ST re re ee ee
Neen ee rere Pot oe ee i
ps Fitbecveerenes :
es - eet Te Sead Be
Z th pre et Mrs -
Soraee;? ARGH LRU eA heey mA SCE nee ee .10
REITING as A cli Chit Sprtcan Savasvu tl vier eet ag eames La OL ibaa
(Prana porbawoe sete. Meta ine Siesso etek 1.40 ie iat ae bate
BTR N A a otks gic he Behan Se Adeis. oh termes $28.121%4
These are all the materials excepting the timber, stones, and
sand, which I claimed by squatter’s right. I have also a small
woodshed adjoining, made chiefly of the stuff which was left
after building the house. 3
I intend to build me a house which will surpass any on
the main street in Concord in grandeur and luxury, as soon
ECONOMY 69)
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 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 shortcomings and inconsistencies do
not affect the truth of my statement. Notwithstanding much
eant and hypocrisy,—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
attorney. 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 edueation
would be needed, because, forsooth, more would already have
_ been acquired, but the pecuniary expense of getting an educa-
tion would in a great measure vanish. Those conveniences which
| the student requires at Cambridge 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 important
» item in the term bill, while for the far more valuable edueation -
\ which he gets by associating with the most cultivated of his
contemporaries no charge is made. The mode of founding a
| eollege is, commonly, to get up a subscription of dollars and
cents, and then following blindly the principles of a division
70 WALDEN
of labor to its extreme, a principle which should never be fol-
lowed but with cireumspection,—to eall in a contractor who
makes this a subject of speculation, and he employs Irishmen
or other operatives actually to lay the foundations, while the
students 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 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 ean make leisure fruitful.
“But,” says one, “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 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 sciences, for instance, I would not
pursue the common course, which is merely to send him into
the neighborhood of some professor, where anything is pro-
fessed and practiced but the art of life;—to survey the world
through a telescope or a microscope, and never with his 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 swarm all around him, while contemplat-
ing the monsters in a drop of vinegar. Which would have
advaneed 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 7}.
smelted, reading as much as would be necessary for this,—or
the boy who had attended the lectures on metallurgy at the
Institution in the meanwhile, and had received a Rogers’ pen-
knife from his father? Which would be most likely to eut his
fingers? .. . To my astonishment I was informed on leaving
college that I had studied navigation !—why, if I had taken one
turn down the harbor J 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 conse-
quence is that while he is reading Adam Smith, Ricardo, and
Say, he runs his father in debt irretrievably.
As with our colleges, so with a hundred “modern improve-
ments”: there is an illusion about them; there is not always a
_ positive advance. The devil goes on exacting compound interest
to the last for his early share and numerous succeeding invest-
-ments in them. Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys,
which distract our attention 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. Lither 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 Atlantie and bring
| the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the
| first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping Ameri-
/ can 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 important messages; he is not an evan-
| gelist, nor does he come round eating locusts and wild honey.
72 WALDEN
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»
today and see the country.” But I am wiser than that. I have
learned that the swiftest traveler is he that goes afoot. I say
to my friend, Suppose we try who will get there first. The dis-
tance is thirty miles; the fare ninety cents. That is almost a
day’s wages. I remember when wages were sixty cents a day
for laborers on this very road. Well, I start now on foot, and
get there before night; I have traveled at that rate by the week
together. You will in the meanwhile have earned your fare,
and arrive there sometime tomorrow, or possibly this evening,
if you are lucky enough to get 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 eut your
acquaintance altogether.
Such is the universal law, which no man ean 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 surface of the planet.
Men have an indistinet 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 depot, and the conductor shouts “All
aboard!” when the smoke is blown away and the vapor eon-
densed, 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
accident.” No doubt they can ride at last who shall have 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
ECONOMY 73
to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part
of it, reminds me of the Englishman 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 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 finished my house, wishing to earn ten 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 growing up to pines and hickories,
and was sold the preceding season for eight dollars and eight
cents an acre. One farmer said that it was “good for nothing
but to raise cheeping squirrels on.”” I put no manure whatever
on this land, not being the owner, but merely a squatter, and not
expecting to cultivate so much again, and I did not quite hoe it
all onee. I got out several cords of stumps in plowing, which
supplied me with fuel for a long time, and left small cireles of
virgin mold, easily distinguishable through the summer by the
greater luxuriance of the beans there. The dead and for the
most part unmerchantable wood behind my house, and the drift-
wood from the pond, have supplied the remainder of my fuel.
_ I was obliged to hire a team and a man for the plowing, though
==
I held the plow myself. My farm outgoes for the first season
were, for implements, seed, work, ete., $14.7214. The 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
74 WALDEN
corn. The yellow corn and turnips were too late to come to
anything. My whole income from the farm was
$23.44
Deductinethe “Outbeoes 22 oi. 62. Ba ee "alt tated are 14.72%
MPD EGTOGAT Os MEE Glon Siu) 4 Gls ese See ects eae ce ee $ 8.711%
besides produce consumed and on hand at the time this estimate
was made of the value of $4.50,—the amount on 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 today, notwithstanding the short time occupied by
my experiment, nay, partly even because of its transient char-
acter, I believe that that was doing better than any farmer in
Coneord did that year.
The next year I did better aa 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, Arthur Young among
the rest, that if one would live simply and eat only the erop
which he raised, and raise no 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 plow it, and to select a fresh spot from time to time than
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 failure of the present eco-
nomical 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. Besides being better off than they
ECONOMY 15
already, 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 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 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 that there should be. However, I
should never have broken a horse or bull and taken him to board
_ for any work he might do for me, for fear I should become a
horseman or a herdsman merely; and if society seems to be the
gainer by so doing, are we certain that what is one 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 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 unnec-
essary or artistic, but luxurious and idle work, with their assist-
ance, it is inevitable that a few do all the exchange work with
the 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 pros-
} perity of the farmer is still measured by the degree to which
_ the barn overshadows the house. This town is said to have the |
largest houses for oxen, cows, and horses hereabouts, and it is
not behindhand in its public buildings; but there are very few
halls for free worship or free speech in this county. It should
76 WALDEN
not be by their architecture, 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 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 possessed with an insane ambi-
tion 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 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 hundred-gated
Thebes that has wandered farther from the true end of life.
The religion and eivilization which are barbari¢ and heathenish
build splendid temples; but what you might eall 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 so much as the fact that so many
men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives con-
structing 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 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 Banks. It costs more than it comes to. The
mainspring is vanity, assisted by the love of garlic and bread
and butter. Mr. Baleom, a promising young architect, designs
it on the back of his Vitruvius, with hard pencil and ruler, and
ECONOMY 17
the job is let out to Dobson & Sons, stonecutters. When the
thirty centuries begin to look down on it, mankind begin to look
up at it. As for your high towers and monuments, there was a
erazy 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 concerned
about the monuments of the West and East,—to know who built
them. For my part, I should like to know who in those days
did not build them,—who were above such trifling. But to
-proceed with my statistics.
By surveying, carpentry, and day-labor of various other
kinds in the village in the meanwhile, for I have as many trades
as fingers, I had earned $13.34. The expense of food for eight
months, namely, from July 4th to March Ist, 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 considering the value of what was on
hand at the last date, was
ge ee $1.73% :
| REC rae 1.73 Cheapest form of the saccharine.
te eras 1.0434
indien meal........ .9934 Cheaper than rye.
MEIC cinta ie e's b s,0 os oy 22
{ Costs ‘more than Indian meal,
‘both money and trouble.
WEMICS (o's iss cic'e es 25
Wepried apple ........ 22
| Sweet potatoes ..... 10
bOne pumpkin ...... 06
| One watermelon.... .02
“porrey
Yoryam spuouttedxe [[V
7
| Yes, I did eat $8.74, all told; but I should not thus unblush-
ingly publish my guilt, if I did not know that most of my
78 WALDEN
readers were equally guilty with myself, and that their deeds
would look no better in print. The next year I 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, nothwithstanding a musky flavor, I saw that the
longest 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, amounted to
$8.4034
Oil and some household utensils................ 2.00
So that all the pecuniary outgoes, excepting for washing and
mending, which for the most part were done out of the 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
MERESUIGE a ie ok a, holla als eae Ee Ue hanes RRR toed eee $28.12%
MAEM Oe Year 2s). s: wee Ree ate ecln steyelahape ener 14.72%
Hoods Cionb MOMtnS” soe Al. 6 carat terns haat 20s aula ee
Clothing, ete) eisht months sess... 24 ori eee 8.4034
Gil ete, Metabtvinon this occ. a. tec 2 oe leks ee 2.00
BRAT geA Ls Me ie eae Malet! Seeicas Ste eee Eiki SSL eet Rs tee acer $61.99%4
I address myself now to those of my readers who have a living
to get. And to meet this I have for farm produce sold
4 ECONOMY 79
which subtracted from the sum of the outgoes leaves a balance
of $25.2134 on the one side,—this being very nearly the means
with which I started, and the measure of expenses to be in-
curred,—and on the other, besides the leisure and independence
and health thus secured, a comfortable house for me as long as
I choose to occupy it.
These statistics, however accidental and therefore uninstruct-
ive 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 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, mo-
lasses, and salt, and my drink water. It was fit that I should
live on rice, mainly, who loved so well the philosophy of India.
