these bean leaves, corn blades, and potato vines. ts I planted about two acres and a half of upland; and as it was only about fifteen years since the land was cleared, and I myself had got out two or three cords of stumps, I did not give it any manure; but in the course of the summer it appeared by the arrow-heads° which 20 I turned up in hoeing, that an extinct nation had anciently dwelt here and planted corn and beans ere white men came to clear the land, and so, to some extent, had ex- hausted the soil for this very crop. Before yet any woodchuck or squirrel had run across 25 the road, or the sun had got above the shrub-oaks, while all the dew was on, though the farmers warned me against it, —I would advise you to do all your work if possible while the dew is on, —I began to level the ranks of haughty weeds in my bean-field and throw dust upon 30 their heads.° Early in the morning I worked barefooted, dabbling like a plastic artist in the dewy and crumbling sand, but later in the day the sun blistered my feet. There the sun lighted me to hoe beans, pacing slowly THE BEAN-FIELD 157 backward and forward over that yellow gravelly upland, between the long green rows, fifteen rods, the one end terminating in a shrub-oak copse where I could rest in the shade, the other in a blackberry field where the green _ berries deepened their tints by the time I had made s5 another bout. Removing the weeds, putting fresh soil about the bean stems, and encouraging this weed which I had sown, making the yellow soil express its summer thought in bean leaves and blossoms rather than in worm- wood and piper and millet grass, making the earth say 10 beans instead of grass, — this was my daily work. As I had little aid from horses or cattle, or hired men or boys, or improved implements of husbandry, I was much slower, and became much more intimate with my beans than usual. But labor of the hands, even when pursued to the 15 verge of drudgery, is perhaps never the worst, form of idleness. It has a constant and imperishable moral, and to the scholar it yields a classic result. A very agricola laboriosus was I to travellers bound westward through Lincoln and Wayland to nobody knows where; they 20 sitting at their ease in gigs, with elbows on knees, and reins loosely hanging in festoons; I the home-staying, laborious native of the soil. But soon my homestead was out of their sight and thought. It was the only open and cul- tivated field for a great distance on either side of the 2s road; so they made the most of it; and sometimes the man in the field heard more of travellers’ gossip and comment than was meant for his ear: “Beans so late! peas so late !”” — for I continued to plant when others had begun to hoe, — the ministerial husbandman had not sus- 30 pected it. “Corn, my boy, for fodder; corn for fodder.” “Does he live there?” asks the black bonnet of the gray coat; and the hard-featured farmer reins up his grateful 158 WALDEN dobbin® to inquire what you are doing where he sees no manure in the furrow, and recommends a little chip dirt, or any little waste stuff, or it may be ashes or plaster. But here were two acres and a half of furrows and only a shoe for a cart and two hands to draw it, — there being an aversion to other carts and horses, — and chip dirt far away. Fellow-travellers as they rattled by compared it aloud with the fields which they had passed, so that I came to know how I stood in the agricultural world. This ro was one field not in Mr. Coleman’s° report. And, by the way, who estimates the value of the crop which Nature vields in the still wilder fields unimproved by man? The crop of English hay is carefully weighed, the moisture calculated, the silicates and the potash; but in all dells 15 and pond holes in the woods and pastures and swamps grows a rich and various crop only unreaped by man. Mine was, as it were, the connecting link between wild and cultivated fields ; as some states are civilized, and others half-civilized, and others savage or barbarous, so my 20 field was, though not in a bad sense, a half-cultivated field. They were beans cheerfully returning to their wild and primitive state that I cultivated, and my hoe played the Ranz des Vaches° for them. Near at hand, upon the topmost spray of a birch, sings 25 the brown-thrasher — or red mavis, as some love to call him — all the morning, glad of your society, that would find out another farmer’s field if yours were not here. While you are planting the seed, he cries, — “Drop it, drop it, — cover it up, cover it up, — pull it up, pull it 30 up, pull it up.” But this was not corn, and so it was safe from such enemies as he. You may wonder what his rigmarole, his amateur Paganini® performances on one string or on twenty, have to do with your planting, THE BEAN-—FIELD 159 and yet prefer it to leached ashes or plaster. It was a cheap sort of top dressing in which I had entire faith. As I drew a still fresher soil about the rows with my hoe, I disturbed the ashes of unchronicled nations who in pri- meval years lived under these heavens, and their smalls implements of war and hunting were brought to the light of this modern day. They lay mingled with other natural stones, some of which bore the marks of having been burned by Indian fires, and some by the sun, and also bits of pottery and glass brought hither by the recent 10 cultivators of the soil. When my hoe tinkled against the stones, that music echoed to the woods and the sky, and was an accompaniment to my labor which yielded an instant and immeasurable crop. It was no longer beans that I hoed, nor I that hoed beans; and I remembered rs with as much pity as pride, if I remembered at all, my acquaintances who had gone to the city to attend the oratorios. The night-hawk circled overhead in the sunny afternoons —for J] sometimes made a day of it — like a mote in the eye, or in heaven’s eye, falling from time to 20 time with a swoop and a sound as if the heavens were rent, torn at last to very rags and tatters, and yet a seamless cope remained; small imps that fill the air and lay their eggs on the ground on bare sand or rocks on the tops of hills, where few have found them; graceful and 25 slender like ripples caught up from the pond, as leaves are raised by the wind to float in the heavens; such kindredship is in Nature. The hawk is aérial brother of the wave which he sails over and surveys, those in perfect air-inflated wings answering to the elemental unfledged 30 pinions of the sea. Or sometimes I watched a pair of hen-hawks circling high in the sky, alternately soaring and descending, approaching and leaving one another, as if 160 WALDEN they were the embodiment of my own thoughts. Or I was attracted by the passage of wild pigeons from this wood to that, with a slight quivering winnowing sound and carrier haste; or from under a rotten-stump my hoe 5 turned up a sluggish, portentous, and outlandish spotted salamander, a trace of Egypt and the Nile, yet our contem- porary. When I paused to lean on my hoe, these sounds and sights I heard and saw anywhere in the row, a part of the inexhaustible entertainment which the country ro Offers. On gala days the town fires its great guns, which echo like popguns to these woods, and some waifs of martial music occasionally penetrate thus far. To me, away there in my bean-field at the other end of the town, the 15 big guns sounded as if a puff-ball had burst; and when there was a military turnout of which I was ignorant, I have sometimes had a vague sense all the day of some sort of itching and disease in the horizon, as if some erup- tion would break out there soon, either scarlatina or 20 canker-rash, until at length some more favorable puff of wind, making haste over the fields and up the Wayland road, brought me information of the “trainers.”° It seemed by the distant hum as if somebody’s bees had swarmed, and that the neighbors, according to Vergil’s 25 advice,° by a faint téntinnabulum upon the most sonorous of their domestic utensils, were endeavoring to call them down into the hive again. And when the sound died quite away, and the hum had ceased, and the most favorable breeze told no tale, I knew that they had got 30 the last drone of them all safely into the Middlesex hive, and that now their minds were bent on the honey with — which it was smeared. I felt proud to know that the liberties of Massachu- THE BEAN-FIELD 161 setts and of our fatherland were in such safe keeping ; and as I turned to my hoeing again I was filled withan inexpressible confidence, and pursued my labor cheer- fully with a calm trust in the future. When there were several bands of musicians, it sounded 5 as if all the village was a vast bellows, and all the build- ings expanded and collapsed alternately with a din. But sometimes it was a really noble and inspiring strain that reached these woods, and the trumpet that sings of fame, and I felt as if I could spit a Mexican® with a good relish, 10 —for why should we always stand for trifles? — and looked round for a woodchuck or a skunk to exercise my chivalry upon. These martial strains seemed as far away as Palestine, and reminded me of a march of cru- saders in the horizon, with a slight tantivy and tremulous 15 motion of the elm-tree tops which overhang the village. This was one of the great days; though the sky had from my clearing only the same everlastingly great look that it wears daily, and I saw no difference in it. It was a singular experience that long acquaintance 20 which I cultivated with beans, what with planting, and hoeing, and harvesting, and threshing, and picking over, and selling them, — the last was the hardest of all, —I might add eating, for I did taste. I was determined to know beans.° When they were growing, I used to hoe 25 from five o’clock in the morning till noon, and commonly spent the rest of the day about other affairs. Consider the intimate and curious acquaintance one makes with various kinds of weeds — it will bear some iteration in the account, for there was no little iteration in the labor — 30 disturbing their delicate organizations so ruthlessly, and making such invidious distinctions with his hoe, levelling whole ranks of one species, and sedulously cultivating M tO? WALDEN another. That’s Roman wormwood, — that’s pigweed, — that’s sorrel, — that’s piper-grass, — have at him, chop him up, turn his roots upwards to the sun, don’t let him have a fibre in the shade, if you do he’ll turn him- 5 self t’other side up and be as green as a leek in two days. A long war, not with cranes,° but with weeds, those Trojans who had sun and rain and dews on their side. Daily the beans saw me come to their rescue armed with a hoe, and thin the ranks of their enemies, filling up the ro trenches with weedy dead. Many a lusty crest-waving Hector, that towered a whole foot above his crowding comrades, fell before my weapon and rolled in the dust.° Those summer days which some of my contemporaries devoted to the fine arts in Boston or Rome, and others 15 to contemplation in India, and others to trade in London or New York, I thus, with the other farmers of New Eng- land, devoted to husbandry. Not that I wanted beans to eat, for I am by nature a Pythagorean,° so far as beans are concerned, whether they mean porridge or voting, zoand exchanged them for rice; but, perchance, as some must work in the fields if only for the sake of tropes and _ expression, to serve a parable-maker one day. It was on the whole a rare amusement, which, continued too long, might have become a dissipation. Though I gave them no 25 manure, and did not hoe them all once, I hoed them unusually well as far as I went, and was paid for it in the end, “there being in truth,” as Evelyn® says, ‘‘no compost or letation® whatsoever comparable to this continual motion, repastination,® and turning of the mould with 30 the spade.”” ‘‘The earth,” he adds elsewhere, “‘ especially if fresh, has a certain magnetism in it, by which it attracts the salt, power, or virtue (call it either) which gives it life, and is the logic of all the labor and stir we keep about THE BEAN-FIELD 163 it, to sustain us; all dungings and other sordid temperings being but the vicars succedaneous to this improvement.” Moreover, this being one of those “‘wornout and exhausted lay fields which enjoy their sabbath,”’ had perchance, as Sir Kenelm Digby° thinks likely, attracted “vital spirits” 5 from the air. I harvested twelve bushels of beans. But to be more particular, for it is complained that Mr. Coleman has reported chiefly the expensive experi- ments of gentlemen farmers, my outgoes were: — Forahoe . . . $0 54 10 Ploughing, harrowing, and furrowing A 750 Too much. Beans for seed é 124 Potatoes “ EP Uy ements cp ta Uys 8 pes Pye Peas Te oe argh ae eae ee, eal ta 0 40 Turnip seed... niece) So a a 0 06 tS White line for crow fence . ; 0 02 Horse cultivator and boy three hours i 1 00 Horse and cart to get crop... ... « 0 75 ELL Bl IIA cea a ca ~ ih aan weit. A be My income was (patrem familias vendacem, non zo emacem esse oportet), from Nine bushels and twelve quarts of beans sold . . $1694 Five ” fare opotataes Fibs) see ES fm, 2 50 Nine “ smallmatatoes;t: this sit) oh HAs 2 25 REO Se ek she. ee aco rirtt om Peak, pl © baao TS 1-00 \ 25 oD DREW lg 8 ee a lala ean 0 75 co CET | Ul ad aa thighs. aeblila yori pen eee Leaving a pecuniary rea as ‘7 ee pide here said, of $8 714. This is the result of my experience in raising beans. Plant the common small white bush bean about the 30 first of June, in rows three feet by eighteen inches apart, being careful to select fresh, round, and unmixed seed. First look out for worms, and supply vacancies by plant- ing anew. Then look out for woodchucks, if it is an 164 WALDEN exposed place, for they will nibble off the earliest tender leaves almost clean as they go; and again, when the young tendrils make their appearance, they have notice of it, and will shear them off with both buds and young 5 pods, sitting erect like a squirrel. But above all, harvest as early as possible, if you would escape frosts and have a fair and salable crop; you may save much loss by this means. This further experience also I gained. I said to myself, rol will not plant beans and corn with so much industry another summer, but such seeds, if the seed is not lost, as sincerity, truth, simplicity, faith, innocence, and the like, and see if they will not grow in this soil, even with less toil and manurance, and sustain me, for surely it has rs not been exhausted for these crops. Alas! I said this to myself; but now another summer is gone, and another, and another, and I am obliged to say to you, Reader, that the seeds which I planted, if indeed they were the seeds of those virtues, were wormeaten or had lost their 20 Vitality, and so did not come up. Commonly men will only be brave as their fathers were brave, or timid. This generation is very sure to plant corn and beans each new year precisely as the Indians did centuries ago and taught the first settlers to do, as if there were a fate init. I saw 25an old man the other day, to my astonishment, making the holes with a hoe for the seventieth time at least, and not for himself to lie down in! But why should not the New Englander try new adventures, and not lay so much stress on his grain, his potato and grass crop, and 30 his orchards, — raise other crops than these? Why con- cern ourselves so much about our beans for seed, and not be concerned at all about a new generation of men? We should really be fed and cheered if when we met a man we THE BEAN-FIELD 165 were sure to see that some of the qualities which I have named, which we all prize more than those other produc- tions, but which are for the most part broadcast and floating in the air, had taken root and grown in him. Here comes such a subtile and ineffable quality, for in- stance, as truth or justice, though the slightest amount or new variety of it, along the road. Our ambassadors should be instructed to send home such seeds as these, and Congress help to distribute them over all the land. We should never stand upon ceremony with sincerity. We 1o should never cheat and insult and banish one another by our meanness, if there were present the kernel of worth and friendliness. We should not meet thus in haste. Most men I do not meet at all, for they seem not to have time; they are busy about their beans. We would not 15 deal with a man thus plodding ever, leaning on a hoe ora spade as a staff between his work, not as a mushroom, but partially risen out of the earth, something more than erect, like swallows alighted and walking on the ground: un “And as he spake, his wings would now and then 20 Spread, as he meant to fly, then close again,” so that we should suspect that we might be conversing with an angel. Bread may not always nourish us; but it always does us good, it even takes stiffness out of our joints, and makes us supple and buoyant, when we knew 25 not what ailed us, to recognize any generosity in man or Nature, to share any unmixed and heroic joy. Ancient poetry and mythology suggest, at least, that husbandry was once a sacred art; but it is pursued with irreverent haste and heedlessness by us, our object being 30 to have large farms and large crops merely. We have no festival, nor procession, nor ceremony, not excepting 166 WALDEN our Cattle-shows and so-called Thanksgivings, by which the farmer expresses a sense of the sacredness of his calling, or is reminded of its sacred origin. It is the premium and the feast which tempt him. He sacrifices 5 not to Ceres° and the Terrestrial Jove, but to the infernal Plutus° rather. By avarice and selfishness, and a groy- elling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded ro With us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows Nature but as a robber. Cato° says that the profits of agriculture are particularly pious or just (maximeque pius quaestus), and according to Varro° the old Romans ‘called the same earth Mother and Ceres, irs and thought that they who cultivated it led a pious and useful life, and that they alone were left of the race of King Saturn.” We are wont to forget that the sun looks on our cul- tivated fields and on the prairies and forests without 20 distinction. They all reflect and absorb his rays alike,°? and the former make but a small part of the glorious picture which he beholds in his daily course. In his view the earth is all equally cultivated like a garden. Therefore we should receive the benefit of his light and 25 heat with a corresponding trust and magnanimity. What though I value the seed of these beans, and harvest that in the fall of the year? This broad field which I have looked at so long looks not to me as the principal cultivator, but away from me to influences more genial to it, which 30 water and make it green. These beans have results which are not harvested by me. Do they not grow for wood- chucks partly? The ear of wheat (in Latin spica obso- letely spece, from spe,° hope) should not be the only THE BEAN-FIELD 167 hope of the husbandman; its kernel or grain (granum, from gerendo,° bearing) is not all that it bears. How, then, can our harvest fail? Shall I not rejoice also at the abundance of the weeds whose seeds are the granary°® of the birds? It matters little comparatively whether the 5; fields fill the farmer’s barns. The true husbandman will cease from anxiety as the squirrels manifest no con- cern whether the woods will bear chestnuts this year or not, and finish his labor with every day, relinquishing all claim to the produce of his fields, and sacrificing in his ro mind not only his first but his last fruits also. THE VILLAGE AFTER hoeing, or perhaps reading and writing in the forenoon, I usually bathed again in the pond, swimming across one of its coves for a stint, and washed the dust of labor from my person, or smoothed out the last wrinkle 5 which study had made, and for the afternoon was abso- lutely free. Every day or two I strolled to the village® to hear some of the gossip which is incessantly going on there, circulating either from mouth to mouth, or from newspaper to newspaper, and which, taken in homeopathic 10 doses, was really as refreshing in its way as the rustle of leaves and the peeping of frogs. As I walked in the woods to see the birds and squirrels, so I walked in the village to see the men and boys; instead of the wind among the pines I heard the carts rattle. In one direction from 15my house there was a colony of muskrats in the river meadows; under the grove of elms and buttonwoods in the other horizon was a village of busy men, as curious to me as if they had been prairie dogs, each sitting at the mouth of its burrow, or running over to a neighbor’s to gossip. 201 went there frequently to observe their habits. The village appeared to me a great news room; and on one side, to support it, as once at Redding & Company’s® on State Street, they kept nuts and raisins, or salt and meal and other groceries. Some have such a vast appetite for 25 the former commodity, that is, the news, and such sound 168 THE VILLAGE 169 digestive organs, that they can sit forever in public avenues without stirring, and let it simmer and whisper through them like the Etesian° winds, or as if inhaling ether, it only producing numbness and insensibility to pain, — otherwise it would often be painful to hear, — 5 without affecting the consciousness. I hardly ever failed, when I rambled through the village, to see a row of such worthies, either sitting on a ladder sunning themselves, with their bodies inclined forward and their eyes glancing along the line this way and that, from time to time, with a 10 voluptuous expression, or else leaning against a barn with their hands in their pockets, like caryatides,° as if to prop itup. They, being commonly out of doors, heard whatever was inthe wind. These are the coarsest mills, in which all gossip is first rudely digested or cracked up before it is 15 emptied into finer and more delicate hoppers within doors. I observed that the vitals of the village were the grocery, the bar-room, the post-office, and the bank; and as a necessary part of the machinery, they kept a bell, a big gun, and a fire engine, at convenient places; and the 2o houses were so arranged as to make the most of mankind, in lanes and fronting one another, so that every traveller had to run the gauntlet, and every man, woman, and child might get a lick at him. Of course, those who were stationed nearest to the head of the line, where they could 25 most see and be seen, and have the first blow at him, paid the highest prices for their places; and the few straggling inhabitants in the outskirts, where long gaps in the line began to occur, and the traveller could get over walls or turn aside into cow-paths, and so escape, paid a very 30 slight ground or window tax. Signs were hung out on all sides to allure him; some to catch him by the appetite, as the tavern and victualling cellar; some by the fancy, 170 WALDEN as the dry goods store and the jewellers; and others by the hair or the feet or the skirts, as the barber, the shoe- maker, or the tailor. Besides, there was a still more terrible standing invitation to call at every one of these 5 houses, and company expected about these times. For the most part I escaped wonderfully from these dangers, either by proceeding at once boldly and without deliberation to the goal, as is recommended to those who run the gaunt- let, or by keeping my thoughts on high things, like Orpheus,° 1o who, ‘‘loudly singing the praises of the gods to his lyre, drowned the voices of the Sirens, and kept out of danger.” Sometimes I bolted suddenly, and nobody could tell my whereabouts, for I did not stand much about gracefulness, and never hesitated at a gap in a fence. Iwas even ac- 15 customed to make an irruption into some houses, where I was well entertained, and after learning the kernels and very last sieve-ful of news, what had subsided, the pros- pects of war and peace, and whether the world was likely to hold together much longer, I was let out through the 20 rear avenues, and so escaped to the woods again. It was very pleasant, when I stayed late in town, to launch myself into the night, especially if it was dark and tempest- uous, and set sail from some bright village parlor or lecture room, with a bag of rye or Indian meal upon my shoulder, 25 for my snug harbor in the woods, having made all tight without and withdrawn under hatches with a merry crew of thoughts, leaving only my outer man at the helm, or even tying up the helm when it was plain sailing. I had many a genial thought by the cabin fire “as I sailed.’’° 30 1 was never cast away nor distressed in any weather, though I encountered some severe storms. It is darker in the woods, even in common nights, than most suppose. I frequently had to look up at the opening between the THE “VILLAGE pwr trees above the path in order to learn my route, and, where there was no cart-path, to feel with my feet the faint track which I had worn, or steer by the known rela- tion of particular trees which I felt with my hands, passing between two pines for instance, not more than eighteen 5 inches apart, in the midst of the woods, invariably in the darkest night. Sometimes, after coming home thus late in a dark and muggy night, when my feet felt the path which my eyes could not see, dreaming and absent-minded all the way, until I was aroused by having to raise my hand ro to lift the latch, I have not been able to recall a single step of my walk, and I have thought that perhaps my body would find its way home if its master should forsake it, as the hand finds its way to the mouth without assistance. Several times, when a visitor chanced to stay into evening, 15 and it proved a dark night, I was obliged to conduct him to the cart-path in the rear of the house, and then point out to him the direction he was to pursue, and in keeping which he was to be guided rather by his feet than his eyes. One very dark night I directed thus on their way two 20 young men who had been fishing in the pond. They lived about a mile off through the woods, and were quite used to the route. A day or two after one of them told me that they wandered about the greater part of the night, close by their own premises, and did not get home till 25 toward morning, by which time, as there had been several heavy showers in the meanwhile, and the leaves were very wet, they were drenched to their skins. I have heard of many going astray even in the village streets, when the dark- ness was so thick that you could cut it with a knife, as the 30 saying is. Some who live in the outskirts, having come to town a-shopping in their wagons, have been obliged to put up for the night; and gentlernen and ladies making a tie WALDEN call have gone half a mile out of their way, feeling the side- walk only with their feet, and not knowing when they turned. It is asurprising and memorable, as well as valu- able experience, to be lost in the woods any time. Often 5 in a snow-storm, even by day, one will come out upon a well-known road and yet find it impossible to tell which way leads to the village. Though he knows that he has travelled it a thousand times, he cannot recognize a feature in it, but it is as strange to himas if it were a road in Siberia. 10 By night, of course, the perplexity is infinitely greater. In our most trivial walks, we are constantly, though uncon- sciously, steering like pilots by certain well-known beacons _and headlands, and if we go beyond our usual course we still carry in our minds the bearing of some neighboring 15 cape; and not till we are completely lost, or turned round, — for a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost, —do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of Nature. Every man has to learn the points of compass again as often as 20 he awakes whether from sleep or any abstraction. Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations. “ 25 One afternoon, near the end of the first summer, when I went to the village to get a shoe from the cobbler’s, I was seized and put into jail, because, as I have elsewhere related, I did not pay a tax to, or recognize the authority of, the state which buys and sells men, women, and children, 30 like cattle at the door of its senate house. I had gone down to the woods for other purposes. But, wherever a man goes, men will pursue and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to THE VILLAGE Ts their desperate odd-fellow society. It is true, I might have resisted forcibly with more or less effect, might have run “amok”? against society; but I preferred that society should run “amok” against me, it being the desperate party. However, I was released the next day, obtained 5 my mended shoe, and returned to the woods in season to get my dinner of huckleberries on Fair Haven Hill. I was never molested by any person but those who repre- sented the state. I had no lock nor bolt but for the desk which held my papers, not even a nail to put over my latch 10 or windows. I never fastened my door night or day, though I was to be absent several days; not even when the next fall I spent a fortnight in the woods of Maine. And yet my house was more respected than if it had been sur- rounded by a file of soldiers. The tired rambler could 15 rest and warm himself by my fire, the literary amuse him- self with the few books on my table, or the curious, by opening my closet door, see what was left of my dinner, and what prospect I had of asupper. Yet, though many people of every class came this way to the pond, I suffered 20 no serious inconvenience from these sources, and I never missed anything but one small book, a volume of Homer, which perhaps was improperly gilded, and this I trust a soldier of our camp has found by this time. I am con- vinced, that if all men were to live simply as I then did, 25 thieving and robbery would be unknown. These take place only in communities where some have got more than is sufficient while others have not enough. The Pope’s Homers would soon get properly distributed. — “Nec bella fuerunt, 30 Faginus astabat dum scyphus ante dapes.” “Nor wars did men molest, When only beechen bowls were in request.” 174 WALDEN “You who govern public affairs, what need have you to employ punishments? Love virtue, and the people will be virtuous. The virtues of a superior man are like the wind; the virtues of a common man are like the grass ; 5 the grass, when the wind passes over it, bends.”’ THE PONDS Sometimes, having had a surfeit of human society and gossip, and worn out all my village friends, I rambled still farther westward than I habitually dwell, into yet more unfrequented parts of the town, ‘‘to fresh woods and pastures new,” or while the sun was setting, made my 5 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 ro know the flavor of huckleberries, ask the cow-boy or the partridge. It is a vulgar error to suppose that you have tasted huckleberries who never plucked them. A huckle- berry never reached Boston; they have not been known there since they grew on her three hills. The ambrosial 15 and essential part of the fruit is lost with the bloom which is rubbed off in the market cart, and they become mere provender. Aslong as Eternal Justice reigns, not one inno- cent huckleberry can be transported thither from the country’s hills. 20 Occasionally, after my hoeing was done for the day, I joined some impatient companion who had been fishing on the pond since morning, as silent and motionless as a duck or a floating leaf, and, after practising various kinds of philosophy, had concluded commonly, by the time I 25 arrived, that he belonged to the ancient sect of Coenobites.° 175 176 WALDEN - There was one older man, an excellent fisher and skilled in all kinds of woodcraft, who was pleased to look upon my house as a building erected for the convenience of fisher- men; and I was equally pleased when he sat in my door- 5 way to arrange his lines. Once in a while we sat together on the pond, he at one end of the boat, and I at the other ; but not many words passed between us, for he had grown deaf in his later years, but he occasionally hummed a psalm, which harmonized well enough with my philosophy. ro Our intercourse was thus altogether one of unbroken har- mony, far more pleasing to remember than if it had been carried on by speech. When, as was commonly the case, I had none to commune with, I used to raise the echoes by: striking with a paddle on the side of my boat, filling the 15 surrounding woods with circling and dilating sound, stirring them up as the keeper of a menagerie his wild beasts, until I elicited a growl from every wooded vale and hill-side. In warm evenings I frequently sat in the boat playing 20 the flute, and saw the perch, which I seemed to have charmed, hovering around me, and the moon travelling over the ribbed bottom, which was strewed with the wrecks of the forest. Formerly I had come to this pond adventur- ously, from time to time, in dark summer nights, with a 25 companion, and making a fire close to the water’s edge, which we thought attracted the fishes, we caught pouts with a bunch of worms strung on a thread; and when we had done, far in the night, threw the burning brands high into the air like skyrockets, which, coming down into the 30 pond, were quenched with a loud hissing, and we were suddenly groping in total darkness. Through this, whis- tling a tune, we took our way to the haunts of men again, But now I had made my home by the shore, THE PONDS EE Sometimes, after staying in a village parlor till the family had all retired, I have returned to the woods, and, partly with a view to the next day’s dinner, spent the hours of midnight fishing from a boat by moonlight, serenaded by owls and foxes, and hearing, from time to time, thes creaking note of some unknown bird close at hand. These experiences were very memorable and valuable to me, — anchored in forty feet of water, and twenty or thirty rods from the shore, surrounded sometimes by thousands of small perch and shiners, dimpling the surface with 10 their tails in the moonlight, and communicating by a long flaxen line with mysterious nocturnal fishes which had their dwelling forty feet below, or sometimes dragging sixty feet of line about the pond as I drifted in the gentle night breeze, now and then feeling a slight vibration along 15 it, indicative of some life prowling about its extremity, of dull uncertain blundering purpose there, and slow to make up its mind. At length you slowly raise, pulling hand over hand, some horned pout squeaking and squirm- ing to the-upper air. It was very queer, especially in dark 20 nights, when your thoughts had wandered to vast and cosmogonal themes in other spheres, to feel this faint jerk, which came to interrupt your dreams and link you to Nature again. It seemed as if I might next cast my line upward into the air, as well as downward into this 25 element which was scarcely more dense. ‘Thus I caught two fishes as it were with one hook. The scenery of Walden is on a humble scale, and, though very beautiful, does not approach to grandeur, nor can it much concern one who has not long frequented 30 it or lived by its shore; yet this pond is so remarkable for its depth and purity as to merit a particular description. N 178 WALDEN It is a clear and deep green well, half a mile long and a mile and three-quarters in circumference, and contains about sixty-one and a half acres°; 4 perennial spring in the midst of pine and oak woods, without any visible inlet or 5 outlet except by the clouds and evaporation. The sur- rounding hills rise abruptly from the water to the height of forty to eighty feet, though on the southeast and east they ‘attain to about one hundred and one hundred and fifty feet respectively, within a quarter and a third of a mile. ro They are exclusively woodland. All our Concord waters have two colors at least, one when viewed at a distance, and another, more proper, close at hand. The first de- pends more on the light, and follows the sky. In clear weather, in summer, they appear blue at a little distance, 1s especially if agitated, and at a great distance all appear alike. In stormy weather they are sometimes of a dark slate color. The sea, however, is said to be blue one day and green another without any perceptible change in the atmosphere. Ihave seen our river, when, the landscape be- 20 ing covered with snow, both water and ice were almost as green as grass. Some consider blue “to be the color of pure water, whether liquid or solid.” But looking directly down into our waters from a boat, they are seen to be of very different colors. Walden is blue at one time and 2s green at another, even from the same point of view. Ly- ing between the earth and the heavens, it partakes of the color of both. Viewed from a hill-top it reflects the color of the sky, but near at hand it is of a yellowish tint next the shore, where you can see the sand, then a light green, 30 Which gradually deepens to a uniform dark green in the body of thepond. In some lights, viewed even from a hill- top, it is of a vivid green next the shore. Some have re- ferred this to the reflection of the verdure ; but it is equally THE PONDS 179 green there against the railroad sand-bank, 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 thesand. Suchisthe color of itsiris. Thisis that portion, also, where in the spring, the ice being warmed by the heat 5 of the sun reflected from the bottom, and also transmitted through the earth, melts first and forms a narrow canal about the still frozen middle. Like the rest of our waters, when much agitated, in clear weather, so that the surface of the waves may reflect the sky at the right angle, or because 10 there is more light mixed with it, it appears at a little distance of a darker blue than the sky itself; and at sucha time, being on its surface, and looking with divided vision, so as to see the reflection, I have discerned a matchless and indescribable light blue, such as watered or change- 15 able silks and sword blades suggest, more cerulean® than the sky itself, alternating with the original dark green on the opposite sides of the waves, which last appeared but muddy incomparison. It isa vitreous® greenish blue, as I remember it, like those patches of the winter sky seen 20 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 25 will be colorless. How large a body of Walden water would be required to reflect a green tint I have never proved. The water of our river is black or a very dark brown to one looking directly down on it, and, like that of most ponds, imparts to the body of one bathing in it a30 yellowish tinge ; but this water is of such crystalline purity that the body of the bather appears of an alabaster white- ness, still more unnatural, which, as the limbs are magnified 180 WALDEN and distorted withal, produces a monstrous effect, making fit studies for a Michael Angelo.°® The water is so transparent that the bottom can easily be discerned at the depth of twenty-five or thirty feet. 5 Paddling over it, you may see many feet beneath the sur- face the schools of perch and shiners, perhaps only an inch long, yet the former éasily distinguished by their trans- verse bars, and you think that they must be ascetic fish that find a subsistence there. Once, in the winter, many 10 years ago, when I had been cutting holes through the ice in order to catch pickerel, as I stepped ashore I tossed my axe back on to the ice, but, as if some evil genius had directed it, it slid four or five rods directly into one of the holes, where the water was twenty-five feet deep. Out of 1s curiosity, I lay down on the ice and looked through the hole, until I saw the axe a little on one side, standing on its head, with its helve erect and gently swaying to and fro — with the pulse of the pond; and there it might have stood erect and swaying till in the course of time the handle 20 rotted off, if I had not disturbed it. Making another hole directly over it with an ice chisel which I had, and cutting down the longest birch which I could find in the neighborhood with my knife, I made a slip-noose, which I attached to its end, and, letting it down carefully, passed 25 it over the knob of the handle, and drew it by a line along the birch, and so pulled the axe out again. The shore is composed of a belt of smooth rounded white stones, like paving stones, excepting one or two short sand beaches, and is so steep that in many places a single 30 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 THE PONDS 181 casual observer would say that there were no weeds at all in it ; and of noticeable plants, except in the little meadows recently overflowed, which do not properly belong to it, a closer scrutiny does not detect a flag nor a bulrush, nor even a lily, yellow or white, but only a few small heart- 5 leaves and potamogetons, and perhaps a water-target or two; all which however a bather might not perceive; and these plants are clean and bright like the element they grow in. The stones extend a rod or two into the water, and then the bottom is pure sand, except in the deepest 10 parts, where there is usually a little sediment, probably from the decay of the leaves which have been wafted on to it so many successive falls, and a bright green weed is brought up on anchors even in midwinter. We have one other pond just like this, White Pond 15 in Nine Acre Corner, about two and ahalf miles westerly ; but, though I am acquainted with most of the ponds within a dozen miles of this centre, I do not know a third of this pure and well-like character. Successive nations per- chance have drank at, admired, and fathomed it, and 20 passed away, and still its water is green and pellucid® as ever. Not an intermitting spring! Perhaps on that spring morning when Adam and Eve were driven out of Eden, Walden Pond was already in existence, and even then breaking up in a gentle spring rain accompanied 25 with mists and a southerly wind, and covered with myriads of ducks and geese, which had not heard of the fall, when still such pure lakes sufficed them. Even then it had commenced to rise and fall, and had clarified its waters and colored them of the hue they now wear, and obtained a 39 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 Casta- 182 WALDEN lian Fountain® or what nymphs presided over it in the Golden Age°®? It is a gem of the first water which Con- cord wears in her coronet. Yet perchance the first who came to this well have left 5 some trace of their footsteps. I have been surprised to detect encircling the pond, even where a thick wood has just been cut down on the shore, a narrow shelf-like path in the steep hill-side, alternately rising and falling, ap- proaching and receding from the water’s edge, as old prob- 10 ably as the race of man here, worn by the feet of aboriginal hunters, and still from time to time unwittingly trodden by the present occupants of the land. This is particularly distinct to one standing on the middle of the pond in winter, just after a light snow has fallen, appearing as a 15 clear, undulating white line, unobscured by weeds and twigs, and very obvious a quarter of a mile off in many places where in summer it is hardly distinguishable close at hand. The snow reprints it, as it were, in clear white type alto-relievo. The ornamented grounds of villas 20 which will one day be built here may still preserve some trace of this. The pond rises and falls, but whether regularly or not, and within what period, nobody knows, though, as usual, many pretend toknow. It iscommonly higher in the winter 25 and lower in the summer, though not corresponding to the general wet and dryness. I can remember when it was a foot or two lower, and also when it was at least five feet higher, than when I lived by it. There is a narrow sand- bar running into it, with very deep water on one side, 30 on which I helped boil a kettle of chowder, some six rods from the main shore, about the year 1824, which it has not been possible to do for twenty-five years; and on the other hand, my friends used to listen with incredulity THE PONDS 183 when I told them, that a few years later I was accustomed to fish from a boat in a secluded cove in the woods, fifteen rods from the only shore they knew, which place was long since converted into a meadow. But the pond has risen steadily for two years, and now, inthe summer of ’52, is just 5 five feet higher than when [I lived there, or as high as it was thirty years ago, and fishing goes on again in the meadow. This makes a difference of level, at the outside, of six or seven feet; and yet the water shed by the surrounding hills is insignificant in amount, and this overflow must be 10 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 accomplish- ment. I have observed one rise and part of two falls, and 15 I expect that a dozen or fifteen years hence the water will again be as low as I have ever known it. Flints’ Pond, a mile eastward, allowing for the disturbance occasioned by its inlets and outlets, and the smaller intermediate ponds also, sympathize with Walden, and recently attained their 20 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, 25 kills the shrubs and trees which have sprung up about its edge since the last rise, pitch-pines, birches, alders, aspens, and others, and, falling again, leaves an unobstructed shore ; for, unlike many ponds and all waters which are subject to a daily tide, its shore is cleanest when the water is lowest. 