To meet the objections of some inveterate cavillers, I may as
well state that if I dined out occasionally, as I always had done,
and I trust shall have opportunities to do again, it was fre-
;
i
quently to the detriment of my domestic arrangements. But the
dining out, being, 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 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. And pray what more can a reasonable man
_ desire, in peaceful 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 If used was a yielding to the
demands of appetite, and not of health. Yet men have come to
such a pass that they frequently starve, not for want of neces-
80 WALDEN
saries, but for want of luxuries; and I know a good woman who
thinks that her son lost his life because he took to drinking
water only.
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, 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 and agreeable. In cold weather it was no
little amusement to bake several small loaves of this in suecces-
sion, 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
fruits, which I kept in as long as possible by wrapping them in
cloths. I made a study of the ancient and indispensable art of
bread-making, 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 meats men first reached the
mildness and refinement of this diet, and traveling 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, sweet,
wholesome bread,” the staff of life. Teaven, 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, and its influence is still rising, swell-
ing, spreading. in cerealian billows over the land,—this seed I
regularly and faithfully procured from the village, till at length
one morning I forgot the rules, and scalded my yeast; by which
ECONOMY 81
accident I discovered that even this was not indispensable,—
for my discoveries were not by the synthetic but analytic proc-
ess,—and I have gladly omitted it since, 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 I 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 ean adapt himself to all climates and circumstances.
Neither did I put any sal soda, or other acid or alkali, into my
bread. It would seem that I made it according to the recipe
which Mareus Porcius Cato gave about two centuries before
Christ. “Panem depsticium sic facito. Manus mortariumque
bene lavato. Farinam in mortarium 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 have kneaded it well, mold 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.
Every New Englander might easily raise all his own bread-
stuffs 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, 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,
99 WALDEN
at a greater 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, | found by
experiment that I could make a very good molasses either of
pumpkins or beets, and J knew that I needed only to set out a
few maples to obtain it more easily still, and while these were
growing I could use various substitutes besides those which I
have named. “For,” as the Forefathers 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, or, if I did
without it altogether, I should probably drink the less water.
I do not learn that 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 would only
remain to get clothing and fuel. The pantaloons 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 onerative as great and memorable as that from the man
to the farmer ;—and in a new country fuel is an eneumbrance.
As for a habitat, if I were not permitted still to squat, I might
purehase one acre at the same price for which the land I eulti-
vated was sold—namely, eight dollars and eight cents. But as
it was, I considered that T enhanced the value of the land by
squatting on it.
There is a certain class of unbelievers who sometimes ask me
such anestions as. if T think that I ean live on vegetable food
alone: and to strike at the root of the matter at onee.—for the
root is faith._—T am accustomed to answer such, that I ean live
ECONOMY 83
on board nails. If they 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 eorn on the ear,
using his teeth for all mortar. The squirrel tribe tried the same
and succeeded. The human race is interested in these experi-
ments, though a few old women who are ineapacitated for them,
or who own their thirds in mills, may be alarmed.
My furniture, part of which I made myself, and the rest 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, 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 ean sit and I ean
stand without the aid of a furniture warehouse. What man but
a philosopher would not be ashamed to see his furniture packed
in a cart and going up country exposed to the 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-ealled 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 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 eruvie; 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 were
buckled to a man’s belt, and he could not move over the rough
country where our lines are east without dragging them,—drag-
84 WALDEN
ging 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 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 disown, behind him, even
to his kitchen furniture and all the 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 com-
passion 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 not to have any, if you inquire
more narrowly you will find have some stored in somebody’s
barn. I look upon England today as an old gentleman who is
traveling 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 powers —
of a well man nowadays to take up his bed and walk, and I
should certainly advise a sick one to lay down his bed and run.
When I 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 neck—I have pitied him, not
because that was his all, but because he had all that he could -
earry. If I have got to drag my trap, I will take care that it be
a light one and do not nip me in a vital part. But perchance
it would be wisest never to put one’s paw into it.
I would observe, by the way, that it costs me nothing for cur-
tains, for I have no gazers to shut out but the sun and moon,
and I am willing that they should look in. The moon will not
ECONOMY 85
sour milk nor taint meat of mine, nor will the sun injure my
furniture or fade my carpet, and if he is sometimes too warm a
friend, I find it still better economy to retreat behind some eur-
tain which nature has provided, than to add a single item to the
details of housekeeping. i) the change is in me. It has not acquired one per-
manent wrinkle after all its ripples. It is perennially young,
and I may stand and see a swallow dip apparently to pick an
insect from its surface as of yore. It struck me again tonight,
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 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 tome. It is the work of a brave man, surely, in whom
there was no guile! He rounded this water with his hand, deep-
ened and elarified it in his thought, and in his will bequeathed
it-to Coneord. 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,
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;
In the hollow of my hand
Are its water and its sand,
And its deepest resort
Lies high in my thought.
The ears never pause to look at it; yet I faney that the engi-
neers 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 nature does not,
that he has beheld this vision of serenity and purity onee at
least during the day. Though seen but onee, it helps to wash
out State-street and the engine’s soot. One proposes that it
be ealled “God’s Drop.”
I have said that Walden has no visible inlet nor outlet, but it
200 WALDEN
is on the one hand distantly and indirectly related to Flint’s
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 similar chain of ponds.
through which in some other geological 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 wonder-
ful purity, who would not regret that the comparatively impure
waters of Flint’s Pond should be mingled with it, or itself
should ever go to waste its sweetness in the ocean wave?
Flint’s 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 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 remem-
ber the 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 crept along its sedgy
shore, the fresh spray blowing in my face, I came upon the
moldering wreck of a boat, the sides gone, and hardly more
than the impression of its flat bottom left amid the rushes; yet
its model was sharply defined, as if it were a large decayed pad,
with its veins. It was as impressive a wreck as one could
imagine on the sea-shore, and had as good a moral. It is by this.
time mere vegetable mold and undistinguishable pond shore,
through which rushes and flags have pushed up. I used to
admire the ripple marks on the sandy bottom, at the north end
of this pond, made firm and hard to the feet of the wader by the
pressure of the water, and the rushes which grew in Indian file,
in waving lines, corresponding to these marks, rank behind
THE PONDS 201
rank, as if the waves had planted them. There also I have
found, in considerable 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 east on the shore. They are either solid
grass, or have a little sand in the middle. At first you would
say that they were formed by the 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, the waves, I suspect, do not so much con-
struct as wear down a material which has already acquired con-
sistency. They preserve their form when dry for an indefinite
period.
Flint’s Pond! Such is the poverty of our nomenclature.
What right had the unclean and stupid farmer, 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, 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-lke;
—so it is not named for me. I go not there to see him nor to
hear of him; who never saw it, who never bathed in it, who
never loved it, who never protected it, who never spoke a good
word for it, nor thanked God that He had made it. Rather let
it be named from the fishes that swim in it, the wild fowl or
quadrupeds which frequent it, the wild flowers which grow by
its shores, or some wild man or child the thread of whose history
is interwoven with its own; not from him who could show no
title to it but the deed which a like-minded neighbor or legisla-
ture 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
202 WALDEN
within it, who regretted only that it was not English hay or
cranberry meadow,—there was nothing to redeem it, forsooth, in
his eyes,—and would have drained and sold it for the mud at
its bottom. It did not turn his mill, and it was no privilege to
him to behold it. I respect not his labors, his farm where every-
thing has its price; who would carry the landscape, who would
earry his God to market if he could get anything for Him; who
goes to market for his god as it is; on whose farm nothing
grows free, whose fields bear no crops, whose meadows no
flowers, whose trees no fruits, but dollars; who loves not the
beauty of his fruits, whose fruits are not ripe for him till they
are turned to dollars. Give me the poverty that enjoys true
wealth. Farmers are respectable and interesting to me in pro-
portion as they are poor,—poor farmers. A model farm! where
the house stands like a fungus in a muck-heap, chambers for
men, horses, oxen, and swine, cleansed and uncleansed, all con-
tiguous to one another. Stocked with men! A great grease-
spot, redolent of manures and buttermilk! Under a high
state of cultivation, being manured with the hearts and brains
of men! As if you were to raise your potatoes in the 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 least as the
Tearian Sea, where “still the shore” a “brave attempt resounds.”
Goose Pond, of small extent, is on my way to Flint’s; Fair-
Haven, an expansion of Concord River, said to contain some
seventy acres, is a mile southwest; and White Pond, of about
forty acres, is a mile and a half beyond Fair-Haven. This is
my lake country. These, with Concord River, are my water
privileges; and night and day, year in and year out, they grind
such grist as I earry to them.
Since the wood-eutters, and the rapieonal and I myself have
THE PONDS 203
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 commonness, whether derived
from the remarkable purity of its waters or the color of its
sands. In these as in other respects, however, it is a lesser twin
of Walden. They are so much alike that you would say they
must be connected under ground. It has the same stony shore,
and its waters are of the same hue. As at Walden, in sultry
dog-day weather, looking down through the woods on some of
its bays which are net so deep but that the reflection 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 eart-loads, to make sand-paper with, and I have
continued to visit it ever since. One who frequents it proposes
to call it Virid Lake. Perhaps it might be called Yellow-Pine
Lake, from the following circumstance. About fifteen years ago
you Gould see the top of a pitch-pine of the kind ealled yellow-
pine hereabouts, though it is not a distinet 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 forests that formerly stood there. I find
that even so long ago as 1792, in a “Topographical Description
of the Town of Concord,” by one of its citizens, in the Collee-
tions 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 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 me that it was
he who got out this tree ten or fifteen years before. As near as
he could remember, it stood twelve or fifteen rods from the
shore, where the water was thirty or forty feet deep. It was
204. WALDEN
in the winter, and he had been getting out ice in the forenoon,
and had resolved that in the afternoon, with the aid of his neigh- |
bors, he would take out the old yellow pine. He sawed a chan-
nel in the ice toward the shore, and hauled it over and along and
out on to the ice with oxen; but, before he had gone far in his
work, he was surprised to find that it was wrong end upward,
with the stumps of the branches pointing down, and the small
end firmly fastened in the sandy bottom. It was about a foot in
diameter at the big end, and he had expected to get a good saw-
log, but it was so rotten as to be fit only for fuel, if for that.
He had some of it in his shed then. There were marks of an
_ axe and of woodpeckers 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-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 remem-
ber 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, 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
(Iris versicolor) grows thinly in the pure water, rising from the
stony bottom all around the shore, where it is visited by hum-
ming birds in June, and the color both of its bluish blades and
its flowers, and especially their reflections, are in singular har-
mony with the glaucous water.
White Pond and Walden are great crystals on the surface
of the earth, Lakes of Light. If they were permanently con-
gealed, and small enough to be clutched, they would, perchance,
be carried off by slaves, like precious stones, to adorn the heads
of emperors; but being liquid, and ample, and secured to us and
our successors forever, we disregard them, and run after the
diamond of Kohinoor. They are too pure to have a marke*
THE PONDS 205
value; they contain no muck. How much more beautiful than
our lives, how much more transparent than our characters, are
they! We never learned meanness of them. How much fairer
than the pool before the farmer’s door, in which his ducks swim!
Hither the clean wild ducks come. Nature has no human inhab-
itant who appreciates her. “he 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?
She flourishes most alone, far from the towns where they reside.
Talk of heaven! ye disgrace earth,
x
BAKER FARM
Sometimes I rambled to pine groves, standing like temples,
or like fleets at sea, full-rigged, with wavy boughs, and rip-
pling with light, so soft and green and shady that the Druids
would have forsaken their oaks to worship in them; or to the
cedar wood beyond Flint’s Pond, 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
toadstools, 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 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 ealling
on some scholar, I paid many a visit to particular trees, of 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 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 speci-
mens, I know but one small grove of sizable trees left in the
206
BAKER FARM 207
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 hornbeam; 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 summer and winter.
- Once it chanced that I stood in the very abutment of a rain-
bow’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 erystal. It 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 faney
myself 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 distinguished. Benvenuto
Cellini tells us in his memoirs, that, after a certain terrible
dream or vision which he had during his confinement in the
eastle 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
grass was moist with dew. This was probably the same phe-
nomenon 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 commonly noticed, and, in the
ease of an excitable imagination like Cellini’s, it would be basis
enough for superstition. Besides, 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, through
208 WALDEN
the woods, to eke out my scanty fare of vegetables. 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,
Which some mossy fruit trees yield
Partly to a ruddy brook,
By gliding musquash undertook,
And mercurial trout,
Darting about.
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, 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,
standing up to my middle in water, I found myself suddenly
in the shadow of a cloud, and the thunder began to rumble
with such emphasis that I could do no more than listen to it.
The gods must be proud, thought J, with such forked flashes
to rout a poor unarmed fisherman. So I made haste for shelter
to the nearest hut, which stood half a mile from any road, but
so much the nearer to the pond, and had long been unin-
habited :—
And here a poet builded,
In the completed years,
For behold a trivial cabin
That to destruction steers.
So the Muse fables. But therein, as I found, dwelt now John
Field, an Irishman, and his wife, and several children, from
the broad-faced boy who assisted his father at his work, and
BAKER FARM 209
now came running by his side from the 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 last of a noble line, and the hope and eynosure 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. IJ had sat there many
times of old before the ship was built 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 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, 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 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 experience, 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 him-
self; that Ilived in a tight, hght, and clean house, which hardly
cost more than the annual rent of such a ruin as his commonly
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
210 WALDEN
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 sys-
tem,—and so it was as broad as it was long, indeed it was
broader than 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 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 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 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 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 gentle-
man (which, however, was not the case), and in an hour or two,
without 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 this, and his wife stared with
arms akimbo, and both appeared to be wondering if they had
capital enough to begin such a course with, or arithmetic enough
to earry it through. It was sailing by dead reckoning to them,
and they saw not clearly how to make their port so; therefore I
BAKER FARM D1
suppose they still take life bravely, after their fashion, face to
face, giving it tooth and nail, not having skill to split its mas-
sive 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 fight at an overwhelming disadvantage,—
living, John Field, alas! without arithmetic, and failing so.
“To you ever fish?” I asked. “Oh, yes, I catch a mess now
and then when I am lying by; good perch I catch.” “What’s
your bait?” “T eatch 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 the 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 irrecoverable. Meanwhile the right culinary
vessel was selected, water was seemingly distilled, and after
consultation and long delay passed out to the thirsty one,—
not yet suffered to cool, not yet to settle. Such gruel sustains
life here, I thought; so, shutting my eyes, and excluding the
motes by a skilfully directed under-current, I drank to genuine
hospitality the heartiest draught I could. I am not squeamish
in such cases when manners are concerned.
As I was leaving the Irishman’s roof after the rain, 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 instant trivial to me who had
been sent to school and college; but as I ran down the hill
toward the reddening 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 brooks an¢ hearth-
212 WALDEN
sides without misgiving. Remember thy Creator in the days of
thy youth. Rise free from care before the dawn, and seek
adventures. Let the 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
BAKER FARM 213
should come home from far, 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, disturbed only a couple of
fins while I was catching a fair string, and he said it was his
luck; but when he 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 old
country mode in this primitive new country,—to eatch 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 in this world, he nor his posterity,
till their wading, webbed, bog-trotting feet’ get talaria to their
heels.
XI
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 tempted to seize and devour
him raw; not that I was hungry then, except for that wildness
which he represented. 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 veni-
son 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 instinet toward a
higher, or, as it is named, spiritual life, as do most men, and
another toward a primitive rank and savage one, and I reverence
them both. I love the wild not less than the good. The wild-
ness and adventure that are in fishing still recommended 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 this em-
ployment and to hunting, when quite voung, my closest acquaint-
» ance with Nature. They early introduce us to and detain us in
scenery with which otherwise, at that age, we should have little
aequaintanee. Fishermen, hunters, wood-choppers, and others,
spending their lives in the fields and woods, in a peculiar sense
a part of Nature themselves, are often in a more favorable
mood for observing her, in the intervals of their pursuits, than
philosophers or poets even, who approach her with expectation.
She is not afraid to exhibit herself to them. The traveler on
214
HIGHER LAWS 915
the prairie is naturally a hunter, on the head waters of the
Missouri and Columbia a trapper, and at the Falls of St. Mary a
fisherman. He who is only a traveler 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 account of human experience.
They mistake who assert that the Yankee has few amusements,
because he has not so many public holidays, and men and boys
do not play so many games as 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 his
hunting and fishing grounds were not limited like the preserves
of an English nobleman, but were more boundless 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 humanity, but to an increased
searcity of game, for perhaps 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 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 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
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 ornithology, and sought
only new or rare birds. But I confess that I am now inclined
to think that there is a finer way of studying ornithology than
216 WALDEN
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 seore of
humanity, I am compelled to doubt if equally valuable sports
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,—remembering that it was
one of the best parts of my education,—make them hunters,
though sportsmen only at first, 1f 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
yave not of the text a pulled hen
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 his education has been sadly neg-
lected. This was my answer with respect to those youths who
were bent on this pursuit, trusting that they would soon outgrow
it. No humane being, past the thoughtless age of boyhood, will
wantonly murder any ¢reature which holds its life by the same
tenure that he does. The hare in its extremity cries like a ehild.
I warn you, mothers, that my sympathies do not always make
the usual philanthropic 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 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 countries a hunting parson is no uncommon sight. Sueh
HIGHER LAWS ; 217
a one might make a good shepherd’s dog, but is far from being
the Good Shepherd. IJ have been surprised to consider 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 or 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 all the
while. They might go there a thousand times before the sedi-
ment 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 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
regulate 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, empaling the legislature for a bait. Thus, even in
civilized communities, the embryo man 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
instinet for it, which revives from 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 instinet in me which belongs to the lower orders of creation ;
yet with every year I am less a fisherman, though without more
humanity or even wisdom; at present I am no fisherman at all.
But I see that if I were to live in a wilderness I should again be
tempted to become a fisher and hunter in earnest. Besides,
918 WALDEN
there is something 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 my own butcher
and seullion 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 ease
was its uncleanness; and, besides, when I had caught and
cleaned 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 filth. Like many
of my contemporaries, I had rarely for many years used animal
food, or tea, or coffee, &e.; not so much because of any ill effects
which I had traced to them, as because they were not agreeable
to my imagination. The repugnance to animal food is not the
effect of experience, but is an instinct. It appeared more beau-
tiful 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 best condition has been par-
ticularly inclined to abstain from animal food, and from much
food of any kind. It is a significant fact, stated by entomolo-
gists, I find it in Kirby and Spence, that “some inseets in their
perfect state, though furnished with organs of feeding, 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 caterpillar when transformed into a but-
terfly,’” ... “and the gluttonous maggot when become a fly,”
content themselves 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;
HIGHER LAWS 219
and there are whole nations in that condition, nations without
faney or imagination, whose vast abdomens 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 down at the same
table. Yet perhaps this may be done. The fruits eaten tem-
perately need not make us ashamed of our appetites, nor inter-
rupt the worthiest pursuits. But 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 pre-
paring with their own hands precisely such a dinner, whether of
animal or vegetable food, as is every day prepared for them by
others. Yet till this is otherwise we are not civilized, and, if
gentlemen and ladies, are not true men and women. ‘This cer-
tainly suggests what change is to be made. It may be vain to
ask why the imagination will not be reconciled to 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 slaughter-
ing lambs, may learn,—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 is a part of the destiny of the human
race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as
surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when
they came in contact with the more civilized.