30 On the side of the pond next my house, a row of pitch-pines fifteen feet high has been killed and tipped over as if by a lever, and thus a stop put to their encroachments ; and their 184 WALDEN size indicates how many years have elapsed since the last rise to this height. By this fluctuation the pond asserts its title to a shore, and thus the shore is shorn,° and the trees cannot hold it by right of possession. These are the lips 5 of the lake on which no beard grows. It licks its chaps from time to time. When the water is at its height, the alders, willows, and maples send forth a mass of fibrous red roots several feet long from all sides of their stems in the water, and to the height of three or four feet from the ground, in ro the effort to maintain themselves; and I have known the high-blueberry bushes about the shore, which commonly produce no fruit, bear an abundant crop under these cir- cumstances. Some have been puzzled to tell how the shore became so 15 regularly paved. My townsmen have all heard the tradi- tion, the oldest people tell me that they heard it in their youth, that anciently the Indians were holding a pow-wow upon a hill here, which rose as high into the heavens as the pond now sinks deep into the earth, and they used much 20 profanity, as the story goes, though this vice is one of which the Indians were never guilty, and while they were thus engaged the hill shook and suddenly sank, and only one old squaw, named Walden, escaped, and from her the pond was named. It has been conjectured that when 25 the hill shook these stones rolled down its side and became the present shore. Itis very certain, at any rate, that once ~ there was no pond here, and now there is one; and this Indian fable does not in any respect conflict with the account of that ancient settler whom I have mentioned, 30 who remembers so well when he first came here with his divining rod, saw a thin vapor rising from the sward, and the hazel pointed steadily downward, and he concluded to dig a wellhere. As for the stones, many still think that THE PONDS 185 they are hardly to be accounted for by the action of the waves on these hills; but I observe that the surrounding hills are remarkably full of the same kind of stones, so that they have been obliged to pile them up in walls on both sides of the railroad cut nearest the pond; and, 5 moreover, there are most stones where the shore is most abrupt; so that, unfortunately, it is no longer a mystery tome. 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, ro originally, Walled-in Pond. The pond was my well ready. dug. For four months in the year its water is as cold as it is pure at all times; and I think that it is then as good as any, if not the best, in the town. In the winter, all water which is exposed rs to the air is colder than springs and wells which are pro- tected from it. The temperature of the pond water which had stood in the room where I sat from five o’clock in the afternoon till noon the next day, the sixth of March, 1846, the thermometer having being up to 65° or 70° some of the 20 time, owing partly to the sun on the roof, was 42°, or one degree colder than the water of one of the coldest wells in the village just drawn. The temperature of the Boiling Spring the same day was 45°, or the warmest of any water tried, though it is the coldest that I know of in summer, 25 when, beside, shallow and stagnant surface water is not mingled with it. Moreover, in summer, Walden never becomes so warm as most water which is exposed to the sun, on account of its depth. In the warmest weather I usually placed a pailful in my cellar, where it became cool 3° in the night, and remained so during the day; though I also resorted to a spring in the neighborhood. It was as good when a week old as the day it was dipped, and had 186 WALDEN no taste of the pump. Whoever camps for a week in summer by the.shore of a pond, needs only bury a pail of water a few feet deep in the shade of his camp to be inde- pendent of the luxury of ice. 5 There have been caught in Walden, pickerel, one weighing seven pounds, to say nothing of another which carried off a reel with great velocity, which the fisherman safely set down at eight pounds because he did not see him, perch and pouts, some of each weighing over two pounds, ro 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 com- monly its only title to fame, and these are the only eels I have heard of here ; — also, I have a faint recollection of a rs little fish some five inches long, with silvery sides and a greenish back, somewhat dace-like in its character, which I mention here chiefly to link my facts to fable. Nevertheless, this pond is not very fertile in fish. Its pickerel, though not abundant, are its chief boast. Ihave 20 seen at one time lying on the ice pickerel of at least three different kinds; a long and shallow one, steel-colored, most like those caught in the river; a bright golden kind, with greenish reflections and remarkably deep, which is the most common here; and another, golden-colored, and 25 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. Thespecific name reticulatus° would not apply to this; it should be guttatus®° rather. These are all very firm fish, and weigh more than 30 their size promises. The shiners, pouts, and perch also, and indeed all the fishes which inhabit this pond, are much cleaner, handsomer, and firmer fleshed than those in the river and most other ponds, as the water is pure, and they THE PONDS ‘187 can easily be distinguished from them. Probably many ichthyologists would make new varieties of some of them. There are also a clean race of frogs and tortoises, and a few mussels in it; muskrats and minks leave their traces about it, and occasionally a travelling mud-turtle visits it. 5 Sometimes, when I pushed off my boat in the morning, I disturbed a great mud-turtle which had secreted himself under the boat in the night. Ducks and geese frequent it in the spring and fall, the white-bellied swallows (Hirundo bicolor) skim over it, and the peetweets (Totanus macu- 10 larius) ‘‘teter’’ along its stony shores all summer. I have sometimes disturbed a fishhawk sitting on a white-pine over the water; but I doubt if it is ever profaned by the wing of a gull, like Fair Haven. At most, it tolerates one annual loon. These are all the animals of consequence which 15 frequent it now. | You may see from a boat, in calm weather, near the sandy eastern shore, where the water is eight or ten feet deep, and also in some other parts of the pond, some circu- lar heaps half a dozen feet in diameter by a foot in height, 20 consisting of small stones less than a hen’s egg in size, where all around is bare sand. At first you wonder if the Indians could have formed them on the ice for any purpose, .and so, when the ice melted, they sank to the bottom; but they are too regular and some of them plainly too fresh 25 forthat. They are similar to those found in rivers; but as there are no suckers nor lampreys here, I know not by what fish they could be made. Perhaps they are the nests of the chivin. These lend a pleasing mystery to the bottom. The shore is irregular enough not to be monotonous. 30 I have in my mind’s eye the western indented with deep bays, the bolder northern, and the beautifully scolloped southern shore, where successive capes overlap each other 188 WALDEN and suggest unexplored coves between. The forest has never so good a setting, nor is so distinctly beautiful, as when seen from the middle of a small lake amid hills which rise from the water’s edge; for the water in which it is 5 reflected not only makes the best foreground in such a case, but, with its winding shore, the most natural and agreeable boundary to it. There is no rawness nor imperfection in its edge there, as where the axe has cleared a part, or a cultivated field abuts on it. The trees have ample room ro to expand on the water side, and each sends forth its most vigorous branch in that direction. There Nature has woven a natural selvage, and the eye rises by just gradations from the low shrubs of the shore to the highest trees. There are few traces of man’s hand to be seen. 15 The water laves the shore as it did a thousand years ago. A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. Itisearth’seye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature. The fluviatile® trees next the shore are the slender eyelashes which fringe 20 it, and the wooded hills and cliffs around are its overhang- 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. 25 have seen whence came the expression, ‘‘the glassy surface of alake.’””, When you invert your head, it looks like a thread of finest gossamer stretched across the valley, and gleaming against the distant pine woods, separating one stratum of the atmosphere from another. You would 30 think that you could walk dry under it to the opposite hills, and that the swallows which skim over might perch on it. Indeed, they sometimes dive below the line, as it were by mistake, and are undeceived. As you look over the pond THE PONDS 189 westward you are obliged to employ both your hands to de- fend your eyes against the reflected as well as the true sun, for they are equally bright; and if, between the two, you survey its surface critically, it is literally as smooth as glass, except where the skater insects, at equal intervals scattered over its whole extent, by their motions in the sun produce the finest imaginable sparkle on it, or, per- chance, a duck plumes itself, or, as I have said, a swallow skims so low as to touch it. It may be that in the dis- tance 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 are is revealed; or here and there, perhaps, is a thistle- down floating on its surface, which the fishes dart at and so dimple it again. It is like molten glass cooled but not congealed, and the few motes in it are pure and beautiful like the imperfections in glass. You may often detect a yet smoother and darker water, separated from the rest as if by an invisible cobweb, boom of the water nymphs, resting on it. From a hill-top you can see a fish leap in almost any part; for not a pickerel or shiner picks an in- sect from this smooth surface but it manifestly disturbs the equilibrium of the whole lake. It is wonderful with what elaborateness this simple fact is advertised, — this piscine murder will out, — and from my distant perch I distinguish the circling undulations when they are half a dozen rods in diameter. You can even detect a water-bug (Gyrinus) ceaselessly progressing over the smooth surface a quarter of a mile off; for they furrow the water slightly, 5 Io 25 making a conspicuous ripple bounded by two diverging 3° lines, but the skaters glide over it without rippling it perceptibly. When the surface is considerably agitated there are no skaters nor water-bugs on it, but apparently, 190 WALDEN in calm days, they leave their havens and adventurously glide forth from the shore by short impulses till they com- pletely cover it. It is a soothing employment, on one of those fine days in the fall when all the warmth of the sun 51s 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 in- visible surface amid the reflected skies and trees. Over this great expanse there is no disturbance but it is thus at ro once gently smoothed away and assuaged, as, when a vase of water is jarred, the trembling circles seek the shore and * all is smooth again. Not a fish can leap or an insect fall on the pond but-it is thus reported in circling dimples, in lines of beauty, as it were the constant welling up of its 15 fountain, the gentle pulsing of -its life, the heaving of its breast. The thrills of joy and thrills of pain are undis- . tinguishable. 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- 20 afternoon as when covered with dew in a spring morning. Every motion of an oar or an insect produces a flash of light ; and if an oar falls, how sweet the echo! In such a day, in September or October, Walden is a perfect forest mirror, set round with stones as precious 25 to myeye as if fewer or rarer. Nothing so fair, so pure, and at the same time so large, as a lake, perchance, lies on the surface of the earth. Sky water. It needs no fence. Nations come and go without defiling. It isa mirror which no stone can crack, whose quicksilver will never wear off, 30 Whose gilding Nature continually repairs; no storms, no dust, can dim its surface ever fresh ; — a mirror in which all impurity presented to it sinks, swept and dusted by the sun’s hazy brush, — this the light dustcloth, — which THE PONDS 191 retains no breath that is breathed on it, but sends its own to float as clouds high above its surface, and be re- flected in its bosom still. A field of water betrays the spirit that is in the air. It * is continually receiving new life and motion from above. 5 It is intermediate in its nature between land and sky. On land only the grass and trees wave, but the water itself is rippled by the wind. I see where the breeze dashes across it by the streaks or flakes of light. It is remarkable that we can look down on its surface. We shall, perhaps, 10 look down thus on the surface of air at length, and mark where a still subtler spirit sweeps over it. The skaters and water-bugs finally disappear in the latter part of October, when the severe frosts have come; and then and in November, usually, in a calm day, there rs is absolutely nothing to ripple the surface. One Novem- ber afternoon, in the calm at the end of a rain-storm of several days’ duration, when the sky was still completely overcast and the air was full of mist, I observed that the pond was remarkably smooth, so that it was difficult to 20 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 2s ribbed appearance to the reflections. But, as I was look- ing over the surface, I saw here and there at a distancea faint glimmer, as if some skater insects which had escaped the frosts might be collected there, or, perchance, the surface, being so smooth, betrayed where a spring welled 30 up from the bottom. Paddling gently to one of these places, I was surprised to find myself surrounded by myri- ads of small perch, about five inches long, of a rich bronze 192 WALDEN color in the green water, sporting there and constantly rising to the surface and dimpling it, sometimes leaving bubbles on it. In such transparent and seemingly bottom- less water, reflecting the clouds, I seemed to be floating 5 through the air as in a balloon, and their swimming im- pressed me as a kind of flight or hovering, as if they were a compact flock of birds passing just beneath my level on the right or left, their fins, like sails, set all around them. There were many such schools in the pond, apparently 10 improving the short season before winter would draw an icy shutter over their broad skylight, sometimes giving to the surface an appearance as if a slight breeze struck it, or a few rain-drops fell there. When I approached carelessly and alarmed them, they made a sudden plash r5 and rippling with their tails, as if one had struck the water with a brushy bough, and instantly took refuge in the depths. At length the wind rose, the mist increased, and the waves began to run, and the perch leaped much higher than before, half out of water, a hundred black 20 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 full of mist, I made haste to take my place at the oars and row homeward; already 25 the rain seemed rapidly increasing, though I felt none on my cheek, and I anticipated a thorough soaking. But suddenly the dimples ceased, for they were produced by the perch, which the noise of my oars had seared into the depths, and I saw their schools dimly disappearing; so I 30 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 THE PONDS 193 with ducks and other water fowl, and that there were many eagles about it. He came here a-fishing, and used an old log canoe which he found on the shore. It was made of two white-pine logs dug out and pinned together, and was cut off square at the ends. It was very clumsy, but s lasted a great many years before it became water-logged and perhaps sank to the bottom. He did not know whose it was; it belonged to the pond. He used to make a cable for his anchor of strips of hickory bark tied together. An old man, a potter, who lived by the pond before the ro Revolution, told him once that there was an iron chest at, the bottom, and that he had seen it. Sometimes it would come floating up to the shore; but when you went toward it, it would go back into deep water and disappear. I was pleased to hear of the old log canoe, which took the 15 place of an Indian one of the same material but more graceful construction, which perchance had first been a tree on the bank, and then, as it were, fell into the water, to float there for a generation, the most proper vessel for the lake. I remember that when I first looked into these 20 depths there were many large trunks to be seen indistinctly Wing on the bottom, which had either been blown over formerly, or left on the ice at the last cutting, when wood was cheaper; but now they have mostly disappeared. When I first paddled a boat on Walden, it was com- 25 pletely surrounded by thick and lofty pine and oak woods, and in some of its coves grape vines had run over the trees next the water and formed bowers under which a boat could pass. The hills which form its shores are so steep, and the woods on them were then so high, that, as you 30 looked down from the west end, it had the appearance of an amphitheatre for some kind of sylvan spectacle. I have spent many an hour, when I was younger, floating over its o) 194. WALDEN surface as the zephyr willed, having paddled my boat to the middle, and lying on my back across the seats, in a summer forenoon, dreaming awake, until I was aroused by the boat touching the sand, and I arose to see what shore 5 my fates had impelled me to; days when idleness was the most attractiveand productiveindustry. Many a forenoon have I stolen away, preferring to spend thus the most valued part of the day; for I was rich, if not in money in sunny hours and summer days, and spent them lavishly ; 1o nor do I regret that I did not waste more of them in the workshop or the teacher’s desk. But since I left those shores the woodchoppers have still further laid them waste, and now for many a year there will be no more rambling through the aisles of the wood, with occasional vistas 15 through which you see the water. My Muse may be excused if she is silent henceforth. How can you expect the birds to sing when their groves are cut down? Now the trunks of trees on the bottom, and the old log canoe, and the dark surrounding woods, are gone, zo and the villagers, who scarcely know where it lies, instead of going to the pond to bathe or drink, are thinking to bring its water, which should be as sacred as the Ganges at least, to the village in a pipe, to wash their dishes with ! — to earn their Walden by the turning of a cock or drawing of a 25 plug! That devilish Iron Horse, whose ear-rending neigh is heard throughout the town, has muddied the Boiling Spring with his foot, and he it is that has browsed off all the woods on Walden shore; that Trojan horse,° with a thousand men in his belly, introduced by mercenary 30 Greeks! Where is the country’s champion, the Moore of Moore Hall,° to meet him at the Deep Cut® and thrust an avenging lance between the ribs of the bloated pest ? Nevertheless, of all the characters I have known, per- THE PONDS 195 haps Walden wears best, and best preserves its purity. Many men have been likened to it, but few deserve that honor. Though the woodchoppers have laid bare first this shore and then that, and the Irish have built their sties by it, and the railroad has infringed on its border, and 5 the icemen have skimmed it once, it is itself unchanged, the same water which my youthful eyes fell on; all the change is in me. It has not acquired one permanent wrinkle after all its ripples. It is perennially young, and I may stand and see a swallow dip apparently to pick ro an insect from its surface as of yore. It struck me again to-night, as if I had not seen it almost daily for more than twenty years, — Why, here is Walden, the same woodland lake that I discovered so many years ago; where a forest was cut down last winter another is springing up 15 by its shore as lustily as ever; the same thought is welling up to its surface that was then; it is the same liquid joy and happiness to itself and its Maker, ay, and it may be to me. It is the work of a brave man surely, in whom there was no guile! He rounded this water with his hand, 20 deepened and clarified it in his thought, and in his will bequeathed it to Concord. I see by its face that it is visited by the same reflection; and I can almost say, Walden, is it you? It is no dream of mine, 25 To ornament a line; I cannot come nearer to God and Heaven Than I live to Walden even. I am its stony shore, And the breeze that passes o’er; 30 In the hollow of my hand Are its water and its sand, And its deepest resort Lies high in my thought. 196 WALDEN The cars never pause to look at it; yet I fancy that the engineers and firemen and brakemen, and those passengers who have a season ticket and see it often, are better men for the sight. The engineer does not forget at night, or his 5 nature does not, that he has beheld this vision of serenity and purity once at least during the day. Though seen but once, it helps to wash out State-street and the engine’s soot. One proposes that it be called “‘God’s Drop.” I have said that Walden has no visible inlet nor outlet, ro but it is on the one hand distantly and indirectly related to Flints’ Pond, which is more elevated, by a chain of small ponds coming from that quarter, and on the other directly and manifestly to Concord River, which is lower, by a simi- lar chain of ponds through which in some other geological rs period it may have flowed, and by a little digging, which God forbid, it can be made to flow thither again. If by living thus reserved and austere, like a hermit in the woods, so long, it has acquired such wonderful purity, who would not regret that the comparatively impure 2o waters of Flints’ Pond should be mingled with it, or itself should ever go to waste its sweetness in the ocean wave? Flints’, or Sandy Pond, in Lincoln, our greatest lake and inland sea, lies about a mile east of Walden. It is much larger, being said to contain one hundred and 25 ninety-seven acres, and is more fertile in fish; but it is comparatively shallow, and not remarkably pure. A walk - through the woods thither was often my recreation. It was worth the while, if only to feel the wind blow on your cheek freely, and see the waves run, and remember the 30 life of mariners. I went a-chestnutting there in the fall, on windy days, when the nuts were dropping into the water and were washed to my feet; and one day, as I THE PONDS 197 crept along its sedgy shore, the fresh spray blowing in roy 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. 5 It was as impressive a wreck as one could imagine on the sea-shore, 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 10 north end of this pond, made firm and hard to the feet of the wader by the pressure of the water, and the rushes which grew in Indian file, in waving lines, corresponding to these marks, rank behind rank, as if the waves had planted them. There also I have found, in considerable 15 quantities, curious balls,° composed apparently of fine grass or roots, of pipewort perhaps, from half an inch to four inches in diameter, and perfectly spherical. These wash back and forth in shallow water on a sandy bottom, and are sometimes cast on the shore. They are either 20 solid grass, or have a little sand in the middle. At first you would say that they were formed by the action of the waves, like a pebble; yet the smallest are made of equally coarse materials, half an inch long, and they are produced only at one season of the year. Moreover, 25 the waves, I suspect, do not so much construct as wear down a material which has already acquired consistency. They preserve their form when dry for an indefinite period. Flints’ Pond! Such is the poverty of our nomencla- ture. What right had the unclean and stupid farmer, 30 whose farm abutted on this sky water, whose shores he has ruthlessly laid bare, to give his name to it? Some skin- flint, who loved better the reflecting surface of a dollar, 198 WALDEN or a bright cent, in which he could see his own brazen face; who regarded even the wild ducks which settled in it as trespassers; his fingers grown into crooked and horny talons from the long habit of grasping harpy-like°® ; 5 —sSo 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 ro 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 inter- woven with its own; not from him who could show no title to it but the deed which a like-minded neighbor or 15 legislature gave him, —him who thought only of its money value; whose presence perchance cursed all the shore; who exhausted the land around it, and would fain have exhausted the waters within it, who regretted only that it was not English hay or cranberry meadow, — 20 there was nothing to redeem it forsooth, in his eyes, — and would have drained and sold it for the mud at its bottom. It did not turn his mill, and it was no privilege® to him to behold it. I respect not his labors, his farm where everything has its price; who would carry the 25 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 30 fruits are not ripe for him till they are turned to dollars. Give me the poverty that enjoys true wealth. Farmers are respectable and interesting to me in proportion as they are poor, — poor farmers. A model farm! where the THE PONDS 199 house stands like a fungus in a muck-heap, chambers for men, horses, oxen, and swine, cleansed and uncleansed, all contiguous to one another! Stocked with men! A great grease-spot, redolent of manures and buttermilk! Under a high state of cultivation, being manured with the 5 hearts and brains of men! As if you were to raise your potatoes in the church-yard! Such is a model farm. No, no; if the fairest features of the landscape are to be named after men, let them be the noblest and worthiest men alone. Let our lakes receive as true names at 10 least as the Icarian Sea, where “‘still the shore” a “‘brave attempt resounds.”’ ° Goose Pond, of small extent, is on my way to Flints’; Fair Haven, an expansion of Concord River, said to con- tain some seventy acres, is a mile southwest; and White 15 Pond, of about forty acres, is a mile and a half beyond Fair Haven. This is my lake country. These, with Concord River, are my water privileges°; and night and day, year in year out, they grind such grist as I carry to them. 20 Since the woodcutters, 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 common- ness, whether derived from the remarkable purity of its 25 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 con- nected under ground. It has the same stony shore, and its waters are of the same hue. As at Walden, in sultry 30 dog-day weather, looking down through the woods on. some of its bays which are not so deep but that the reflection 200 WALDEN from the bottom tinges them, its waters are of a misty bluish-green or glaucous color. Many years since I used to go there to collect the sand by cart-loads, to make sand-paper with, and I have continued to visit it ever 5since. 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 ro species, projecting above the surface in deep water, many rods from the shore. It was even supposed by some that the pond had sunk, and this was one of the primitive forest that formerly stood there. I find that even so long ago as 1792, in a “Topographical Description of the rs Town of Concord,” by one of its citizens, in the Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, the author, after speaking of Walden and White Ponds, adds: ‘‘In the middle of the latter may be seen, when the water is very low, a tree which appears as if it grew in 20 the place where it now stands, although the roots are fifty feet below the surface of the water; the top of this tree is broken off, and at that place measures fourteen inches in diameter.” In the spring of ’49 I talked with the man who lives nearest the pond in Sudbury, who told 25me that it was he who got out this tree ten or fifteen years before. As near as he could remember, it stood twelve or fifteen rods from the shore, where the water was thirty or forty feet deep. It was in the winter, and he had been getting out ice in the forenoon, and had 30 resolved that in the afternoon, with the aid of his neighbors, he would take out the old yellow-pine. He sawed a channel in the ice toward the shore, and hauled it over and along and out on to the ice with oxen; but, before he had gone THE PONDS 201 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 5 rotten as to be fit only for fuel, if for that. He had some of it in his shed then. There were marks of an axe and of woodpeckers on the butt. He thought that it might have been a dead tree on the shore, but was finally blown over into the pond, and after the top had become water- 10 logged, while the butt-end was still dry and light, had drifted out and sunk wrong end up. His father, eighty years old, could not remember when it was not there. Several pretty large logs may still be seen lying on the bottom, where, owing to the undulation of the surface, rs they look like huge water snakes in motion. This pond has rarely been profaned by a boat, for there is little in it to tempt a fisherman. Instead of the white lily, which requires mud, or the common sweet flag, the blue flag (/ris versicolor) grows thinly in the pure water, 20 rising from the stony bottom all around the shore, where it is visited by humming-birds in June, and the color both of its bluish blades and its flowers, and especially their reflections, are in singular harmony with the glaucous water. 25 White Pond and Walden are great crystals on the surface of the earth, Lakes of Light. If they were per- manently congealed, and small enough to be clutched, they would perchance be carried off by slaves, like pre- cious stones, to adorn the heads of emperors; but being 30 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; 202 WALDEN they contain no muck. How much more beautiful than our lives, how much more transparent than our char- acters, are they! We never learned meanness of them. How much fairer than the pool before the farmer’s door, 5in which his ducks swim! Hither the clean wild ducks come. Nature has no human inhabitant who appre- ciates her. The birds with their plumage and their notes are in harmony with the flowers, but what youth or maiden conspires with the wild luxuriant beauty of .Nature? 10 She flourishes most alone, far from the towns where they reside. Talk of heaven! ye disgrace earth. BAKER FARM Sometimes I rambled to pine groves, standing like temples, or like fleets at sea, full-rigged, with wavy boughs, and rippling with light, so soft and green and shady that the Druids® would have forsaken their oaks to wor- ship in them; or to the cedar wood beyond Flints’ Pond, 5 where the trees, covered with hoary blue berries, spiring higher and higher, are fit to stand before Valhalla,° and the creeping juniper covers the ground with wreaths full of fruit; or to swamps where the usnea lichen hangs in festoons from the white-spruce trees, and toad-stools, 10 round tables of the swamp gods, cover the ground, and more beautiful fungi adorn the stumps, like butterflies or shells, vegetable winkles; where the swamp-pink and dogwood grow, the red alder-berry glows like eyes of imps, the waxwork grooves and crushes the hardest 1; woods in its folds, and the wild-holly berries make the beholder forget his home with their beauty, and he is dazzled and tempted by nameless other wild forbidden fruits, too fair for mortal taste. Instead of calling on some scholar, I paid many a visit to particular trees, of 20 kinds which are rare in this neighborhood, standing far away in the middle of some pasture, or in the depths of a wood or swamp, or on a hill-top; such as the black- birch, of which we have some handsome specimens two 203 204. WALDEN feet in diameter; its cousin the yellow-birch, with its loose golden vest, perfumed like the first; the beech, which has so neat a bole and beautifully lichen-painted, perfect in all its details, of which, excepting scattered 5 specimens, I know but one small grove of sizable trees left in the township, supposed by some to have been planted by the pigeons that were once baited with beech nuts near by; it is worth the while to see the silver grain sparkle when you split this wood; the bass; the horn- ro beam; the celtis occidentalis, or false elm, of which we have but one well-grown; some taller mast of a pine, a shingle tree, or a more perfect hemlock than usual, standing like a pagoda in the midst of the woods; and many others I could mention. These were the shrines I visited both rs Summer and winter. Once it chanced that I stood in the very abutment of a rainbow’s arch, which filled the lower stratum of the atmosphere, tingeing the grass and leaves around, and dazzling me as if I looked through colored crystal. It 20 was a lake of rainbow light, in which, for a short while, I lived like a dolphin. If it had lasted longer it might have tinged my employments and life. As I walked on the railroad causeway, I used to wonder at the halo of light around my shadow, and would fain fancy myself 25 one of the elect. One who visited me declared that the shadows of some Irishmen before him had no halo about them, that it was only natives that were so distin- guished. Benvenuto Cellini® tells us in his memoirs, that, after a certain terrible dream or vision which he had 3e during his confinement in the castle of St. Angelo, a resplendent light appeared over the shadow of his head at morning and evening, whether he was in Italy or France, and it was particularly conspicuous when the BAKER FARM 205 grass was moist with dew. This was probably the same phenomenon to which I have referred, which is especially observed in the morning, but also at other times, and ~ even by moonlight. Though a constant one, it is not eommonly noticed, and, in the case of an excitable imagi- 5 nation like Cellini’s, it would be basis enough for super- stition. Beside, he tells us that he showed it to very few. But are they not indeed distinguished who are conscious that they are regarded at all? I set out one afternoon to go.a-fishing to Fair Haven, 1o through the woods, to eke out my scanty fare of vege- tables. My way led through Pleasant Meadow, an adjunct of the Baker Farm, that retreat of which a poet has since sung,° beginning, — “Thy entry is a pleasant field, 15 Which some mossy fruit trees yield Partly to a ruddy brook, By gliding musquash° undertook, And mercurial trout, Darting about.” 20 I thought of living there before I went to Walden. I “hooked” the apples, leaped the brook, and scared the musquash and the trout. It was one of those afternoons which seem indefinitely long before one, in which many events may happen, a large portion of our natural life, 25 though it was already half spent when I started. By the way there came up a shower, which compelled me to stand half an hour under a pine, piling boughs over my head, and wearing my handkerchief for a shed; and when at length I had made one cast over the pickerel-weed, stand- 30 ing up to my middle in water, I found myself suddenly in the shadow of a cloud, and the thunder began to 206 WALDEN rumble with such emphasis that I could do no more than listen to it. The gods must be proud, thought I, with such forked flashes to rout a poor unarmed fisherman. So I made haste for shelter to the nearest hut, which s stood half a mile from any road, but so much the nearer to the pond, and had long been uninhabited : — “ And here a poet builded, In the completed years, For behold a trivial cabin 10 That to destruction steers.” So the Muse fables. But therein, as I found, dwelt now John Field, Irishman, and his wife, and several chil- dren, from the broad-faced boy who assisted his father at his work, and now came running by his side from the 15 bog to escape the rain, to the wrinkled, sibyl-like, cone- headed infant that sat upon its father’s knee as in the palaces of nobles, and looked out from its home in the midst of wet and hunger inquisitively upon the stranger, with the privilege of infancy, not knowing but it was the 20 last of a noble line, and the hope and cynosure of the world, instead of John Field’s poor starveling brat. There we sat together under that part of the roof which leaked the least, while it showered and thundered without. I had sat there many times of old before the ship was built 25 that floated this family to America. An honest,-hard- working, but shiftless man plainly was John Field; and his wife, she too was brave to cook so many successive dinners in the recesses of that lofty stove; With round greasy face and bare breast, still thinking to improve 30 her condition one day; with the never absent mop in one -hand, and yet no effects of it visible anywhere. The chickens, which had also taken shelter here from the rain, BAKER FARM 207 stalked about the room like members of the family, too humanized methought to roast well. They stood and looked in my eye or pecked at my shoe significantly. Meanwhile my host told me his story, how hard he worked “bogging” for a neighboring farmer, turning up a meadow 5 with a spade or bog hoe at the rate of ten dollars an acre and the use of the land with manure for one year, and his little broad-faced son worked cheerfully at his father’s side the while, not knowing how poor a bargain the latter had made. I tried to help him with my experi- ro ence, telling him that he was one of my nearest neighbors, and that I too, who came a-fishing here, and looked like a loafer, was getting my living like himself; that I lived in a tight, light, and clean house, which hardly cost more than the annual rent of such a ruin as his commonly 15 amounts to; and how, if he chose, he might in a month or two build himself a palace of his own; that I did not. use tea, nor coffee, nor butter, nor milk, nor fresh meat, and so did not have to work to get them; again, as I did not work hard, I did not have to eat hard, and it cost me but a trifle for my food; but as he began with tea, and coffee, and butter, and milk, and beef, he had to work hard to pay for them, and when he had worked hard he had to eat hard again to repair the waste of his system, — and so it was as broad as it was long, indeed it was broader than 25 it was long, for he was discontented and wasted his life into the bargain; and yet he had rated it as a gain in coming to America, that here you could get tea, and coffee, and meat every day. But the only true America is that country where you are at liberty to pursue such a mode of 30 life as may enable you to do without these, and where the state does not endeavor to compel you to sustain the slavery and war and other superfluous expenses which iS) ie) 208 WALDEN directly or indirectly result from the use of such things. For I purposely talked to him as if he were a philosopher, or desired to be one. I should be glad if all the meadows on the earth were left in a wild state, if that were the 5 consequence of men’s beginning to redeem themselves. A man will not need to study history to find out what is best for his own culture. But alas! the culture of an Irishman is an enterprise to be undertaken with a sort of moral bog hoe. I told him, that as he worked so hard at 10 bogging, he required thick boots and stout clothing, which yet were soon soiled and worn out, but I wore light shoes and thin clothing, which cost not half so much, though he might think that I was dressed like a gentleman, (which, however, was not the case,) and in an hour or two, without 15 labor, but as a recreation, I could, if I wished, catch as many fish as I should want for two days, or earn enough money to support me a week. If he and his family would live simply, they might all go a-huckleberrying in the summer for their amusement. John heaved a sigh at 20 this, and his wife stared with arms a-kimbo, and both appeared to be wondering if they had capital enough to begin such a course with, or arithmetic enough to carry it through. It was sailing by dead reckoning to them, and they saw not clearly how to make their port so; 25 therefore I suppose they still take life bravely, after their fashion, face to face, giving it tooth and nail, not having skill to split its massive columns with any fine entering wedge, and rout it in detail; — thinking to deal with it roughly, as one should handle a thistle. But they 30 fight at an overwhelming disadvantage, — living, John Field, alas! without arithmetic, and failing so. “Do you ever fish?” I asked. ‘O yes, I catch a mess now and then when I am lying by; good perch I catch.” BAKER FARM 209 “What’s your bait?” ‘‘I catch shiners with fish-worms, and bait the perch with them.” “ You’d better go now, John,” said his wife with glistening and hopeful face; but John demurred. The shower was now over, and a rainbow above thes eastern woods promised a fair evening: so I took my departure. When I had got without I asked for a dish, hoping to get a sight of the well bottom, to complete my survey of the premises; but there, alas! are shallows and quicksands, and rope broken withal, and bucket irre- ro coverable. Meanwhile the right culinary vessel was selected, water was seemingly distilled, and after consulta- tion and long delay passed out to the thirsty one, — not yet suffered to cool, nor yet to settle. Such gruel sustains life here, I thought; so, shutting my eyes, and exclud- rs ing the motes by a skilfully directed under-current, I drank to genuine hospitality the heartiest draught I could. JI am not squeamish in such cases when manners are concerned. As I was leaving the Irishman’s roof after the rain, 20 bending my steps again to the pond, my haste to catch pickerel, wading in retired meadows, in sloughs and bog- holes, in forlorn and savage places, appeared for an- in- stant trivial to. me who had been sent to school and college; but as I ran down the hill toward the reddening 25 west, with the rainbow over my shoulder, and some faint tinkling sounds borne to my ear through the cleansed air, from I know not what quarter, my Good Genius seemed to say, — Go fish and hunt far and wide day by day, — farther and wider,—and rest thee by many 30 brooks and hearthsides without misgiving. Remember® thy Creator in the days of thy youth. Rise free from care before the dawn, and seek adventures. Let the P 5 Io 15 20 25 30 210 WALDEN noon find thee by other lakes, and the night overtake thee everywhere at home. There are no larger fields than these, no worthier games than may here be played. Grow wild according to thy nature, like these sedges and brakes, which will never become English hay. Let the thunder rumble; what if it threaten ruin to farmers’ crops? that is not its errand to thee. Take shelter under the cloud, while they flee to carts and sheds. Let not to get a living be thy trade, but thy sport. Enjoy the land, but own it not. Through want of enterprise and faith men are where they are, buying and selling, and spending their lives like serfs. O Baker Farm! “Landscape where? the richest element Is a little sunshine innocent.” “No one runs to revel On thy rail-fenced lea.” “Debate with no man hast thou, With questions art never perplexed, As tame at the first sight as now, In thy plain russet gabardine dressed.” “Come ye who love, And ye who hate, Children of the Holy Dove, And Guy Faux of the state, And hang conspiracies From the tough rafters of the trees!” Men come tamely home at night only from the next field or street, where their household echoes haunt, and their life pines because it breathes its own breath over again; their shadows morning and evening reach farther than their daily steps. We should come home from far, BAKER FARM ZA from adventures, and perils, and discoveries every day, with new experience and character. Before I had reached the pond some fresh impulse had brought out John Field, with altered mind, letting go “bogging” ere this sunset. But he, poor man, dis- 5 turbed only a couple of fins while I was catching a fair string, and he said it was his luck; but when we changed seats in the boat luck changed seats too. Poor John Field! — I trust he does not read this, unless he will improve by it, — thinking to live by some derivative 10 old country mode in this primitive. new country, — to catch perch with shiners. It is good bait sometimes, I allow. With his horizon all his own, yet he a poor man, born to be poor, with his inherited Irish poverty or poor life, his Adam’s grandmother and boggy ways, not to rise 15 in this world, he nor his posterity, till their wading webbed bog-trotting feet get talaria® to their heels. HIGHER LAWS As I came home through the woods with my string of fish, trailing my pole, it being now quite dark, I caught a glimpse of a woodchuck stealing across my path, and felt a strange thrill of savage delight, and was strongly 5 tempted to seize and devour him raw; not that I was hungry then, except for that wildness which he repre- sented. Once or twice, however, while I lived at the pond, I found myself ranging the woods, like a half-starved hound, with a strange abandonment, seeking some kind of ro venison which I might devour, and no morsel could have been too savage for me. The wildest scenes had become unaccountably familiar. I found’ in myself, and still find, an instinct toward a higher, or, as it is named, spirit- ual life, as do most men, and another toward a primitive, 1 rank, and savage one, and I reverence them both. I love the wild not less than the good. The wildness and adventure that are in fishing still recommend it to me. I like sometimes to take rank hold on life and spend my day more as the animals do. Perhaps I have owed to 20 this employment and to hunting, when quite young, my closest acquaintance with Nature. They. early introduce us to and detain us in scenery with which otherwise, at that age, we should have little acquaintance. Fishermen, bunters, woodchoppers, and others, spending their lives 25 in the fields and woods, in a peculiar sense a part of Na- 212 HIGHER LAWS 213 ture themselves, are often in & more favorable mood for observing her, in the intervals of their pursuits, than phi- losophers or poets even, who approach her with expecta- tion. She is not afraid to exhibit herself to them. The traveller on the prairie is naturally a hunter, on the head 5 waters of the Missouri and Columbia a trapper, and at the Falls of St. Mary a fisherman. He who is only a traveller learns things at second-hand and by the halves, and is poor authority. We are most interested when science reports what those men already know practically or instinctively, for that alone is a true humanity, or ac- count of human experience. They mistake who assert that the Yankee has few amusements, because he has not so many public holi- days, and men and boys do not play so many games as 15 they do in England, for here the more primitive but solitary amusements of hunting, fishing, and the like have not yet given place to the former. Almost every New England boy among my contemporaries shouldered a fowling-piece between the ages of ten and fourteen; and 20 his hunting and fishing grounds were not limited like the preserves of an English nobleman, but were more bound- less even than those of a savage. No wonder, then, that he did not oftener stay to play on the common. But already a change is taking place, owing, not to an increased 25 humanity, but to an increased scarcity of game, for per- haps the hunter is the greatest friend of the animals hunted, not excepting the Humane Society. Moreover, when at the pond, I wished sometimes to add fish to my fare for variety. I have actually fished 30 from the same kind of necessity that the first fishers did. Whatever humanity I might conjure up against it was all factitious, and concerned my philosophy more than 4 ° 214 WALDEN my feelings. I speak of fishing only now, for I had long felt differently about fowling, and sold my gun before I went to the woods. Not that I am less humane than others, but I did not perceive that my feelings were much 5 affected. I did not pity the fishes nor the worms. This was habit. As for fowling, during the last years that I carried a gun my excuse was that I was studying or- nithology, and sought only new or rare birds. But I confess that I am now inclined to think that there is a ro finer way of studying ornithology than this. It requires so much closer attention to the habits of the birds, that, if for that reason only, I have been willing to omit the gun.