If one listens to the faintest but constant suggestions of his
genius, which are certainly true, he sees not to what extremes,
or even insaimity, it may lead him; and yet that way, as he grows
more resolute and faithful, his road hes. 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 him. Though the result were
290 WALDEN
bodily weakness, yet perhaps no one can say that the conse-
quences were to be regretted, for these were a life in conformity
to higher principles. If the day and the night are such that you
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 from being appreciated. We
easily come to doubt if they exist. We soon forget them.
They are the highest reality. Perhaps the facts most astound-
ing and most real are never communicated by man toman. The
true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and inde-
seribable as the 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.
T am glad to have drunk water so long, 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 drunk-
enness. 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 with a eup 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 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 present somewhat less particular in these respects.
I carry less religion to the table, ask no blessing; not because I
am wiser than I was, but, I am obliged to confess, because, how-
ever much it is to be regretted, with years I have grown more
coarse and indifferent. Perhaps these questions are entertained
HIGHER LAWS > PA
only in youth, as most believe of poetry. My practice is “no-
where,” my opinion is here. Nevertheless I am far from regard-
ing myself as one of those privileged ones to whom the Ved
refers when it says that “he who has true faith in the Omnipres-
ent 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 has
remarked, that the Vedant limits this privilege to “the time of
distress.”’
Who has not sometimes derived an inexpressible satisfaction
from his food in which appetite had no share? I have been
thrilled to think that I owed a mental perception to the com-
monly gross sense of taste, that I have been inspired through the
palate, that some berries which I had eaten on a hillside 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; one eats, and one does not know the savor of
food.” He who distinguishes the true savor of his food ean 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 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 devo-
tion to sensual savors; when that which is eaten is not a viand to
sustain our animal, or inspire our spiritual life, but food for the
worms that possess us. If the hunter has a taste for mud-
turtles, muskrats, and other such savage tidbits, the fine lady
indulges a taste for jelly made of a calf’s foot, or for sardines
from over the sea, and they are even. He goes to the mill-pond,
she to her preserve-pot. The wonder is how they, how you and
I, can live this slimy beastly life, eating and drinking.
Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an in-
stant’s truce between virtue and vice. Goodness is the only
investment that never fails. In the musie of the harp which
999 WALDEN
trembles round the world it is the insisting on this which thrills
us. The harp is the traveling patterer for the Univeérse’s Insur-
ance Company, recommending its laws, and our little goodness
is all the assessment that we 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 a stop but the charming moral transfixes us. Many an.
irksome 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 pro-
portion as our higher nature slumbers. It is reptile and sensual,
and perhaps cannot be wholly expelled; like the worms which,
even in life and health, oceupy 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 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 than temperance and
purity. “That in which men differ from brute beasts,” says
Mencius, “is a thing very inconsiderable; the common herd lose
it very soon; superior men preserve it carefully.” Who knows
what sort of life would result if we had attained to purity? if
T 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 indispensable in the mind’s approximation to
God.” Yet the spirit can for the 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 and
makes us unclean, when we are continent invigorates and in-
HIGHER LAWS 292
spires 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 turns our purity inspires and our impur-
ity 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.
Perhaps there is none but has cause for shame on account of the
inferior and brutish nature to which he is allied. I 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 disaforested his mind!
*¥ * * ¥* * ¥
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.
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 appetite, 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 bur-
row, he shows himself at another. If you would be chaste, you
must be temperate. 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 stu-
dent sensuality is a sluggish habit of mind. An unclean person
iS universally a slothful one, one who sits by a stove, whom the
224 WALDEN
sun shines on prostrate, who reposes without being fatigued.
If you would avoid uncleanliness, and all the sins, work ear-
nestly, though it be at cleaning a stable. Nature is hard to be
overcome, but she must be overcome. What avails it that you
are Christian, 1f 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 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 sub-
ject,—I care not how obscene my words are,—but because I
cannot speak of them without betraying my impurity. We dis-
course freely without shame of one form of sensuality, and are
silent about another. We are so degraded that we cannot speak
simply of the necessary functions of human nature. In earlier
ages, In some countries, every function was reverently spoken of
and regulated by 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
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 ean he get off
by hammering marble instead. We are all sculptors and paint-
ers, 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.
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 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
HIGHER LAWS 295
work; but the burden of his thought was that though this kept
running in his head, and he found himself planning and ¢on-
triving it against his will, yet it concerned him very little. It
was no more than the seurf 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 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
this mean moiling life, when a glorious existence is possible for
you? Those same stars twinkle over other fields than these.—
But how to come out of this condition and actually migrate
thither? All that he could think of was to practice some new
austerity, to let his mind descend into his body and redeem it,
and treat himself with ever increasing respect,
XTE
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 exer-
cise as the eating of it.
Hermit. I wonder what the world is doing now. 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 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 ean never think for the barking of Bose? And oh, the
housekeeping! to keep bright the devil’s door-knobs, and scour
his tubs this bright dav! Better not keep a house. Say, some
hollow tree; and then for morning ealls and dinner-parties!
Only a wood-pecker tapping. Oh, they swarm; the sun is too
warm there: they are born too far into life for me. 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 trem-
ble-—Eh, Mr. Poet, is it you? How do you like the world
today ?
226
BRUTE NEIGHBORS 2at
Poet. See those clouds; how they hang! That’s the greatest
thing I have seen today. There’s nothing like it in old paint-
ings, nothing like it in foreign lands,—unless when we were off
the coast of Spain. That’s a true Mediterranean sky. I thought,
as I have my living to get, and have not eaten today, 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. I eannot resist. My brown bread will soon be.gone.
I will go with you gladly soon, but I am just concluding a seri-
ous 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 meanwhile. Angle-worms are rarely
to be met with in these 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
today. I would advise you to set in the spade 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 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 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 thing's
as ever I wasin my life. I fear my thoughts will not come back
to me. If 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 sentences of Con-fut-see;
998 WALDEN
they may fetch that state about again. I know not whether it
was the dumps or a budding eestasy. Mem. There never is but
one opportunity of a kind.
Poet. How noy, Hermit, is it too soon? I have got just
thirteen whole ones, besides several which are imperfect 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.
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 for his
neighbors; as if nothing but a mouse 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.
’ 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 dis-
tinguished naturalist, and it interested him much. When I was
building, one of these had its nest underneath the house, and
before I had laid the second floor, and swept out the shavings,
would come out regularly at lunch time and pick up the erumbs
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 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 elothes, and along my sleeve, and round and round
the paper which held my dinner, while I kept the latter close,
and dodged and played at bo-peep with it; and when at last I
held still a piece of cheese between my thumb and finger, it
BRUTE NEIGHBORS 999
eame and nibbled it, sitting in my hand, and afterward cleaned
its face and paws, like a fly, and walked away.
A pheebe soon built in my shed, and a robin for protection in
a pine which grew against the house. In June the partridge
(Tetrao umbellus), which is so shy a bird, led her brood past
my windows, from the woods to 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 of the woods. The young sud-
denly disperse on your approach, 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 traveler has
placed his foot in the midst of a brood, and heard the whir of
the old bird as she flew off, and her anxious calls and mewing,
or seen her trail her wings to attract his attention, without sus-
pecting their neighborhood. The parent will sometimes roll
and spin round before you in such a dishabille, that you cannot,
for a few moments, detect what kind of creature it is. The
young squat still and flat, often running their heads under a
leaf, and mind only their mother’s directions given from a dis-
tance, nor will your approach make them run again and betray
themselves. You 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, obedi-
ent to their mother and their instinet, was to squat there without
fear or trembling. So perfect is this 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 deyeloped and precocious even
than chickens. The remarkably adult yet innocent expression
of their open and serene eyes is very memorable. All intelli-
gence 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 the bird was, but is coeval with the
930 | WALDEN
sky it reflects. The woods do not yield another such gem. The
traveler does not often look into such a limpid well. The igno-
rant or reckless sportsman often shoots the parent at such a
time, and leaves these innocents to fall a prey to some 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 my hens and chickens.
It is remarkable how many creatures live wild and free
though secret in the woods, and still sustain themselves in the
neighborhood of towns, suspected by hunters only. How re-
tired the otter manages to live here! He 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 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 a
brook, oozing from under Brister’s Hill, half a mile from my
field. The approach to this was through a succession of de-
seending 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-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 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 wings and legs, to attract
my attention, and get off her young, who would already have
BRUTE NEIGHBORS . 93]
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 over the spring, or fluttered from bough to bough of
the soft white-pines over my head; or the red squirrel, coursing
down the nearest bough, was particularly familiar and inquisi-
tive. You only need sit still long enough in some attractive
spot in the woods that all its inhabitants 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 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 far-
ther, I was surprised to find that the chips were covered with
such 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 strewn with the dead and
dying, both red and black. It was the only battle 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 em-
braces, in a little sunny valley amid the chips, now at noonday
prepared to fight till the sun went 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;
939 WALDEN
while 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 pertinacity than bull-
dogs. Neither manifested the least disposition to retreat. It
was evident that their battle-cry 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 dis-
patched his foe, or had not yet taken part in the battle; prob-
ably the latter, for he had lost none of his limbs; whose mother
had charged him to return with his shield or upon it. Or per-
chance he was some Achilles, who had nourished his 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 his opportunity, he sprang upon the black war-
rior, 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 attrac-
tion had been invented which put all other locks and cements to
shame. I should not have wondered by this time to find that
they had their respective musical bands stationed on some emi-
nent 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 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 patriotism
and heroism displayed. For numbers and for carnage it was
an Austerlitz or Dresden. Coneord 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
thousands shared the fate of Davis and Hosmer. There was
BRUTE NEIGHBORS 233
not one hireling there. I have no doubt that it was a principle
they fought for, as much 2% our ancestors, and not to avoid a
three-penny tax on their tea; and the results of this battle will
be as important and memorable 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 particularly
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-mentioned 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 breast-plate was appa-
rently 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 struggled 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 saddle-
bow, 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 erippled 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.
Kirby and Spenee tell us that the battles of ants have long
been celebrated and the date of them recorded, though they say
934 WALDEN
that Huber is the only modern author who appears to have
witnessed them. “/Hneas Sylvius,” say they, “after giving a
very circumstantial account of one contested with great obsti-
nacy by a great and small species on the trunk of a pear tree,”
adds that “‘This action was fought in the pontificate of Eu-
genius the Fourth, in the presence of Nicholas Pistoriensis, an
eminent lawyer, who related the whole history of the battle
with the greatest fidelity.’ A similar engagement between great
and small ants is 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 their giant enemies a prey
to the birds. This event happened previous to the expulsion of
the tyrant Christiern 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 Bull.
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 wood-chucks’ holes; led perchance by
some slight eur 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 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. The surprise was mutual.
Nevertheless the most domestic eat, 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 inhabitants. Once, when berrying, I met with a
eat with young 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
BRUTE NEIGHBORS 20D
was called a “winged cat” in one of the farm-houses in Lincoln
nearest the pond, Mr. Gilian Baker’s. When I 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 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 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 appearance 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 eat.
This would have been the right kind of cat for me to keep, if
I had kept any; for why should 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 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 come 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 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
236 WALDEN
generously rise and dash angrily, taking sides with all water-
fowl, and our sportsmen must 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 to see how
he would maneuver, 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.
As I 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 me, set up his wild
laugh and betrayed himself. I pursued with a paddle and he
dived, but when he came up I was nearer than before. He
dived again, but I miscaleulated the direction he would take,
and we were fifty rods apart when he came to the surface this
time, for I had helped to widen the interval; and again he
laughed long and loud, and with more reason than before.
He maneuvered 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 surveyed 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 surface
of the pond, a man against a loon. Suddenly your adversary’s
checker disappears beneath the board, and the problem is to
BRUTE NEIGHBORS Pol
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 unweariable, 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. How
surprised must the fishes be to see this ungainly 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. Once or twice I saw a
ripple where he approached the surface, just put his head
out to reconnoiter, and instantly dived again. JI found that it
was as well for me to rest on my oars and wait his reappearing
as to endeavor 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 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 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, when he
had balked me most successfully and come up a long way off,
he uttered a long-drawn unearthly howl, probably more like
238 WALDEN
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 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 hear
him. His white breast, the stillness of the air, and the smooth-
ness 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 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 the
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 sports-
man; tricks which they will have less need to practice in
Louisiana bayous. When compelled to rise they would some-
times circle round and round and over the pond at a consider-
able 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 of a quarter of a mile on to a distant part
which was left free; but what besides 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,
XIII
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 admired, though I
did not gather, the cranberries, small waxen gems, pendants
of the meadow grass, pearly and red, which the farmer plucks
with an ugly rake, leaving the smooth meadow in a snarl,
heedlessly measuring them by the bushel and the dollar only,
and sells the spoils of the meads to Boston and New York;
destined to be jammed, to satisfy the tastes of lovers of Nature
there. So butchers rake the tongues of bison out of the prairie
grass, regardless of the torn and drooping plant. The bar-
berry’s brilliant fruit was likewise food for my eyes merely;
but I collected a small store of wild apples for coddling, which
the proprietors and travelers 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 Lincoln,—they now sleep their long sleep under the
railroad,—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 reproofs of the
red squirrels and the jays, whose half-consumed nuts I some-
times stole, for the burrs which they had selected were sure
to contain sound ones. Occasionally I climbed and shook the
trees. They grew also behind my house, and one large tree
which almost overshadowed it was, when in flower, a bouquet
which scented the whole neighborhood, but the squirrels and
239
240 WALDEN
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. I 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. Digging one day
for fishworms I discovered the ground-nut (Apios tuberosa)
on its string, the potato of the aborigines, 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 crimpled red velvety blossom supported
by the stems of other plants without knowing it to be the same.
Cultivation has well-nigh exterminated it. It has a sweetish
taste, much lke 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 them
simply here at some future period. In these days of fatted
eattle 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 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 cornfield of the Indian’s God im the southwest, whence
he is said to have brought it; but the now almost exterminated
ground-nut will perhaps revive and flourish in spite of frosts
and wildness, prove itself indigenous, and resume its ancient
importance and dignity as the diet 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.
Already, by the first of September, I had seen two or three
small maples turned scarlet across the pond, beneath where
HOUSE-WARMING 241
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 the character of each tree
came out, and it admired itself reflected in the smooth mirror
of the lake. Each morning the manager of this gallery sub-
stituted some new picture, distinguished by more brilliant or
harmonious coloring, for the old upon the walls.
The wasps came by thousands to my lodge in October, as to
winter quarters, and settled on my windows 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, 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 disappeared,
into what crevices I do not know, avoiding winter and unspeak-
able cold.
Like the wasps, before I finally went into winter quarters in
November, I used to resort to the northeast side of Walden,
which the sun, reflected from the pitch-pine woods and the
stony shore, made the fireside of the pond; it is so much
pleasanter and wholesomer to be warmed by the sun while you
ean be, than by an artificial fire. I thus warmed myself by the
still glowing embers which the summer, like a departed hunter,
had left.
When I came to build my 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; 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
249 WALDEN
to elean an old wiseacre of them. Many of the villages of
Mesopotamia 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 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 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
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, 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,
and reflected that, if it proceeded slowly, it was calculated to
endure a long time. The chimney is to some extent an inde-
pendent structure, standing on the ground and rising through
the house to the heavens; even after the house is burned it still
stands sometimes, and its importance and independence are
apparent. This was toward the end of summer. It was now
November.
The north wind had already begun to cool the pond, though
it took many weeks of steady blowing to accomplish it, it is so
deep. When I began to havea fire at evening, before I plastered
my house, the chimney carried smoke particularly well, because
HOUSE-WARMING 243
of the numerous chinks between the boards. Yet I passed some
cheerful evenings in that cool and airy apartment, surrounded
by the rough brown boards full of knots, and rafters with the
bark on high overhead. My house never pleased my eye so
much after it was plastered, though I was obliged to confess
that it was more comfortable. Should not every 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 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
ehimney which I had built, and I poked the fire with more
right and more satisfaction than usual. My dwelling was
small, and I could hardly entertain an echo in it; but it seemed
larger for being a single apartment and remote from neighbors.
All the attractions of a house were coneentrated in one room;
it was kitchen, chamber, parlor, and keeping-room; and what-
ever satisfaction parent or child, master or.servant, derive
from living in a house, I enjoyed it all. Cato says, the master
of a family (paterfamilias) must have in his rustic villa “cellam
oleariam, vinariam, dolia multa, uti lubeat caritatem expectare,
et rei, et virtuti, et gloriz erit,” that is, “an oil and wine eellar,
many casks, so that it may be pleasant to expect hard times;
it will be for his advantage, and virtue, and glory.” I had in
my cellar a firkin of potatoes, about two quarts of peas with
the weevil in them, and on my shelf a little rice, a jug of
molasses, and of rye and Indian meal a peck each.
I sometimes dream of a larger and more populous house,
standing in a golden age, of enduring materials, and without
gingerbread-work, which shall still consist of only one room,
a vast, rude, substantial, primitive hall, without ceiling or
244 WALDEN
plastering, with bare rafters and purlins supporting a sort of
lower heaven over one’s head,—useful to keep off rain and
snow; where the king and queen 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 caver-
nous house, wherein you must reach up a toreh upon a pole
to see the roof; where some may live in the fireplace, some in
the 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 traveler may wash, and eat, and converse, and
sleep, without further journey; such a shelter as you would be
glad to reach in a tempestuous night, containing all the essen-
tials of a house, and nothing for house-keeping, where you
can see all the treasures of the house at one view, and every-
thing hangs upon its peg that a man should use; at once kitchen,
pantry, parlor, chamber, store-house, and garret; where you
can see so necessary a thing as a barrel or a ladder, so con-
venient 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 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 as a bird’s nest, and you ¢an-
not 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 in a particular cell, and told
to make yourself at home there,—in solitary confinement. Now-
adays the host does not admit you to his hearth, but has got the
HOUSE-WARMING 245
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 to poison you. I am aware that I have been on many
a man’s premises, and might have been legally ordered off,
but I am 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 their way; but backing out of a modern palace will
be all that I shall desire to learn, if ever I am caught in
one.