° Yet notwithstanding the objection on the score of hu- manity, Iam compelled to doubt if equally valuable sports 15 are ever substituted for these; and when some of my friends have asked me anxiously about their boys, whether they should let them hunt, I have answered, yes, — re- membering that it was one of the best parts of my educa- tion, — make them hunters, though sportsmen only at 20 first, if possible, mighty hunters at last, so that they shall not find game large enough for them in this or any vegetable wilderness, — hunters as well as fishers of men. Thus far I am of the opinion of Chaucer’s nun,° who “vave not of the text a pulled hen 25 That saith that hunters ben not holy men.” There is a period in the history of the individual, as of the race, when the hunters are the ‘‘best men,” as the Algonquins® called them. We cannot but pity the boy who has never fired a gun; he is no more humane, while 30 his education has been sadly neglected. This was my answer with respect to those youths who were bent on this pursuit, trusting that they would soon outgrow it. HIGHER LAWS 215 No humane being, past the thoughtless age of boyhood, will wantonly murder any creature, which holds its life by the same tenure that he does. The hare in its ex- tremity cries like a child. I warn you, mothers, that my sympathies do not always make the usual philan- 5 thropic® distinctions. Such-is oftenest the young man’s introduction to the forest, and the most original part of himself. He goes thither at first as a hunter and fisher, until at last, if he has the seeds of a better life in him, he distinguishes his 10 proper objects, as a poet or naturalist it may be, and leaves the gun and fish-pole behind. The mass of men are still and always young in this respect. In some coun- tries a hunting parson is no uncommon sight. Such a one might make a good shepherd’s dog, but is far from 15 being the Good Shepherd. I have been surprised to con- sider that the only obvious employment, except wood- chopping, ice-cutting, or the like business, which ever to my knowledge detained at .Walden Pond for a whole half day any of my fellow-citizens, whether fathers orzo children of the town, with just one exception, was fishing. Commonly they did not think that they were lucky, or well paid for their time, unless they got a long string of fish, though they had the opportunity of seeing the pond allthewhile. They might go there a thousand times before 25 the sediment of fishing would sink to the bottom and leave their purpose pure; but no doubt such a clarifying process would be going on all the while. The governor and his council faintly remember the pond, for they went a-fishing there when they were boys; but now they are 30 too old and dignified to go a-fishing, and so they know it no more forever. Yet even they expect to go to heaven at last. If the legislature regards it, it is chiefly to regu- 216 WALDEN late the number of hooks to be used there; but they know nothing about the hook of hooks with which to angle for the pond itself, impaling the legislature for a bait. Thus, even in civilized communities, the embryo man 5 passes through the hunter stage of development. I have found repeatedly, of late years, that I cannot fish without falling a little in self-respect. I have tried it again and again. I have skill at it, and, like many of my fellows, a certain instinct for it, which revives from 1o time to time, but always when I have done I feel that it would have been better if I had not fished. I think that I do not mistake. It is a faint intimation, yet so are the first streaks of morning. There is unquestionably this instinct in me which belongs to the lower order of creation ; 15 yet with every year I am less a fisherman, though without more humanity or even wisdom; at present I am no fisher- man at all. But I see that if I were to live in a wil- derness I should again be tempted to become a fisher and hunter in earnest. Beside, there is something 20 essentially unclean about this diet and all flesh, and I began to see where housework commences, and whence the endeavor, which costs so much, to wear a tidy and respectable appearance. each day, to keep the house sweet and free from all ill odors and sights. Having been 25my own butcher and scullion and cook, as well as the gentleman for whom the dishes were served up, I can speak from an unusually complete experience. The practical objection to animal food in my case was its un- cleanness; and, besides, when I had caught and cleaned 30 and cooked and eaten my fish, they seemed not to have fed me essentially. It was insignificant and unnecessary, and cost more than it came to. A little bread or a few potatoes would have done as well, with less trouble and HIGHER LAWS vy beg filth. Like many of my contemporaries, I had rarely for many years used animal food, or tea, or coffee, etc.; not so much because of any ill effects which I had traced to them, as because they were not agreeable to my imagi- nation. The repugnance to animal food is not the effect 5 of experience, but is an instinct. It appeared more beautiful to live low and fare hard in many respects; and though I never did so, I went far enough to please my imagination. I believe that every man who has ever been earnest to preserve his higher or poetic faculties in the 10 best condition has been particularly inclined to abstain from animal food,° and from much food of any kind. It is a significant fact, stated by entomologists, I find it in Kirby and Spence,° “that ‘some insects in their perfect state, though furnished with organs of feed-15 ing, make no use of them”; and they lay it down as “a general rule, that almost all insects in this state eat much less than in that of larve. The voracious cater- pillar when transformed into a butterfly,” ... “and the gluttonous maggot when become a fly,”’ content them- 20 selves with a drop or two of honey or some other sweet liquid. The abdomen under the wings of the butterfly still represents the larva. This is the tidbit which tempts his insectivorous fate. The gross feeder is a man in the larva state; and there are whole nations in that condition, nations without fancy or imagination, whose vast abdo- mens betray them. It is hard to provide and cook so simple and clean a diet as will not offend the imagination; but this, I think, is to be fed when we feed the body; they should both sit 30 down at the same table. Yet perhaps this may be done. The fruits eaten temperately need not make us ashamed of our appetites, nor interrupt the worthiest pursuits. But iS) 3 218 WALDEN put an extra condiment into your dish, and it will poison you. It is not worth the while to live by rich cookery. Most men would feel shame if caught preparing with their own hands precisely such a dinner, whether of animal or 5 vegetable food, as is every day prepared for them by others. Yet till this is otherwise we are not civilized, and, if gentle- men and ladies, are not true men and women. ‘This certainly suggests what change is to be made. It may be vain to ask why the imagination will not be reconciled to ro flesh and fat. I am satisfied that it is not. Is it not a reproach that man is a carnivorous animal? True, he can and does live, in a great measure, by preying on other animals; but this is a miserable way, — as any one who will go to snaring rabbits, or slaughtering lambs, may learn, rs — and he will be regarded as a benefactor of his race who shall teach man to confine himself to a more innocent and wholesome diet. Whatever my own practice may be, I have no doubt that it isa part of the destiny of the hu- man race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating 20 animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came® in contact with the more elvilized. If one listens to the faintest but constant suggestions of his genius, which are certainly true, he sees not to what 25 extremes, or even insanity, it may lead him; and yet that way, as he grows more resolute and faithful, his road lies. The faintest assured objection which one healthy man feels will at length prevail over the arguments and customs of mankind. No man ever followed his genius till it misled 30 him. Though the result were bodily weakness, yet perhaps no one can say that the consequences were to be regretted, for these were a life in conformity to higher principles. If the day and the night are such that you HIGHER LAWS 219 greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal, —that is your success. All nature is your congratulation, and you have cause momentarily to bless yourself. The greatest gains and values are farthest 5 from being appreciated. We easily come to doubt if they exist. Wesoon forget them. They are the highest reality. Perhaps the facts most astounding and most real are never communicated by man to man. The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat intangible and indescribable as the ro tints of morning or evening. It is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched. Yet, for my part, I was never unusually squeamish; I could sometimes eat a fried rat with a good relish, if it were necessary. I am glad to have drunk water so long, 1s for the same reason that I prefer the natural sky to an opium-eater’s heaven. I would fain keep sober always; and there are infinite degrees of drunkenness. I believe that water is the only drink for a wise man; wine is not so noble a liquor ; and think of dashing the hopes of a morning 20 with a cup of warm coffee, or of an evening with a dish of tea! Ah, how low I fall when I am tempted by them! Even music may be intoxicating. Such apparently slight causes destroyed Greece and Rome, and will destroy England and America. Of all ebriosity,° who does not 25 prefer to be intoxicated by the air he breathes? I have found it to be the most serious objection to coarse labors long continued, that they compelled me to eat and drink coarsely also. But to tell the truth, I find myself at pres- ent somewhat less particular in these respects. I carry 30 less religion to the table, ask no blessing; not because I am wiser than I was, but, I am obliged to confess, be- cause, however much it is to be regretted, with years I 220 WALDEN have grown more coarse and indifferent. Perhaps these questions are entertained only in youth, as most believe of poetry. My practice is “‘nowhere,”’ my opinion is here. Nevertheless I am far from regarding myself as one of those 5 privileged ones to whom the Ved® refers when it says, that “he who has true faith in the Omnipresent Supreme Being may eat all that exists,” that is, is not bound to inquire what is his food, or who prepares it; and even in their case it is to be observed, as a Hindoo commentator 10 has remarked, that the Vedant° limits this privilege to “the time of distress.’ Who has not sometimes derived an inexpressible satis- faction from his food in which appetite had no share? I have been thrilled to think that I owed a mental perception 15 to the commonly gross sense of taste, that I, have been inspired through the palate, that some berries which I had eaten on a hill-side had fed my genius. ‘The soul not being mistress of herself,” says Thseng-tseu, ‘‘one looks, and one does not see; one listens, and one does not hear ; 20 one eats, and one does not know the savor of food.’ He who distinguishes the true savor of his food can never be a glutton; he who does not cannot be otherwise. A puritan may go to his brown-bread crust with as gross an appetite as ever an alderman to his turtle. Not that food which 25 entereth into the mouth defileth a man,° but the appetite with which it is eaten. It is neither the quality nor the quantity, but the devotion to sensual savors; when that which is eaten is not a viand to sustain our animal, or in- spire our spiritual life, but the food for the worms that 30 possess us. If the hunter has a taste for mud-turtles, muskrats, and other such savage tid-bits, the fine lady indulges a taste for jelly made of a calf’s foot, or for sar- dines from over the sea, and they are even. He goes to HIGHER LAWS pi the mill-pond, she to her preserve pot. The wonder is how they, how you and J, can live this slimy beastly life, eating and drinking. Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant’s truce between virtue and vice. Goodness is the 5 only investment that never fails. In the music of the harp which trembles round the world it is the insisting on this which thrills us. The harp is the travelling patterer for the Universe’s Insurance Company, recommending its laws, and our little goodness is all the assessment that we ro pay. Though the youth at last grows indifferent, the laws of the universe are not indifferent, but are forever on the side of the most sensitive. Listen to every zephyr for some reproof, for it is surely there, and he is unfortunate who does not hear it. We cannot touch a string or move 15 a stop but the charming moral transfixes us. Many an irk- some noise, go a long way off, is heard as music, a proud sweet satire on the meanness of our lives. We are conscious of an animal in us, which awakens in proportion as our higher nature slumbers. It is reptile 20 and sensual, and perhaps cannot be wholly expelled; like the worms which, even in life and health, occupy our bodies. Possibly we may withdraw from it, but never change its nature. I fear that it may enjoy a certain health of its own; that we may be well, yet not pure. The 25 other day I picked up the lower jaw of a hog, with white and sound teeth and tusks, which suggested that there was an animal health and vigor distinct from the spiritual. This creature succeeded by other means that temperance and purity. ‘That in which men differ from brute beasts,” 3° says Mencius,° “ is a thing very inconsiderable; the com- mon herd lose it very soon; superior men preserve it care- fully.” Who knows what sort of life would result if we 222 WALDEN had attained to purity? If I knew so wise a man as could teach me purity I would go to seek him forthwith. ‘‘A command over our passions, and over the external senses of the body, and good acts, are declared by the Ved to be 5 indispensable in the mind’s approximation to God.” Yet the spirit can for a time pervade and control every member and function of the body, and transmute what in form is the grossest sensuality into purity and devotion. The generative energy, which, when we are loose, dissipates 1o and makes us unclean, when we are continent invigorates and inspires us. Chastity is the flowering of man; and what are called Genius, Heroism, Holiness, and the like, are but various fruits which succeed it. Man flows at once to God when the channel of purity is open. By 1s turns our purity inspires and our impurity casts us down. He is blessed who is assured that the animal is dying out in him day by day, and the divine being established. Per- haps there is none but has cause for shame on account of the inferior and brutish nature to which he is allied. I 20 fear that we are such gods or demigods only as fauns and satyrs, the divine allied to beasts, the creatures of appetite, and that, to some extent our very life is our disgrace. — “How happy’s°® he who hath due place assigned To his beasts and disafforested°® his mind! 25 Can use his horse, goat, wolf, and ev’ry beast, And is not ass himself to all the rest! Else man not only is the herd of swine,° But he’s those devils too which did incline Them to a headlong rage, and made them worse.” 30 ~All sensuality is one, though it takes many forms; all purity is one. It is the same whether a man eat, or drink, or cohabit, or sleep sensually. They are but one appe- HIGHER LAWS 223 tite, and we only need to see a person do any one of these things to know how great a sensualist he is. The impure can neither stand nor sit with purity. When the reptile is attacked at one mouth of his burrow, he shows himself at another. If you would be chaste, you must be temperate. 5 What is chastity? How shall a man know if he is chaste? He shall not know it. We have heard of this virtue, but we know not what it is. We speak conformably to the rumor which we have heard. From exertion come wisdom and purity; from sloth ignorance and sensuality. In the 10 student sensuality isa sluggish habit of mind. An unclean person is universally a slothful one, one who sits by a stove, whom the sun shines on prostrate, who reposes without being fatigued. If you would avoid uncleanness, and all the sins, work earnestly, though it be at cleaning a stable. 15 Nature is hard to be overcome, but she must be over- come. What avails that you are Christian, if you are not purer than the heathen, if you deny yourself no more, if you are not more religious? I know of many systems of religion esteemed heathenish whose precepts fill the reader 20 with shame, and provoke him to new endeavors, though it be to the performance of rites merely. I hesitate to say these things, but it is not because of the subject, — I care not how obscene my words are, — but because I cannot speak of them without betraying my 25 impurity. We discourse freely without shame of one form of sensuality, and are silent about another. We are so de- graded that we cannot speak simply of the necessary func- tions of human nature. In earlier ages, in some countries, every function was reverently spoken of and regulated by 30 law. Nothing was too trivial for the Hindoo lawgiver, however offensive it may be to modern taste. He teaches how to eat, drink, cohabit, void excrement and urine, and v 224 WALDEN the like, elevating what is mean, and does not falsely excuse himself by calling these things trifles. Every man is the builder of a temple, called his body, to the god he worships, after a style purely his own, nor 5 can he get off by hammering marble instead. We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones. Any nobleness begins at once to refine a man’s features, any meanness or sensuality to imbrute them. 1o John Farmer sat at his door one September evening, after a hard day’s work, his mind still running on his labor more or less. Having bathed, he sat down to recreate his intellectual man. It was a rather cool evening, and some of his neighbors were apprehending a frost. He had not 15 attended to the train of his thoughts long when he heard some one playing on a flute, and that sound harmonized with his mood. Still he thought of his work; but the burden of his thought was, that though this kept running in his head, and he found himself planning and contriving it 20 against his will, yet it concerned him very little. It was no more than the scurf of his skin, which was constantly shuffled off. But the notes of the flute came home to his ears out of a different sphere from that he worked in, and suggested work for certain faculties which slumbered in 25 him. They gently did away with the street, and the village, and the state in which he lived. A voice said to him, — Why do you stay here and live in this mean moiling® life, when a glorious existence is possible for you? Those same stars twinkle over other fields than these. — But how to 30 come out of this condition and actually migrate thither? All that he could think of was to practise some new auster- ity, to let his mind descend into his body and redeem it, and treat himself with ever increasing respect. BRUTE NEIGHBORS Sometimes I had a companion in my fishing, who came through the village to my house from the other side of the town, and the catching of the dinner was as much a social exercise as the eating of it. Hermit. I wonder what the world is doing now. 5 I have not heard so much as a locust over the sweet-fern these three hours. The pigeons are all asleep upon their roosts, —no flutter from them. Was that a farmer’s noon horn which sounded from beyond the woods just now ? The hands are coming in to boiled salt beef and cider and 10 Indian bread. Why will men worry themselves so? He that does not eat need not work. I wonder how much they have reaped. Who would live there where a body can never think for the barking of Bose°? And O, the house- keeping! to keep bright the devil’s door-knobs, and scour 15 his tubs this bright day! Better not keep a house. Say, some hollow tree; and then for morning calls and dinner- parties! Only a woodpecker tapping. O, they swarm; the sun is too warm there; they are born too far into life forme. I have water from the spring, and a loaf of brown bread on the shelf. — Hark! I hear a rustling of the leaves. Is it some ill-fed village hound yielding to the instinct of the chase? or the lost pig which is said to be in these woods, whose tracks I saw after the rain? It comes on apace; my sumachs and sweet-briers tremble. — Eh, 2s Mr. Poet, is it you? How do you like the world to-day? Q 225 Nd ° fe 226 WALDEN Poet.° See those clouds; how they hang! That’s the greatest thing I have seen to-day. There’s nothing like it in old paintings, nothing like it in foreign lands, — unless when we were off the coast of Spain. 5 That’s a true Mediterranean sky. I thought, as I have my living to get, and have not eaten to-day, that I might go a-fishing. That’s the true industry for poets. It is the only trade I have learned. Come, let’s along. Hermit. Icannot resist. My brown bread will soon be ro gone. I will go with you gladly soon, but I am just con- cluding a serious meditation. I think that I am near the end of it. Leave me alone, then, for a while. But that we may not be delayed, you shall be digging the bait mean- while. Angle worms are rarely to be met with in these 15 parts, where the soil was never fattened with manure; the race is nearly extinct. The sport of digging the bait is nearly equal to that of catching the fish, when one’s appetite is not too keen; and this you may have all to yourself to-day. I would advise you to set in the spade 20 down yonder among the ground-nuts, where you see the -Johnswort waving. I think that I may warrant you one worm to every three sods you turn up, if you look well in among the roots of the grass, as if you were weeding. Or, if you choose to go farther, it will not be unwise, for I have 25 found the increase of fair bait to be very nearly as the squares of the distances. Hermit alone. Let me see; where was I? Methinks I was nearly in this frame of mind; the world lay about at this angle. Shall I go to heaven or a-fishing? If I 30 Should soon bring this meditation to an end, would another so sweet occasion be likely to offer? I was as near being resolved into the essence of things as ever I was in my life. I fear my thoughts will not come back to me. If BRUTE NEIGHBORS TOT it would do any good, I would whistle for them. When they make us an offer, is it wise to say, We will think of it? My thoughts have left no track, and I cannot find the path again. What was it that I was thinking of? It was a very hazy day: I will just try these three 5 sentences of Con-fut-see° ; they may fetch that state about again. I know not whether it was the dumps or a budding ecstasy. Mem. There never is but one opportunity of a kind. Poet. How now, Hermit, is it too soon? I have got 10 just thirteen whole ones, besides several which are im- perfect or undersized; but they will do for the smaller fry; they do not cover up the hook so much. Those village worms are quite too large; a shiner may make a meal off one without finding the skewer.° 15 Hermit. Well, then let’s be off. Shall we to the Concord? There’s good sport there if the water be not too high. Why do precisely these objects which we behold make a world? Why has man just these species of animals 20 for his neighbors; as if nothing but a house could have filled this crevice? I suspect that Pilpay & Co.° have put animals to their best use, for they are all beasts of burden, in a sense, made to carry some portion of our thoughts. 25 The mice which haunted my house were not the common ones, which are said to have been introduced into the country, but a wild native kind not found in the village. I sent one to a distinguished naturalist, and it interested him much. When I was building, one of these had its 30 nest underneath the house, and before I had laid the second floor, and swept out the shavings, would come out regu- 228 WALDEN larly at lunch time and pick up the crumbs at my feet. It probably had never seen a man before; and it soon became quite familiar, and would run over my shoes and up my clothes. It could readily ascend the sides of the 5 room by short impulses, like a squirrel, which it resembled in its motions. At length, as I leaned with my elbow on the bench one day, it ran up my clothes, and along my sleeve, and round and round the paper which held my dinner, while I kept the latter close, and dodged and 10 played at bo-peep with it; and when at last I held still a piece of cheese between my thumb and finger, it came and nibbled it, sitting in my hand, and afterward cleaned its face and paws, like a fly, and walked away. A phoebe soon built in my shed, and a robin for pro- rs tection in a pine which grew against the house. In June the partridge, (T’etrao wmbellus,) which is so shy a bird, led her brood past my windows, from the woods in the rear to the front of my house, clucking and calling to them like a hen, and in all her behavior proving herself the hen 20 of the woeds. The young suddenly disperse on your ap- proach, at a signal from the mother, as if a whirlwind had swept them away, and they so exactly resemble the dried leaves and twigs that many a traveller has placed his foot in the midst of a brood, and heard the whir of the 25 old bird as she flew off, and her anxious calls and mewing, or seen her trail her wings to attract his attention, without suspecting their neighborhood. The parent will some- times roll and spin round before you in such a dishabille, that you cannot, for a few moments, detect what kind of 30 creature it is. The young squat still and flat, often run- ning their heads under a leaf, and mind only their mother’s directions given from a distance, nor will your approach make them run again and betray themselves. You BRUTE NEIGHBORS 229 may even tread on them, or have your eyes on them for a minute, without discovering them. I have held them in my open hand at such a time, and still their only care, obedient to their mother and their instinct, was to squat there without fear or trembling. So perfect is thiss instinct, that once, when I had laid them on the leaves again, and one accidentally fell on its side, it was found with the rest in exactly the same position ten minutes afterward. They are not callow like the young of most birds, but more perfectly developed and precocious even ro than chickens. The remarkably adult yet innocent expression of their open and serene eyes is very mem- orable. All intelligence seems reflected in them. They suggest not merely the purity of infancy, but a wisdom clarified by experience. Such an eye was not born when 15 the bird was, but is coeval with the sky it reflects. The woods do not yield another such a gem. The traveller does not often look into such a limpid well. The ignorant or reckless sportsman often shoots the parent at such a time, and leaves these innocents to fall a prey to some 2o prowling beast or bird, or gradually mingle with the decaying leaves which they so much resemble. It is said that when hatched by a hen they will directly disperse on some alarm, and so are lost, for they never hear the mother’s call which gathers them again. These were 25 my hens and chickens. 5<<" It is remarkable how many creatures live wild and free though secret in the woods, and still sustain them- selves in the neighborhood of towns, suspected by hunters only. How retired the otter manages to live here! He 30 grows to be four feet long, as big as a small boy, perhaps without any human being getting a glimpse of him. I formerly saw the raccoon in the woods behind where my 230 WALDEN house is built, and probably still heard their whinnering at night. Commonly I rested an hour or two in the shade at noon, after planting, and ate my lunch, and read a little by a spring which was the source of a swamp and of 5a brook, oozing from under Brister’s Hill,° half a mile from my field. The approach to this was through a suc- cession of descending grassy hollows, full of young pitch- pines, into a larger wood about the swamp. There, in a very secluded and shaded spot, under a spreading white- 1o pine, there was yet a clean firm sward to sit on. I had dug out the spring and made a well of clear gray water, where I could dip up a pailful without. roiling it, and thither I went for this purpose almost every day in mid- summer, when the pond was warmest. Thither too the 15 wood-cock led her brood, to probe the mud for worms, flying but a foot above them down the bank, while they ran in a troop beneath; but at last, spying me, she would leave her young and circle round and round me, nearer and nearer till within four or five feet, pretending broken 20 wings and legs, to attract my attention, and get off her young, who would already have taken up their march, with faint wiry peep, single file through the swamp, as she directed. Or I heard the peep of the young when I could not see the parent bird. There too the turtle-doves sat 25 over the spring, or fluttered from bough to bough of the soft white-pines over my head; or the red squirrel, cours- ing down the nearest bough, was particularly familiar and inquisitive. You only need sit still long enough in some attractive spot in the woods that all its inhabitants 30 may exhibit themselves to you by turns. I was witness to events of a less peaceful character. One day when I went out to my wood-pile, or rather my pile of stumps, I observed two large ants, the one red, the BRUTE NEIGHBORS 231 other much larger, nearly half an inch long, and black, fiercely contending with one another. Having once got hold they never let go, but struggled and wrestled and rolled on the chips incessantly. Looking farther, I was surprised to find that the chips were covered with such 5 combatants, that it was not a duellum, but a bellum, a war between two races of ants, the red always pitted against the black, and frequently two red ones to one black. The legions of these Myrmidons® covered all the hills and vales in my wood-yard, and the ground was already ro strewn with the dead and dying, both red and black. It was the only battle-field which I have ever witnessed, the only battle-field I ever trod while the battle was raging ; internecine war; the red republicans on the one hand, and the black imperialists on the other. On every side they were engaged in deadly combat, yet without any noise that I could hear, and human soldiers never fought so resolutely. I watched a couple that were fast locked in each other’s embraces, in a little sunny valley amid the chips, now at noon-day prepared to fight till the sun went 20 down, or life went out. The smaller red champion had fastened himself like a vice to his adversary’s front, and through all the tumblings on that field never for an instant ceased to gnaw at one of his feelers near the root, having already caused the other to go by the board ; while 25 the stronger black one dashed him from side to side, and, as I saw on looking nearer, had already divested him of several of his members. They fought with more perti- nacity than bull-dogs. Neither manifested the least dispo- sition to retreat. It was evident that their battle-cry 30 was Conquer or die. In the meanwhile there came along a single red ant on the hill-side of this valley, evidently full of excitement, who either had despatched Lal 5 232 WALDEN his foe, or had not yet taken part in the battle; probably the latter, for he had lost none of his limbs; whose mother had charged him® to return with his shield or upon it. Or perchance he was some Achilles, who had nourished his 5 wrath apart, and had now come to avenge or rescue his Patroclus.° He saw this unequal combat from afar, — for the blacks were nearly twice the size of the red, — he drew near with rapid pace till he stood on his guard within half an inch of the combatants; then, watching 1o his opportunity, he sprang upon the black warrior, and commenced his operations near the root of his right fore- leg, leaving the foe to select among his own members; and so there were three united for life, as if a new kind of attraction had been invented which put all other locks and 15 cements to shame. I should not have wondered by this time to find that they had their respective musical bands stationed on some eminent chip, and playing their national airs the while, to excite the slow and cheer the dying combatants. I was myself excited somewhat even as if 20 they had been men. The more you think of it, the less the difference. And certainly there is not the fight recorded in Concord history, at least, if in the history of America, that will bear a moment’s comparison with this, whether for the numbers engaged in it, or for the 25 patriotism and heroism displayed. For numbers and for carnage it was an Austerlitz or Dresden.° Concord Fight! Two killed on the patriots’ side, and Luther Blanchard® wounded! Why here every ant was a Buttrick,° — “Fire! for God’s sake fire!””— and thou- 30 sands shared the fate of Davis and Hosmer.° ‘There was not one hireling there. I have no doubt that it was a principle they fought for, as much as our ancestors, and not to avoid a three-penny tax on their tea; and the BRUTE NEIGHBORS pts) results of this battle will be as important and mem- orable to those whom it concerns as those of the battle of Bunker Hill at least. I took up the chip on which the three I have particu- larly described were struggling, carried it into my house, and placed it under a tumbler on my window-sill, in order to see the issue. Holding a microscope to the first-men- tioned red ant, I saw that, though he was assiduously gnawing at the near fore-leg of his enemy, having severed his remaining feeler, his own breast was all torn away, exposing what vitals he had there to the jaws of the black warrior, whose breastplate was apparently too thick for him to pierce; and the dark carbuncles of the sufferer’s eyes shone with ferocity such as war only could excite. They striggled half an hour longer under the tumbler, and when I looked again the black soldier had severed the heads of his foes from their bodies, and the still living heads were hanging on either side of him like ghastly trophies at his saddlebow, still apparently as firmly fastened as ever, and he was endeavoring with feeble struggles, being without feelers and with only the remnant of a leg, and I know not how many other wounds, to divest himself of them; which at length, after half an hour more, he accomplished. I raised the glass, and he went off over the window-sill in that crippled state. Whether he finally survived that combat, and spent the remainder of his days in some Hotel des Invalides,° I do not know; but I thought that his industry would not be worth much thereafter. I never learned which party was victorious, nor the cause of the war; but I felt for the rest of that day as if I had had my feelings excited and harrowed by witnessing the struggle, the ferocity and carnage, of a human battle before my door. on 30 234 WALDEN Kirby and Spence® tell us that the battles of ants have long been celebrated, and the date of them recorded, though they say that Huber® is the only modern author who appears to have witnessed them. ‘‘ Aineas Sylvius,” 5 say they, “after giving a very circumstantial account of one contested with great obstinacy by a great and small species on the trunk of a pear tree,” adds that ‘‘This action was fought in the pontificate of Eugenius the Fourth,° in the presence of Nicholas Pistoriensis, an roeminent lawyer, who related the whole history of the battle with the greatest fidelity.’ A similar engagement between great and small antsis recorded by Olaus Magnus, ° in which the small ones, being victorious, are said to have buried the bodies of their own soldiers, but left those of 15 their giant enemies a prey to the birds. This event happened previous to the expulsion of the tyrant Chris- tiern the Second® from Sweden.” The battle which I witnessed took place in the Presidency of Polk,° five years before the passage of Webster’s Fugitive-Slave 20 Bill.° Many a village Bose,° fit only to course a mud-turtle in a victualling cellar, sported his heavy quarters in the woods, without the knowledge of his master, and ineffectually smelled at old fox burrows and woodchucks’ 25 holes; led perchance by some slight cur which nimbly threaded the wood, and might still inspire a natural terror in its denizens ; — now far behind his guide, barking like a canine bull toward some small squirrel which had treed itself for scrutiny, then, cantering off, bending the bushes 30 with his weight, imagining that he is on the track of some stray member of the jerbilla° family. Once I was surprised to see a cat walking along the stony shore of the pond, for they rarely wander so far from home. BRUTE NEIGHBORS 235 The surprise was mutual. Nevertheless the most domestic cat, which has lain on a rug all her days, appears quite at home in the woods, and, by her sly and stealthy behavior, proves herself more native there than the regular inhab- itants. Once, when berrying, I met witha cat with young 5 kittens in the woods, quite wild, and they all, like their mother, had their backs up and were fiercely spitting at me. A few years before I lived in the woods there was what was called a ‘‘ winged cat” in one of the farm-houses in Lincoln nearest the pond, Mr. Gilian Baker’s. When 10 IT called to see her in June, 1842, she was gone a-hunting in the woods, as was her wont, (I am not sure whether it was a male or female, and so use the more common pronoun,) but her mistress told me that she came into the neighborhood a little more than a year before, in 15 April, and was finally taken into their house; that she was of a dark brownish-gray color, with a white spot on her throat, and white feet, and had a large bushy tail like a fox; that in the winter the fur grew thick and flatted out along her sides, forming strips ten or twelve inches long 20 by two and a half wide, and under her chin like a muff, the upper side loose, the under matted like felt, and in the spring these appendages dropped off. They gave me a pair of her “wings,” which I keep still. There is no ap- pearance of a membrane about them. Some thought it was part flying-squirrel or some other wild animal, which is not impossible, for, according to naturalists, prolific hybrids have been produced by the union of the marten and domestic cat. This would have been the right kind of cat for me to keep, if I had kept any; for why should 30 not a poet’s cat be winged as well as his horse? In the fall the loon (Colymbus glacialis) came, as usual, to moult and bathe in the pond, making the woods ring to mn 236 WALDEN with his wild laughter before I had risen. At rumor of his arrival all the Mill-dam° sportsmen are on the alert, in gigs and on foot, two by two and three by three, with patent rifles and conical balls and spy-glasses. They 5come rustling through the woods like autumn leaves, at least ten men to one loon. Some station themselves on this side of the pond, some on that, for the poor bird cannot be omnipresent; if he dive here he must come up there. But now the kind October wind rises, rustling the to leaves and rippling the surface of the water, so that no loon can be heard or seen, though his foes sweep the pond with spy-glasses, and make the woods resound with their discharges. The waves generously rise and dash angrily, taking sides with all waterfowl, and our sportsmen must 15 beat a retreat to town and shop and unfinished jobs. But they were too often successful. When I went to get a pail of water early in the morning I frequently saw this stately bird sailing out of my cove within a few rods. If I endeavored to overtake him in a boat, in order 20 to see how he would manceuvre, he would dive and be completely lost, so that I did not discover him again, sometimes, till the latter part of the day. But I was more than a match for him on the surface. He commonly went off in a rain. 25 AsI was paddling along the north shore one very calm October afternoon, for such days especially they settle on to the lakes, like the milkweed down, having looked in vain over the pond for a loon, suddenly one, sailing out from the shore toward the middle a few rods in front of 30 me, set up his wild laugh and betrayed himself. I pur- sued with a paddle and he dived, but when he came up I was nearer than before. He dived again, but I mis- calculated the direction he would take, and we were fifty — land BRUTE NEIGHBORS 237 rods apart when he came to the surface this time, for I had helped to widen the interval; and again he laughed loud and long, and with more reason than before. He manceuvred so cunningly that I could not get within half a dozen rods of him. Each time, when he came to the surface, turning his head this way and that, he coolly sur- veyed the water and the land, and apparently chose his course so that he might come up where there was the widest: expanse of water and at the greatest distance from the boat. It was surprising how quickly he made up his mind and put his resolve into execution. He led me at once to the widest part of the pond, and could not be driven from it. While he was thinking one thing in his brain, I was endeavoring to divine his thought in mine. It was a pretty game, played on the smooth sur- face of the pond, a man against a loon. Suddenly your adversary’s checker disappears beneath the board, and the problem is to place yours nearest to where his will appear again. Sometimes he would come up unexpectedly on the opposite side of me, having apparently passed directly under the boat. So long-winded was he and so unweari- able, that when he had swum farthest he would immediately plunge again, nevertheless; and then no wit could divine where in the deep pond, beneath the smooth surface, he might be speeding his way like a fish, for he had time and ability. to visit the bottom of the pond in its deepest part. It is said that loons have been caught in the New York lakes eighty feet beneath the surface, with hooks set for trout,—though Walden is deeper than that. 5 I5 How surprised must the fishes be to see this ungainly 30 visitor from another sphere speeding his way amid their schools! Yet he appeared to know his course as surely under water as on the surface, and swam much faster there, 238 WALDEN Once or twice I saw a ripple where he approached the surface, just put his head out to reconnoitre, and in- stantly dived again. I found that it was as well for me to rest on my oars and wait his reappearing as to endeavor 5 to calculate where he would rise; for again and again, when I was straining my eyes over the surface one way, I would suddenly be startled by his unearthly laugh behind me. But why, after displaying so much cunning, did he invariably betray himself the moment he came up 1o by that loud laugh? Did not his white breast enough betray him? He was indeed a silly loon, I thought. I could commonly hear the plash of the water when he came up, and so also detected him. But after an hour he seemed as fresh as ever, dived as willingly and swam 15 yet farther than at first. It was surprising to see how serenely he sailed off with unruffled breast when he came to the surface, doing all the work with his webbed feet beneath. His usual note was this demoniac laughter, yet somewhat like that of a water-fowl; but occasionally, 20 when he had balked me most successfully and come up a long way off, he uttered a long-drawn unearthly howl, probably more like that of a wolf than any bird; as when a beast puts his muzzle to the ground and deliberately howls. This was his looning, — perhaps the wildest sound 25 that is ever heard here, making the woods ring far and wide. I concluded that he laughed in derision of my efforts, confident of his own resources. Though the sky was by this time overcast, the pond was so smooth that I could see where he broke the surface when I did not 30 hear him. His white breast, the stillness of the air, and the smoothness of the water were all against him. At length, having come up fifty rods off, he uttered one of those prolonged howls, as if calling on the god of loons BRUTE NEIGHBORS 239 to aid him, and immediately there came a wind from the east and rippled the surface, and filled the whole air with misty rain, and I was impressed as if it were the prayer of the loon answered, and his god was angry with me; and so I left him disappearing far away on thes tumultuous surface. For hours, in fall days, I watched the ducks cunningly tack and veer and hold the middle of the pond, far from the sportsmen; tricks which they will have less need to practise in Louisiana bayous.° When compelled to rise 10 they would sometintes circle round and round and over the pond at a considerable height, from which they could easily see to other ponds and the river, like black motes in the sky; and, when I thought they had gone off thither long since, they would settle down by a slanting flight 15 of a quarter of a mile on to a distant part which was left free; but what beside safety they got by sailing in the middle of Walden I do not know, unless they love its water for the same reason that I do. HOUSE-WARMING In October I went a-graping to the river meadows, and loaded myself with clusters more precious for their beauty and fragrance than for food. There too I ad- mired, though I did not gather, the cranberries, small 5 waxen gems, pendants of the meadow grass, pearly and red, which the farmer plucks with an ugly rake, leaving the smooth meadow in a snarl, heedlessly measuring them _by the bushel and the dollar only, and sells the spoils of the meads to Boston and New York; destined to be ro jammed, to satisfy the taste of lovers of Nature there. So butchers rake the tongues of bison out of the prairie grass, regardless of the torn and drooping plant. The barberry’s brilliant fruit was likewise food for my eyes merely; but I collected a small store of wild apples 15for coddling, which the proprietor and travellers had overlooked. When chestnuts were ripe I laid up half a bushel for winter. It was very exciting at that season to roam the then boundless chestnut woods of Lin- coln, —they now sleep their long sleep under the rail- 20road, — with a bag on my shoulder, and a stick to open burrs with in my hand, for I did not always wait for the frost, amid the rustling of leaves and the loud re- proofs of the red squirrels and the jays, whose half-con- sumed nuts I sometimes stole, for the burrs which they 25 had selected were sure to contain sound ones. Occasionally I climbed and shook the trees. They grew also behind my 240 HOUSE-WARMING 241 house, and one large tree which almost overshadowed it, was, when in flower, a bouquet which scented the whole neighborhood, but the squirrels and the jays got most of its fruit; the last coming in flocks early in the morning and picking the nuts out of the burrs before they fell. I5 relinquished these trees to them and visited the more distant woods composed wholly of chestnut. These nuts, as far as they went, were a good substitute for bread. Many other substitutes might, perhaps, be found. Dig- ging one day for fish-worms, I discovered the ground-nut 10 (Apios tuberosa) on its string, the potato of the aborig- ines, 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 crim- pled red velvety blossom supported by the stems of other 15 plants without knowing it to be the same. Cultivation has well-nigh exterminated it. It has a sweetish taste, much like that of a frostbitten potato, and I found it better boiled than roasted. This tuber seemed like a faint promise of Nature to rear her own children and feed bd fo) _ them simply here at some future period. In these days of fatted cattle and waving grain-fields, this humble root, which was once the totem° of an Indian tribe, is quite forgotten, or known only by its flowering vine; but let wild Nature reign here once more, and the tender and 25 luxurious English grains will probably disappear before a myriad of foes, and without the care of man the crow may carry back even the last seed of corn to the great corn-field of the Indian’s God in the south-west, whence he is said to have brought it; but the now almost exter- 30 minated ground-nut will perhaps revive and flourish. in spite of frosts and wildness, prove itself indigenous, and resume its ancient importance and dignity as the diet R 242 WALDEN of the hunter tribe. Some Indian Ceres or Minerva must have been the inventor and bestower of it; and when the reign of poetry commences here, its leaves and string of nuts may be represented on our works of art. 5 Already, by the first of September, I had seen two or three small maples turned scarlet across the pond, beneath where the white stems of three aspens diverged, at the point of a promontory, next the water. Ah, many a tale their color told! And gradually from week to week 1o the character of each tree came out, and it admired itself reflected in the smooth mirror of the lake. Each morn- ing the manager of this gallery substituted some new picture, distinguished by more brilliant or harmonious coloring, for the old upon the walls. 15 The wasps came by thousands to my lodge in October, as to winter quarters, and settled on my win- dows within and on the walls overhead, sometimes deterring visitors from entering. Each morning, when they were numbed with cold, I swept some of them out, 20 but I did not trouble myself much to get rid of them; I even felt complimented by their regarding my house as a desirable shelter. They never molested me seriously, though they bedded with me; and they gradually dis- appeared, into what crevices I do not know, avoiding 25 winter and unspeakable cold. Like the wasps, before I finally went into winter quar- ters 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 ; 30 it is so much pleasanter and wholesomer to be warmed by the sun while you can be, than by artificial fire. I thus warmed myself by the still glowing embers which the summer, like a departed hunter, had left. HOUSE-—WARMING 243 When I came to build my chimney I studied masonry. My bricks being second-hand ones required to be cleaned with a trowel, so that I learned more than usual of the qualities of bricks and trowels. The mortar on them was fifty years old, and was said to be still growing harder ; s but this is one of those sayings which men love to repeat whether they are true or not. Such sayings themselves grow harder and adhere more firmly with age, and it would take many blows with a trowel to clean an old wise- acre of them. Many of the villages of Mesopotamia ro are built of second-hand bricks of a very good quality, obtained from the ruins of Babylon, and the cement on them is older and probably harder still. However that may be, I was struck by the peculiar toughness of the steel which bore so many violent blows without being worn 1s out. As my bricks had been in a chimney before, though I did not read the name of Nebuchadnezzar on them, I picked out as 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 20 shore, and also made my mortar with the white sand, from the same place. I lingered most about the fireplace, as the most vital part of the house. Indeed, I worked so deliberately, that though I commenced at the ground in the morning, a course of bricks raised a few inches above 2s the floor served for my pillow at night; yet I did not get a stiff neck for it that I remember; my stiff neck is of older date. I took a poet° to board for a -fortnight about those times, which caused me to be put to it for room. He brought his own knife, though I had two, 30 and we used to scour them by thrusting them into the earth. He shared with me the labors of cooking. I was pleased to see my work rising so square and solid by degrees, 244 WALDEN and reflected, that, if it proceeded slowly, it was calculated to endure a long time. The chimney is to some extent an independent structure, standing on the ground and rising through the house to the heavens; even after the 5 house is burned it still stands sometimes, and its impor- tance and independence are apparent. This was tow- ard the end of summer. It was now November. The north wind had already begun to cool the pond, 10 though it took many weeks of steady blowing to accom- plish it, it is so deep. When I began to have a fire at evening, before I plastered my house, the chimney car- ried smoke particularly well, because of the numerous chinks between the boards. Yet I passed some cheerful t5 evenings in that cool and airy apartment, surrounded by the rough brown boards full of knots, and rafters with the bark on high overhead. My house never pleased my eye so much after it was plastered, though I was obliged to confess that it was more comfortable. Should not every 20 apartment in which man dwells be lofty enough to create some obscurity overhead, where flickering shadows may play at evening about the rafters? These forms are more agreeable to the fancy and imagination than fresco paintings or other the most expensive furniture. I now 25 first began to inhabit my house, I may say, when I began to use it for warmth as well as shelter. I had got a couple of old fire-dogs to keep the wood from the hearth, and it did me good to see the soot form on the back of the chimney which I had built, and I poked the fire with 30 more right and more satisfaction than usual. My dwell- ing was small, and I could hardly entertain an echo in it; but it seemed larger for being a single apartment and re- mote from neighbors. All the attractions of a house were HOUSE-WARMING 245 concentrated in one room; it was kitchen, chamber, parlor, and keeping-room ; and whatever satisfaction par- ent or child, master or servant, derive from living in a house, I enjoyed it all. Cato° says, the master of family (paterfamilias) must have in his rustic villa “‘cellam 5 oleariam, vinariam, dolia multa, uti lubeat caritatem ex- pectare, et rei, et virtuti, et glorie 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 pota- ro toes, 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 15 gingerbread work, which shall still consist of only one room, a vast, rude, substantial, primitive hall, without ceiling or plastering, with bare rafters and purlins® sup- porting a sort of lower heaven over one’s head, — useful to keep off rain and snow; where the king and queen 20 posts° stand out to receive your homage, when you have done reverence to the prostrate Saturn® of an older dynasty on stepping over the sill; a cavernous house, wherein you must reach up a torch upon a pole to see the roof; where some may live in the fireplace, some in the 25 recess of a window, and some on settles, some at one end of the hall, some at another, and some aloft on rafters with the spiders, if they choose; a house which you have got into when you have opened the outside door, and the ceremony is over; where the weary traveller may wash, 30 and eat, and converse, and sleep, without further journey ; such shelter as you would be glad to reach in a tempestuous night, containing all the essentials of a house, and nothing 246 WALDEN for house-keeping ; where you can see all the treasures of the house at one view, and everything hangs upon its peg that a man should use; at once kitchen, pantry, parlor, chamber, store-house, and garret; where you can see so 5 necessary a thing as a barrel or a ladder, so convenient a thing as a cupboard, and hear the pot boil, and pay your respects to the fire that cooks your dinner and the oven, that bakes your bread, and the necessary furniture and utensils are the chief ornaments; where the washing is not ro 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 descend into the cellar, and so learn whether the ground is solid or hollow beneath you without stamping. A house whose inside is as open and manifest asa bird’s nest, 15 and you cannot go in at the front door and out at the back without seeing some of its inhabitants; where to be a guest is to be presented with the freedom of the house, and not to be carefully excluded from seven-eighths of it, shut up ina particular cell, and told to make yourself at home there, — 20 in solitary confinement. Nowadays the host does not ad- mit you to his hearth, but has got the mason to build one for yourself somewhere in his alley, and hospitality is the art of keeping you at the greatest distance. There is as much secrecy about the cooking as if he had a design 25to poison you. I am aware that I have been on many a man’s premises, and might have been legally ordered off, but Iam not:aware that I have been in many men’s houses. I might visit in my old clothes a king and queen who lived simply in such a house as I have described, if I were going 3o their way; but backing out of a modern palace will be all that I shall desire to learn, if ever Iam caught in one. It would seem as if the very language of our parlors would lose all its nerve and degenerate into parlaver® HOUSE-WARMING 247 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’ kitchen and workshop. The dinner even is only the parable of a dinner, 5 commonly. As if only the savage dwelt near enough to Nature and Truth to borrow a trope from them. How ean the scholar, who dwells away in the NorthWest Territory or the Isle of Man, tell what is parliamentary in the kitchen? Io However, only one or two of my guests were bold enough to stay and eat a hasty-pudding with me; but when they saw that crisis approaching they beat a hasty retreat rather, as if it would shake the house to its foundations. Nevertheless, it stood through a great many hasty-pud- 15 dings. - I did not plaster till it was freezing weather. I brought over some whiter and cleaner sand for this purpose from the opposite shore of the pond in a boat, a sort of convey- ance which would have tempted me to go much farther if 20 necessary. My house had in the meanwhile been shingled down to theground onevery side. In lathing I was pleased to be able to send home each nail with a single blow of the hammer, and it was my ambition to transfer the plaster from the board to the wall neatly and rapidly. I remember 25 the story of a conceited fellow, who, in fine clothes, was wont to lounge about the village once, giving advice to work- men. Venturing one day to substitute deeds for words, he turned up his cuffs, seized a plasterer’s board, and having loaded his trowel without mishap, with a compla- 30 cent look toward the lathing overhead, made a bold gesture thitherward; and straightway, to his complete discomfi- ture, received the whole contents in his ruffled bosom, I 248 WALDEN admired anew the economy and convenience of plastering, which so effectually shuts out the cold and takes a hand- some finish, and I learned the various casualties to which the plasterer is liable. I was surprised to see how thirsty 5 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 pre- vious winter made a small quantity of lime by burning the shells of the Unio fluviatilis,° which our river affords, for 1o the sake of the experiment; so that I knew where my materials came from. I might have got good limestone within a mile or two and burned it myself, if I had cared to do so. The pond had in the meanwhile skimmed over in the 15 Shadiest and shallowest coves, some days or even weeks before the general freezing. The first ice is especially interesting and perfect, being hard, dark, and transparent, and affords the best opportunity that ever offers for exam- ining the bottom where it is shallow; for you can lie at 20 your length on ice only an inch thick, like a skater insect on the surface of the water, and study the bottom at your leisure, only two or three inches distant, like a picture be- hind a glass, and the water is necessarily always smooth then. There are many furrows in the sand where some 25 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 30make. But the ice itself is the object of most interest, though you must improve the earliest opportunity to study it, If you examine it closely the morning after it HOUSE-WARMING 249 freezes, you find that the greater part of the bubbles, which at first appeared to be within it, are against its under surface, and that more are continually rising from the bottom; while the ice is as yet comparatively solid and dark, that is, you see the water through it. These 5 bubbles are from an eightieth to an eighth of an inch in diameter, very clear and beautiful, and you see your face reflected in them through the ice. There may be thirty or forty of them to a square inch. There are also already within the ice narrow oblong perpendicular bubbles about half an inch long, sharp cones with the apex upward; or oftener, if the ice is quite fresh, minute spherical bubbles one directly above another, like a string of beads. But these within the ice are not so numerous nor obvious as those beneath. I sometimes used to cast stones to try the strength of the ice, and those which broke through carried in air with them, which formed very large and con- spicuous white bubbles beneath. One day when I came to the same place forty-eight hours afterward, I found that those large bubbles were still perfect, though an inch more of ice had formed, as I could see distinctly by the seam in the edge of a cake. But as the last two days had been very warm, like an Indian summer, the ice was not now transparent, showing the dark green color of the water, and the bottom, but opaque and whitish or gray, and though twice as thick was hardly stronger than before, for the air bubbles had greatly expanded under this heat and run together, and lost their regularity ; they were no longer one directly over another, but often like silvery coins poured from a bag, one overlapping another, or in thin flakes, as if occupying slight cleavages. The beauty of the ice was gone, and it was too late to study the bottom. Being curious to know what position my great bubbles | ° 30 250 WALDEN occupied with regard to the new ice, I broke out a cake containing a middling sized one, and turned it bottom upward. The new ice had formed around and under the bubble, so that it was included between the two ices. It 5 was wholly in the lower ice, but close against the upper, and was flattish, or perhaps slightly lenticular, with a rounded edge, a quarter of an inch deep by four inches in diameter; and I was surprised to find that directly under the bubble‘the ice was melted with great regularity in the ro form of a saucer reversed, to the height of five-eighths of an inch in the middle, leaving a thin partition there between the water and the bubble, hardly an eighth of an inch thick; and in many places the small bubbles in this partition had burst out downward, and probably there was 15 no ice at all under the largest bubbles, which were a foot in diameter. I inferred that the infinite number of minute bubbles which I had first seen against the under surface of the ice were now frozen in likewise, and that each, in its degree, had operated like a burning glass on the ice beneath 20 to melt and rot it. These are the little air-guns which contribute to make the ice crack and whoop. At length the winter set in in good earnest, just as I had finished plastering, and the wind began to howl around the house as if it had not had permission to do so till then. 2s Night after night the geese came lumbering in in the dark with a clangor and a whistling of wings, even after the ground was covered with snow, some to alight in Walden, and some flying low over the woods toward Fair Haven, bound for Mexico. Several times, when returning from 30 the village at ten or eleven o’clock at night, I heard the tread of a flock of geese, or else ducks, on the dry leaves in the woods by a pond-hole behind my dwelling, where they HOUSE-WARMING 251 had come up to feed, and the faint honk or quack of their leader as they hurried off. In 1845 Walden froze entirely over for the first time on the night of the 22d of December, Flint’s and other shallower ponds and the river having been frozen ten days or more; in 746, the 16th; in 749, 5 about the 31st; and in 750, about the 27th of December ; in 752, the 5th of January; in ’53, the 31st of December. The snow had already covered the ground since the 25th of November, and surrounded me suddenly with the scenery of winter. I withdrew vet farther into my shell, 10 and endeavored to keep a bright fire both within my house and within my breast. My employment out of doors now was to collect the dead wood in the forest, bringing it in my hands or on my shoulders, or sometimes trailing a dead pine tree under each arm to my shed. An old forest fence rs which had seen its best days was a great haul for me. I sacrificed it to Vulcan,° for it was past serving the god Terminus.° How much more interesting an event is that man’s supper who has just been forth in the snow to hunt, nay, you might say, steal, the fuel to cook it with! His 20 bread and meat are sweet. There are enough fagots and waste food of all kinds in the forests of most of our towns to support many fires, but which at present warm none, and, some think, hinder the growth of the young wood. There was also the drift-wood of the pond. In the course 25 of the summer I had discovered a raft of pitch-pine logs with the bark on, pinned together by the Irish when the railroad was built. This I hauled up partly on the shore. After soaking two years and then lying high six months it was perfectly sound, waterlogged past drying. I amused 30 myself one winter day with sliding this piecemeal across the pond, nearly half a mile, skating behind with one end of a log fifteen feet long on my shoulder, and the other 252 WALDEN on the ice; or I tied several logs together with a birch withe, and then, with a longer birch or alder which had a hook at the end, dragged them across. Though completely waterlogged and almost as heavy as lead, they not only 5 burned long, but made a very hot fire; nay, I thought that they burned better for the soaking, as if the pitch, being confined by the water, burned longer as in a lamp. Gilpin,° in his account of: the forest borders of England, says that “the encroachments of trespassers, and the ro houses and fences thus raised on the borders of the forest,” were “considered as great nuisances by the old forest law, and were severely punished under the name of purpres- tures, as tending ad terrorem ferarum — ad nocumentum forestae, etc.,” to the frightening of the game and the detri- 15 ment of the forest. But I was interested in the preserva- tion of the venison and the vert° more than the hunters or wood-choppers, and as much as though I had been the Lord Walden himself; and if any part was burned, though I burned it myself by accident, I grieved with a grief that 20 lasted longer and was more inconsolable than that of the proprietors; nay, I grieved when it was cut down by the proprietors themselves. I would that our farmers when they cut down a forest felt some of that awe which the old Romans did when they came to thin, or let in the light to, 25 a consecrated grove (lucum conlucare), that is, would be- lieve that it is sacred to some god. The Roman made an expiatory offering, and prayed, Whatever god or goddess thou art to whom this grove is sacred, be propitious to me, my family, and children, ete. 30 ©=It is remarkable what a value is still put upon wood even in this age and in this new country, a value more permanent and universal than that of gold. After all our discoveries and inventions no man will go by a pile of wood. HOUSE-—WARMING 253 It is as precious to us as it was to our Saxon and Norman ancestors. If they made their bows of it, we make our gun-stocks of it. Michaux,° more than thirty years ago, says that the price of wood for fuel in New York and Philadelphia “‘nearly equals, and sometimes exceeds, that 5 of the best woods in Paris, though this immense capital an- nually requires more than three hundred thousand cords, and is surrounded to the distance of three hundred miles by cultivated plains.” In this town the price of wood rises almost steadily, and the only question is, how much higher it is to be this year than it was the last. Mechanics and tradesmen who come in person to the forest on no other errand, are sure to attend the wood auction, and even pay a high price for the privilege of gleaning after the wood-chopper. It is now many years that men have re- sorted to the forest for fuel and the materials of the arts; the New Englander and the New Hollander,° the Parisian and the Celt, the farmer and Robinhood,° Goody Blake and Harry Gill,° in most parts of the world the prince and the peasant, the scholar and the savage, equally require still a few sticks from the forest to warm them and cook their food. Neither could I do without them. Every man looks at his wood-pile with a kind of affec- tion. I love to have mine before my window, and the more chips the better to remind me of my pleasing work. I had an old axe which nobody claimed, with which by spells in winter days, on the sunny side of the house, I played about the stumps which I had got out of my bean- field. As my driver prophesied when I was ploughing, they warmed me twice, onte while I was splitting them, and again when they were on the fire, so that no fuel could give out more heat. As for the axe, I was advised to get the village blacksmith to “jump” it; but I jumped him, and, bd ° 30 254 WALDEN putting a hickory helve from the woods into it, made it do. If it was dull, it was at least hung true. A few pieces of fat pine were a great treasure. It is interesting to remember how much of this food for fire 5 is still concealed in the bowels of the earth. In previous years I have often gone ‘“‘prospecting”’ over some bare hillside, where a pitch-pine wood had formerly stood, and got out the fat pine roots. They are almost indestructible. Stumps thirty or forty years old, at least, will still be sound 10 at the core, though the sap-wood has all become vegetable mould, as appears by the scales of the thick bark forming a ring level with the earth four or five inches distant from the heart. With axe and shovel you explore this mine, and follow the marrowy store, yellow as beef tallow, 15 or as if you had struck on a vein of gold, deep into the earth. But commonly I kindled my fire with the dry leaves of the forest, which I had stored up in my shed before the snow came. Green hickory finely split makes the wood-chopper’s kindlings, when he has a camp in the 20 woods. Once in a while I got a little of this. When the villagers were lighting their fires beyond the horizon, I too gave notice to the various wild inhabitants of Walden vale, by a smoky streamer from my chimney, that I was awake. — 25 Light-winged Smoke,° Icarian bird, Melting thy pinions in thy upward flight, Lark without song, and messenger of dawn, Circling above the hamlets as thy nest; Or else, departing dream, and shadowy form 30 Of midnight vision, gathering up thy skirts; By night star-veiling, and by day Darkening the light and blotting out the sun; Go thou my incense upward from this hearth, And ask the gods to pardon this clear flame. HOUSE-—WARMING 255 Hard green wood just cut, though I used but little of that, answered my purpose better than any other. I sometimes left a good fire when I went to take a walk in the winter afternoon; and when I returned, three or four hours afterward, it would be still alive and glowing. Mys house was not empty though I was gone. It was as if I had left a cheerful housekeeper behind. It was I and Fire that lived there; and commonly my housekeeper proved trustworthy. One day, however, as I was splitting wood, I thought that I would just look in at the window and see if zo the house was not on fire; it was the only time I remember to have been particularly anxious on this score ; so I looked and saw that a spark had caught my bed, and I went in and extinguished it when it had burned a place as big as my hand. But my house occupied so sunny and sheltered a 15 position, and its roof was so low, that I could afford to let the fire go out in the middle of almost any winter day. The moles nested in my cellar, nibbling every third potato, and making a snug bed even there of some hair left after plastering and of brown paper; for even the 20 wildest animals love comfort and warmth as well as man, and they survive the winter only because they are so care- ful to secure them. Some of my friends spoke as if I was coming to the woods on purpose to freeze myself. The animal merely makes a bed, which he warms with his own 25 body in a sheltered place; but man, having discovered fire, boxes up some air in a spacious apartment, and warms that, instead of robbing himself ,makes that his bed,in which he can move about divested of more cumbrous clothing, maintain a kind of summer in the midst of winter, and by 30 means of windows, even admit the light, and with a lamp lengthen out the day. Thus he goes a step or two beyond instinct, and saves a little time for the fine arts. Though, 256 WALDEN 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 facul- ties and prolonged my life. But the most luxuriously 5 housed has little to boast of in this respect, nor need we trouble ourselves to speculate how the human race may be at last destroyed. It would be easy to cut their threads any time with a little sharper blast from the north. We go on dating from Cold Fridays and Great Snows; ro but a little colder Friday, or greater snow, would put a period to man’s existence on the globe. The next winter I used a small cooking-stove for economy, since I did not own the forest; but it did not keep fire so well as the open fireplace. Cooking was then, 15 for the most part, no longer a poetic, but merely a chemic process. It will soon be forgotten, in these days of stoves, that we used to roast potatoes in the ashes, after the Indian fashion. The stove not only took up room and scented the house, but it concealed the fire, and I felt as if I had lost 20acompanion. You can always see a face in the fire. The laborer, looking into it at evening, purifies his thoughts of the dross and earthiness which they have accumulated during the day. But I could no longer sit and look into the fire, and the pertinent words of a poet recurred to me 25 with new force : — “Never, bright flame, may be denied to me Thy dear, life imaging, close sympathy. What but my hopes shot upward e’er so bright ? What but my fortunes sunk so low in night? 30 Why art thou banished from our hearth and hall, Thou who are welcomed and beloved by all? Was thy existence then too fanciful For our life’s common light, who are so dull ? HOUSE-WARMING 257 Did thy bright gleam mysterious converse hold With our congenial souls? secrets too bold? Well, we are safe and strong, for now we sit Beside a hearth where no dim shadows flit, Where nothing cheers nor saddens, but a fire Warms feet and hands — nor does to more aspire; By whose compact utilitarian heap The present may sit down and go to sleep, Nor fear the ghosts who from the dim past walked, And with us by the unequal light of the old wood fire talked.” Io FORMER INHABITANTS ; AND WINTER VISITORS I WEATHERED some merry snow-storms, and spent some cheerful winter evenings by my fireside, while the snow whirled wildly without, and even the hooting of the owl was hushed. For many weeks I met no one in my 5 walks but those who came occasionally to cut wood and sled it to the village. The elements, however, abetted me in making a path through the deepest snow in the woods, for when I had once gone through the wind blew the oak leaves into my tracks, where they lodged, and by absorbing ro the rays of the sun melted the snow, and so not only made a dry bed for my feet, but in the night their dark line was my guide. For human society I was obliged to conjure up the former occupants of these woods. Within the mem- ory of many of my townsmen the road near which my house 15 stands resounded with the laugh and gossip of inhabitants, and the woods which border it were notched and dotted here and there with their little gardens and dwellings, though it was then much more shut in the forest than now. In some places, within my own remembrance, the pines 20 would scrape both sides of a chaise at once, and women and children who were compelled to go this way to Lincoln alone and on foot did it with fear, and-often ran a good part of the distance. Though mainly but a humble route to neigh- boring villages, or for the woodman’s team, it once amused 2s the traveller more than now by its variety, and lingered 258 FORMER INHABITANTS 259 longer in hismemory. Where now firm open fields stretch from the village to the woods, it then ran through a maple swamp on a foundation of logs, the remnants of which, doubtless, still underlie the present dusty highway, from the Stratten, now the Alms House Farm, to Brister’s Hill. 5 East of my bean-field, across the road, lived Cato Ingraham, slave of Duncan Ingraham, Esquire, gentle- man of Concord village, who built his slave a house, and gave him permission to live in Walden Woods ; — Cato, not Uticensis, but Concordiensis. Some say that he ro was a Guinea Negro. There are a few who remember his little patch among the walnuts, which he let grow up till he should be old and need them; but a younger and whiter speculator got them at last. Hetoo, however, occu- pies an equally narrow house at present. Cato’s half- obliterated cellar hole still remains, though known to few, being concealed from the traveller by a fringe of pines. It is now filled with the smooth sumach (Rhus glabra), and one of the earliest species of golden-rod (Solidago stricta) grows there luxuriantly. 20 Here, by the very corner of my field, still nearer to town, Zilpha,° a colored woman, had her little house, where she spun linen for the townsfolk, making the Walden - Woods ring with her shrill singing, for she had a loud and notable voice. At length, in the war of 1812, her dwelling 25 was set on fire by English soldiers, prisoners on parole, when she was away, and her cat and dog and hens were all burned up together. She led a hard life, and somewhat inhumane. One old frequenter of these woods remembers, that as he passed her house one noon he heard her muttering to 30 herself over her gurgling pot, — ‘‘ Ye are all bones, bones !” I have seen bricks amid the oak copse there. Down the road, on the right hand, on Brister’s Hill, Lan! 5 260 WALDEN lived Brister Freeman,° “a handy Negro,” slave of Squire Cummings once, — there where grow still the apple-trees which Brister planted and tended; large old trees now, but their fruit still wild and ciderish to my taste. Not 5 long since I read his epitaph in the old Lincoln burying- ground, a little on one side, near the unmarked graves of some British grenadiers who fell in the retreat from Con- cord, — where he is styled “Sippio Brister,’”? — Scipio Africanus he had some title to be called, — ‘‘a man of 10 color,”’ as if he were discolored. It also told me, with staring emphasis, when he died ; which was but an indirect way of informing me that he ever lived. With him dwelt Fenda, his hospitable wife, who told fortunes, yet pleas- antly, — large, round, and black, blacker than any of the 15 children of night, such a dusky orb as never rose on Concord before or since. Farther down the hill, on the left, on the old road in the woods, are marks of some homestead of the Stratten family ; whose orchard once covered all the slope of Brister’s Hill, 20 but was long since killed out by pitch-pines, excepting a few stumps, whose old roots furnish still the wild stocks of many a thrifty village tree. Nearer yet to town, you come to Breed’s location,°® on the other side of the way, just on the edge of the wood; 25 ground famous for the pranks of a demon not distinctly named in old mythology, who has acted a prominent and astounding part in our New England life, and deserves, as much as any mythological character, to have his biography written one day; who first comes in the guise of a friend or 30 hired man, and then robs and murders the whole family, — New England Rum. But history must not yet tell the tragedies enacted here; let time intervene in some meas- ure to assuage and lend an azure tint to them. Here the FORMER INHABITANTS 261 most indistinct and dubious tradition says that once a tavern stood; the well the same, which tempered the traveller’s beverage and refreshed his steed. Here then men saluted one another, and heard and told the news, and went their ways again. = Breed’s hut was standing only a dozen years ago, though it had long been unoccupied. It was about the size of mine. It was set on fire by mischievous boys, one Election night, if I do not mistake. I lived on the edge of the village then, and had just lost myself over ro Davenant’s Gondibert,° that winter that I labored with a lethargy, — which, by the way, I never knew whether to regard as a family complaint, having an uncle who goes to sleep shaving himself, and is obliged to sprout potatoes in a cellar Sundays, in order to keep awake and 15 keep the Sabbath, or as the consequence of my attempt to read Chalmers’ collection® of English poetry without skip- ping. It fairly overcame my Nervii.° I had just sunk my head on this when the bells rung fire, and in hot haste the engines rolled that way, led by a straggling troop of 20 men and boys, and I among the foremost, for I had leaped the brook. We thought it was far south over the woods, — we who had run to fires before, — barn, shop, or dwelling-house, or all together. “It’s Baker’s barn,” cried one. ‘‘It is the Codman Place,” affirmed another. 25 And then fresh sparks went up above the wood, as if the roof fell in, and we all shouted, “Concord to the rescue!” Wagons shot past with furious speed and crushing loads, bearing perchance, among the rest, the agent of the Insurance Company, who was bound to go, 30 however far; and ever and anon the engine bell tinkled behind, more slow and sure, and rearmost of all, as it was afterward whispered, came they who set the fire and gave 262 WALDEN the alarm. Thus we kept on like true idealists, rejecting the evidence of our senses, until at a turn in the road we heard the crackling and actually felt the heat of the fire from over the wall, and realized, alas! that we were there. 5 The very nearness of the fire but cooled our ardor. At first we thought to throw a frog-pond on to it: but con- cluded to let it burn, it was so far gone and so worthless. So we stood round our engine, jostled one another, ex- pressed our sentiments through speaking trumpets, or in ro lower tone referred to the great conflagrations which the world has witnessed, including Bascom’s shop, and, between ourselves, we thought that, were we there in season with our “tub,” and a full frog-pond by, we could turn that threatened last and universal one into another 15 flood. We finally retreated without doing any mischief, —returned to sleep and Gondibert. But as for Gondi- bert I would except that passage in the preface about wit being the soul’s powder, — “‘but most of mankind are strangers to wit, as Indians are to powder.” 20 It chanced that I walked that way across the fields the following night, about the same hour, and _hear- ing a low moaning at this spot, I drew near in the dark, and discovered the only survivor of the family that I know, the heir of both its virtues and its vices, who alone 25 was interested in this burning, lying on his stomach and looking over the cellar wall at the stillsmouldering cinders beneath, muttering to himself, as is his wont. He had been working far off in the river meadows all day, and had improved the first moments that he could call his 30 own to visit the home of his fathers and his youth. He gazed into the cellar from all sides and points of view by turns, always lying down to it, as if there was some treasure, which he remembered, concealed between FORMER INHABITANTS 2638 the stones, where there was absolutely nothing but a heap of bricks and ashes. The house being gone, he looked at what there was left. He was soothed by the sympathy which my mere presence implied, and showed me, as well as the darkness permitted, where 5 the well was covered up; which, thank Heaven, could never be burned; and he groped long about the wall to find the well-sweep which his father had cut and mounted, feeling for the iron hook or staple by which a burden had been fastened to the heavy end, — all that 10 he could now cling to, — to convince me that it was no common “‘rider.”’ I felt it, and still remark it almost daily in my walks, for by it hangs the history of a family. Once more, on the left, where are seen the well and lilac bushes by the wall, in the now open field, lived 15 Nutting and Le Grosse. But to return toward Lincoln. Farther in the woods than any of these, where the road approaches nearest to the pond, Wyman the potter squatted, and furnished his townsmen with earthern ware, and left descendants to succeed him. Neither 20 were they rich in worldly goods, holding the land by sufferance while they lived; and there often the sheriff came in vain to collect the taxes, and ‘‘attached a chip,” for form’s sake, as I have read in his accounts, there being nothing else that he could lay his hands on. One 25 day in midsummer, when I was hoeing, a man who was carrying a load of pottery to market stopped his horse against my field and inquired concerning Wyman the younger. He had long ago bought a potter’s wheel of him, and wished to know what had become of him. I had 30 read of the potter’s clay and wheel in Scripture, but it had never occurred to me that the pots we use were not such as had come down unbroken from those days, or grown 264 WALDEN on trees like gourds somewhere, and I was pleased to hear that so fictile an art was ever practised in my neigh- borhood. . The last inhabitant of these woods before me was 5 an Irishman, Hugh Quoil (if I have spelt his name with coil? enough), who occupied Wyman’s tenement, — Col. Quoil, he was called. Rumor said that he had been a soldier at Waterloo. If he had lived I should have made him fight his battles over again. His trade here was that 10 of aditcher. Napoleon went to St. Helena®; Quoil came to Walden Woods. All I know of him is tragic. He was a man of manners, like one who had seen the world, and was capable of more civil speech than you could well attend to. He wore a great coat in midsummer, 15 being affected with the trembling delirium, and _ his face was the color of carmine. He died in the road at the foot of Brister’s Hill shortly after I came to the woods, so that I have not remembered him as a neighbor. _Before his house was pulled down, when his comrades 20 avoided it as ‘‘an unlucky castle,” I visited it. There lay his old clothes curled up by use, as if they were him- self, upon his raised plank bed. His pipe lay broken on the hearth, instead of a bowl broken at the fountain.