It would seem as if the very language of our parlors would
lose all its nerve and degenerate into parlaver 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, commonly. As if only the savage dwelt
near enough to Nature and Truth to borrow a trope from them.
How can the scholar, who dwells away in the North West Ter-
ritory or the Isle of Man, tell what is parliamentary in the
kitchen ? ,
However, only one or two of my guests were ever 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 it
would shake the house to its foundations. Nevertheless, it
stood through a great many hasty-puddings.
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 conveyance
which would have tempted me to go much farther if necessary.
My house had in the meanwhile been shingled down to the
ground on every side. In lathing I was pleased to be able to
send home each nail with a single blow of the hammer, and
246 WALDEN
it was my ambition to transfer the plaster from the board to
the wall neatly and rapidly. J remembered the story of a
conceited fellow, who, in fine clothes, was wont to lounge about
the village once, giving advice to workmen. Venturing one
day to substitute deeds for words, he turned up his cuffs, seized
a plasterer’s board, and having loaded his trowel without mis-
hap, with a complacent look toward the lathing overhead, made
a bold gesture thitherward; and straightway, to his complete
discomfiture, received the whole contents in his ruffled bosom.
I admired anew the economy and convenience of plastering,
which so effectually shuts out the cold and takes a handsome
finish, and I learned the various casualties to which the plas-
terer is liable. J was surprised to see how thirsty the bricks
were, which drank up all the moisture in my plaster before I
had smoothed it, and how many pailfuls of water it takes to
christen a new hearth. I had the previous winter made a small
quantity of lime by burning the shells of the Unio fluviatilis,
which our river affords, for the sake of the experiment; so that
I knew where my materials came from. J might have got good
-jimestone within a mile or two and burned it myself, if I had
eared to do so.
The pond had in the meanwhile skimmed over in the shadiest
and shallowest coves, some days or even weeks before the
general freezing. The first ice is especially interesting and
perfect, being hard, dark, and transparent, and affords the
best opportunity that ever offers for examining the bottom
where it is shallow; for you ean lie at 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 behind a glass, and the water is neces-
sarily always smooth then. There are many furrows in the
sand where some creature has traveled about and doubled on
its tracks; and, for wrecks, it is strewn with the cases of eadis
worms made of minute grains of white quartz. Perhaps these
HOUSE-WARMING 247
have creased it, for you find some of their eases in the furrows,
though they are deep and broad for them to make. 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 freezes, you find that the greater part of
the bubbles, which at first appeared to be within it, are against
the 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 bubbles are
from an eightieth to an eighth of an inch im 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
east on stones to try the strength of the ice, and those which
broke through earried in air with them, which formed very
large and conspicuous 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 distinetly 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 regu-
larity ; 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.
248 Bin WALDEN
Being curious to know what position my great bubbles 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 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 regu-
larity in the 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 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 to melt and rot it.
These are the little air guns which contribute to make the ice
erack and whoop.
At length the winter set in in good earnest, just as I bad
finished plastering, and the wind began to howl around the
house as if it had not had permission to do so till then. Night
after night the geese came lumbering in 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 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 had come up to feed, and the faint
honk or quack of their leader as they hurried off. In 1845
HOUSE-WARMING 949
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 ’46, the 16th;
in 749, about the 31st; and in ’50, about the 27th of December;
in 52, the 5th of January; in 753, the 3lst of December. The
snow had already covered the ground since the 25th of Novem-
ber, and surrounded me suddenly with the scenery of winter.
I withdrew yet farther into my shell, and endeavored to keep
a bright fire both within my house and within my breast. My
employment out of doors now was to collect the dead wood
in the forest, bringing it in my hands or on my shoulders, or
sometimes trailing a dead pine tree under each arm to my
shed. An old forest fence which had seen its best days was a
great haul for me. I sacrificed it to Vulean, 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 may say, steal, the fuel to cook it with!
His bread and meat are sweet. There are enough fagots and
waste wood of all kinds in the forests of most of our towns
to support many fires, but which at present warm none, and,
some think, hinder the growth of the young wood. There was
also the drift-wood of the pond. In the course 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, though
waterlogged past’ drying. JI amused 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 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 burned long, but made a very hot fire; nay, I thought
250 WALDEN
that they burned better for the soaking, as if the piteh, being
confined by the water, burned longer as in a lamp.
Gilpin, in his account of the forest borderers of England,
says that “the encroachments of trespassers, and the 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 purprestures, as tending
ad terrorem ferarum—ad nocumentum foreste, etc.,’ to the
frightening of the game and the detriment of the forest. But
I was interested in the preservation of the venison and the
vert more than the hunters or wood-choppers, and as much as
though I had been the Lord Warden himself; and if any part
was burned, though I burned it myself by accident, I grieved
with a grief that lasted longer and was more ineconsolable than
that of the proprietors; nay, I grieved when it was eut down
by the proprietors themselves. I would that our farmers when
they eut down a forest felt some of that awe which the old
Romans did when they came to thin, or let in the light to, a
consecrated grove (lucum conlucare), that is, would believe
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.
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. It is as precious *
to us as it was to our Saxon and Norman aneestors. 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 some-
times exceeds, that of the best wood in Paris, though this
immense capital annually requires more than three hundred
thousand cords, and is surrounded to the distance of three
HOUSE-WARMING ° 951
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 resorted 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 affection.
I loved to have mine before my window, and the more ehips
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 beanfield. As my driver prophesied
when I was plowing, they warmed me twice, once 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, 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 inter-
esting to remember how much of this food for fire is still
concealed in the bowels of the earth. In previous years I
had often gone “prospecting” over some bare hill side, 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 at the core, though
the sapwood has all become vegetable mold, as appears by
252 WALDEN
the seales 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, 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 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.—
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
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.
Hard green wood just cut, though I used but little of that,
answered my purpose better than any other. JI sometimes left
a good fire when I went to take a walk in a winter afternoon;
and when I returned, three or four hours afterward, it would
be still alive and glowing. My 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 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
HOUSE-WARMING 253
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 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 eellar, nibbling every third potato,
and making a snug bed even there of some hair left after
plastering and of brown paper; for even the wildest animals
love comfort and warmth as well as man, and they survive
the winter only because they are so careful to secure them.
Some of my friends spoke as if I was coming to the woods
on purpose to freeze myself. The animal merely makes a bed,
which he warms with his body in a sheltered place; but man,
having discovered fire, boxes up some air in a spacious apart-
ment, 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 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,
when I had been exposed to the rudest blasts a long time, my
whole body began to grow torpid, when I reached the genial
atmosphere of my house I soon recovered my faculties and
prolonged my life. But the most luxuriously housed has little
to boast of in this 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; 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 fire place. Cooking was then, for the most part,
no longer a poetic, but merely a chemic, process. It will soon
254 WALDEN
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 a companion. You ean 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
zecurred to me 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?
Why art thou banished from our hearth and hall,
Thou who art welcomed and beloved by all?
Was thy existence then too fanciful
For our life’s common light, who are so dull?
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.
XIV
FORMER INHABITANTS AND WINTER VISITORS
I weathered some merry snow-storms, and spent some cheer-
ful winter evenings by my fireside, while the snow whirled
wildly without, and even the hooting of the owl was hushed.
For many weeks I met no one in my walks but those who came
occasionally to cut wood and sled it to the village. The elements,
however, abetted me in making a path through the deepest
snow in the woods, for when I had once gone through the
wind blew the oak leaves into my tracks, where they lodged,
and by absorbing 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 memory of many of my townsmen the road near which
my house stands resounded with the laugh and gossip of
inhabitants, and the woods which border it were notched and
dotted here and there with their little gardens and dwellings,
though it was then much more shut in by the forest than now.
In some places, within my own remembranee, the pines would
serape both sides of a chaise at once, and women and ehildren
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 neighboring villages, or
for the woodman’s team, it once amused the traveler more
than now by its variety, and lingered longer in his memory.
Where now firm open fields stretch from the village. to the
woods, it then ran through a maple swamp on a foundation of
logs, the remnants of which, doubtless, still underlie the present
255
256 WALDEN
dusty highway, from the Stratten, now the Alms House, Farm,
to Brister’s Hill.
Kast of my beanfield, across the road, lived Cato Ingraham,
slave of Duncan Ingraham, Esquire, gentleman of Concord
village; who built his slave a house, ana gave him permission
to live in Walden Woods ;—Cato, not Uticensis, but Coneordi-
ensis. Some say that he was a Guinea Negro. There are a
few who remember his little patch among the walnuts, which
he let grow up till he should be old and need them; but a
younger and whiter speculator got them at last. He, too,
however, occupies an equally narrow house at present. Cato’s
half-obliterated cellar hole still remains, though known to
few, being concealed from the traveler by a fringe of pines.
It is now filled with the smooth sumach (Rhus glabra), and
one of the earliest species. of goldenrod (Solidago stricta)
grows there luxuriantly.
Here, by the very 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 was set on fire by
English soldiers, prisoners on parole, when she was away, and
her cat and dog and hens were all burned up together. She
led a hard life, and somewhat inhumane. One old frequenter
of these woods remembers that as he passed her house one noon
he heard her muttering to herself over her gurgling pot,—‘Ye
are all bones, bones!’”’ I have seen bricks amid the oak copse
there.