° The last could never have been the symbol of his death, 25for he confessed to me that though he had heard of Brister’s Spring, he had never seen it; and soiled cards, kings of diamonds, spades, and hearts, were scattered over the floor. One black chicken which the adminis- trator could not catch, black as night and as silent, 3onot even croaking, awaiting Reynard,° still went to roost in the next apartment. In the rear there was the dim outline of a garden, which had been planted but had never received its first hoeing, owing to those terrible FORMER INHABITANTS 265 shaking fits, though it was now harvest time. It was overrun with Roman wormwood and beggar-ticks, which last stuck to my clothes for all fruit. The skin of a wood- chuck was freshly stretched upon the back of the house, a trophy of his last Waterloo; but no warm cap or mittens 5 would he want more. Now only a dent in the earth marks the site of these. dwellings, with buried cellar stones, and strawberries, raspberries, thimble-berries, hazel-bushes, and sumachs growing in the sunny sward there; some pitch-pine or gnarled oak occupies what was the chimney nook, and a sweet-scented black-birch, perhaps, waves where the door-stone was. Sometimes the well dent is visible, where once a spring oozed; now dry and tearless grass; or it was covered deep, — not to be discovered till some late day, — with a flat stone under the sod, when the last of the race departed. What a sorrowful act must that be, — the covering up of wells! coincident with the opening of wells of tears. These cellar dents, like deserted fox burrows, old holes, are all that is left where once were 20 the stir and bustle of human life, and “fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute,” ° in some form and dialect or other were by turns discussed. But all I can learn of their conclusions amounts to just this, that “Cato and Brister pulled wool;” which is about as edifying as the 25 history of more famous schools of philosophy. Still grows the vivacious lilac a generation after the door and lintel and the sill are gone, unfolding its sweet- scented flowers each spring, to be plucked by the musing traveller; planted and tended once by children’s hands, 30 in front-yard plots, — now standing by wall-sides in retired pastures, and giving place to new-rising forests ; — the last of that stirp, sole survivor of that family. Little Lal ° 5 266 © WALDEN did the dusky children think that the puny slip with its two eyes only, which they stuck in the ground in the shadow of the house and daily watered, would root itself so, and outlive them, and house itself in the rear that shaded 5it, and grown man’s garden and orchard, and tell their story faintly to the lone wanderer a half century after they had grown up and died, — blossoming as fair, and smelling as sweet, as in that first spring. I mark its still tender, civil, cheerful, lilac colors. 10 But this small village, germ of something more, why did it fail while Concord keeps its ground? Were there no natural advantages, — no water privileges,° forsooth ? Ay, the deep Walden Pond and cool. Brister’s Spring, — privilege to drink long and healthy draughts at these, rs all unimproved by these men but to dilute their glass. They were universally a thirsty race. Might not the basket, stable-broom, mat-making, corn-parching, linen- spinning, and pottery business have thrived here, making the wilderness to blossom like the rose,° and a numerous 20 posterity have inherited the land of their fathers? The sterile soil would at least have been proof against a low- land degeneracy. Alas! how little does the memory of these human inhabitants enhance the beauty fo the landscape! Again, perhaps, Nature will try, with me 25 for a first settler, and my house raised last spring to be the oldest in the hamlet. I am not aware that any man has ever built on the spot which I occupy. Deliver me from a city built on the site of a more ancient city, whose materials are 3oTuins, whose gardens cemeteries. The soil is blanched and accursed there, and before that becomes necessary the earth itself will be destroyed. With such remi- niscences I repeopled the woods and lulled myself asleep. FORMER INHABITANTS 267 At this season I seldom had a visitor. When the snow lay deepest no wanderer ventured near my house for a week or fortnight at a time, but there I lived as snug as a meadow mouse, or as cattle and poultry which are said to have survived for a long time buried in drifts, even 5 without food; or like that early settler’s family in the town of Sutton, in this state, whose cottage was com- pletely covered by the great snow of 1717 when he was absent, and an Indian found it only by the hole which the chimney’s breath made in the drift, and so relieved the ro family. But no friendly Indian concerned himself about me; nor needed he, for the master of the house was at home. The Great Snow! How cheerful it is to hear of! When the farmers could not get to the woods and swamps with their teams, and were obliged to cut down 15 the shade trees before their houses, and when the crust was harder cut off the trees in the swamps ten feet from the ground, as it appeared the next spring. | In the deepest snows, the path which I used from the highway to my house, about half a mile long, might have 20 been represented by a meandering dotted line, with wide intervals between the dots. For a week of even weather I took exactly the same number of steps, and of the same length, coming and going, stepping deliberately and with the precision of a pair of dividers in my own deep 25 tracks, — to such routine the winter reduces us, — yet often they were filled with heaven’s own blue. But no weather interfered fatally with my walks, or rather my going abroad, for I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment 30 with a beech-tree, or a yellow-birch, or an old acquaint- _ ance among the pines; when the ice and snow causing their limbs to droop, and so sharpening their tops, had 268 WALDEN changed the pines into fir-trees; wading to the tops of the highest hills when the snow was nearly two feet deep on a level, and shaking down another snow-storm on my head at every step; or sometimes creeping and 5 floundering thither on my hands and knees, when the hunters had gone into winter quarters. One afternoon I amused myself by watching a barred owl (Strix nebu- losa) sitting on one of the lower dead limbs of a white- pine, close to the trunk, in broad daylight, I standing ro within a rod of him. He could hear me when I moved and cronched the snow with my feet, but could not plainly see me. When I made most noise he would stretch out his neck, and erect his neck feathers, and open his eyes wide; but their lids soon fell, and he began to 15nod. I too felt a slumberous influence after watching him half an hour, as he sat thus with his eyes half open, like a cat, winged brother of the cat. There was only a narrow slit left between their lids, by which he preserved a peninsular relation to me; thus, with half-shut eyes, 20 looking out from the land of dreams, and endeavoring to realize me, vague object or mote that interrupted his visions. At length, on some louder noise or my nearer approach, he would grow uneasy and sluggishly turn about on his perch, as if impatient at having his dreams dis- 25 turbed; and when he launched himself off and flapped — through the pines, spreading his wings to unexpected breadth, I could not hear the slightest sound from them. Thus, guided amid the pine boughs rather by a delicate sense of their neighborhood than by sight, feeling his 30 twilight way as it were with his sensitive pinions, he found a new perch, where he might in peace await the dawning of his day. As I walked over the long causeway made for the FORMER INHABITANTS 269 railroad through the meadows, I encountered many a blustering and nipping wind, for nowhere has it freer play; and when the frost had smitten me on one cheek, heathen as I was, I turned to it the other also.° Nor was it much better by the carriage road from Brister’s 5 Hill. For I came to town still, like a friendly Indian, when the contents of the broad open fields were all piled up between the walls of the Walden road, and half an hour sufficed to obliterate the tracks of the last traveller. And when I returned new drifts would have formed, through 10 which I floundered, where the busy north-west wind had been depositing the powdery snow round a sharp angle in the road, and not a rabbit’s track, nor even the fine print, the small type, of a meadow mouse was to be seen. Yet I rarely failed to find, even in mid-winter, rs5 some warm and springy swamp where the grass and the skunk-cabbage still put forth with perennial verdure, and some hardier bird occasionally awaited the return of spring. Sometimes, notwithstanding the snow, when I returned 20 from my walk at evening I crossed the deep tracks of a wood-chopper leading from my door, and found his pile of whittlings on the hearth, and my house filled with the odor of his pipe. Or on a Sunday afternoon, if I chanced to be at home, I heard the cronching of the snow made by 2s the step of a long-headed farmer, who from far through the woods sought my house, to have a social “crack”’°; one of the few of his vocation who are ‘‘men on their farms”; who donned a frock instead of a professor’s gown, and is as ready to extract the moral out of church 30 or state as to haul a load of manure from his barn-yard. We talked of rude and simple times, when men sat about large fires in cold bracing weather, with clear heads; and 270 WALDEN when other dessert failed, we tried our teeth on many a nut which wise squirrels have long since abandoned, for those which have the thickest shells are commonly empty. The one who came from farthest to my lodge, through 5 deepest snows and most dismal tempests, was a poet.° A farmer, a hunter, a soldier, a reporter, even a philoso- pher, may be daunted; but nothing can deter a poet, for he is actuated by pure love. Who can predict his comings and goings? His business calls him out at all ro hours, even when doctors sleep. We made that small house ring with boisterous mirth and resound with the murmur of much sober talk, making amends then to Walden vale for the long silences. Broadway was still and deserted in comparison. At suitable intervals there 15 were regular salutes of laughter, which might have been referred indifferently to the last uttered or the forth- coming jest. We made many a “‘bran new” theory of life over a thin dish of gruel, which combined the ad- vantages of conviviality with the clear-headedness which 20 philosophy requires. I should not forget that during my last winter at the pond there was another welcome visitor,° who at one time came through the village, through snow and rain and darkness, till he saw my lamp through the trees, and 25 shared with me some long winter evenings. One of the last of the philosophers, — Connecticut gave him to the world, — he peddled first her wares, afterwards, as he declares, his brains. These he peddles still, prompting God and disgracing man, bearing for fruit his brain only, 30 like the nut its kernel. I think that he must be the man of the most faith of any alive. His words and attitude al- ways suppose a better state of things than other men are acquainted with, and he will be the last man to be disap- FORMER INHABITANTS Bik pointed as the ages revolve. He has no venture in the present. But though comparatively disregarded now, when his day comes, laws unsuspected by most will take effect, and masters of families and rulers will come to him for advice. — 5 “How blind that cannot see serenity !”’ A true friend of man; almost the only friend of human progress. An Old Mortality,° say rather an Immortality, with unwearied patience and faith making plain the image engraven in men’s bodies, the God of whom they are but ro defaced and leaning monuments. With his hospitable intellect he embraces children, beggars, insane, and scholars, and entertains the thought of all, adding to it commonly some breadth and elegance. I think that he should keep a caravansary on the world’s highway, where philosophers 15 of all nations might put up, and on his sign should be printed, “‘Entertainment for man, but not for his beast. Enter ye that have leisure and a quiet mind, who earnestly seek the right road.” He is perhaps the sanest man and has the fewest crotchets of any I chance to know; the same 20 yesterday and to-morrow. Of yore we had sauntered and talked, and effectually put the world behind us; for he was pledged to no institution in it, freeborn, ingenwus.° Whichever way we turned, it seemed that the heavens and the earth had met together, since he enhanced the 25 beauty of the landscape. A blue-robed man, whose fittest roof is the overarching sky which reflects his serenity. I do not see how he can ever die; Nature cannot spare him. Having each some shingles of thought well dried, we sat and whittled them, trying our knives, and admiring 30 the clear yellowish grain of the pumpkin pine. We waded so gently and reverently, or we pulled together so 272 WALDEN smoothly, that the fishes of thought were not scared from the stream, nor feared any angler on the bank, but came and went grandly, like the clouds which float through the western sky, and the mother-o’-pearl flocks which some- 5 times form and dissolve there. There we worked, revising mythology, rounding a fable here and there, and building castles in the air for which earth offered no worthy foun- dation. Great Looker! Great Expecter! to converse with whom was a New England Night’s Entertainment. ro Ah! such discourse we had, hermit and philosopher, and the old settler I have spoken of, — we three, — it ex- panded and racked my little house; I should not dare to say how many pounds’ weight there was above the atmos- pheric pressure on every circular inch; it opened its seams 15 so that they had to be calked with much dulness thereafter to stop the constant leak;— but I had enough of that kind of oakum already picked. There was one other with whom I had “‘solid seasons,’ long to be remembered, at his house in the village, and 20 who looked in upon me from time to time; but I had no more for society there. There too, as everywhere, I sometimes expected the Visitor who never comes. The Vishnu Purana® says, “The house-holder is to remain at eventide in his court- 25 yard as long as it takes to milk a cow, or longer if he pleases, to await the arrival of aguest.”’ I often performed this duty of hospitality, waited long enough to milk a whole herd of cows, but did not see the man approaching from the town. , WINTER ANIMALS WHEN the ponds were firmly frozen, they afforded not only new and shorter routes to many points, but new views from their surfaces of the familiar landscape around them. When I crossed Flint’s Pond, after it was covered with snow, though I had often paddled about and skated over it, 5 it was so unexpectedly wide and so strange that I could think of nothing but Baffin’s Bay. The Lincoln hills rose up around me at the extremity of a snowy plain, in which I did not remember to have stood before; and the fisher- men, ‘at an indeterminable distance over the ice, moving 10 slowly about with their wolfish dogs, passed for sealers, or Esquimaux, or in misty weather loomed like fabulous creatures, and I did not know whether they were giants or pygmies. I took this course when I went to lecture in Lincoln in the evening, travelling in no road and passing no house between my own hut and the lecture room. In Goose Pond, which lay in my way, a colony of musk- rats dwelt, and raised their cabins high above the ice, though none could be seen abroad when I crossed it. Walden, being like the rest usually bare of snow, or with 20 only shallow and interrupted drifts on it, was my yard, where I could walk freely when the snow was nearly two feet deep on a level elsewhere and the villagers were con- fined to their streets. There, far from the village street, and except at very long intervals, from the jingle of sleigh- 25 bells, I slid and skated,as in avast moose-yard well trodden, T 273 H on 274 WALDEN overhung by oak woods and solemn pines bent down with snow or bristling with icicles. For sounds in winter nights, and often in winter days, I heard the forlorn but melodious note of a hooting owl 5 indefinitely far; such a sound as the frozen earth would yield if struck with a suitable plectrum, the very lingua vernacula of Walden Wood, and quite familiar to me at last, though I never saw the bird while it was making it. I- seldom opened my door in a winter evening without hearing 101t; Hoo hoo hoo, hoorer hoo, sounded sonorously, and the first three syllables accented somewhat like how der-do; or sometimes hoo hoo only. One night in the beginning of winter, before the pond froze over, about nine o’clock, I was startled by the loud honking of a goose, and, stepping 15 to the door, heard the sound of their wings like a tempest in the woods as they flew low over my house. They passed over the pond toward Fair Haven, seemingly deterred from settling by my light, their commodore honking all the while with a regular beat. Suddenly an unmistakable 20 cat-owl from very near me, with the most harsh and tre- mendous voice I ever heard from any inhabitant of the woods, responded at regular intervals to the goose, as if determined to expose and disgrace this intruder from Hudson’s Bay, by exhibiting a greater compass and volume 25 of voice in a native, and boo-hoo him out of Concord hori- zon. What do you mean by alarming the citadel at this time of night consecrated to me? Do you think I am ever caught napping at such an hour, and that I have not got lungs and a larynx as well as yourself? Boo-hoo, 30 boo-hoo, boo-hoo! It was one of the most thrilling dis- cords I ever heard. And yet, if you had a discriminating ear, there were in it the elements of a concord such as these plains never saw nor heard. WINTER ANIMALS 275 I also heard the whooping of the ice in the pond, my great bed-fellow in that part of Concord, as if it were restless in its bed and would fain turn over, were troubled with flatulency and bad dreams; or I was waked by the cracking of the ground by the frost, as if some one had 5 driven a team against my door, and in the morning would find a crack in the earth a quarter of a mile long and a third of an inch wide. Sometimes I heard the foxes as they ranged over the snow crust, in moonlight nights, in search of a partridge 10 or other game, barking raggedly and demoniacally like forest dogs, as if laboring with some anxiety, or seeking expression, struggling for light and to be dogs outright and run freely in the streets; for if we take the ages into our account, may there not be a civilization going on rs among brutes as wellas men? They seemed to me to be rudimental, burrowing men, still standing on their defence, awaiting their transformation. Sometimes one came near to my window, attracted by my light, barked a vulpine® curse at me, and then retreated. . 20 Usually the red squirrel (Sciwrus Hudsonius) waked me in the dawn, coursing over the roof and up and down the sides of the house, as if sent out of the woods for this purpose. In the course of the winter I threw out half a bushel of ears of sweet-corn which had not got ripe, on 2s to the snow crust by my door, and was amused by watching the motions of the various animals which were baited by it. In the twilight and the night the rabbits came regularly and made a hearty meal. All day long the red squirrels came and went, and afforded me much entertainment 30 by their manceuvres. One would approach at first warily through the shrub-oaks, running over the snow crust by fits and starts like a leaf blown by the wind, now a few paces 276 WALDEN this way, with wonderful speed and waste of energy, making inconceivable haste with his “trotters,” as if it were for a wager, and now as many paces that way, but never getting on more than half a rod at a time; and 5 then suddenly pausing with a ludicrous expression and a gratuitous somerset, as if all the eyes in the universe were fixed on him, — for all the motions of a squirrel, even in the most solitary recesses of the forest, imply spectators as much as those of a dancing girl, — wasting more time ro in delay and circumspection than would have sufficed to walk the whole distance, — I never saw one walk, — and then suddenly, before you could say Jack Robinson, he would be in the top of a young pitch-pine, winding up his clock and chiding all imaginary spectators, soliloquizing 15 and talking to all the universe at the same time, — for no reason that I could ever detect, or he himself was aware of, I suspect. At length he would reach the corn, and select- ing a suitable ear, brisk about in the same uncertain trigo- nometrical way to the topmost stick of my wood-pile, 20 before my window, where he looked me in the face, and there sit for hours, supplying himself with a new ear from time to time, nibbling at first voraciously and throwing the half-naked cobs about; till at length he grew more dainty still and played with his food, tasting only the inside 25 of the kernel, and the ear, which was held balanced over the stick by one paw, slipped from his careless grasp and fell to the ground, when he would look over at it with a ludi- crous expression of uncertainty, as if suspecting that it had life, with a mind not made up whether to get it again, or 30 a new one, or be off; now thinking of corn, then listening to hear what was in the wind. So the little impudent fellow would waste many an ear in a forenoon; till at last seizing some longer and plumper one, considerably WINTER ANIMALS pati 4 bigger than himself, and skilfully balancing it, he would set out with it to the woods, like a tiger with a buffalo, by the same zigzag course and frequent pauses, scratching along with it as if it were too heavy for him and falling all the while, making its fall a diagonal between a perpendicu- 5 lar and horizontal, being determined to put it through at any rate ; — asingularly frivolous and whimsical fellow ; — and so he would get off with it to where he lived, perhaps carry it to the top of a pine tree forty or fifty rods distant, and I would afterwards find the cobs strewn about the 10 woods in various directions. At length the jays arrive, whose discordant screams were heard long before, as they were warily making their approach an eighth of a mile off, and in a stealthy and sneaking manner they flit from tree to tree, nearer and 15 nearer, and pick up the kernels which the squirrels have dropped. Then, sitting on a pitch-pine bough, they attempt to swallow in their haste a kernel which is too big for their throats and chokes them; and after great labor they disgorge it, and spend an hour in the endeavor 20 to crack it by repeated blows with their bills. They were manifestly thieves, and I had not much respect for them ; but the squirrels, though at first shy, went to work as if they were taking what was their own. Meanwhile also came the chickadees in flocks, which, 25 picking. up the crumbs the squirrels had dropped, flew to the nearest twig, and, placing them under their claws, hammered away at them with their little bills, as if it were an insect in the bark, till they were sufficiently reduced for their slender throats. A little flock of these titmice 30 came daily to pick a dinner out of my wood-pile, or the crumbs at my door, with faint flitting lisping notes, like the tinkling of icicles in the grass, or else with sprightly 278 WALDEN day day day, or more rarely, in spring-like days, a wiry summery phe-be from the wood-side. They were so familiar that at length one alighted on an armful of wood which I was carrying in, and pecked at the sticks without sfear. I once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance than I should have been by any epaulet I could have worn. The squirrels also grew at last to be quite familiar, and to occasionally stepped upon my shoe, when that was the nearest way. When the ground was not yet quite covered, and again near the end of winter, when the snow was melted on my south hillside and about my wood-pile, the partridges came t5 out of the woods morning and evening to feed there. Whichever side you walk in the woods the partridge bursts away on whirring wings, jarring the snow from the dry leaves and twigs on high, which comes sifting down in the sunbeams like golden dust; for this brave bird is not to 20 be scared by winter. It is frequently covered up by drifts, and, it is said, ““sometimes plunges from on wing into the soft snow, where it remains concealed for a day or two.” I used to start them in the open land also, where they. had come out of the woods at sunset to ‘‘bud” the wild apple- 25 trees. They will come regularly every evening to particu- lar trees, where the cunning sportsman lies in wait for them, and the distant orchards next the woods suffer thus not a little. Iam glad that the partridge gets fed, at any rate. It is Nature’s own bird which lives on buds and diet- 30 drink. In dark winter mornings, or in short winter afternoons, I sometimes heard a pack of hounds threading all the woods with hounding cry and yelp, unable to resist the WINTER ANIMALS 279 instinct of the chase, and the note of the hunting horn at intervals, proving that man was in the rear. The woods ring again, and yet no fox bursts forth on to the open level of the pond, nor following pack pursuing their Actzon. And perhaps at evening I see the hunters returning with a 5 single brush trailing from their sleigh for a trophy, seeking theirinn. They tell me that if the fox would remain in the bosom of the frozen earth he would be safe, or if he would run in a straight line away no fox-hound could overtake him; but, having left his pursuers far behind, he stops to 10 rest and listen till they come up, and when he runs he circles round to his old haunts, where the hunters await him. Sometimes, however, he will run upon a wall many rods, and then leap off far to one side, and he appears to know that water will not retain his scent. A hunter told 15 me that he once saw a fox pursued by hounds burst out on to Walden when the ice was covered with shallow puddles, run part way across, and then return to the same shore. Ere long the hounds arrived, but here they lost the scent. Sometimes a pack hunting by themselves would pass my 2° door, and circle round my house, and yelp and hound with- out regarding me, as if afflicted by a species of madness, so that nothing could divert them from the pursuit. Thus they circle until they fall upon the recent trail of a fox, for a wise hound will forsake everything else for this. One 25 day aman came to my hut from Lexington to inquire after his hound that made a large track, and had been hunting for a week by himself. But I fear that he was not the wiser for all I told him, for every time I attempted to answer his questions he interrupted me by asking, “‘ What 30 doyoudohere?”’ He had lost a dog, but found a man. One old hunter who has a dry tongue, who used to come to bathe in Walden once every year when the 280 WALDEN water was warmest, and at such times looked in upon me, told me, that many years ago he took his gun one afternoon and went out for a cruise in Walden Woods; and as he walked the Wayland road he heard the ery of 5 hounds approaching, and ere long a fox leaped the wall into the road, and as quick as thought leaped the other wall out of the road, and his swift bullet had not touched him. Some way behind came an old hound and her three pups in full pursuit, hunting on their own account, 1o and disappeared again in the woods. Late in the after- . noon, as he was resting in the thick woods south of Wal- den, he heard the voice of the hounds far over toward Fair Haven still pursuing the fox; and on they came, their hounding cry which made all the woods ring sound- ™5 ing nearer and nearer, now from Well-Meadow, now from the Baker Farm. For a long time he stood still and listened to their music, so sweet to a hunter’s ear, when suddenly the fox appeared, threading the solemn aisles with an easy coursing pace, whose sound was concealed 20 by a sympathetic rustle of the leaves, swift and still, keeping the ground, leaving his pursuers far behind; and, leaping upon a rock amid the woods, he sat erect and listening, with his back to the hunter. For a moment compassion restrained the latter’s arm; but that was 2s a short-lived mood, and as quick as thought can follow thought his piece was levelled, and whang!— the fox rolling over the rock lay dead on the ground. The hunter still kept his place and listened to the hounds. Still on they came, and now the near woods resounded through all 30 their aisles with their demoniac cry. At length the old hound burst into view with muzzle to the ground, and snapping the air as if possessed, and ran directly to the rock; but spying the dead fox she suddenly ceased her WINTER ANIMALS 281 hounding, as if struck dumb with amazement, and walked round and round him in silence; and one by one her pups arrived, and, like their mother, were sobered into silence by the mystery. Then the hunter came forward and stood in their midst, and the mystery was solved. They waited in silence while he skinned the fox, then followed the brush awhile, and at length turned off into the woods again. That evening a Weston Squire came to the Concord hunter’s cottage to inquire for his hounds, and told how for a week they had been hunting on their own account from Weston Woods. _The Concord hunter told him what he knew and offered him the skin; but the other declined it and departed. He did not find his hounds that night, but the next day learned that they had crossed the river and put up at a farm-house for the night, whence, having been well fed, they took their departure early in the morning. The hunter who told me this could remember one Sam Nutting,° who used to hunt bears on Fair Haven Ledges, and exchange their skins for rum in Concord village; who told him, even, that he had seen a moose there. Nutting had a famous fox-hound named Bur- goyne, — he pronounced it Bugine, — which my inform- ant used to borrow. In the ‘‘Wast Book,”° of an old trader of this town, who was also a captain, town-clerk, and representative, I find the following entry. Jan. 18th, 1742-3, “John Melven Cr. by 1 Grey Fox 0 — 2 — 3;” they are not now found here; and in his ledger, Feb. 7th, 1743, Hezekiah Stratton has credit “by 4 a Catt skin 0 — 1 — 44;” of course, a wild-cat, for Stratton was a sergeant in the old French war, and would not have got credit for hunting less noble game. Credit is given for deer skins also, and they were daily sold. One man 5 Lo 5 LS) 5 30 282 WALDEN still preserves the horns of the last deer that was killed in this vicinity, and another has told me the particu- lars of the hunt in which his uncle was engaged. The hunters were formerly a numerous and merry crew here. 5 | remember well one gaunt Nimrod who would catch up a leaf by the road-side and play a strain on it wilder and more melodious, if my memory serves me, than any hunting horn. At midnight, when there was a moon, I sometimes ro met with hounds in my path prowling about the woods, which would skulk out of my way, as if afraid, and stand silent amid the bushes till I had passed. Squirrels and wild mice disputed-for my store of nuts. There were scores of pitch-pines around my house, from rs one to four inches in diameter, which had been gnawed by mice the previous winter, —a Norwegian winter for them, for the snow lay long and deep, and they were obliged to mix a large proportion of pine bark with their other diet. These trees were alive and apparently 20 flourishing at midsummer, and many of them had grown a foot, though completely girdled; but after another winter such were without exception dead. It is remark- able that a single mouse should thus be allowed a whole pine tree for its dinner, gnawing round instead of up and 25 down it; but perhaps it is necessary in order to thin these trees, which are wont to grow up densely. The hares (Lepus Americanus) were very familiar. One had her form under my house all winter, separated from me only by the flooring, and she startled me each 30 morning by her hasty departure when I began to stir, — thump, thump, thump, striking her head against the floor timbers in her hurry. They used to come round my door at dusk to nibble the potato parings which I had WINTER ANIMALS 283 thrown out, and were so nearly the color of the ground that they could hardly be distinguished whenstill. Some- times in the twilight I alternately lost and recovered sight of one sitting motionless under my window. When I opened my door in the evening, off they would go with 5 a squeak and a bounce. Near at hand they only excited my pity. One evening one sat by my door two paces from me, at first trembling with fear, yet unwilling to move; a poor wee thing, lean and bony, with ragged ears and sharp nose, scant tail and slender paws. It looked as if Nature no longer contained the breed of nobler bloods, but stood on her last toes. Its large eyes appeared young and unhealthy, almost dropsical. I took a step, and lo, away it scud® with an elastic spring over the snow crust, straightening its body and its limbs into grace- ful length, and soon put the forest between me and itself, —the wild free venison, asserting its vigor and the dig- nity of Nature. Not without reason was its slenderness. Such then was its nature. (Lepus, levipes, light-foot, some think.) What is a country without rabbits and partridges? They are among the most simple and indigenous animal products; ancient and venerable families known to an- tiquity as to modern times; of the very hue and substance of Nature, nearest allied to leaves and to the ground, — and to one another; it is either winged or it is legged. It is hardly as if you had seen a wild creature when a rabbit or a partridge bursts away, only a natural one, as much to be expected as rustling leaves. The partridge Io tS 20 25 and the rabbit are still sure to thrive, like true natives 30 of the soil, whatever revolutions occur. If the forest. is cut off, the sprouts and bushes which spring up afford them concealment, and they become more numerous 284 WALDEN than ever. That must be a poor country indeed that does not support a hare. Our woods teem with them both, and around every swamp may be seen the par- tridge or rabbit walk, beset with twiggy fences and s horse-hair snares, which some cow-boy tends. THE POND IN WINTER AFTER a still winter night I awoke with the impres- sion that some question had been put to me, which I had been endeavoring in vain to answer in my sleep, as what —how — when—where? But there was dawning Nature, in whom all creatures live, looking in at mys broad windows with serene and satisfied face, and no Auestion on her lips. I awoke to an answered question, to Nature and daylight. The snow lying deep on the earth dotted with young pines, and the very slope of the hill on which my house is placed, seemed to say, Forward ! 10 Nature puts no question and answers none which we mortals ask. She has long: ago taken her resolution. “QO Prince, our eyes contemplate with admiration and transmit to the soul the wonderful and varied spectacle of this universe. The night veils without doubt a part 15 of this glorious creation; but day comes to reveal to us this great work, which extends from earth even into the plains of the ether.” Then to my morning work. First I take an axe and pail and go in search of water, if that be not a dream. 20 After a cold and snowy night it needed a divining rod to find it. Every winter the liquid and trembling surface of the pond, which was so sensitive to every breath, and reflected every light and shadow, becomes solid to the depth of a foot or a foot and a half, so that it will support 25 the heaviest teams, and perchance the snow covers it to an equal depth, and it is not to be distinguished from 285 286 WALDEN any level field. Like the marmots in the surrounding hills, it closes its eyelids and becomes dormant for three months or more. Standing on the snow-covered plain, as if in a pasture amid the hills, I cut my way first through 5 a foot of snow, and then a foot of ice, and open a window under my feet, where, kneeling to drink, I look down into the quiet parlor of the fishes, pervaded by a softened light as through a window of ground glass, with its bright sanded floor the same as in summer; there a perennial ro waveless serenity reigns as in the amber twilight sky, corresponding to the cool and even temperament of the inhabitants. Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads. Early in the morning, while all things are crisp with 15 frost, men come with fishing reels and slender lunch, and let down their fine lines through the snowy field to take pickerel and perch; wild men, who instinctively follow other fashions and trust other authorities than their townsmen, and by their goings and comings stitch towns 20 together in parts where else they would be ripped. They sit and eat their luncheon in stout fear-naughts° on the dry oak leaves on the shore, as wise in natural lore as the citizen is in artificial. They never consulted with books, and know and can tell much less than they have 25done. The things which they practise are said not yet to be known. Here is one fishing for pickerel with grown perch for bait. You look into his pail with wonder as into a summer pond, as if he kept summer locked up at home, or knew where she had retreated. How, pray, 30 did he get these in midwinter? O, he got worms out of rotten logs since the ground froze, and so he caught them. His life passes deeper in Nature than the studies of the naturalist penetrate; himself a subject for the naturalist. THE POND IN WINTER 287 The latter raises the moss and bark gently with his knife in search of insects; the former lays open logs to their core with his axe, and moss and bark fly far and wide. He gets his living by barking trees. Such aman has some right to fish, and I love to see Nature carried out in him. 5 The perch swallows the grub-worm, the pickerel swallows the perch, and the fisherman swallows the pickerel; and so all the chinks in the scale of being are filled. When I strolled around the pond in misty weather I was sometimes amused by the primitive mode which 10 some ruder fisherman had adopted. He would perhaps have placed alder branches over the narrow holes in the ice, which were four or five rods apart and an equal dis- tance from the shore, and having fastened the end of the line to a stick to prevent its being pulled through, have 15 passed the slack line over a twig of the alder, a foot or more above the ice, and tied a dry oak leaf to it, which, being pulled down, would show when he had a bite. These alders loomed through the mist at regular intervals as you walked halfway round the pond. 20 Ah, the pickerel of Walden! when I see them lying on the ice, or in the well which the fisherman cuts in the ice, making a little hole to admit the water, I am always surprised by their rare beauty, as if they were fabulous fishes, they are so foreign to the streets, even to the 2s woods, foreign as Arabia to our Concord life. They possess a quite dazzling and transcendent beauty which separates them by a wide interval from the cadaverous cod and haddock whose fame is trumpeted in our streets. They are not green like the pines, nor gray like the stones, 30 nor blue like the sky; but they have, to my eyes, if possible, yet rarer colors, like flowers and precious stones, as if they were the pearls, the animalized nuclei or crystals 288 WALDEN of the Walden water. They, of course, are Walden all over and all through; are themselves small Waldens in the animal kingdom, Waldenses.° It is surprising that they are caught here, — that in this deep and capa- 5 cious spring, far beneath the rattling teams and chaises and tinkling sleighs that travel the Walden road, this great gold and emerald fish swims. I never chanced to see its kind in any market; it would be the cynosure of all eyes there. Easily, with a few convulsive quirks, they give ro up their watery ghosts, like a mortal translated before his time to the thin air of heaven. As I was desirous to recover the long lost bottom of Walden Pond, I surveyed carefully, before the ice broke up, early in 746, with compass and chain and sounding 15 line. There have been many stories told about the bot- tom, or rather no bottom, of this pond, which certainly had no foundation for themselves. Itis remarkable how long men will believe in the bottomlessness of a pond without taking the trouble to sound it. I have visited 20two such Bottomless Ponds in one walk in this neigh- borhood. Many have believed that Walden reached quite through to the other side of the globe. Some who have lain flat on the ice for a long time, looking down through the illusive medium, perchance with watery 25 eyes into the bargain, and driven to hasty conclusions by the fear of catching cold in their breasts, have seen vast holes ‘“‘into which a load of hay might be driven,” if there were anybody to drive it, the undoubted source of the Styx and entrance to the Infernal Regions from 30 these parts. Others have gone down from the village with a “fifty-six ’”’° and a wagon load of inch rope, but yet have failed to find any bottom; for while the “fifty-six” THE POND IN WINTER 289 was resting by the way, they were paying out the rope in the vain attempt to fathom their truly immeasur- able capacity for marvellousness. But I can assure my readers that Walden has a reasonably tight bottom at a not unreasonable, though at an unusual, depth. 