Down the road, on the right hand, on Brister’s Hill, lived
Brister Freeman, “a handy Negro,” slave of Squire Cummings
onece,—there where grow still the apple trees which Brister
planted and tended; large old trees now, but their fruit still
wild and ciderish to my taste. Not long since I read his
epitaph in the old Lincoln burying-ground, a little on one
FORMER INHABITANTS AND WINTER VISITORS 257
side, near the unmarked graves of some British grenadiers who
fell in the retreat from Coneord,—where he is styled “Sippio
Brister,’—Scipio Africanus he had some title to be ealled,—
“a man of 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 pleasantly,—
large, round, and black, blacker than any of the children of
of the 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 Stratton family;
whose orchard once covered all the slope of Brister’s Hill, 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; 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 mytho-
logical character, to have his biography written one day; who
first comes in the guise of a friend or hired man, and then robs
and murders the whole family,—New England Rum. But
history must not yet tell the tragedies enacted here; let time
intervene in some measure to assuage and lend an azure tint
to them. Here the most indistinct and dubious tradition says
that once a tavern stood; the well the same, which tempered
the traveler’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
258 WALDEN
—
I do not mistake. I lived on the edge of the village then, and.
had just lost myself over 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
unele who goes to sleep shaving himself, and is obliged to
sprout potatoes in a cellar Sundays, in order to keep awake
and keep the Sabbath, or as the consequence of my attempt
to read Chalmers’ collection of English poetry without skip-
ping. It fairly overcame my Nervi. I had just sunk my
head on this when the bells rang fire, and in hot haste the
engines rolled that way, led by a straggling troop of men and
boys, and I among the foremost, for I had leaped the brook.
We thought it was far south over the woods,—we who had
run to fires before,—barn, shop, or dwelling-house, or all
together. “It’s Baker’s barn,” cried one. “It is the Codman
Place,” affirmed another. 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
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 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. The very nearness of the fire but
cooled our ardor. At first we thought to throw a frog-pond
on to ‘it; but concluded to let it burn, it was so far gone and
so worthless. So we stood round our engine, jostled one
another, expressed our sentiments through speaking trumpets,
or in lower tone referred to the great conflagrations which
the world had witnessed, including Bascom’s shop, and, between
ourselves, we thought that, were we there in season with our
FORMER INHABITANTS AND WINTER VISITORS 259
“tub” and a full frog-pond by, we could turn that threatened
last and universal one into another flood. We finally retreated
without doing any mischief,—returned to sleep and Gondibert.
But as for Gondibert, 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.” ie
It chaneed that I walked that way across the fields the
following night, about the same hour, and hearing a low
moaning at this spot, I drew near in the dark, and discovered
the only survivor of the family that I know, the heir of: both
its virtues and its vices, who alone was interested in this
burning, lying on his stomach and looking over the cellar wall
at the still smoldering cinders beneath, muttering to himself,
as is his wont. He had been working far off in the river
meadow all day, and had improved the first moments that he
eould call his own to visit the home of his fathers and his
youth. He gazed into the cellar from all sides and points of
_ view by turns, always lying down to it, as if there was some
treasure, which he remembered, concealed between 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 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 eut and mounted, feeling
for the iron hook or staple by which a burden had been fastened
to the heavy end,—all that he could now cling to,—to eonvinee
me tnat it was no common “rider.” J 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 Hlae
bushes by the wall, in the now open field, lived Nutting and
Le Grosse. But to return toward Lincoln.
260 WALDEN
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 earthen ware, and left
descendants to succeed him. Neither 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 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. J had read of the potter’s
clay and wheel in Seripture, 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 on trees like gourds somewhere,
and I was pleased to hear that so fictile an art was ever prac-
ticed in my neighborhood.
The last inhabitant of these woods before me was an Irish-
man, 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 of a ditcher. 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,
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 avoided it as “an unlucky
castle,” I visited it. There lay his old clothes curled up by
FORMER INHABITANTS AND WINTER VISITORS 961
use, as if they were himself, upon his raised plank bed. His
pipe lay broken on the hearth, instead of a bowl broken at
the fountain. The last could never have been the symbol of
his death, for he 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 administrator could not catch,
black as night and as silent, not even croaking, awaiting Rey-
nard, 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
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 woodchuck was freshly
stretched upon the back of the house, a trophy of his last
Waterloo; but no warm cap or mittens 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 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 history.
of more famous schools of philosophy.
262 WALDEN
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 traveler;
planted and tended once by children’s hands, 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 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 it, and grow 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.
But this small village, germ of something more, why did it
fail while Coneord 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, 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 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 of the landscape!
Again, perhaps, Nature will try, with me for a first settler, and
my house raised last spring to be the oldest: in the hamlet.
IT am not aware. that any man has ever built on the spot
which I oceupy. Deliver me from a city built on the site of
a more ancient city, whose materials are ruins, whose gardens
cemeteries. The soil is blanched and accursed there, and before
FORMER INHABITANTS AND WINTER VISITORS 263
that becomes necessary the earth itself will be destroyed. With
such reminiscences I repeopled the woods and lulled myself
asleep.
At this season I seldom had a visitor. When the snow lay
deepest no wanderer ventured near my house for a week or
a 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 without food; or like
that early settler’s family in the town of Sutton, in this state,
whose cottage was completely 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 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 eut down the shade trees before
their houses, and when the erust 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 high-
way to my house, about half a mile long, might have 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 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 with a
beech tree, or a yellow-birch, or an old acquaintance among
the pines; when the ice and snow, causing their limbs to droop,
264 WALDEN
and so sharpening their tops, had 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 ereeping
and 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 nebulosa) sitting on
one of the lower dead limbs of a white-pine, close to the trunk,
in broad daylight, I standing within a rod of him. He could
hear me when I moved and ecronched 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 again, and he began
to nod. I too felt a slumberous influence after watching him
half an hour, as he sat thus with his eyes half open, like a
eat, winged brother of the eat. There was only a narrow slit
left between their lids, by which he preserved a peninsular
relation to me; thus, with half-shut eyes, 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 disturbed; 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 twilight way as it were
with his sensitive pinions, he found a new perch, where he
might in peace await the dawning of his day.
As I walked over the long causeway made for the railroad
through the meadows, I 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
FORMER INHABITANTS AND WINTER VISITORS 965
-road from Brister’s 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 traveler.
And when I returned new drifts would have formed through
which I floundered, where the busy northwest wind had been
depositing the powdery snow round a sharp angle in the road,
and not a 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, 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 from
my walk at evening I crossed the deep tracks of a woodchopper
leading from my door, and found his pile of whittlings on the
hearth, and my house filled with the odor of his pipe. Or on
a Sunday afternoon, if I chanced to be at home, I heard the
eronching of the snow made by the step of a long-headed
farmer, who from far through the woods sought my house, to
have a social “erack’’; one of the few of his vocation who are
“men on their farms”; who donned a frock instead of a pro-
fessor’s gown, and is as ready to extract the moral out of
church or state as to haul a load of manure from his barn-yard.
We talked of rude and simple times, when men sat about large
fires in cold bracing weather, with clear heads; and when other
dessert failed, we tried our teeth on many a nut which wise
squirrels have long since abandoned, for those which have the
thickest shells are commonly empty.
The one who came from farthest to my lodge, through deepest
snows and most dismal tempests,-was a poet. A farmer, a
hunter, a soldier, a reporter, even a philosopher, may be
daunted; but nothing can deter a poet, for he is actuated by
pure love. Who ean predict his comings and goings? His
266 WALDEN
business calls him out at all hours, even when doctors sleep.
We made that small house ring with boisterous mirth and
resound with the murmur of much sober talk, making amends
then to Walden vale for the long silences. Broadway was
still and deserted in comparison. At suitable intervals there
were regular salutes of laughter, which might have been referred
indifferently to the last-uttered or the forthcoming jest. We
made many a “bran new” theory of life over a thin dish of
gruel, which combined the advantages of conviviality with the
clearheadedness which philosophy requires.
I should not forget that during my last winter at the pond
there was another weleome visitor, who at one time came
through the village, through snow and rain and darkness, till
he saw my lamp through the trees and shared with me,some
long winter evenings. One of the last of the philosophers,—
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, like the nut its kernel. I think that he must be the man
of the most faith of any alive. His words and attitude always
suppose a better state of things than other men are acquainted
with, and he will be the last man to be disappointed as the
ages revolve. He has 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.—
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 defaced and
leaning monuments. -With his hospitable intellect he embraces
FORMER INHABITANTS AND WINTER VISITORS 967
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 ecaravansary on the
world’s highway, where philosophers 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 erotchets of any
I chance to know; the same yesterday and tomorrow. Of yore
we had sauntered and talked, and effectually put the world
behind us; for he was pledged to no institution in it, freeborn,
ingenuus. Whichever way we turned, it seemed that the heavens
and the earth had met together, since he enhanced the beauty
of the landscape.
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 Walden
September 6th, 1847, )
XVIII
CONCLUSION
To the sick the doctors wisely recommend a change of air
and scenery. Thank Heaven, here is not all the world. The
buckeye does not grow in New England, and the mocking-bird
is rarely heard here. The wild 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 in a southern bayou.