5 I fathomed it easily with a cod-line and a stone weighing about a pound and a half, and could tell accu- rately when the stone left the bottom, by having to pull so much harder before the water got underneath to help me. The greatest depth was exactly one hundred and to two feet; to which may be added the five feet which it has risen since, making one hundred and seven. This is a remarkable depth for so small an area; yet not an inch of it can be spared by the imagination. What if all ponds were shallow? Would it not react on the minds 15 of men? I am thankful that this pond was made deep and pure forasymbol. While men believe in the infinite, some ponds will be thought to be bottomless. | A factory owner, hearing what depth I had found, thought that it could not be true, for, judging from 20 his acquaintance with dams, sand would not lie at so steep an angle. But the deepest ponds are not so deep in proportion to their area as most suppose, and, if drained, would not leave very remarkable valleys. They are not like cups between the hills; for this one, which is so 2s unusually deep for its area, appears in a vertical section through its centre not deeper than a shallow plate. Most ponds, emptied, would leave a meadow no more hollow than we frequently see. William Gilpin,° who is so admirable in all that relates to landscapes, and usually 30 so correct, standing at the head of Loch Fyne, in Scotland, which he describes as ‘‘a bay of salt water, sixty or seventy fathoms deep, four miles in breadth,” and about U 290 WALDEN fifty miles long, surrounded by mountains, observes, “‘If we could have seen it immediately after the diluvian crash, or whatever convulsion of Nature occasioned it, before the waters gushed in, what a horrid chasm it 5must have appeared! So high° as heaved the tumid hills, so low Down sunk a hollow bottom, broad, and deep, Capacious bed of waters —”’ But if, using the shortest diameter of Loch Fyne, we 1oapply these proportions to Walden, which, as we have seen, appears already in a vertical section only like a shal- low plate, it will appear four times as shallow. So much for the increased horrors of the chasm of Loch Fyne when emptied. Nodoubt many asmiling valley with its stretch- 15ing cornfields occupies exactly such a “horrid chasm,” from which the waters have receded, though it requires the insight and the far sight of the geologist to convince the unsuspecting inhabitants of this fact. Often an inquisi- tive eye may detect the shores of a primitive lake in the low 20 horizon hills, and no subsequent elevation of the plain have been necessary° to conceal their history. But it is easiest, as they who work on the highways know, to find the hol- lows by the puddles after a shower. The amount of it is, the imagination, give it the least license, dives deeper and 25 soars higher than Nature goes. So, probably, the depth of the ocean will be found to be very inconsiderable compared with its breadth. As I sounded through the ice I could determine the shape of the bottom with greater accuracy than is possible in 30 surveying harbors which do not freeze over, and I was surprised at its general regularity. In the deepest part there are several acres more level than almost any field THE POND IN WINTER 291 which is exposed to the sun, wind, and plough. In one instance, on a line arbitrarily chosen, the depth did not vary more than one foot in thirty rods; and generally, near the middle, I could calculate the variation for each one hundred feet in any direction beforehand within three or 5 four inches. Some are accustomed to speak of deep and dangerous holes even in quiet sandy ponds like this, but the effect of water under these circumstances is to level all inequalities. The regularity of the bottom and its con- formity to the shores and the range of the neighboring hills ro were so perfect that a distant promontory betrayed itself in the soundings quite across the pond, and its direction could be determined by observing the opposite shore. Cape becomes bar, and plain shoal, and valley and gorge deep water and chained: When I had mapped the pond by the scale of ten radar to an inch, and put down the soundings, more than a hundred a all, I observed this remarkable coincidence. Having noticed that the number indicating the greatest depth was apparently in the centre of the map, I laid a 20 rule on the map lengthwise, and then breadthwise, and found, to my surprise, that the line of greatest length inter- sected the line of greatest breadth exactly at the point of greatest depth, notwithstanding that the middle is so nearly level, the outline of the pond far from regular, and 25 the extreme length and breadth were got by measuring into the coves; and I said to myself, Who knows but this hint would conduct to the deepest part of the ocean as well as of a pond or puddle? Is not this the rule also for the height of mountains, regarded as the opposite of valleys? We 30 know that a hill is not highest at its narrowest part. Of five coves, three, or all which had been sounded, were observed to have a bar quite across their mouths and 292 WALDEN deeper water within, so that the bay tended to be an ex- pansion of water within the land not only horizontally but vertically, and to form a basin or independent pond, the direction of the two capes showing the course of the bar. 5 Every harbor on the sea-coast, also, has its bar at its en- trance. In proportion as the mouth of the cove was wider compared with its length, the water over the bar was deeper compared with that in the basin. Given, then, the length and breadth of the cove, and the character of the ro Surrounding shore, and you have almost elements enough to make out a formula for all cases. In order to see how nearly I could guess, with this ex- perience, at the deepest point in a pond, by observing the outlines of its surface and the character of its shores alone, 1s 1 made a plan of White Pond, which contains about forty- one acres, and, like this, has no island in it, nor any visible inlet or outlet ; and as the line of greatest breadth fell very near the line of least breadth, where two opposite capes approached each other and two opposite bays receded, I 20 ventured to mark a point a short distance from the latter line, but still on the line of greatest length, as the deepest. The deepest part was found to be within one hundred feet of this, still farther in the direction to which I had inclined, and was only one foot deeper, namely, sixty osfeet. Of course, a stream running through, or an is- land in the pond, would make the problem much more complicated. If we knew all the laws of Nature, we should need only one fact, or the description of one actual phenomenon, to 3o infer all the particular results at that point. Now we know onlv a few laws, and our result is vitiated, not, of course, by any confusion or irregularity in Nature, but by our ignorance of essential elements in the calculation. THE POND IN WINTER 293 Our notions of law and harmony are commonly confined to those instances which we detect ; but the harmony which results from a far greater number of seemingly conflicting, but really concurring, laws, which we have not detected, is still more wonderful. The particular laws are as our 5 points of view, as, to the traveller, a mountain outline varies with every step, and it has an infinite number of profiles, though absolutely but one form. Even when cleft or bored through it is not comprehended in its entireness. 10 What I have observed of the pond is no less true in ethics. It is the law of average. Such a rule of the two diameters not only guides us toward the sun in the system and the heart in man, but draws lines through the length and breadth of the aggregate of a man’s particular daily 15 behaviors and waves of life into his coves and inlets, and where they intersect will be the height or depth of his character. Perhaps we need only to know how his shores trend and his adjacent country or circumstances, to infer his depth and concealed bottom. If he is surrounded by 20 mountainous circumstances, an Achillean shore, whose peaks overshadow and are reflected in his bosom, they suggest a corresponding depth in him. But a low and smooth shore proves him shallow on that side. In our bodies, a bold projecting brow falls off to and indicates a 25 corresponding depth of thought. Also there is a bar across the entrance of our every cove, or particular inclination ; each is our harbor fora season, in which we are detained and partially landlocked. These inclinations are not whimsi- cal usually, but their form, size, and direction are deter- 30 mined by the promontories of the shore, the ancient axes of elevation. When this bar is gradually increased by storms, tides, or currents, or there is a subsidence of the 294 WALDEN waters, so that it reaches to the surface, that which was at first but an inclination in the shore in which a thought was harbored becomes an individual lake, cut off from the ocean, wherein the thought secures its own conditions, changes, 5 perhaps, from salt to fresh, becomes a sweet sea, dead sea, or amarsh. At the advent of each individual into this life, may we not suppose that such a bar has risen to the surface somewhere? It is true, we are such poor navi- gators that our thoughts, for the most part, stand off and ro on upon a harborless coast, are conversant only with the bights of the bays of poesy, or steer for the public ports of entry, and go into the dry docks of science, where they merely refit for this world, and no natural currents concur to individualize them. 15 As for the inlet or outlet of Walden, I have not dis- covered any but rain and snow and evaporation, though perhaps, with a thermometer and a line, such places may be found, for where the water flows into the pond it will prob- ably be coldest in summer and warmest in winter. When 20 the icemen were at work here in ’46-7, the cakes sent to the shore were one day rejected by those who were stacking them up there, not being thick enough to lie side by side with the rest; and the cutters thus discovered that the ice over a small space was two or three inches thinner than 25 elsewhere, which made them think that there was an inlet there. They also showed me in another place what they thought was a ‘‘leach hole,’’® through which the pond leaked out under a hill into a neighboring meadow, pushing me out on a cake of ice to see it. It was a small 30 cavity under ten feet of water; but I think that I can warrant the pond not to need soldering till they find a worse leak than that. One has suggested, that if such a “leach hole” should be found, its connection with the THE POND IN WINTER 295 meadow, if any existed, might be proved by conveying some colored powder or sawdust to the mouth of the hole, and then putting a strainer over the spring in the meadow, which would catch some of the particles carried through by the current. 5 While I was surveying, the ice, which was sixteen inches thick, undulated under a slight wind like water. It is well known that a level cannot be used on ice. At one rod from the shore its greatest fluctuation, when observed by means of a level on land directed toward a graduated staff on the ice, was three-quarters of an inch, though the ice appeared firmly attached to the shore. It was prob- ably greater in the middle. Who knows but if our instru- ments were delicate enough we might detect an undulation in the crust of the earth? When two legs of my level were on the shore and the third on the ice, and the sights were directed over the latter, a rise or fall of the ice of an almost infinitesimal amount made a difference of several feet on a tree across the pond. When I began to cut holes for sound- ing, there were three or four inches of water on the ice2o under a deep snow which had sunk it thus far; but the water began immediately to run into these holes, and con- tinued to run for two days in deep streams, which wore away the ice on every side, and contributed essentially, if not mainly, to dry the surface of the pond; for, as the 25 water ran in, it raised and floated the ice. This was some- what like cutting a hole in the bottom of a ship to let the water out. When such holes freeze, and a rain succeeds, and finally a new freezing forms a fresh smooth ice over all, it is beautifully mottled internally by dark figures, shaped 30 somewhat like a spider’s web, what you may call ice rosettes, produced by the channels worn by the water flowing from all sides to a centre. Sometimes, also, Lal ie) =] 5 296 WALDEN when the ice was covered with shallow puddles, I saw a double shadow of myself, one standing on the head of the other, one on the ice, the other on the trees or hillside. While yet it is cold January, and snow and ice are thick 5 and solid, the prudent landlord comes from the village to get ice to cool his summer drink ; impressively, even pathet- ically wise, to foresee the heat and thirst of July now in January, — wearing a thick coat and mittens! when so many things are not provided for. It may be that he lays ro Up no treasures in this world which will cool his summer drink in the next. He cuts and saws the solid pond, un- roofs the house of fishes, and carts off their very element and air, held fast by chains and stakes like corded wood, through the favoring winter air, to wintry cellars, to rs underlie the summer there. It looks like solidified azure, as, far off, it is drawn through the streets. These ice- cutters are a merry race, full of jest and sport, and when I went among them they were wont to invite me to saw pit- fashion with them, I standing underneath. 20 In the winter of ’46-7 there came a hundred men of Hyperborean® extraction swoop down on to our pond one morning, with many car-loads of ungainly-looking farming tools, sleds, ploughs, drill-barrows, turf-knives, spades, saws, rakes, and each man was armed with a double- 25 pointed pikestaff, such as is not described in the New- England Farmer or the Cultivator.° I did not know whether they had come to sow a crop of winter rye, or some other kind of grain recently introduced from Iceland. As I saw no manure, I judged that they meant to skim 30 the land, as I had done, thinking the soil was deep and had lain fallow long enough. They said that-a gentleman farmer, who was behind the scenes, wanted to double his THE POND‘IN WINTER 297 money, which, as I understood, amounted to half a million already; but in order to cover each one of his dollars with another, he took off the only coat, ay, the skin itself, of Walden Pond in the midst of a hard winter. They went to work at once, ploughing, harrowing, rolling, 5 furrowing, in admirable order, as if they were bent on making this a model farm; but when I was looking sharp to see what kind of seed they dropped into the furrow, a gang of fellows by my side suddenly began to hook up the virgin mould itself, with a peculiar jerk, clean down to ro the sand, or rather the water, — for it was a very springy soil, — indeed all the terra firma there was, — and hauled it away on sleds, and then I guessed that they must be cutting peat ina bog. So they came and went every day, with a peculiar shriek from the locomotive, from and tors some point of the polar regions, as it seemed to me, like a flock of arctic snow-birds. But sometimes Squaw Walden had her revenge, and a hired man, walking behind his team, slipped through a crack in the ground down toward Tartarus,° and he who was so brave before suddenly 20 became but the ninth part of a man, almost gave up his ani- mal heat, and was glad to take refuge in my house, and acknowledged that there was some virtue in a stove; er sometimes the frozen soil took a piece of steel out of a ploughshare, or a plough got set in the furrow and had to 25 be cut out. To speak literally, a hundred Irishmen, with Yankee overseers, came from Cambridge® every day to get out the ice. They divided it into cakes by methods too well known to require description, and these, being sledded to the3o shore, were rapidly hauled off on to an ice platform, and raised by grappling irons and block and tackle, worked by horses, on to a stack, as surely as so many 298 WALDEN barrels of flour, and there placed evenly side by side, and row upon row, as if they formed the solid base of an obelisk designed to pierce the clouds. They told me that in a good day they could get out a thousand tons, which 5 was the yield of about one acre. Deep ruts and “cradle holes”? were worn in the ice, as on terra firma, by the passage of the sleds over the same track, and the horses invariably ate their oats out of cakes of ice hollowed out like buckets. They stacked up the cakes thus in ro the open air in a pile thirty-five feet high on one side and six or seven rods square, putting hay between the outside layers to exclude the air; for when the wind, though never so cold, finds a passage through, it will wear large cavities, leaving slight supports or studs only here and 15 there, and finally topple it down. At first it looked like a vast blue fort or Valhalla®; but when they began to tuck the coarse meadow hay into the crevices, and this became covered with rime and icicles, it looked like a venerable moss-grown and hoary ruin, built of azure-tinted marble, 20 the abode of Winter, that old man we see in the almanac, — his shanty, as if he had a design to estivate° with us. They calculated that not twenty-five per cent. of this would reach its destination, and that two or three per cent. would be wasted in the cars. However, a still greater part of 25 this heap had a different destiny from what was intended ; for, either because the ice was found not to keep so well as was expected, containing more air than usual, or for some other reason, it never got to market. This heap, made in the winter of ’46-7 and estimated to contain ten thousand 30 tons, was finally covered with hay and boards; and though it was unroofed the following July, and a part of it carried off, the rest remaining exposed to the sun, it stood over that summer and the next winter, and was not quite THE POND IN WINTER 299 melted till September, 1848. Thus the pond recovered the greater part. Like the water, the Walden ice, seen near at hand, has a green tint, but at a distance is beautifully blue, and you can easily tell it from the white ice of the river, 5 or the merely greenish ice of some ponds, a quarter of a mile off. Sometimes one oi those great cakes slips from the ice-man’s sled into the village street, and lies there fora week like a great emerald, an object of interest to all passers. I have noticed that a portion of Walden which 10 in the state of water was green will often, when frozen, ap- pear from the same point of view blue. So the hollows about this pond will, sometimes, in the winter, be filled wita a greenish water somewhat like its own, but the next day will have frozen blue. Perhaps the blue color of 15 water and ice is due to the light and air they contain, and the most transparent is the bluest. Ice is an interest- ing subject for contemplation. They told me that they had some in the ice-houses at Fresh Pond?® five years old which was as good as ever. Why is it that a bucket of 20 ‘water soon becomes putrid, but frozen remains sweet for- ever? It is commonly said that this is the difference between the affections and the intellect. Thus for sixteen days I saw from my window a hun- dred men at work like busy husbandmen, with teams and 25 horses and apparently all the implements of farming, such a picture as we see on the first page of the almanac; and as often as I looked out I was reminded of the fable of the lark and the reapers, or the parable of the sower,° and the like; and now they are all gone, and in thirty 30 days more, probably, I shall look from the same window on the pure sea-green Walden water there, reflecting the clouds and the trees, and sending up its evaporations in 300 WALDEN solitude, and no traces will appear that a man has ever stood there. Perhaps I shall hear a solitary loon laugh as he dives and plumes himself, or shall see a lonely fisher in his boat, like a floating leaf, beholding his form 5 reflected in the waves, where lately a hundred men securely labored. Thus it appears that the sweltering inhabitants of Charleston and New Orleans, of Madras and Bombay and — Calcutta,° drink at my well. In the morning I bathe my ro intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat Geeta,° since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial ; and I doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred 15 to a previous state of existence, so remote is its sublimity from our conceptions. I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Bramin, priest of Brahma and Vishnu and Indra,° who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the 20 Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water jug. I meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in: the same well. The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges. With favoring winds it is 25 wafted past the site of the fabulous islands of Atlantis® and the Hesperides,° makes the periplus of Hanno,° and, floating by Ternate and Tidore® and the mouth of the Persian Gulf, melts in the tropic gales of the Indian seas, and is landed in ports of which Alexander only heard the 30 names. SPRING THE opening of large tracts by the ice-cutters com- monly causes a pond to break up earlier; for the water, agitated by the wind, even in cold weather, wears away the surrounding ice. But such was not the effect on Walden that year, for she had soon got a thick new gar- 5 ment to take the place of the old. This pond never breaks up so soon as the others in this neighborhood, on account both of its greater depth and its having no stream passing through it to melt or wear away the ice. I never knew it to open in the course of a winter, not 10 excepting that of ’52-3, which gave the ponds so severe a trial. It commonly opens about the first of April, a week or ten days later than Flint’s Pond and Fair Haven, beginning to melt on the north side and in the shallower parts where it began to freeze. It indicates better than r5 any water hereabouts the absolute progress of the season, being least affected by transient changes of temperature. A severe cold of a few days’ duration in March may very much retard the opening of the former ponds, while the temperature of Walden increases almost uninterruptedly. 20 A thermometer thrust into the middle of Walden on the 6th of March, 1847, stood at 32°, or freezing point; near the shore, at 33°; in the middle of Flint’s Pond, the same day, at 323°; at a dozen rods from the shore, in shallow water, under ice a foot thick, at 36°. This difference of 25 three and a half degrees between the temperature of the 301 | 302 WALDEN deep water and the shallow in the latter pond, and the fact that a great proportion of it is comparatively shallow, show why it should break up so much sooner than Walden. The ice in the shallowest part was at this time several 5inches thinner than in the middle. In mid-winter the middle had been the warmest and the ice thinnest there. So, also every one who has waded about the shores of a pond in summer must have perceived how much warmer the water is close to the shore, where only three or four to inches deep, than a little distance out, and on the sur- face where it is deep, than near the bottom. In spring the sun not only exerts an influence through the increased temperature of the air and earth, but its heat passes through ice a foot or more thick, and is reflected from the 15 bottom in shallow water, and so also warms the water and melts the under side of the ice, at the same time that it is melting it more directly above, making it uneven, and causing the air bubbles which it contains to extend themselves upward and downward until it is completely 20 honey-combed, and at last disappears suddenly in a single spring rain. Ice has its grain as well as wood, and when a cake begins to rot or ‘‘comb,”’ that is, assume the appear- ance of honey-comb, whatever may be its position, the air cells are at right angles with what was the water surface. 25 Where there is a rock or a log rising near to the surface the ice over it is much thinner, and is frequently quite dissolved by this reflected heat ; and I have been told that in the experiment at Cambridge to freeze water in a shallow wooden pond, though the cool air circulated under- 30 neath, and so had access to both sides, the reflection of the sun from the bottom more than counter-balanced this advantage. When a warm rain in the middle of the winter melts off the snow-ice from Walden, and leaves a SPRING 303 hard dark or transparent ice on the middle, there will be a strip of rotten though thicker white ice, a rod or more wide, about the shores, created by this reflected heat. Also, as I have said, the bubbles themselves within the ice operate as burning glasses to melt the ice beneath. 5 The phenomena of the year take place every day in a pond on a small scale. Every morning, generally speaking, the shallow water is being warmed more rapidly than the deep, though it may not be made so warm after all, and every evening it is being cooled more rapidly until 10 the morning. The day is an epitome of the year. The night is the winter, the morning and evening are the spring and fall, and the noon is the summer. The crack- ing and booming of the ice indicate a change of temper- ature. One pleasant morning after a cold night, February 15 24th, 1850, having gone to Flint’s Pond to spend the day, I noticed with surprise, that when I struck the ice with the head of my axe, it resounded like a gong for many rods around, or as if I had struck on a tight drum-head. The pond began to boom about an hour 2o after sunrise, when it felt the influence of the sun’s rays slanted upon it from over the hills; it stretched itself and yawned like a waking man with a gradually increas- ing tumult, which was kept up three or four hours. It took a short siesta at noon, and boomed once more 25 toward night, as the sun was withdrawing his influence. In the right stage of the weather a pond fires its evening gun with great regularity. But in the middle of the day, being full of cracks, and the air also being less elastic, it had completely lost its resonance, and probably fishes 30 and muskrats could not then have been stunned by a blow on it. The fisherman say that the “thundering of the pond” scares the fishes and prevents their biting. 304 WALDEN The pond does not thunder every evening, and I cannot tell surely when to expect its thundering; but though I may perceive no difference in the weather, it does. Who would have suspected so large and cold and thick-skinned 5 a thing to be so sensitive? Yet it has its law to which it thunders obedience when it should as surely as the buds expand in the spring. The earth is all alive and cov- ered with papille.° The largest pond is as sensitive to atmospheric changes as the globule of mercury in its ro tube. One attraction in coming to the woods to live was that I should have leisure and opportunity to see the spring come in. The ice in the pond at length begins to be honey-combed, and I can set my heel in it as I walk. 15 Fogs and rains and warmer suns are gradually melting the snow; the days have grown sensibly longer; and I see how I shall get through the winter without adding to my wood-pile, for large fires are no longer necessary. I am on the alert for the first signs of spring, to hear 20 the chance note of some arriving bird, or the striped squirrel’s chirp, for his stores must be now nearly ex- hausted, or see the woodchuck venture out of his winter quarters. On the 13th of March, after I had heard the bluebird, song-sparrow, and red-wing, the ice was still 2snearly a foot thick. As the weather grew warmer, it was not sensibly worn away by the water, nor broken up and floated off as in rivers, but, though it was completely melted for half a rod in width about the shore, the middle was merely honey-combed and saturated with water, 30 so that you could put your foot through it when six inches thick; but by the next day evening, perhaps, after a warm rain followed by fog, it would have wholly disap- SPRING 305 peared, all gone off with the fog, spirited away. One year I went across the middle only five days before it disappeared entirely. In 1845 Walden was first com- pletely open on the Ist of April; in ’46, the 25th of March; in 747, the 8th of April; in ’51, the 28th of March; ins 52, the 18th of April; in ’53, the he of March; in ’54, about the 7th of April. Every incident connected with the breaking up of the rivers and ponds and the settling of the weather is par- ticularly interesting to us who live in a climate of so great 10 extremes. When the warmer days come, they who dwell near the river hear the ice crack at night with a startling whoop as loud as artillery, as if its icy fetters were rent from end to end, and within a few days see it rapidly going out. So the alligator comes out of thers mud with quakings of the earth. One old man, who has been a close observer of Nature, and seems as thor- oughly wise in regard to all her operations as if she had been put upon the stocks when he was a boy, and he had helped to lay her keel, —who has come to his growth, and 20 can hardly acquire more natural lore if he should live to the age of Methuselah,°? — told me, and I was surprised to hear him express wonder at any of Nature’s operations, for I thought that there were no secrets between them, that one spring day he took his gun and boat, and 2s thought that he would have a little sport with the ducks. There was ice still on the meadows, but it was all gone out of the river, and he dropped down without obstruc- tion from Sudbury, where he lived, to Fair-Haven Pond, which he found, unexpectedly, covered for the most 30 part with a firm field of ice. It was a warm day, and he was surprised to see so great a body of ice remaining. Not seeing any ducks, he hid his boat on the north or x 306 WALDEN back side of an island in the pond, and then concealed himself in the bushes on the south side, to await them. The ice was melted for three or four rods from the shore and there was a smooth and warm sheet of water, with 5 a muddy bottom, such as the ducks love, within, and he thought it likely that some would be along pretty soon. After he had lain still there about an hour he heard a low and seemingly very distant sound, but singularly grand and impressive, unlike anything he had ever heard, ro gradually swelling and increasing as if it would have a universal and memorable ending, a sullen rush and roar, which seemed to him all at once like the sound of a vast body of fowl coming in to settle there, and, seizing his gun, he started up in haste and excited; but he found, to 15 his surprise, that the whole body of the ice had started while he lay there, and drifted in to the shore, and the sound he had heard was made by its edge grating on the shore, — at first gently nibbled and crumbled off, but at length heaving up and scattering its wrecks along the 20 island to a considerable height before it came to a stand- still. At length the sun’s rays have attained the right angle, and warm winds blow up mist and rain and melt the snow banks, and the sun dispersing the mist smiles on a 25 checkered landscape of russet and white smoking with incense, through which the traveller picks his way from islet to islet, cheered by the music of a thousand tinkling rills and rivulets whose veins are filled with the blood of winter which they are bearing off. 30 Few phenomena gave me more delight than to observe the forms which thawing sand and clay assume in flowing down the sides of a deep cut on the railroad through which I passed on my way to the village, a phenomenon SPRING 3507 not very common on so large a scale, though the number of freshly exposed banks of the right material must have been greatly multiplied since railroads were invented. The material was sand of every degree of fineness and of various rich colors, commonly mixed with a little clay. 5 When the frost comes out in the spring, and even in a thawing day in the winter, the sand begins to flow down the slopes like lava, sometimes bursting out through the snow and overflowing it where no sand was to be seen before. Innumerable little streams overlap and interlace 10 one with another, exhibiting a sort of hybrid product, _which obeys halfway the law of currents, and halfway that of vegetation. As it flows it takes the forms of sappy leaves or vines, making heaps of pulpy sprays a foot or more in depth, and resembling, as you look down on them, r5 the laciniated,° lobed, and imbricated thalluses° of some lichens; or you are reminded of coral, of leopards’ paws or birds’ feet, of brains or lungs or bowels, and excrements of all kinds. It is a truly grotesque vegetation, whose forms and color we see imitated in bronze, a sort of archi- 20 tectural foliage more ancient and typical than acanthus, chicory, ivy, vine, or any vegetable leaves; destined perhaps, under some circumstances, to become a puzzle to future geologists. The whole cut impressed me as if it were a cave with its stalactites laid open to the light. 25 The various shades of the sand are singularly rich and agreeable, embracing the different iron colors, brown, gray, yellowish, and reddish. When the flowing mass reaches the drain at the foot of the bank it spreads out flatter into strands, the separate streams losing their 30 semi-cylindrical form and gradually becoming more flat and broad, running together as they are more moist, till they form an almost flat sand still variously and beautifully 308 WALDEN shaded, but in which you can trace the original forms of vegetation; till at length, in the water itself, they are converted into banks, like those formed off the mouths of rivers, and the forms of vegetation are lost in the ripple 5 marks on the bottom. The whole bank, which is from twenty to forty feet high, is sometimes overlaid with a mass of this kind of foliage, or sandy rupture, for a quarter of a mile on one or both sides, the produce of one spring day. What makes 10 this sand foliage remarkable is its springing into existence thus suddenly. When I see on the one side the inert bank —for the sun acts on one side first — and on the other this luxuriant foliage, the creation of an hour, I am affected as if ina peculiar sense I stood in the laboratory of the 15 Artist who made the world and me,—had come to where he was still at work, sporting on this bank, and with excess of energy strewing his fresh designs about. I feel as if I were nearer to the vitals of the globe, for this sandy overflow is something such a foliaceous mass 20 as the vitals of the animal body. You find thus in the very sands an anticipation of the vegetable leaf. No wonder that the earth expresses itself outwardly in leaves, it so labors with the idea inwardly. The atoms have already learned this law, and are pregnant by it. 25 The overhanging leaf sees here its prototype. Internally, whether in the globe or animal body, it is a moist thick lobe, a word especially applicable to the liver and lungs and the leaves of fat (Ae(Bw, labor, lapsus, to flow or slip downward, a lapsing; AoBos, globus, lobe, globe; also 30 lap, flap, and many other words), externally, a dry thin leaf, even as the f and v are a pressed and dried b. The radicals of lobe are /b, the soft mass of the 6 (single lobed, or B, double lobed), with the liquid / behind it pressing SPRING 309 it forward. In globe, glb, the guttural g adds to the meaning the capacity of the throat. The feathers and wings of birds are still drier and thinner leaves. Thus, also, you pass from the lumpish grub in the earth to the airy and fluttering butterfly. The very globe continually ; transcends and translates itself, and becomes winged in its orbit. Even ice begins with delicate crystal leaves, as if it had flowed into moulds which the fronds of water plants have impressed on the watery mirror. The whole tree itself is but one leaf, and rivers are still vaster leaves 10 whose pulp is intervening earth, and towns and cities are the ova of insects in their axils. When the sun withdraws the sand ceases to flow, but in the morning the streams will start once more and branch and branch again into a myriad of others. Yours here see perchance how blood vessels are formed. If you look closely you observe that first there pushes forward from the thawing mass a stream of softened sand with a drop-like point, like the ball of the finger, feeling its way slowly and blindly downward, until at last 20 with more heat and moisture, as the sun gets higher, the most fluid portion, in its effort to obey the law to which the most inert also yields, separates from the latter and forms for itself a meandering channel or artery within that, in which is seen a little silvery stream glancing 25 like lightning from one stage of pulpy leaves or branches to another, and ever and anon swallowed up in the sand. It is wonderful how rapidly yet perfectly the sand organizes itself as it flows, using the best material its mass affords to form the sharp edges of its channel. Such 30 are the sources of rivers. In the silicious matter which the water deposits is perhaps the bony system, and in the still finer soil and organic matter the fleshy fibre or cel- 310 WALDEN lular tissue. What is man but a mass of thawing clay? The ball of the human finger is but a drop congealed. The fingers and toes flow to their extent from the thaw- ing mass of the body. Who knows what the human body 5 would expand and flow out to under a more genial heaven? Is not the hand a spreading palm leaf with its lobes and veins? The ear may be regarded, fancifully, as a lichen, wmbilicaria, on the side of the head, with its lobe or drop. The lip —labium, from labor (?) — laps ro or lapses from the sides of the cavernous mouth. The nose is a manifest congealed drop or stalactite. The chin is a still larger drop, the confluent dripping of the face. The cheeks are a slide from the brows into the valley of the face, opposed and diffused by the cheek bones. 15 Hach rounded lobe of the vegetable leaf, too, is a thick and now loitering drop, larger or smaller; the lobes are the fingers of the leaf; and as many lobes as it has, in so many directions it tends to flow, and more heat or other genial influences would have caused it to flow yet 20 farther. Thus it seemed that this one hillside illustrated the principle of all the operations of Nature. The Maker of this earth but patented a leaf. What Champollion® will decipher this hieroglyphic for us, that we may turn over a 25 new leaf at last? This phenomenon is more exhilarating to me than the luxuriance and fertility of vineyards. True, it is somewhat excrementitious in its character, and there is no end to the heaps of liver, lights, and bowels, as if the globe were turned wrong side outward; but this 30 suggests at least that Nature has some bowels,° and there again is mother of humanity. This is the frost coming out of the ground; this is Spring. It precedes the green and flowery spring, as mythology precedes regular poetry. I SPRING oul know of nothing more purgative of winter fumes and in- digestions. It convinces me that Earth is still in her swad- dling clothes, and stretches forth baby fingers on every side. Fresh curls spring from the baldest brow. There is nothing inorganic. These foliaceous heaps lie along the 5 bank like the slag of a furnace, showing that Nature is “in full blast” within. The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers ro and fruit, — not a fossil earth, but a living earth; com- pared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life-is merely parasitic. Its throes will heave our exuvie from their graves. You may melt your metals and cast them into the most beautiful moulds you can; they will 15 never excite me like the forms which this molten earth flows out into. And not only it, but the institutions upon it, are plastic like clay in the hands of the potter. Ere long, not only on these banks, but on every hill and plain and in every hollow, the frost comes out of the 20 ground like a dormant quadruped from its burrow, and seeks the sea with music, or migrates to other climes in clouds. Thaw with his gentle persuasion is more powerful than Thor® with his hammer. The one melts, the other but breaks in pieces. 25 When the ground was partially bare of snow, and a few warm days had dried its surface somewhat, it was pleasant to compare the first tender signs of the infant year just peeping forth with the stately beauty of the withered vege- tation which had withstood the winter, — life-everlasting, 30 golden-rods, pinweeds, and graceful wild grasses, more obvious and interesting frequently than in summer even, olZ WALDEN as if their beauty was not ripe till then; even cotton-grass, cat-tails, mulleins, johnswort, hard-hack, meadow-sweet, and other strong-stemmed plants, those unexhausted granaries which entertain the earliest birds, — decent°® 5 weeds, at least, which widowed Nature wears. I am particularly attracted by the arching and sheaf-like top of the wool-grass; it brings back the summer to our winter memories, and is among the forms which art loves to copy, and which, in the vegetable kingdom, have the same rela- ro tion to types already in the mind of man that astronomy has. It is an antique style older than Greek or Egyptian. Many of the phenomena of Winter are suggestive of an in- expressible tenderness and fragile delicacy. We are ac- customed to hear this king described as a rude and boister- 15 ous tyrant; but with the gentleness of a lover he adorns the tresses of Summer. _ At the approach of spring the red squirrels got under my house, two at a time, directly under my feet as I sat reading or writing, and kept up the queerest chuckling and chirrup- 20 ing and vocal pirouetting and gurgling sounds that ever were heard; and when I stamped they only chirruped the louder, as if past all fear and respect in their mad pranks, defying humanity to stop them. No, you don’t — chicka- ree — chickaree. They were wholly deaf to my argu- 25 ments, or failed to perceive their force, and fell into a strain of invective that was irresistible. The first sparrow of spring! The year beginning with younger hope than ever! The faint silvery warblings heard over the partially bare and moist fields from the 30 bluebird, the song-sparrow and the red-wing, as if the last flakes of winter tinkled as they fell! What at such a time are histories, chronologies, traditions, and all written revelations? The brooks sing carols and glees to the SPRING alo spring. The marsh-hawk sailing low over the meadow is already seeking the first slimy life that awakes. The sinking sound of melting snow is heard in all dells, and the ice dissolves apace in the ponds. The grass flames up on the hillsides like a spring fire, — “et primutus 5 oritur herba imbribus primoribus evocata,’’ — as if the earth sent forth an inward heat to greet the returning sun; not yellow but green is the color of its flame; — the symbol of perpetual youth, the grass-blade, like a long green ribbon, streams from the sod into the summer, checked indeed by the frost, but anon pushing on again, lifting its spear of last year’s hay with the fresh life below. It grows as steadily as the rill oozes out of the ground. It is almost identical with that, for in the growing days of June, when the rills are dry, the grass 15 blades are their channels, and from year to year the herds drink at this perennial green stream, and the mower draws from it betimes their winter supply. So our human life but dies down to its root, and still puts forth its green blade to eternity. 20 Walden is melting apace. There is a canal two rods wide along the northerly and westerly sides, and wider still at the east end. A great field of ice has cracked off from the main body. I hear a song-sparrow singing from the bushes on the shore, — olit, olit, olit, — chip, chip, chip, 25 che char, — che wiss, wiss, wiss. He too is helping to crack it. How handsome the great sweeping curves in the edge of the ice, answering somewhat to those of the shore, but more regular! It is unusually hard, owing to the recent severe but transient cold, and all watered or waved 30 like a palace floor. But the wind slides eastward over its opaque surface in vain, till it reaches the living surface beyond. It is glorious to behold this ribbon of water Lal oO 314 WALDEN sparkling in the sun, the bare face of the pond full of glee and youth, as if it spoke the joy of the fishes within it, and of the sands on its shore, — a silvery sheen as from the scales of a leuciscus,° as it were all one active fish. Such 5 is the contrast between winter and spring. Walden was dead and is alive again.° But this spring it broke up more steadily, as I have said. The change from storm and winter to serene and mild weather, from dark and sluggish hours to bright and elastic ro ones, is a memorable crisis which all things proclaim. It is seemingly instantaneous at last. Suddenly an influx of light filled my house, though the evening was at hand, and the clouds of winter still overhung it, and the eaves were dripping with sleety rain. I looked out the window, 15 and lo! where yesterday was cold gray ice there lay the transparent pond already calm and full of hope as in a summer evening, reflecting a summer evening sky in its bosom, though none was visible overhead, as if it had in- telligence with some remote horizon. I heard a robin 20 in the distance, the first I had heard for many a thousand years, methought, whose note I shall not forget for many a thousand more, — the same sweet and powerful song as of yore. O the evening robin, at the end of a New England summer day! If I could ever find the twig he sits upon! 251 mean he; I mean the twig. This at least is not the Turdus migratorius.° The pitch-pines and shrub-oaks about my house, which had so long drooped, suddenly resumed their several characters, looked brighter, greener, and more erect and alive, as if effectually cleansed and 30 restored by the rain. I knew that it would not rain any more. You may tell by looking at any twig of the forest, ay, at your very wood-pile, whether its winter is past or not. As it grew darker, I was startled by the honking of geese ‘SPRING 315 flying low over the woods, like weary travellers getting in late from southern lakes, and indulging at last in unre- strained complaint and mutual consolation. Standing at my door, I could hear the rush of their wings ; when, driving toward my house, they suddenly spied my light, and with 5 hushed clamor wheeled and settled in the pond. So I came in, and shut the door, and passed my first spring night in the woods. In the morning I watched the geese from the door through the mist, sailing in the middle of the pond, fifty 10 rods off, so large and tumultuous that Walden appeared like an artificial pond for their amusement. But when I stood on the shore they at once rose up with a great flapping of wings at the signal of their commander, and when they had got into rank circled about over my head, 15 twenty-nine of them, and then steered straight to Canada, with a regular honk from the leader at intervals, trusting to break their fast in muddier pools. A “plump” of ducks rose at the same time and took the route to the north in the wake of their noisier cousins. 20 For a week I heard the circling groping clangor of some solitary goose in the foggy mornings, seeking its companion, and still peopling the woods with the sound of a larger life than they could sustain. In April the pigeons were seen again flying express in small flocks, and in due time I 25 heard the martins twittering over my clearing, though it had not seemed that the township contained so many that it could afford me any, and I fancied that they were pecul- iarly of the ancient race that dwelt in hollow trees ere white men came. In almost all climes the tortoise and the 30 frog are among the precursors and heralds of this season, and birds fly with song and glancing plumage, and plants spring and bloom, and winds blow, to correct this slight 316 WALDEN oscillation of the poles and preserve the equilibrium of Nature. As every season seems best to us in its turn, so the coming in of spring is like the creation of Cosmos out of 5 Chaos and the realization of the Golden Age. — “Kurus ad Auroram,°? Nabathacaque regna recessit, Persidaque, et radiis juga subdita matutinis.”’ “The East-Wind withdrew to Aurora and the Nabathzean kingdom, ’ And the Persian, and the ridges placed under the morning rays. 10 Man was born. Whether that Artificer of things, The origin of a better world, made him from the divine seed; Or the earth being recent and lately sundered from the high Ether, retained some seeds of cognate heaven.” A single gentle rain makes the grass many shades 1s greener. So our prospects brighten on the influx of better thoughts. We should be blessed if we lived in the present always, and took advantage of every accident that befell us, like the grass which confesses the influence of the slightest dew that falls on it ; and did not spend our time in 20 atoning for the neglect of past opportunities, which we call doing our duty. We loiter in winter while it is already spring. In a pleasant spring morning all men’s sins are forgiven. Such a day isa truce to vice. While such a sun holds out to burn, the vilest sinner may return. Through 25 our own recovered innocence we discern the innocence of our neighbors. You may have known your neighbor yesterday for a thief, a drunkard, ora sensualist, and merely pitied or despised him, and despaired of the world; but the sun shines bright and warm this first spring morning, 30 recreating the world, and you meet him at some serene SPRING alt work, and see how his exhausted and debauched veins expand with still joy and bless the new day, feel the spring influence with the innocence of infancy, and all his faults are forgotten. There is not only an atmosphere of good- will about him, but even a savor of holiness groping for 5 expression, blindly and ineffectually perhaps, like a new- born instinct, and for a short hour the south hillside echoes to no vulgar jest. You see some innocent fair shoots preparing to burst from his gnarled rind and try another year’s life, tender and fresh as the youngest plant. Even 10 he has entered into the joy of his Lord. Why the jailer does not leave open his prison doors, — why the judge does not dismiss his case, — why the preacher does not dis- miss his congregation! It is because they do not obey the hint which God gives them, nor accept the pardon which he freely offers to all. ‘“‘A return to goodness produced each day in the tran- quil and beneficent breath of the morning, causes that in respect to the love of virtue and the hatred of vice, one approaches a little the primitive nature of man, as the 20 sprouts of the forest which has been felled. In like manner the evil which one does in the interval of a day prevents the germs of virtues which began to spring up again from developing themselves and destroys them. “ After the germs of virtue have thus been prevented 25 many times from developing themselves, then the benefi- . cent breath of evening does not suffice to preserve them. As soon as the breath of evening does not suffice longer to preserve them, then the nature of man does not differ much from that of the brute. Men seeing the nature of this 30 man like that of the brute, think that he has never pos- sessed the innate faculty of reason. Are those the true and natural sentiments of man?’’ wn : 318 WALDEN “The Golden Age® was first created, which without any avenger Spontaneously without law cherished fidelity and rectitude. Punishment and fear were not; nor were threatening words read On suspended brass; nor did the suppliant crowd fear 5 The words of their judge; but were safe without an avenger. Not yet the pine felled on its mountains had descended To the liquid waves that it might see a foreign world, And mortals knew no shores but their own. There was eternal spring, and placid zephyrs with warm 10 Blasts soothed the flowers born without seed.” On the 29th of April, as I was fishing from the bank of the river near the Nine-Acre-Corner bridge, standing on the quaking grass and willow roots, where the muskrats lurk, I heard a singular rattling sound, somewhat like that of the 15 sticks which boys play with their fingers, when, looking up, I observed a very slight and graceful hawk, like a night- hawk, alternately soairng like a ripple and tumbling a rod or two over and over, showing the under side of its wings, , which gleamed like a satin ribbon in the sun, or like the: 20 pearly inside of a shell. This sight reminded me of falconry and what nobleness and poetry are associated with the’ sport. The Merlin® it seemed to me it might be called: but I care not for its name. It was the most ethereal flight I had ever witnessed. It did not simply flutter 25 like a butterfly, nor soar like the larger hawks, but it sported with proud reliance in the fields of air; mounting again and again with its strange chuckle, it repeated its free and beautiful fall, turning over and over likea kite, and then recovering from its lofty tumbling, as if it had never 3° set its foot on terra firma. It appeared to have no com- panion in the universe, — sporting there alone, — and tc need none but the morning and the ether with which it SPRING a played. It was not lonely, but made all the earth lonely beneath it. Where was the parent which hatched it, its kindred, and its father in the heavens? The tenant of the air, it seemed related to the earth but by an egg hatched sometime in the crevice of a crag ;—or was its native nest 5 made in the angle of a cloud, woven of the rainbow’s trimmings and the sunset sky, and lined with some soft midsummer haze caught up from earth? Its eyry now some cliffy cloud. Beside this I got a rare mess of golden and silver and bright cupreous® fishes, which looked like a string of jewels. Ah! I have penetrated to those meadows on the morning of many a first spring day, jumping from hum- mock to hummock, from willow root to willow root, when the wild river valley and the woods were bathed in so pure and bright a light as would have waked the dead, if they had been slumbering in their graves, as some suppose. There needs no stronger proof of immortality. All things must live in sucha light. O Death,° where was thy sting? O Grave, where was thy victory, then? Our village life would stagnate if it were not for the un- explored forests and meadows which surround it. We need the tonic of wildness, —to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground. At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysteri- ous and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathom- able. We can never have enough of Nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and 20 25 30 320 WALDEN Titanic® features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilder- ness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder- cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, 5 and some life pasturing freely where we never wander. We are cheered when we observe the vulture feeding on the carrion which disgusts and disheartens us and deriving health and strength from the repast. There was a dead horse in the hollow by the path to my house, which com- ro pelled me sometimes to go out of my way, especially in the night when the air was heavy, but the assurance it gave me of the strong appetite and inviolable health of Nature was my compensation for this. I love to see that Nature is so rife with life that myriads can be afforded to be 15 sacrificed and suffered to prey on one another; that tender organizations can be so serenely squashed out of existence like pulp, — tadpoles which herons gobble up, and tor- toises and toads run over in the road; and that sometimes it has rained flesh and blood. With the liability to acci- 20 dent, we must see how little account is to be made of it. The impression made on a wise man is that of universal innocence. Poison is not poisonous after all, nor are any wounds fatal. Compassion is a very untenable ground. It must be expeditious. Its pleadings will not bear to be 25 stereotyped. Early in May, the oaks, hickories, maples, and other trees, just putting out amidst the pine woods around the pond, imparted a brightness like sunshine to the land- scape in cloudy days, as if the sun were breaking through 3o mists and shining faintly on the hillsides here and there. On the third or fourth of May I saw a loon in the pond, and during the first week of the month I heard the whip- poorwill, the brown-thrasher, the veery, the wood-pewee, SPRING VA the chewink, and other birds. I had heard the wood- thrush long before. The phoebe had already come once more and looked in at my door and window, to see if my house was cavern-like enough for her, sustaining herself on humming wings with clinched talons, as if she held by 5 the air, while she surveyed the premises. The sulphur- like pollen of the pitch-pine soon covered the pond and the stones and rotten wood along the shore, so that you could have collected a barrelful. This isthe ‘‘ sulphur showers ” we hear of. Even in Calidas’ drama of Sacontala,° we 10 read of “‘rills dyed yellow with the golden dust of the lotus.”” And so the seasons went rolling on into summer, as one rambles into higher and higher grass. Thus was my first year’s life in the woods completed, and the second year was similar to it. I finally left rs Walden September 6th, 1847. CONCLUSION To the sick the doctors wisely recommend a change of air and scenery. Thank Heaven, here is not all the world. The buck-eye does not grow in New England, and the mocking-bird is rarely heard here. The wild- 5 goose is more of a cosmopolite than we; he breaks his fast in Canada, takes a luncheon in the Ohio, and plumes himself for the night ina southern bayou. Even the bison, to some extent, keeps pace with the seasons, cropping the pastures of the Colorado only till a greener and sweeter 1ograss awalts him by the Yellowstone. Yet we think that if rail-fences are pulled down, and stone-walls piled up on our farms, bounds are henceforth set to our lives and our fates decided. If you are chosen town-clerk, forsooth, you cannot go to Tierra de] Fuego° this summer : 15 but you may go to the land of infernal fire nevertheless. The universe is wider than our views of it. Yet we should oftener look over the tafferel° of our craft, like curious passengers, and not make the voyage like stupid sailors picking oakum.° The other side of the 20 globe is but the home of our correspondent. Our voyaging is only great-circle sailing, and the doctors prescribe for diseases of the skin merely. One hastens to Southern Africa to chase the giraffe; but surely that is not the game he would be after. How long, pray, would a man hunt 25 giraffes if he could? Snipes and woodcocks also may 322 CONCLUSION one afford rare sport; but I trust it would be nobler game to shoot one’s self. — “Direct your eye right inward, and you'll find A thousand regions in your mind Yet undiscovered. Travel them, and be 5 Expert in home-cosmography.”’ What does Africa — what does the West stand for? Is not our own interior white on the chart? black though it may prove, like the coast, when discovered. Is it the source of the Nile, or the Niger, or the Mississippi, or a 10 North-West Passage around this continent, that we would find? Are these the problems which most concern man- kind? Is Franklin® the only man who is lost, that his wife should be so earnest to find him? Does Mr. Grinnell? know where he himself is? Be rather the Mungo Park, 15 the Lewis and Clark and Frobisher,° of your own streams and oceans; explore your own higher latitudes, — with shiploads of preserved meats to support you, if they be necessary; and pile the empty cans sky-high for a sign. Were preserved meats invented to preserve meat merely ? 20 Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought. Every man is the lord of a realm beside which the earthly empire of the Czar is but a petty state, a hum- mock left by the ice. Yet some can be patriotic who 25 have no self-respect, and sacrifice the greater to the less. They love the soil which makes their graves, but have no sympathy with the spirit which may still animate their clay. Patriotism is a maggot in their heads. What was the meaning of that South-Sea Exploring Expedition,° with 30 all its parade and expense, but an indirect recognition of the fact, that there are continents and seas in the moral 324 WALDEN world, to which every man is an isthmus or an inlet, yet unexplored by him, but that it is easier to sail many thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals, in a government ship, with five hundred men and boys to 5 assist one, than it is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one’s being alone. — “Erret, et extremos alter scrutetur Iberos. Plus habet hic vite, plus habet ille vie.” ‘Let them wander and scrutinize the outlandish Australians, ro Ihave more of God, they more of the road.” It is not worth the while to go round the world to count the eatsin Zanzibar.° Yet do this even till you can do better, and you may perhaps find some “‘Symmes’ Hole’°® by which to get at the inside at last. England and France, 15 Spain and Portugal, Gold Coast and Slave Coast,° all front on this private sea; but no bark from them has ventured out of sight of land, though it is without doubt the direct way to India. If you would learn to speak all tongues and conform to the customs of all nations, if you 20 would travel farther than all travellers, be naturalized in all climes, and cause the Sphinx® to dash her head against a stone, even obey the precept of the old philoso- pher, and Explore thyself. Herein are demanded the eye and the nerve. Only the defeated and deserters go to the 23 wars, cowards that run away andenlist. Start now on that farthest western way, which does not pause at the Missis- sippi or the Pacific, nor conduct toward a worn-out China or Japan, but leads on direct, a tangent to this sphere, summer and winter, day and night, sun down, moon down, 32 and at last earth down too. It is said that Mirabeau° took to highway robbery “to ascertain what degree of resolution was necessary CONCLUSION 325 in order to place one’s self in formal opposition to the most sacred laws of society.”” He declared that “‘a soldier who fights in the ranks does not require half so much courage as a foot-pad,’’ — “‘that honor and religion have never stood in the way of a well-considered and a firm 5 resolve.” This was manly, as the world goes; and yet it was idle, if not desperate. A saner man would have found himself often enough “in formal opposition” to what are deemed ‘‘the most sacred laws of society,” through obedi- ence to yet more sacred laws, and so have tested his resolu- 10 tion without going out of his way. It is not for a man to put himself in such an attitude to society, but to maintain himself in whatever attitude he find himself through obedience to the laws of his being, which will never be one of opposition to a just government, if he should chance to 15 meet with such. I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one. It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particu- 20 lar route, and make a beaten track for ourselves. I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond-side; and though it is five or six years since I trod it, it is still quite distinct. It is true, I fear, that others may have fallen into it, and so helped to keep 25 itopen. The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the high- ways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and con- formity! I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but 30 rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now. 326 WALDEN I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. 5 He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary ; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher ro order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where 15they should be. Now put the foundations under them. It is a ridiculous demand which England and America make, that you shall speak so that they can understand you. Neither men nor toadstools grow so. As if that 20 were important, and there were not enough to understand you without them. As if Nature could support but one order of understandings, could not sustain birds as well as quadrupeds, flying as well as creeping things, and hush and who, which Bright can understand, were the best 25 English. As if there were safety in stupidity alone. I fear chiefly lest my expression may not be extra-vagant° enough, may not wander far enough beyond the narrow limits of my daily experience, so as to be adequate to the truth of which I have been convinced. Extra vagance! 30 it depends on how youare yarded. The migrating buffalo, which seeks new pastures in another latitude, is not ex- travagant like the cow which kicks over the pail, leaps the cow-yard fence, and runs after her calf, in milking time. I CONCLUSION Olt desire to speak somewhere without bounds; like a man in a waking moment, to men in their waking moments; for I am convinced that I cannot exaggerate enough even to lay the foundation of a true expression. Who that has heard a strain of music feared then lest he should speak 5 extravagantly any more forever? In view of the future or possible, we should live quite laxly and undefined in front, our outlines dim and misty on that side; as our shadows reveal an insensible perspiration toward the sun. The volatile truth of our words should continually betray 10 the inadequacy of the residual statement. Their truth is instantly translated°; its literal monument alone remains. The words which express our faith and piety are not definite; yet they are significant and fragrant like frankin- cense to superior natures. 15 Why level downward to our dullest perception always, and praise that as common sense? The commonest sense is the sense of men asleep, which they express by snoring. Sometimes we are inclined to class those who are once-and-a-half witted, with the half-witted, because we 20 appreciate only a third part of their wit. Some would find fault with the morning-red, if they ever got up early enough. ‘‘They pretend,” as I hear, ‘‘that the verses of Kabir® have four different senses: illusion, spirit, intellect, and the exoteric doctrine of the Vedas;” but in this part 25 of the world it is considered a ground for complaint if a man’s writings admit of more than one interpretation. While England endeavors to cure the potato-rot, will not any endeavor to cure the brain-rot, which prevails so much more widely and fatally ? 3° I do not suppose that I have attained to obscurity, but I should be proud if no more fatal fault were found with my pages on this score than was found with the Walden 328 WALDEN ice. Southern customers objected to its blue color, which is the evidence of its purity, as if it were muddy, and pre- ferred the Cambridge ice, which is white, but tastes of weeds. The purity men love is like the mists which 5 envelop the earth, and not like the azure ether beyond. Some are dinning in our ears that we Americans, and moderns generally, are intellectual dwarfs compared with the ancients, or even the Elizabethan men. But what is that to the purpose? A living dog® is better than a dead ro lion. Shall aman go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies, and not be the biggest pygmy that he can? Let every one mind his own business, and en- deavor to be what he was made. Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, rs and in such desperate enterprises? Ifaman does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or faraway. It is not important that he should mature as soon as an apple-tree or an oak. 20 Shall he turn his spring into summer? If the condition of things which we were made for is not yet, what were any reality which we can substitute? We will not be ship- wrecked on a vain reality. . Shall we with pains erect a heaven of blue glass over ourselves, though when it is done 25 we Shall be sure to gaze still at the true ethereal heaven far above, as if the former were not ? There was an artist in the city of Kouroo who was dis- posed to strive after perfection. One day it came into his mind to make a staff. Having considered that in an im- 30 perfect work time is an ingredient, but into a perfect work time does not enter, he said to himself, It shall be perfect in all respects, though I should do nothing else in my life. He proceeded instantly to the forest for wood, being re- CONCLUSION 329 solved that it should not be made of unsuitable material; and as he searched for and rejected stick after stick, his friends gradually deserted him, for they grew old in their works and died, but he grew not older by amoment. His singleness of purpose and resolution, and his elevated piety, endowed him, without his knowledge, with perennial youth. As he made no compromise with Time, Time kept out of his way, and only sighed at a distance because he could not overcome him. Before he had found a stock in all respects suitable the city of Kouroo was a hoary ruin, and he sat on one of its mounds to peel the stick. Before he had given it the proper shape the dynasty of the Candahars was at an end, and with the point of the stick he wrote the name of the last of that race in the sand, and then resumed his work. By the time he had smoothed and polished the staff Kalpa was no longer the pole-star; and ere he had put on the ferule and the head adorned with precious stones, Brahma had awoke and slumbered many times. But why do I stay to mention these things? When the finish- ing stroke was put to his work, it suddenly expanded before the eyes of the astonished artist into the fairest of all the creations of Brahma. He had made a new system in making a staff, a world with full and fair proportions; in which, though the old cities and dynasties had passed away, fairer and more glorious ones had taken their places. And now he saw by the heap of shavings still fresh at his feet, that, for him and his work, the former lapse of time had been an illusion, and that no more time had elapsed than is required for a single scintillation from the brain of Brahma to fall on and inflame the tinder of a mortal brain. The material was pure, and his art was pure; how could the result be other than wonderful? No face which we can give to a matter will stead us so On he) LS) Q 30 330 WALDEN well at last as the truth. This alone wears well. For the most part, we are not where we are, but in a false position. Through an infirmity of our natures, we sup- pose a case, and put ourselves into it, and hence are in 5 two cases at the same time, and it is doubly difficult to get out. In sane moments we regard only the facts, the case that is. Say what you have to say, not what vou ought. Any truth is better than make-believe. Tom Hyde, the tinker, standing on the gallows, was asked 10 if he had anything to say. ‘Tell the tailors,” said he, “to remember to make a knot in their thread before they take the first stitch.”” His companion’s prayer is for- gotten. However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do 15 not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poor-house. 20 The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the alms- house as brightly as from the rich man’s abode; the snow melts before its door as early in the spring. I do not see but a quiet mind may live as contentedly there, and have as cheering thoughts, as in a palace. The town’s poor 25 seem to me often to live the most independent lives of any. Maybe they are simply great enough to receive without misgiving. Most think that they are above being supported by the town; but it oftener happens that they are not above supporting themselves by dis- 3o honest means, which should be more disreputable. Cul- tivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Turn the old; return to them. Things CONCLUSION oon do not change; we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. God will see that you do not want society. If I were confined to a corner of a garret all my days, like a spider, the world would be just as large to me while I had my thoughts about me. The philosopher 5s said: “From an army of three divisions one can take away its general, and put it in disorder; from the man the most abject and vulgar one cannot take away his thought.”” Do not seek so anxiously to be developed, to subject yourself to many influences to be played on; it 10 is all dissipation. Humility like darkness reveals the heavenly lights. The shadows of poverty and meanness gather around us, ‘‘and lo! creation widens to our view.” We are often reminded that if there were bestowed on us the wealth of Croesus,° our aims must still be the same, rs and our means essentially the same. Moreover, if you are restricted in your range by poverty, if you cannot buy books and newspapers, for instance, you are but confined to the most significant and vital experiences; you are compelled to deal with the material which yields 20 the most sugar and the most starch. It is life near the bone where it is sweetest. You are defended from being a trifler. No man loses ever on a lower level by magnanimity on a higher. Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only. Money is not required to buy one2s necessary of the soul. I live in the angle of a leaden wall, into whose compo- sition was poured a little alloy of bell metal. Often, in the repose of my mid-day, there reaches my ears a confused tintinnabulum from without. It is the noise 30 of my contemporaries. My neighbors tell me of their adventures with famous gentlemen and ladies, what notabilities they met at the dinner-table; but I am no oo WALDEN more interested in such things than in the contents of the Daily Times. The interest and the conversation are about costume and manners chiefly; but a goose is a goose still, dress it as you will. They tell me of Cali- 5 fornia and Texas, of England and the Indies, of the Hon. Mr. of Georgia or of Massachusetts, all transient and fleeting phenomena, till I am ready to leap from their court-yard like the Mameluke bey. I delight to come to my bearings, — not walk in procession with pomp and ro parade, in a conspicuous place, but to walk even with the Builder of the universe, if I may, — not to live in this restless, nervous, bustling, trivial Nineteenth Century, but stand or sit thoughtfully while it goes by. What are men celebrating? They are all ona committee of arrange- 13 ments, and hourly expect a speech from somebody. God is only the president of the day, and Webster is his orator. I love to weigh, to settle, to gravitate toward that which most strongly and rightfully attracts me;— not hang by the beam of the scale and try to weigh less, — 20 not suppose a case, but take the case that is; to travel the only path I can, and that on which no power can resist me. It affords me no satisfaction to commence to spring an arch before I have got a solid foundation. Let us not play at kittlybenders.° There isa solid bottom 25 everywhere. We read that the traveller asked the boy if the swamp before him had a hard bottom. The boy replied that it had. But presently the traveller’s horse sank in up to the girths, and he observed to the boy, “I thought you said that this bog had a hard bottom.” 30 “‘So it has,”’ answered the latter, ‘“‘but you have not got halfway to it vet.”” So it is with the bogs and quicksands of society; but he is an old boy that knows it. Only what is thought, said, or done at a certain rare coincidence CONCLUSION ov is good. I would not be one of those who will foolishly drive a nail into mere lath and plastering; such a deed would keep me awake nights. Give me a hammer, and let me feel for the furrowing. Do not depend on the putty. Drive a nail home and clinch it so faithfully 5 that you can wake up in the night and think of your work with satisfaction, —a work at which you would not be ashamed to invoke the Muse. So will help you God, and so only. Every nail driven should be as another rivet in the machine of the sane ee you carrying on ro the work. Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth. I sat at a table where were rich food and wine in abundance, and obsequious attendance, but sincerity and truth were not; and I went away hungry from the 15 inhospitable board. The hospitality was as cold as the ices. I thought that there was no need of ice to freeze them. They talked to me of the age of the wine and the fame of the vintage; but I thought of an older, a newer, and purer wine, of a more glorious vintage, which they 20 had not got, and could not buy. The style, the house and grounds and “entertainment” pass for nothing with me. I called on the king, but he made me wait in his hall, and conducted® like a man incapacitated for hospitality. There was a man in my neighborhood who lived in aas hollow tree. His manners were truly regal. I should have done better had I called on him. How long shall we sit in our porticoes practising idle and musty virtues, which any work would make imper- tinent? As if one were to begin the day with long-suffer- 30 ing, and hire a man to hoe his potatoes; and in the after- noon go forth to practise Christian meekness and charity with goodness aforethought! Consider the China pride 304 WALDEN and stagnant self-complacency of mankind. This genera- tion reclines a little to congratulate itself on being the last of an illustrious line; and in Boston and London and Paris and Rome, thinking of its long descent, it speaks 5 of its progress in art and science and literature with satisfaction. There are the Records of the Philosophi- cal Societies, and the public Eulogies of Great Men! It is the good Adam contemplating his own virtue. “Yes, we have done great deeds, and sung divine songs, 1o Which shall never die,’’ — that is, as long as we can remember them. The learned societies and great men of Assyria, — where are they? What youthful philosophers and experimentalists we are! There is not one of my readers who has yet lived a whole human life. These 15 may be but the spring months in the life of the race. If we have had the seven-years’ itch, we have not seen the seventeen-year locust yet in Concord. We are acquainted with a mere pellicle° of the globe on which we live. Most have not delved six feet beneath the surface, nor leaped 20 as many above it. We know not where we are. Beside, we are sound asleep nearly half our time. Yet we esteem ourselves wise, and have an established order on the sur- face. Truly, we are deep thinkers, we are ambitious spirits! As I stand over the insect crawling amid the 25 pine needles on the forest floor, and endeavoring to con- ceal itself from my sight, and ask myself why it will cherish those humble thoughts, and hide its head from me who might, perhaps, be its benefactor, and impart to its race some cheering information, I am reminded of the 30 greater Benefactor and Intelligence that stands over me, the human insect. There is an incessant influx of novelty into the world, and yet we tolerate incredible dulness. I need only CONCLUSION 335 suggest what kind of sermons are still listened to in the most enlightened countries. There are such words as joy and sorrow, but they are only the burden of a psalm, sung with a nasal twang, while we believe in the ordinary and mean. We think that we can change our clothes 5 only. It is said that the British Empire is very large and respectable, and that the United States are a first- rate power. We do not believe that a tide rises and falls behind every man which can float the British Empire like a chip, if he should ever harbor it in his mind. Who 10 knows what sort of seventeen-year locust will next come out of the ground? The government of the world I live in was not framed, like that of Britain, in after-dinner conversations over the wine. The life in us is like the water in the river. It may 15 rise this year higher than man has ever known it, and flood the parched uplands; even this may be the eventful year, which will drown out all our muskrats. It was not always dry land where we dwell. I see far inland the banks which the stream anciently washed, before science 20 began to record its freshets. Every one has heard the story which has gone the rounds of New England, of a strong and beautiful bug which came out of the dry leaf of an old table of apple-tree wood, which had stood in a farmer’s kitchen for sixty years, first in Connecticut, and 25 afterwards in Massachusetts, — from an egg deposited in the living tree many years earlier still, as appeared by counting the annual layers beyond it; which was heard gnawing out for several weeks, hatched perchance by the heat of an urn. Who does not feel his faith in a resurrec- 30 tion and immortality strengthened by hearing of this? Who knows what beautiful and winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under many concentric layers of 336 WALDEN woodenness in the dead dry life of society, deposited at first in the alburnum of thegreen and living tree, which has been gradually converted into the semblance of its well- seasoned tomb, — heard perchance gnawing out now for 5 years by the astonished family of man, as they sat round the festive board, — may unexpectedly come forth from amidst society’s most trivial and handselled furniture, to enjoy its perfect summer life at last! I do not say that John or Jonathan® will realize all to this; but such is the character of that morrow which mere lapse of time can never make to dawn. The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star. NOTES 1:4. Concord, Massachusetts, not to be confused with Concord, New Hampshire, is about twenty miles northwest of Boston. It is now easily accessible both by train and electric car. 1:6. two years. Thoreau began to live at Walden Pond July 4, 1845. 1:23. that, in respect to egotism, is the main difference. That is, egotism is to be seen both in ‘‘most books ”’ and in Walden; the ‘‘ main difference’’ is that in Walden “1” is used frequently. 2:2. Ishould not talk so much about myself, etc. Fora more recent expression of the idea, see George Santayana’s The Sense of Beauty, Part I, Section 8. ‘I care about myself because ‘ myself ’ is a name for the things I have at heart.” 2:17. as you, 7.e. as (concerning) you. 2:27. Bramins sitting exposed to four fires.. Oriental philosophies and religions had great fascination for Thoreau, as they did for Emerson and all the Concord school of thinkers. 3:5. twelve labors of Hercules. See Bulfinch, Age of Fable (David McKay, Philadelphia, 1898), p. 178. 3:9. Iolas. Iolaus, the faithful companion of Hercules. See Bulfinch, p. 179. 3:14. for these, etc. In this clause Thoreau tells the reader why he has used the term “‘ misfortune ”’ above, Z 337 338 NOTES 3:20. peck of dirt. The allusion is to the saying that “ Every man must eat a peck of dirt before he dies.” 3:26. Augean. See Bulfinch, p. 179. 3:27. tillage. Cultivated land. The word is from the Anglo-Saxon verb tilian, to cultivate, to till. 4:2. old book. See Matthew vi., 19, 20. 4:6. Deucalion and Pyrrha. See Bulfinch, pp. 25, 26. 4:8. Inde genus, etc. Ovid’s Metamorphoses, I., ll. 414, 415. 4:19. factitious. From Latin factitius or facticius, made by art, artificial; in contradistinction to that pro- duced by nature. 5:32. Negro Slavery. Thoreau, notwithstanding his expression here, took a bold stand with regard to slavery, refusing resolutely to pay taxes to a government that per- mitted it; he was not willing, he said, that his money should ‘‘ buy a man, or a musket to shoot one with.” In consequence of his refusal he was lodged for a night in the town jail at Concord. ‘‘ Henry, why are you here?” said Emerson, when he came to visit him. ‘‘ Why are you not here?”’ was the reply. 6:9. Squire Make-a-stir. Cf. Bunyan’s use of vividly suggestive names in The Pilgrim’s Progress. 6:18. Wilberforce, William (1759-1833), the most con- spicuous English opponent of slavery. The Emancipation Bill was passed by Parliament a month after his death. 6:20. green. Immature, inexperienced. 6 : 33. chief end of man. “Question. ‘What is the chief end of man?’ “Answer. ‘Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.’’’ — The Shorter Catechism. 7:16. dry wood under a pot. Cf. De Quincey’s famous characterization of the locomotive and ‘“‘ the pot-wallopings NOTES 339 of the boiler ” in ‘‘ The Glory of Motion ” in The English Mail Coach. 7:18. Age is no better, etc. For a whimsical and lively treatment of this theme see Stevenson’s ‘‘ Crabbed Age and Youth.” 7:28. some thirty years. Thoreau was about twenty- eight when he went to live at Walden. 8:2. Mentors. Mentor was the faithful monitor to whom Ulysses intrusted the education of his son Telemachus. 8:3. vegetable. Thoreau was not always a strict vege- tarian. In writing to Colonel T. W. Higginson in 1858 he speaks of the provisions carried on one of his trips to the Maine woods. ‘ Perhaps you would like a few more de- tails. We used (three of us) exactly twenty-six pounds of hard bread, fourteen pounds of pork, three pounds of coffee, twelve pounds of sugar (and could have used more), besides a little tea, Indian meal, and rice, — and plenty of berries and moose-meat. ... For solid food, I decide that it is not worth the while to carry anything but hard bread and pork, whatever your tastes may be. These wear best, and you have no time nor dishes in which to cook anything else.”’ — Familiar Letters of Henry David Thoreau, ed. by F. B. Sanborn (Boston, 1895). 8:16. Evelyn, John (1620-1706), the famous diarist. He wrote much concerning gardening. 8:18. preztors. See Seyffert’s Dictionary of Classical Antiquities (1901), p. 512. 8:21. Hippocrates (c. 460-c. 377 B.c.), a celebrated Greek physician, often spoken of as ‘‘ the father of medicine.” 10:6. Confucius (550-478 B.c.), celebrated Chinese philosopher. See Ency. Brit. 10 : 22. grossest groceries. What is the derivation of these words? 340 NOTES 11:17. Darwin, Charles (1809-1882), the author of The Origin of Species. 11:18. Tierra del Fuego. See map of South America. 11:23. New Hollander. The name formerly applied to Australia was New Holland. 11:26. Liebig. Baron Justus von Liebig (1803-1873), the German chemist, was professor at Giessen and, later, at Munich. 12:19. Elysian. From Elysium, in Greek mythology, the abode of the blessed after death. 14:15. radicle. Here used as synonym for root. 14:21. esculents. From Latin esculentus, ‘“ eatable, good toeat.’”’ Esculent is often used for “‘ edible vegetable.” 14:22. biennials. Plants that live for two years. 15 : 23. notch it on my stick. An allusion to Thoreau’s pencil-making, as to toe that line is to his surveying. What is the meaning of the word “‘ tally’’? See Cent. Dict. 15:31. on their trail, This paragraph is probably the most beautiful, certainly the best known, expression of Thoreau’s idealism. 16:24. manna-wise. See Hzodus xvi., especially v. 20. 16:26. reporter to a journal. Thoreau’s journal, to which he here alludes, was the great repository to which he committed from day to day the results of his observation and reflection. It extended from 1837 to within a few months of his death. From it he took many of his lectures, and the greater part of the two books published during his lifetime (A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and Walden). Since his death the same quarry has furnished, in the hands of editors, particularly Mr. H. G. O. Blake, several other volumes, such as Early Spring in Massachu- setts, Summer, Winter, and Autumn. 16 : 33. surveyor. Thoreau seems to have been a very NOTES 341 eareful and skilful surveyor. His services were in demand not only in Concord but elsewhere. 17:18. sinecure. What is the derivation of this word? 18:16. but I, z.e. but (that) I. 18:32. bottoms. Ships. 19:21. La Pérouse. A French navigator, supposedly lost at sea in 1788. 19:23. Hanno. A Carthaginian navigator and colo- nizer who visited the west coast of Africa in the fifth cen- tury B.c. 19:27. tareandtret, and gauging. Tare, a deduction from the gross weight equivalent to the weight of the cask, box, etc. —tret, in the older commerce, was an allowance to the purchaser of four pounds in the hundred, after the deduction of the tare, in consideration of the expense of transporta- tion. — gauging, the art of ascertaining the capacity of casks, — etc. 19:33. Neva. Ariver in Russia; St. Petersburg is built on the marshy land about the mouths of the Neva. See map of St. Petersburg in Century Atlas. 20:7. Clothing. Cf. the passage which follows with Carlyle’s treatment of the subject in Sartor Resartus, which appeared in 1833 and had great influence upon the New England Transcendentalists. 21:20. Pfeiffer. Madame Ida Reyer Pfeiffer (1797- 1858), a celebrated Austrian traveller, went round the world twice, the first time in 1846-1848. The account of her journey (Hine Frauenfahrt um die Welt) appeared in 1850. Though much of Walden was written during Thoreau’s stay at Walden Pond (1845-1847), additions were made from time to time up to 1854, the year of publication. 22:20. menwant. Need. 22:32. cashiered. Dismissed, cast off, discarded. 342 NOTES 23:7 cortex. Bark. 23:29. Fates. Clotho, lLachesis, and Atropos. See Bulfinch, p. 476. 24:11. Graces. Euphrosyne, Aglaia, and Thalia. See Bulfinch, p. 479.—Parce. See note on Fates above. 24:24. Egyptian wheat. The allusion is to the stories, now discredited, of ‘‘mummy wheat’ which germinated after remaining thousands of years in the tombs of Egypt. 25:18. most fashionable. Perhaps a slip for ‘‘ more fashionable.’? This use of ‘‘ most ’”’ was formerly common even among good writers. Jane Austen (Emma, Ch. XLIX) writes ‘‘ infinitely the most worthy of the two.” 26:2. Samuel Laing (1780-1868). Traveller; trans- lator of the Hetmskringla, the Icelandic chronicle of the kings of Norway. 26:10. domestic. What is the derivation? 26:18. gazettes. Newspapers; used loosely of Indian writing. What is the etymology of “gazette”? Cf. the word ‘“‘ picayune ”’ as used in the name of a newspaper, the New Orleans Picayune. 27:27. Indians. Thoreau was deeply interested in Indian history and in the Indian character. For an illumi- nating essay on the ‘‘ wildness” in his nature, see Mr. Bur- roughs’s “‘ Thoreau’s Wildness ”’ in Literary Values (Boston, 1902). ‘Everything connected with the Indians had a strange interest and fascination for him; ... he several times visited Maine in order to study their language and habits, and never failed to converse with the wandering parties who sometimes pitched their tents for a few weeks on the banks of the Concord River. ... This remarkable sympathy, on the part of one of the most advanced of modern thinkers, NOTES 343 with the spirit of a savage and decaying race is accounted for by Thoreau’s strong natural inclination to the uncultivated and wild. He loved the sea and all desert places; preferred the wild apple to the cultured orchard, and the dreariest swamp to the most fragrant garden; and it cheered him to see the young forest-pines springing up anew in the fertile corn-land. The Indian, the human representative of wild life in New England, thus attracted his sympathies, just as the sympathies of George Borrow were attracted to the roam- ing gypsy tribes.’”,— H. 8S. Saur’s Life of Thoreau, pp. 97, 98. During the closing months of his life he was preparing ar- ticles on the Indians for the Atlantic Monthly, and his last audible words were ‘‘ moose ”’ and ‘ Indian.”’ 28:19. Gookin, Daniel (1612-1678), became superintend- ent of the Indians in Massachusetts Colony in 1656. The book to which Thoreau refers, Historical Collections of the Indians of Massachusetts, was first published in 1792. 29:6. its. The antecedent is family. 29:30. Rumford fireplace. An improved type of fire- place first constructed by Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford (1753-1814). — back plastering. Formerly build- ers plastered between the studding; thick paper now ordi- narily takes the place of the “ back ” or ‘‘ first ’’ plaster. 29:31. Venetian blinds. ‘ Window-shades made of thin laths of wood attached to strips of webbing.” 31.:1. What mean ye, etc. See LHzekiel xviii., 2, 3, 4; Mark xiv., 7. 32:10. éclat. French, ‘ pomp, display, dash.’’ 32:11. suent. Suant, smooth, even. 32:16. hair springe. A noose or snare; a gin. This form of the word is now unusual. See Hamlet, Act I, Se:3, 1.115: 32 ; 20, Chapman, George (1559-1634), Elizabethan poet 344 NOTES and dramatist, author of Bussy d’ Ambois (1607), is chiefly known for his translation of the Iliad and Odyssey. Thoreau was well read in English sixteenth and seventeenth century authors. For quotation see Cesar and Pompey (p. 376 of Vol. 1, Chapman’s Works, Chatto and Windus). 32:25. and it be, 7z.e. it (may) be, etc. 32:27. Momus. The god of censure and faultfinding. See Bulfinch, pp. 14, 488.— Minerva. Goddess of wisdom. See index of Bulfinch. 33 : 32. last improvement. The Fitchburg Railroad had but recently been built when Thoreau began to live at Walden. 34:3. and the, 7.e. and (where) the. 35:5. glow-shoes. Perhaps a New England folk-ety- mology for galoshes. See goloeshoes in Murray’s New Eng- lish Dictionary. 35:19. Aurora. The goddess of the dawn. 35:20. Memnon. The “ column of Memnon” gave forth music when the rays of the sun fell upon it in the morning. See note on p. 352. 35:31. Sardanapalus or Asurbanipal (668-626 B.c.), an Assyrian king whose reign was notable for material pros- perity. 36:8. Jonathan. ‘ Brother Jonathan,” the name ap- plied to the people of the United States as a whole. It originated, perhaps, in Washington’s saying, at a time when the American army was in great need of supplies, ‘‘We must consult Brother Jonathan,’ 7.e. Jonathan Trumbull, governor of Connecticut, in whose sagacity Washington had great confidence. Cf. the name ‘‘ John Bull,” which origi- nated with Dr. Arbuthnot (The History of John Bull), the witty member of the Scriblerus Club to whom Pope addressed his ‘‘ Epistle to Dr, Arbuthnot,” NOTES 345 36:27. agri-culture. What is the derivation? 37:17. factitious. See note on p. 338. 37:30. Old Johnson. Edward Johnson (1599-1672) accompanied Governor Winthrop to New England in 1630, and became prominent in Massachusetts political life. He wrote a rambling but quaint and interesting history of the country, published in London in 1654, under the title of Wonder-working Providence of Zion’s Saviour in New England, 38:7. New Netherland. The old name for the colony which later became New York. 40:3. The owner. Amos Bronson Alcott (1799-1888) ; pedler, school-teacher, and finaily dean of the Concord School of Philosophy. He was the father of Louisa May Alcott, author of Little Women, etc. There is an account of him in Walden ; see p. 270. 40:18. winter of man’s discontent. Cf. “Now is the winter of our discontent Made glorious summer by this sun of York.’ — King Richard III, Act I, Se. 1. 41:20. tenoned. Both the verb and noun (tenon) have become obsolete. Cf. Exodus xxvi., 19. 44:8. raisers. Among them were George William Curtis and the Amos Bronson Alcott mentioned above. 44:11. 4thof July. ‘A significant and auspicious date for the commencement of such an undertaking.’’ — H. S. SALT. 45:17. ninth part. An allusion to the saying, ‘‘ It takes nine tailors to make one man.’’ On the origin of the ex- pression, see Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable under ~) Lailors,”’ 46:8. Trinity Church. Lower Broadway, New York. 346 NOTES The present structure was completed about 1846, and was therefore much talked of at the time Thoreau was writing Walden. 46:22. beauty of life. The thought here expressed was fully treated by Ruskin, one of the few modern authors whom Thoreau admired. 49:7. Cambridge College. Thoreau entered Harvard College in 1833, occupying in succession Hollis 20, 32, 31, and 23 during his undergraduate life. 49:12. noisy neighbors. For an amusing account of student disturbances, see a letter to Thoreau by a classmate, quoted in Mr. F. B. Sanborn’s Henry D. Thoreau (Boston, 1882), p. 55 51:3. Institute. The Lowell Institute, Boston. Founded by John Lowell, Jr. Lectures by eminent men have been given since 1839. 51:12. Adam Smith (1723-1790). Scotch political economist; the author of Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), an. epoch- mate book in the history of political economy. 51:13. Ricardo, David (1772-1823). Economist of Jewish descent, member of English House of Parliament, and author of Principles of Political Economy (1817). — Say, Jean Baptiste (1767-1823). French economist who was much influenced by Smith’s Wealth of Nations. 52:1. Princess Adelaide (1792-1849). Married in 1818 the Duke of Clarence, who later became William IV. 52:6. Flying Childers. A race-horse, famous in the early part of the eighteenth century. He was never beaten. 53:18. brothers of mine. The pity and tenderness of Thoreau’s nature, though somewhat disguised by his affec- tation of stoicism, are evident to the careful reader; indeed, it may be said that they are more moving because of the NOTES 347 habitual sternness of his manner. The impression produced by Emerson’s selection of Letters to Various Persons by Henry D. Thoreau should be corrected by the consideration of San- born’s Familiar Letters of Henry D. Thoreau (Boston, 1895). 64:30. Arthur Young (1741-1820), an English economist, wrote much on the subject of scientific agriculture. He was made secretary of the Board of Agriculture in 1793. Read- ers of Adam Bede (Ch. XVI) will remember that Arthur Donnithorne studied him. 56 : 22. Bhagvat-Geeta or Bhagavadgita. A Sanskrit poem written about the first century of our era and later incorporated in the great epic Mahabharata. It is ‘‘ charac- terized by great loftiness of thought and beauty of expres- sion.’”?’ Thoreau was very familiar with it in translation, and often quotes from it. In his Journal (Vol. IV, p. 152) he writes: ‘‘ It should not be by their architecture but by their abstract thoughts that a nation should seek to commemorate itself. How much more admirable is the Bhagvat-Geeta than all the ruins of the East.”’ 56:28. Arcadia. A district in ancient Greece proverbial for its rural simplicity. Thoreau visited it through his imagination. : 57:22. Vitruvius (first century B.c.). A Roman archi- tect and engineer who wrote the only Roman treatise on architecture that has survived. 60:10. philosophy of India. ‘‘ His (Thoreau’s) Indian studies never went deep, technically; into the philological discussion as to whether a-b, ab, is Sanscrit, or ‘ What is Om?’ he entered not. But no one relished the Bhagvat- Geet better, or the good sentences from the Vishnu Purana. He loved the laws of Menu, the Vishnu Sarma, Saadi, and similar books.’’ — ELLERY CHANNING, Thoreau; Poet- Natu- ralist (new ed., Boston, 1902), p. 50. 348 NOTES 61 : 32. cerealian. Pertaining to cereals—a rare use of the word; it has reference usually to Ceres, the goddess of agriculture, or to the Cerealia, festivals in honor of the goddess. 63:18. chips. Mr. F.H. Allen points out that thisis from “New England’s Annoyances.” ‘‘ Written towards 1630. The oldest known composition written by an American colonist.’”’ See Fugitive Poetry, Chandos Classics. 63:19. grossest of groceries. Cf. p. 10 for this play on the etymology of these words. 64:14. all mortar. That is, “ for all the means of grind- ing’ that he had? Cf. “for all fruit,”’ p. 265. 65:2. Spaulding’s. A family then living in Carlisle, not far from Concord. ~ 65:8. exuviz. Cast-off skins, feathers, or shells of ani- mals. 65:14. lucky fox. In Asop’s Fables see the fable ‘‘ The Fox Who Had Lost His Tail.’”? Thoreau means that the fox was lucky in that he could never again be caught by the tail. 65 : 26. trig. Trim, neat. 66 : 29. The evil, etc. See Julius Cesar, Act I, Sc. 2 .67:14. Bartram, William (1739-1823). Botanist and ornithologist. Published Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida (1791). 68:5. Mexicans. For an eloquent and informing pas- sage on the Mexican festival here mentioned, see Prescott’s Conquest of Mexico (New York, 1843), Vol. I, p. 125. 68:13. revelation. Though Thoreau refused to pay church rates and though he differed radically from the reli- gious leaders of his day, it is obvious from passages such as this that he was not irreligious. 69:8. The flocks of Admetus. Apollo, enraged at the death of his son, whom Jupiter had slain with a thunderbolt NOTES 349 at the request of Pluto, shot his arrows at the Cyclops, the innocent forgers of the thunderbolt. Jupiter punished Apollo by compelling him to serve Admetus, king of Thessaly, for one year as shepherd of his flocks. The story is a favor- ite one with Thoreau. See familiar Letters, pp. 51, 52, 269, and 410. 70:15. my mode of living. Thoreau opposed the idea that any one mode of life was suited to the moral and spiritual development of all men. He distrusted the Brook Farm and the Fruitlands experiments, and he distrusted quite as much any attempt to apply his own programme to the lives of other persons. Each man, he felt, must see to it that he lived the “‘ uncommitted life ’’ — the details were relatively unimportant. 73:6. Robin Goodfellow. Puck. A merry domestic spirit of Scandinavian origin, probably introduced into England by the Danes. See Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream; Milton’s L’ Allegro, ll. 105-114. 73:14. Phaeton. See Ovid’s Metamorphoses, I., l. 748-779; I1., ll. 1-339; Bulfinch, pp. 51-59. 74:4. Howard, John (1726-1790), was instrumental in effecting important. prison reforms. While high sheriff of Bedfordshire, England, he became interested in prison condi- tions and travelled over Europe in order to make a compara- tive study of penal institutions. His State of the Prisons in England and Wales (1777) was widely read. 74:11. Jesuits. Members of the Roman Catholic ‘ So- ciety of Jesus,’’ founded by Ignatius Loyola in 1534. The Jesuit missionaries labored among the American Indians with great zeal. 75:8. slop-shop. A shop where cheap clothing, bedding, etc., are sold (usually to seamen). 76:2. Newton, Sir Isaac (1642-1727) elaborated the 300 NOTES universal law of gravitation and discovered the method of fluxions; perhaps the greatest of English mathematicians. See Wordsworth’s oft-quoted characterization of his mind in The Prelude, Book Third :— “« .. I could behold The antechapel where the statue stood Of Newton with his prism and silent face, The marble index of a mind forever Voyaging through strange seas of thought alone.” 76:5. Penn, William (1644-1718), celebrated Quaker minister and founder of Pennsylvania. — Howard. See note on p. 349.—Mrs. Fry. Elizabeth Gurney Fry (1780-1845), a Quakeress whose achievement in prison reform was notable. See portrait, with poem by Lewis Morris, in Quaker Poems (Philadelphia, 1893), p. 100. 78:16. Sadi, or Shaikh Muslih al Din (thirteenth cen- tury). Persian poet. His Gulistan, a collection of odes, is his most carefully wrought work. See Emerson’s Saadt. 78:27. Dijlah. See map of Turkey-in-Asia. 79 : Title. Complemental Verses. ‘This title and the sub- title are Thoreau’s. The lines are from Carew’s Coelum Brittanicum, a Masque (performed at Whitehall, 1634). See Poems of Thomas Carew (London, 1899), in ‘“‘ Muses’ Library,’”’ p. 208. 79:6. right. Carew wrote rigid. 79:28. T. Carew. Thomas Carew (c. 1598-c. 1639), a Caroline poet possessed of great facility and not lacking in charm. See his famous ‘‘ Ask me no more.” ‘‘ They say that Carew was a laborious writer, but his poems do not show it. They are finished, but do not show the marks of the chisel.’”? — Journal, Vol. I, p. 465. NOTES 3ol - 81:12. Hollowell place. An attractive farm still. Now occupied by a Mr. Brooks. 81:14. carry it on or off with. Carry on the work of the farm, and carry off, appropriate, the essential, spiritual value of the property. Si131; I am monarch. From William Cowper’s ‘“ Verses supposed to be written by Alexander Selkirk.’’ —survey. Allusion to Thoreau’s work as surveyor. 82:29. like Atlas. Atlas bore the earth on his shoulders. See Bulfinch, p. 181. 83:10. uncommitted. Perhaps Thoreau’s most memo- rable pun. For his imprisonment, see p. 172. 83:13. Old Cato. Marcus Porcius Cato (234-149 B.c.), the censor. A Roman statesman and author who endeavored to inculcate the morals and simplicity of the earlier days of the Republic. He was largely concerned in the instigation of the Third Punic War, closing each speech in the senate with ‘“‘Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.”’ — ‘‘Cul- tivator.”’ The Boston Cultivator, founded in 1838; an ag- ricultural journal. 83 : 26. ode to dejection. Coleridge’s powerful ‘“ Ode to Dejection ”’ was written in 1802. See the Poetical Works of Coleridge (ed. by J. D. Campbell, New York, 1899), p. 159. 84:22. the boat. The blue and green boat which Thoreau and his brother built, and in which they made the famous journey recorded in A Week on the Concord and M erri- mack Rivers. Hawthorne owned it at one time. See the introduction to Mosses from an Old Manse. 84 : 32. The Harivansa or Harivansha. A Sanskrit poem, “purporting to be a part of the Mahabharata but really of much later date.”’ 87:28. Every morning. ‘‘ My most sacred and memor- able life is commonly on awaking in the morning. I fre- 352 NOTES quently awake with an atmosphere about me asif my unre- membered dreams had been divine, as if my spirit had jour- neyed to its native place, and, in the act of reéntering its native body, had diffused an Elysian fragrance around.’”’? — Journal, Vol. II, p. 213. “‘Most men have forgotten that it was ever morning; but a few serene memories, healthy and wakeful natures, there are who assure us that the sun rose clear, heralded by the singing of birds, — this very day’s sun, which rose be- fore Memnon was ready to greet it.’”’— Journal, Vol. I, p. 386. 89:5. Memnon. The statue of the Egyptian king Amenophis III (supposed by the Greeks to be that of Mem- non, a hero of the Trojan war) emitted music when the sunlight fell upon it in the morning. See The American Cyclopedia under ‘‘ Memnon.”’ 90:16. next excursion. In another life. 91:7. German Confederacy. The German Confedera- tion constituted in 1815 gave way to the North German Confederation in 1866; this in turn was replaced by the Em- pire in 1871. 92:19. setting the bell. Ringing the bell so energetically as to make it stand mouth upward. 93:6. Wachito River. Perhaps the river now spelled Washita. Near Hot Springs, Arkansas. 93:21. Western Railroad. A railroad from “Woneestath to Albany; now a part of the ‘‘ Boston and Albany.”’ 94:10. revolution of 1649. The Civil War, which re- sulted in the death of Charles I and the establishment of the Commonwealth in 1649, began in 1642. 95:16. more clearly. For this view of childhood, see Henry Vaughn’s ‘ The Retreat ’’? and Wordsworth’s “ In- timations of Immortality.”” It was a favorite idea with the Transcendentalists. NOTES 353 96:1. “Mill-dam.” ‘The centre of Concord village, where the post-office and shops are — so called from an old mill-dam where now is a street.’?’ — F. B. SANBORN. 96 : 33. tied to the mast. Ulysses, following the instruc- tions of Circe, escaped the lure of the Sirens. See Bulfinch, p. 302. 97:12. point d’appui. French for “ basis, support.” 97:14. Nilometer, a gauge for determining the height of the water in the Nile. An ancient one is mentioned by Herodotus. 97:15. Realometer. A coined word. Thoreau puns on Nilometer as if Latin nil (nihil). 97:19. cimeter. Scimitar. 97:31. notaswise. Cf. note on p. 352. 99:3. their. The antecedent is men. 100 : 2. esoteric. ‘‘ Designed for, and understood by the initiated only; said of the private and more recondite in- structions and doctrines of philosophers.’? — WEBSTER. 100:12. Homer. See Hncy. Brit. for articles on Homer and A‘schylus. 101 :5. Delphiand Dodona. The oracle of Apollo was at Delphi ; that of Zeus at Dodona. See Cent. Dict. 102 : 24. Alexander the Great. See Ency. Brit. 103 : 30. never yet been printed in English, 7.e. transla- tions are inadequate, not fairly representing the original. 104:10. Zendavestas. The Zendavesta or, more prop- erly, Avesta, is the Bible of Zoroastrianism. 104: 30. form. Bench (in a schoolroom). 105 :4. town. Reading and North Reading are towns within twenty miles of Concord. 106: 3. deliquium. “ A failure of vital force; syncope.” — Cent. Dict. 107: 16. manikins. What is the derivation? Cf. the 2A 354 NOTES use of the diminutive -kin in lambkin, catkin, Thompkins, etc. 107 : 32. tit-men. Small men. From “‘ tit,’? which is from Icelandic “ tittr’’ (small bird), applied to several species of small birds. 108 :19. Zoroaster or Zarathushtra, the founder of the Perso-Iranian national religion. Zoroastrianism is still the religion of the Parsees in Bombay. 109:14. Abelard, Peter (1079-1142). Notable French scholar who assisted in the founding of scholastic theology. See Pope’s Epistle from Eloise to Abelard. 110: 4. ‘“‘Olive-Branches.”” The Boston Olive Branch, Devoted to Christianity, Mutual Rights, Polite Literature, General Intelligence, Agriculture and the Arts was established in 1836 under the auspices of the Protestant Methodist Church. It was a weekly of wide circulation. 110:7. Redding & Co. A bookstore at 8 State Street, Boston, long ago destroyed. 112 :18. clock. Cf. As You Like It, Act 111, Sc. 2,1. 282:— ‘““ Rosalind. ‘1 pray you, what is ’t o’clock? ’ ‘Orlando. ‘ You should ask me what time o’ day; there’s no clock in the forest.’ ”’ 114:28. tantivy. A rush, violent flight. From the adverb tantivy ; supposed to be an imitation of the sound of the hunting-horn. 116 : 24. iron horse. Cf. Job xxxix., 19-25. 117 :18. drill-barrow. A machine for planting grain, etc. 118 : 22. Atropos. See note on p. 342. 118 : 28. Tell, Wilhelm, who. was “‘ ordered to place an apple on the head of his little son and shoot it off.’’ See Schiller’s play, Wilhelm Tell. Variants of the story are found in several German-Scandinavian literatures. See, for ex- ample, the ballads ‘‘ Adam Bell,’’ ‘‘Clym of the Clough,” and NOTES aau “William of Cloudesly ’’ (conveniently found in Old English Ballads and Folk Songs, ed. by W. D. Armes. New York, 1908). 119: 5. Buena Vista, a battle in the Mexican War, Febru- ary 27, 1847, in which the American army under General Taylor was victorious. 119 : 28. Long Wharf or Boston Pier. Still an important wharf in Boston. See Bacon’s Dictionary of Boston (Hough- ton, Mifflin & Co., 1886). ‘‘ Whoever has been down to the end of Long Wharf, and walked through Quincy Market has seen Boston’ (Thoreau in Cape Cod (Manuscript ed., p. 268)). Note the implied indifference to Beacon Street. 120 :13. Thomaston lime. Town near Rockland, Maine. 120 :14. Slacked. A pun? 121:4. dun fish, z7.e. dunfish; fish cured or dunned. In the process of dunning, the fish assumes a brown, or dun, color. 121 :7. Spanish main, ‘ formerly the northeast coast of South America, between the Orinoco River and the Isthmus of Panama, and the adjoining part of the Caribbean Sea.” 121 : 20. Cuttingsville. In Rutland County, Vermont. 122 :3. great ammiral. See Milton’s Paradise Lost, I, 1. 292, et seq. Milton’s spelling is more nearly correct than our admiral. The word is from the Arabic amir-al- bahr, commander of the sea, and has no connection with the word “‘admire.’’ See Kittredge and Greenough’s Words and their Ways (New York, 1901), p. 108. 122 :5. thousand hills. See Psalms 1., 10. 122 :11. bell-wether. Jocose for locomotive. 122 :13. skip likerams. See Psalms exiv., 4. 122 :19. Peterboro’ Hills. In Hillsboro County, New Hampshire. 123 ; 11, Lincoln, Acton, and Bedford are all within a few 356 NOTES miles of Walden Pond. Concord is a little over a mile northwest. 124 :18. bar, of music. 124 : 29. Ben Jonsonian. Ben Jonson (1573- 1637), the greatest of the dramatists contemporary with Shakespeare, wrote The Alchemist, Every Man in his Humour, ete. 126 :8. usnea. A small genus of lichens of which the common ‘‘ hanging moss ”’ is one. 126 :21. Stygian. From Styx; in Greek mythology, a mighty river in the lower world. 126: 30. aldermanic. Slow, pompous; perhaps merely fat. 127:4. mark. An allusion to the old peg-tankard, which contained marks or pegs to indicate the levels to which the successive draughts should lower the liquor. 127 : 32. healthy, wealthy, and wise. The form of the proverb now common — ‘* Karly to bed and early to rise Makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise’? — comes from Benjamin Franklin’s (1760-1790) Poor Richard’s Almanac. In slightly different forms it appears as early as the sixteenth century. 128 :1. Chanticleer, the name of the cock in the old ani- mal epic of Reynard the Fox; from the Old French chanter, to sing, and cler, clear. Chaucer uses the term in ‘“ The Nun’s Priest’s Tale.” 130 : 32. pouts. Hornpout, catfish. 131 : 3. to darkness and tome. See Gray’s “ Elegy in a Country Churchyard,” stanza 1. 131 :14. AMolian music. From Molus, the god of winds in Greek mythology; used here in the sense of ‘“‘ wind music,”’ See “‘ Holian harp” in Ceni, Dict, NOTES 357 133 : 24. Beacon Hill. An elevation north of the Com- mon in Boston. The former location of the ancient beacon from which it is named is marked by a monument. 133 : 25. Five Points. In New York, northeast of City Hall. Formerly very populous, but now a park. 134 :6. Brighton. A town near Boston. 135 :9. Indra. In the theology of the Vedas, the chief god of the air; the favorite god of the Indo-Aryan tribes. 135 : 24. wholesome to be alone. The reader should re- member that some of the Transcendentalists favored the phalanstery. See Mr. Lindsey Swift’s Brook Farm. In such communal experiments as those of Fruitlands, A. Bronson Alcott’s enterprise in the town of Harvard, near Concord, and Brook Farm, Ripley’s undertaking in West Roxbury, he, like Emerson, had little faith. 136 : 22. sociable. A gathering for social purposes, par- ticularly a ‘ church social.” 137 : 20. Mill Brook. A small brook a little north of Walden Pond, running westward through Concord. Ellery Channing wrote a poem about it. 137 : 24. occasional visits. Compare the mythical ele- ment in this paragraph with that in the paragraph printed on the title-page. 137 : 33. Goffe or Whalley. William Goffe (1605-1679) and his father-in-law, Edward Whalley (1620-1678), promi- nent in the Commonwealth under Cromwell and concerned in the death of Charles I, fled to Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1660. Excepted from the act of indemnity, they were compelled to leave Cambridge, and lived in hiding, first near New Haven, Connecticut, then at Hadley, Massachusetts. For a treatment of them in fiction, see Scott’s Peveril of the Peak, also Cooper’s The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish. 138 :4, simples, Medicinal plants, Explain the appli- 358 ‘NOTES cation of the term “simple” to a plant (see Dict.). For an account of an interesting simple-gatherer, see the chap- ters on Mrs. Todd in the late Miss Jewett’s delightful The Country of the Pointed Firs. 138 :25. old Parrs. Thomas Parr, known as ‘“ Old Parr,’”’ died in 1635 at the reputed age of one hundred and fifty-two! ‘There seems no doubt that he was considerably over one hundred. See Chambers’s Book of Days, Novem- ber 15. Not to be confused with Dr. Samuel Parr, the early nineteenth-century scholar, who, according to De Quincey, gloried in “ inflicting his eye ”’ upon people. 138 :28. Acheron. The old name for the Gurla, a river in Greece. In classical mythology, a river in Hades. —Dead Sea. A salt lake sixteen miles southeast of Jeru- salem. Though the Jordan flows into it, there is no outlet. It occupies by tradition the site of Sodom and the ‘other cities of the plain ’”’ (see Genesis xix. for the ac- count of their destruction). Consult also The Voyages and Travels of Sir John Maundeville, Ch. IX. 139 :5. Hygeia. The goddess of health. 139: 6. Aisculapius. God of medicine, son of Apollo. See Gayley, p. 130. 139 :10. wild lettuce. Juno gave birth to Hebe after eating wild lettuce, so that Ovid speaks of her, not as Jupiter’s daughter, but as his step-daughter (Metamor- phoses, IX). 140 : 23. Tremont or Astor or Middlesex House. The Tremont House was a noted Boston hotel on Tremont Street, built in 1828. The Astor House, Broadway, New York, is still standing. Middlesex House, a hotel in Concord. A view of the last may be seen in Barber’s Historical Collec- tions (Worcester, 1840). 141 ; 6, ricochet motion, The bounding action of a mis- NOTES 859 sile passing across a smooth surface, as a “‘ skipping stone,”’ “ducks and drakes.”’ 142 :13. more than if, 7.e. (no) more than (there would have been) if eating, etc. 142 : 27. Cerberus. The dog that guards the entrance to Hades. See Bulfinch, p. 470; Gayley, p. 238. 142 : 32. Spenser, Edmund (1552-1599), one of the great- est of English poets, published his world-famous Faerie Queen in 1590 and later. 143 :4. best contentment has. Faerie Queen, Book I, Canto 1, Stanza.35. 143 :5. Winslow, Edward (1595-1655), one of the May- flower worthies. He conducted negotiations with Massa- soit in 1621, making for the purpose a journey inland which » was the first attempt to explore the interior. On one occa- sion he saved Massasoit’s life by skilful medical treatment. His Good News from New England aroused much interest abroad in the new colony. 144:19. Canadian. Thoreau writes in his Journal (Vol. I, p. 365): ‘‘ Who should come to my lodge but a true Homeric boor, one of those Paphlagonian men. Alek Therien, he called himself.’’ Cf. this portrait in Walden with that of Uncle Zeb in Lowell’s A Moosehead Journal. Which is the more lifelike? 144 : 33. should greatly grieve. Jliad, Book XVI. Achilles is about to send his friend Patroclus, dressed in the armor of Achilles, against the Trojans. 146 :3. by gosh. Note Thoreau’s careful realism in reproducing Therien’s oaths in all their variety. Gosh, like Gorrappit (p. 147), Golly, Gorry, Gad, Goodness, etc., is an instance of euphemism in oaths, and illustrates the manner in which human nature secures the satisfaction of profanity without its guilt. Cf. Odd’s bodkins (God’s 360 NOTES “little body,’’ the eucharist), Zounds (God’s wounds, 7.e. Christ’s wounds), Gadzooks (God’s hooks, the nails with which Christ was nailed to the cross), etc. See Greenough and Kittredge’s Words and Their Ways, p. 304. 149:11. pecunia. What is the derivation of pecuniary ? Cf. the derivation of fee. What do these words suggest as to the early forms of wealth? 149: 21. Plato’s man. According to Diogenes Laertius (c. 200 a.p.), Plato defined man as a “ two-legged animal without feathers.” 153 :14. committed. See note on p. 351. 153 : 32. com-munity. What is the derivation? 154 :22. had communication. Thomas Cholmondeley (pronounced Chimly), of Overleigh, Cheshire, England, was . the one Englishman with whom Thoreau became intimate. In 1855 Cholmondeley presented Thoreau with a collection of books on Indian philosophy. See Salt, pp. 95, 115, 116. For letters of Cholmondeley to Thoreau, see Aélantic Monthly, December, 1893. See also Index to Familiar Letters of Henry D. Thoreau. 155 :9. Antzus. He was invincible so long as he was in contact with ‘“‘ mother earth.’”’ See Bulfinch, p. 181; Gay- ley, p. 238. 155 : 20. effete. Exhausted, incapable. 156 :5. my flute. Thoreau was a skilful player on the flute. See Salt, p. 89. Louisa M. Alcott’s exquisite lines on ‘‘ Thoreau’s Flute,’ beginning — “We, sighing, said, ‘Our Pan is dead; His pipe hangs mute beside the river; — Around it wistful sunbeams quiver, But music’s airy voice is fled’ ’’ — may be found in the Atlantic Monthly, September, 1863. NOTES 361 156 :19. arrow-heads. Thoreau made a _ considerable collection of arrow-heads, which he presented to the Boston Society of Natural History. They are now in the Peabody Museum at Cambridge. 156 : 30. dust upon their heads. A token of humiliation. See Job ii., 12; Lamentations ii., 10. 158:1. dobbin. Whatisthederivation? Cf. the proper names Dobson and Dobbs. 158 :10. Mr. Coleman’s. Mr. Albert Matthews suggests that this is the Rev. Henry Colman (1785-1849), who pub- lished four reports on the agriculture of Massachusetts. 158 :23. Ranz des Vaches. “A strain of an irregular description, which in some parts of Switzerland is sung or _ blown on the Alpine horn in June to call the cattle from the valleys to the higher pastures.’? — Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians. 158 : 32. Paganini, Nicolo (1782-1840), an extraordinary Italian violinist, celebrated for his performances on the single G-string. “ He ambled awkward on the stage, the while Across the waiting audience swept a smile; With clumsy touch, when first he drew the bow, He snapped a string, the audience tittered low. Another broke! Off flies another string! With laughter now the circling galleries ring. Once more! The third string breaks its quivering strands And hisses greet the player as he stands. He stands — the while his genius unbereft Is calm — one string and Paganini left. He plays. The one string’s daring notes uprise Against that storm as if they sought the skies. 362 NOTES A silence falls; then awe; the people bow, And they who first had hissed are weeping now. And when the last note, trembling, died away, Some shouted ‘ Bravo!’ some had leaned to pray.” — By the Rev. Cuarues L. THOMPSON, in the Independent, about 1882. 160 : 22. ‘‘trainers.”” See Cent. Dict. Cf. the word ‘“‘train-band,’”’? as in Cowper’s “ John Gilpin.’”? The term “trainer ”’ (militiaman), as formerly used in the United States, came doubtless from the English train-band. 160 : 25. Vergil’s advice. Georgics, Book IV. 161:10. Mexican. The Mexican War, 1846-1847, was much in the mind of Thoreau during his stay at Walden. 161 : 25. know beans. What is the American colloquial- ism on which Thoreau is here punning? 162 :6. cranes. An allusion to the annual warfare be- tween the pygmies and the cranes. See Class. Dict. 162 :12. Dust. Why should Hector be said to roll in the dust? 162 :18. Pythagorean. Pythagoras (c. 582-500 B.c.), Greek philosopher and mathematician. He advocated absti- nence from beans. 162 :27. Evelyn. See note on p. 339. 162 : 28. letation. Manure; more properly, manuring. See Murray’s New English Dictionary. 162 : 29. repastination. From Latin repastinare, to dig up again. A second digging. 163 :5. Sir Kenelm Digby (1603-1665), courtier, soldier, and scientist. In his Discourses Concerning the Vegetation of Plants (1660) he was “‘ the first to notice the importance of vital air or oxygen to plants.”’ NOTES 363 166 :5. Ceres. The goddess of grain and harvest. 166 :6. Plutus (Pluto). Plutus was the Greek personi- fication of riches; Pluto, the god of the underworld. 166:11. Cato. See note on p. 351. 166 :13. Varro, Marcus Tarentius (116-27 B.c.), a learned Roman scholar, author of seventy-four books. 166 : 20. rays alike. Cf. Matthew v., 45. 166 : 33. spe. A doubtful derivation. See Dict. 167 :2. from gerendo. Another questionable derivation. See Dict. 167:4. granary. From Latin granum, grain. How do you pronounce this word? 168 : 6. to the village. Inattention to sentences like this has given rise to much misapprehension as to Thoreau’s mode of life at Walden. He was not a hermit in the ordinary sense of the word; he had no intention of interrupting rela- tionship with his fellows. 168 : 22. Redding & Company’s. See note on p. 354. 169 : 3. Etesian. Greek and Roman authors thus termed the annual summer winds that blew across the Mediterra- nean from the north. 169 :12. caryatides. In architecture, figures of women serving as columns. See Cent. Dict. for account of possible origin of the term. 170.:9. Orpheus. The skilful musician showed his power on the Argonautic expedition. See Seyffert, p. 438. 170: 29. ‘as I sailed.” From the anonymous song Captain Kidd, beginning :— “You captains bold and brave, hear our cries, hear our cries.” The line, ‘My name was Robert Kidd, when I sailed, when I sailed,” 364 NOTES is the best known. The song is found in many collections of songs, for example, in Our Familiar Sonys (Henry Holt and Co., 1881). Captain William Kidd (for ‘‘Robert”’ is an error) was one of the most picturesque of pirates, and the gross unfairness of the trial which resulted in his execu- tion has served to extenuate his faults. The search for his treasure along the New York and New England coasts has now pretty much ceased. For a brief account of Kidd’s life; see Appleton’s Cyclopedia of American Biography. An interesting literary utilization of the Kidd treasure motive may be seen in Poe’s Gold Bug. 173 :3. run ‘ amok.” From a Malay adjective, amoq, “rushing in frenzy to the commission of indiscriminate murder ”’ (Marsden). The word was introduced into Eng- lish through traders to the Eastern Archipelago. Usually spelled ‘‘amuck.”’ 175 : 26. Ccenebites. Members of religious orders living in convents or communities. Contrast hermit, anchorite. 178 : 3. sixty-one and a half acres. Note the surveyor’s exactness. Ona map of Concord published in 1852 by H. F. Walling is printed, ‘‘ White Pond and Walden Pond are laid down from surveys by H. D. Thoreau, Civ. Engr.,’’ and the areas are given as, respectively, ‘‘ 40 acres” and “64,64. acres.’ Edward Jarvis, whose interesting MS., Houses and People in Concord, is in the Concord Public Library, says of Thoreau, ‘“‘ He was also a land surveyor, and his work in this field was very accurate and commanded public confidence, and bears the test of the surveys of his successors.”’ 179 :16. cerulean. Sky-colored. 179 :19. vitreous. Like glass. 180:2. Michael Angelo. See Ency. Brit. Examine photographs or half-tones of Michael Angelo’s paintings and sculptures with this passage in mind. NOTES 365 181: 21. pellucid. Transparent, clear. 182 :1. Castalian Fountain. A spring on Mount Par- nassus, sacred to Apollo and the Muses. It was believed to be capable of conferring poetic inspiration. 182 :2. Golden Age. In mythological history, the reign of Saturn; a time of patriarchal simplicity, when the earth produced food spontaneously, and when men were innocent and peaceable. See Bulfinch, p. 23. 183 : 21. the latter. Examine the construction of this sentence. Whatis the grammatical subject of ‘‘sympathize’’? 184 :3. shore is shorn. Shore and shear are probably from the same word. See Dict. 185 :9. Saffron Walden. In Essex, northeast of London, 186 : 28. reticulatus. ‘‘ Like a net,’’ with reference to arrangement of markings. 186 : 28. guttatus. Marked by drops; spotted. 188 : 18. fluviatile. Pertaining to rivers. See Dict. for the etymology. 194 : 28. Trojan horse. The wooden horse by means of which the Greeks entered Troy. See Bulfinch, p. 287. 194 : 31. Moore of Moore Hall. (Usually spelled ‘‘ More of More Hall.’’) “More of More Hall With nothing at all He slew the Dragon of Wantley.”’ From The Dragon of Wantley, a burlesque ballad printed in Percy’s Reliques.. It satirizes ballad conventions and ex- cesses much as the Sir Thopas of Chaucer does those of the Metrical Romances. 194 :31. Deep Cut. A railway cut near Walden Pond. 197 : 16. curious balls. ‘‘ It seems plain that the balls are simply an incidental mechanical result of the rolling 366 NOTES about of light water-logged materials on sandy bottoms by the under-water parts of waves, aided perhaps as to their cohesion by the development of glutinous microérganisms.”’ — W. F. Ganone in Rhodora, March, 1905. Thoreau de- posited the balls he found, with his collection of arrow-heads, at the Boston Museum of Natural History. The arrow- heads have since his death been removed to the Peabody Museum in Cambridge, but the balls are not with them; probably when dry they fell to pieces. 198 :4. harpy-like. The harpies were winged monsters, half women, half birds of prey. See Bulfinch, p. 320. 198 : 22. privilege. The right to use the water-power of a stream. 199: 12. brave attempt resounds. From William Drum- mond of Hawthornden (1585-1649); Sonnet, Icarus. The sonnets of Drummond are celebrated for their elevation of sentiment and grace of expression. Ber\Jonson visited him at ‘classic Hawthornden,”’ one of the prettiest glens in _ Scotland, in 1618. See Conversations with Ben Jonson, Drummond’s notes on Jonson. 199 : 18. water privileges. See note on privilege above. 201 : 33. Kohinoor. A large diamond belonging to the British crown, acquired by Queen Victoria in 1850. 203 :4. Druids. Priests of the ancient Celts. See Bul- finch, p. 445. 203 :7. Valhalla. The hall of Odin, to which, in Scandi- navian mythology, go all heroes who fall in battle. See Bulfinch, p. 413. 204 : 28. Benvenuto Cellini (1500-1571), Italian sculptor and goldsmith. His marvellous Memoirs are written in a very vivacious and interesting fashion. See Ch. XXVI for the account of the common phenomenon of the shadow aureole mentioned by Thoreau. NOTES 367 205: 14. has since sung. Ellery Channing, in his poem “‘ Baker Farm.” 205: 18. musquash. Muskrat. 209 :31. Remember. See Ecclesiastes xii., 1. 210:14. Landscape where. This quotation is from “ Baker Farm ”’ cited above. 211:17. talaria. Wings. See Cent. Dict. 214 :12. omit the gun. Cf. Emerson’s beautiful ‘ For- bearance ”’ — *“* Hast thou named all the birds without a gun? Loved the wood-rose and left it on its stalk? ”’ 214 : 23. Chaucer’s nun. Not the nun, but the monk. See Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, ll. 177, 178. Tho- reau says in his Journal (Vol. I, p. 303): ‘“‘ I admire Chaucer for a sturdy English wit. The easy height he speaks from in his Prologue to a Canterbury Tales is as good as any- thing in it, — as if he were indeed better than any of the company there assembled. ... Great delicacy and gentleness of character is constantly displayed in Chaucer’s verse. The whole story of Chanticleer and Dame Partlet in The Nun’s Priest’s Tale is genuine humanity. I know of nothing better in its kind.” 214 : 28. Algonquins. A group of tribes of North Ameri- can Indians, formerly in possession of a district north of the St. Lawrence River. 215 :6. philanthropic. What is the derivation? 217: 12. animal food. See note on p. 339. 217 : 14. Kirby and Spence. William Kirby and William Spence, authors of An Introduction to Entomology or Elements of the Natural History of Insects. The work is still consid- ered valuable by scientists. 218 :21. came. Have come. Why? 368 NOTES 219 : 25. ebriosity. » Habitual drunkenness. 220:5. Ved (or Veda). The sacred scriptures of the ancient Hindus, written in Sanskrit. 220:10. Vedant (or Vedanta). A Hindu system of philosophy founded on the Veda. 220 :25. defileth aman. See Matthew xv., 11. 221: 31. Mencius (fourth century, B.c.). Great Chinese philosopher; expounder of Confucianism. 222 :23. How happy’s. From John Donne’s “ To Sir Edward Herbert, since Lord Herbert of Cherbury.” See Anderson’s Complete British Poets, Vol. IV, p. 97, or The Poems of John Donne, Muses’ Library ed., Vol. II, p. 20. 222 : 24. disafforested. To disafforest is to free from the restrictions of forest laws, to change to common land. 222 :27. herd of swine. See Mark v., 1-14. 224 :27. moiling. To moil is to soil one’s self with severe physical labor; hence, to toil, to be subjected to drudgery. 225 :14. Bose. Formerly common in New England as a name for a dog. From Bowser? Bow-wow? 226:1. Poet. William Ellery Channing (1818-1901), nephew of the great divine and an intimate friend of Tho- reau. He was author of Thoreau: Poet- Naturalist, an in- valuable quarry for Thoreau material. 227:6. Con-fut-see. Confucius. See note on p. 339. 227 :15. skewer. Barb. 227 : 22. Pilpay & Co., i.e. Pilpay (or Bidpai) and other writers of fables. Bidpai is not a proper name but the title formerly applied to the chief scholar in an Indian court. The Fables are from the fourth century B.c. La Fontaine drew eighteen of his fables from this source. 230: 5. Brister’s Hill. A rather low hill on the left of the road as one approaches the Pond from Concord. Fora NOTES 369 picture of Brister’s Spring, see Manuscript Edition of Tho- reau’s works. 231:9. myrmidons. The faithful followers of Achilles in the Trojan War. 232: 3. had charged him. An allusion to the Grecian mother who charged her son to return either with his shield (a victor) or upon it. 232 :6. Patroclus. Friend of Achilles in Homer’s /liad. 232 : 26. Austerlitz or Dresden. By his great victory over Austria and Russia at Austerlitz (December 2, 1805) Napo- leon brought about the Peace of Presburg. The Battle of Dresden (August 26, 1813) was Napoleon’s last great vic- tory on German soil. 232 : 28. Luther Blanchard. A fifer in the Acton com- pany at the Battle of Concord. 232 : 29. Buttrick, Major, gave the order to fire. 232 :30. Davis and Hosmer. Isaac Davis, the Acton captain, and Abner Hosmer were killed. 233 : 27. Hotel des Invalides, an asylum in Paris for in- firm and disabled soldiers, founded in 1670. Best known as the burial place of Napoleon. 234 :1. Kirby and Spence. See note on p. 367. 234: 3. Huber, Francois (1750-1831). ‘‘ A Swiss natu- ralist, best known for his observations on the honey-bee.”’ 234 :9. Eugenius the Fourth. Was Pope 1431-1447. 234 :12. Olaus Magnus (or Magni) (1490-1558). Eccle- siastic and diplomat. Leaving Sweden because of the suc- cess of the Reformation, he went to Rome, where he became titular archbishop of Upsala. He wrote Historia de Genti- bus Septentrialibus, a book still valuable for the light it sheds on Scandinavian customs and folk-lore. See Ency. Brit. - 234 :17. Christiern the Second, often called Christian the 25 370 ; NOTES Cruel (1481-1559). He was expelled from Sweden by Gustavus Vasa. 234 :18. Polk, James K. Was President of the United States, 1845-1849. 234 : 20. Fugitive-Slave Bill, The Fugitive-Slave Bill, supported by Daniel Webster, much to the annoyance and disgust of the Abolitionists, became a law as a part of Henry Clay’s ‘“‘ Compromise Bill ”’ in 1850. 234 :21. village Bose. See note on p. 368. 234 :31. jerbilla. Perhaps jerboa. But see gerbillus in Dict. 236 :2. Mill-dam. See note on p. 353. 239:10. bayous. From American Indian bayuk, an inlet from a gulf or river. A word used chiefly in the South- ern States. 241: 23. totem. Tribes and families of American In- dians assumed natural objects, often animals, as distin- guishing marks or symbols. Representations of these were tattooed on the body, worked into garments, or carved on poles. 243 : 28. poet. See note on p. 368. 245 :4. Cato. See note on p. 351. 245 :10. firkin. In England, a measure of capacity equal to one-fourth of a barrel, or nine imperial gallons. In the United States, the word usually means a small cask or wooden vessel. 245 :18. purlins. Horizontal timbers supported by the principal rafters and supporting the common rafters. 245 :21. king and queen posts. The king-post is a middle post supporting the apex of a pair of rafters; it rests upon the tie-beam. When the support of the rafters is maintained by two posts they are termed queen-posts. 245 : 22. prostrate Saturn. Saturn, confused with Cro- NOTES 371 nus, is sometimes spoken of as if he were one of the Titans overthrown by Zeus. 246 : 33. parlaver (or palaver). ‘“‘ Flattery, adulation; talk intended to deceive.’”” This word is a good example of degeneration in the meaning of words. See Dict. for older meanings. As instances of degeneration, study: villain, knave, caitiff, fellow, cunning. 247:2. tropes. Figures of speech. 248 :9. unio fluviatilis. River mussel; fresh-water clam. 248 :27. caddis worms. The larve of caddis-flies. 251:17. Vulcan. In Roman mythology, the god of fire. 251:18. Terminus. In Roman mythology, the god of boundaries. : 252: 8. Gilpin, William (1724-1804). He wrote exten- sively on the natural scenery of England. 252 :16. vert. In English forest law, anything bearing a green leaf that may serve as a covert for deer. 253 :3. Michaux, André (1746-1802). A French botanist and traveller. He visited America, and wrote on its flora. 253 :17. New Hollander. See note on p. 340. 253 :18. Robinhood or Robin Hood. The Sherwood Forest outlaw; said to have lived in the twelfth century. See Child’s English and Scottish Ballads_for the superb ballad literature on him. 253 : 19. Goody Blake and Harry Gill. Characters in a notoriously poor piece of verse by Wordsworth (p. 79 of Globe ed. of Wordsworth’s Poetical Works). 254 :25. Light-winged Smoke. This poem had been printed in the Dial, the organ of the Transcendentalists, in April, 1843, where it was signed ‘“‘ T.”’ It is the only part of Walden printed before 1854. 259 :22. Zilpha. This is the Zilpah of Jarvis’s manu- script. 372 NOTES 260 :1. Brister Freeman (or Bristol Freeman, according to Jarvis). He was ‘‘a passionate man and quarreled with boys ” (Jarvis.) For an account of Brister’s fight with a bull see Sanborn’s Henry D. Thoreau, p. 206. 260 : 23. Breed’s location. Jarvis speaks of “ John C. Breed, barber and drunkard; found dead in the road at last, in 1824.’”? He was “‘ an extreme instance of the power of appetite for rum . . . was its complete slave. He was all absorbed in it; he had no other want, no other affection. If he had opportunity to earn six cents by shaving, he would spend one cent for a cracker and five cents for his rum.” 261 :11. Davenant’sGondibert. ‘‘Gondibert,’’ a long and tedious poem in heroic stanzas by Sir William Davenant, published in 1653. 261 :17. Chalmers’scollection. Chalmers’s English Poets, a huge collection of the work of poets from Chaucer to Cowper. Many of the biographical sketches are those of Dr. Johnson, but others are by Alexander Chalmers (Lon- don, 1810). 261 :18. Nervii. Conquered by Cesar in Gaul. 264 :6. coil. Punon “Q.” Fora more complete account of Quoil, see Journal, Vol. I., p. 415. 264 :10. St. Helena. A small island in the South Atlan- tic, eight hundred miles from the nearest land. Napoleon spent from 1815 to 1821 at Longwood. 264 : 23. broken at the fountain. See Ecclesiastes xii., 6. 264 :30. Reynard. The hero of the beast-epic; a com- mon name for “ fox.’’ 265 : 22. absolute. From Milton’s Paradise Lost, I1., 1, 559. ‘266 : 12. water privileges. See note on p. 366. 266 :19. like the rose. See Jsaiah xxxv., 1. 269 :4. the other also. See Matthew v., 39. NOTES 373 269 :27. ‘“‘crack.”