Even the bison to some extent keeps pace with the seasons,
cropping the pastures of the Colorado only till a greener and
sweeter grass awaits him by the Yellowstone. Yet we think
that if rail-fences are pulled down, and stone-walls piled up
on our farms, bounds are henceforth set to our lives and our
fates decided. If you are chosen town clerk, forsooth, you
-eannot go to Terra del Fuego this summer: 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 globe is but the
home of our correspondent. Our voyage is only great circele-
sailing, and the doctors prescribe for diseases of the skin merely.
One hastens to Southern Africa to chase the giraffe; but surely
that is not the game he would be after. How long, pray, would
a man hunt giraffes if he could? Snipes and woodcocks also
may afford rare sport; but I trust it would be nobler game to
shoot one’s self.—
313
314 WALDEN
Direct your eye right inward, and you’ll find
A thousand regions in your mind ’
Yet undiscovered. Travel them, and be
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 Northwest Passage around
this continent, that we would find? Are these the problems
which most concern mankind? 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, 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? 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 hummock left by the ice. Yet some can be
patriotie who have no self-respect, and sacrifice the greater
to the less. They love the soil which makes their graves, but
have no sympathy with the spirit which may still animate their
clay. Patriotism is a maggot in their heads. What was the
meaning of that South-Sea Exploring Expedition, with all
its parade and expense, but an indirect recognition of the
fact that there are continents and seas in the moral 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
eold and storm and cannibals, in a government ship, with five
hundred men and boys to assist one, than it is to explore the
private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one’s being,
alone.—
CONCLUSION 315
Erret, et extremos alter scrutetur Iberos.
Plus habet hic vite, plus habet ille vie.
Let them wander and scrutinize the outlandish Australians.
I have more of God, they more of the road.
It is not worth the while to go round the world to count the
eats in Zanzibar. Yet do this even till you ean do better, and
you may perhaps find some “Symmes’ Hole” by which to get
at the inside at last. England and France, 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 would travel farther than all travelers, be naturalized
in all climes, and cause the Sphinx to dash her head against
a stone, even obey the precept of the old philosopher, and
Explore thyself. Herein are demanded the eye and the nerve.
Only the defeated and deserters go to the wars, cowards that
run away and enlist. Start now on that farthest western way,
which does not pause at the Mississippi or the 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, and at last earth down too.
It is said that Mirabeau took to highway robbery “to ascer-
tain what degree of resolution was necessary in order to place |
one’s self in formal opposijion 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 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
obedience to yet more sacred laws, and so have tested his
316 WALDEN |
resolution 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 opposi-'
tion to a just government, if he should chance to meet with.
such. “a §
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 remark-.
able how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, |
and make a beaten track for ourselves. I had not lived there.
a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond-
side; and though it is five or six years 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 it open. The surface of the
earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with
the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then,
must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of
tradition and 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 moonlight amid the
mountains. I do not wish to go below now.
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. He will put
some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new,
universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish them-
selves 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 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
CONCLUSION 317
the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they 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 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 under-
stand, were the best 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 convineed.. Extravagance!
it depends on how you are yarded. The migrating buffalo
which seeks new pastures in another latitude, is not extravagant
like the cow which kicks over the pail, leaps the cowyard fence,
and runs after her calf, in milking-time. I desire to speak
somewhere without bounds; like a man in a waking moment,
to men in their waking moments; for I am convineed 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 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
ithe 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
ithey are significant and fragrant like frankincense to superior
natures.
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. Some-
times we are inclined to class those who are once-and-a-half-
witted with the half-witted, because we 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 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 eure the potato-—
rot, will not any endeavor to cure the brain-rot, which prevails”
so much more widely and fatally? )
I do not suppose that I have 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 ice.
Southern customers objected to its blue color, which is the
evidence of its purity, as if it were muddy, and preferred the
Cambridge ice, which is white, but tastes of weeds. The purity
men love is like the mists which envelop the earth, and not
like the azure ether beyond.
Some are dinning in our ears that we 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 lion. Shall a man 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 endeavor to be what he was made.
Why should we be in such desperate haste to sueceed, and
in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace
with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different
drummer. Let him step to the musie which he hears, however
measured or far away. It is not important that he should
mature as soon as an apple tree or an oak. Shal! he turn his
spring into summer? If the condition of things which we
318 WALDEN , |
|
|
CONCLUSION 319
were made for is not yet, what were any reality which we can
substitute? We will not be shipwrecked on a vain reality.
Shall we with pains erect a heaven of blue glass over ourselves,
though when it is done we shall be sure to gaze still at the true
ethereal heaven far above, as if the former were not?
There was an artist in the city of Kouroo who was disposed
to strive after perfection. One day it came into his mind to
make a staff. Having considered that in an imperfect 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 resolved 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 a moment. His singleness of purpose and reso-
lution, and his elevated piety, endowed him, without his knowl-
edge, 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 ferrule 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 finishing 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
>
320 WALDEN
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 ean give to a matter will stead us so well |
at last as the truth. This alone wears well. For the most part,
we are not where we are, but in a false position. Through an
infirmity of our natures, we suppose a case, and put ourselves |
into it, and hence are in two cases at the same time, and it is
doubly difficult te get out. In sane moments we regard only
the facts, the case that is. Say what you have to say, not what
you ought. Any truth is better than make-believe. Tom
Hyde, the tinker, standing on the gallows, was asked if he
had anything to say. “Tell the tailors,” said he, “to remember
to make a knot in their thread before they take the first stitch.”
His companion’s prayer is forgotten.
However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun
it and eall it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It
looks poorest when you are richest. The faultfinder will find
faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You
may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours,
even in a poorhouse. The setting sun is reflected from the
windows of the almshouse as brightly as from the rich 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
seem to me often to live the most independent lives of any.
Maybe they are simply great enough to receive without mis-
giving. Most think that they are above being supported by the
town; but it oftener happens that they are not above support-
CONCLUSION 394
ing themselves by dishonest means, which should be more dis-
reputable. Cultivate 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 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 said: “From an army of three divisions one ean
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 is all dissipation. Humil-
ity 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, 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 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 ean buy
superfluities only. Money is not required to buy one necessary
of the soul.
I live in the angle of a leaden wall, into whose composition
was poured a little alloy of bell metal. Often, in the repose of
my midday, there reaches my ears a confused tintinnabulum
from without. It is the noise 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 more interested in such things than in the contents of the
322 WALDEN
Daily Times. The interest and the conversation are about cos-
tume and manners chiefly; but a goose is a goose still, dress it
as you will. They tell me of California and Texas, of England
and the Indies, of the Hon. Mr. of Georgia or of Massa-
chusetts, 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
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 on a committee of arrangements, and hourly expeet
a speech from somebody. God is only the president of the day,
and Webster is His orator. I love to weigh, to settle, to gravi-
tate toward that which most strongly and rightfully attraets
me;—not hang by the beam of the seale and try to weigh less,—
not suppose a ease, but take the case that is; to travel the only
path I ean, 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
is a solid bottom everywhere. We read that the traveler asked
the boy if the swamp before him had a hard bottom. The boy
replied that it had. But presently the traveler’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.” “So it has,” answered
the latter, “but you have not got half way to it yet.” 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 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 furring. Do not depend on the putty. Drive a nail
home and elinech it so faithfully that you can wake up in the
night and think of your work with satisfaction,—a work at
CONCLUSION 393
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 universe, you carrying on
the work. |
Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth. I[
sat at a table where were rich food and wine in abundanee, and
obsequious attendance, but sincerity and truth were not; and [
went. away hungry from the inhospitable board. The hospital-
ity 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 had not
got, and could not buy. The style, the house and grounds and
“entertainment,” pass for nothing with me. I ealled 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 a hollow tree. His manners were
truly regal. I should have done better had I ealled on him.
How long shall we sit in our porticos practicing idle and
musty virtues, which any work would make impertinent? As if
one were to begin the day with long-suffering, and hire a man
to hoe his potatoes; and in the afternoon go forth to practice
Christian meekness and charity with goodness aforethought!
Consider the China pride and stagnant self-complaceney of
mankind. This generation reclines a little to congratulate itself
on being the last of an illustrious line; and in Boston and Lon-
don and Paris and Rome, thinking of its long descent, it speaks
of its progress in art and science and literature with satisfac-
tion. There are the Records of the Philosophical Societies, and
the public Eulogies of Great Men! It is the good Adam eon-~
templating his own virtue. “Yes, we have done great. deeds,
and sung divine songs, which shall never die,”—that is, as long
as we ean remember them. The learned societies and great men
of Assyria,—where are they? What youthful philosophers and
394 WALDEN
experimentalists we are! There is not one of my readers who
has yet lived a whole human life. These may be but the spring
months in the life of the race. If we have had the seven-years’ :
itch, we have not seen the seventeen-year locust yet in 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 as many above it. We know not where we are. Besides,
we are sound asleep nearly half our time. Yet we esteem our-
selves wise, and have an established order on the surface. Truly,
we are deep thinkers, we are ambitious spirits! As I stand over
the insect crawling amid the pine needles on the forest floor,
and endeavoring to conceal 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
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 dullness. I need only 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 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 ean float the British Empire like a chip, if he
should ever harbor it in his mind. Who knows what sort of
seventeen-year locust will 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 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
CONCLUSION 395,
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 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 eame 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 Conneetieut and afterward 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 resurrection and immortality strengthened by
hearing of this? Who knows what beautiful and winged life,
whose egg has been buried for ages under man concentric layers
of woodenness in the dead dry life of society, deposited at the
first in the alburnum of the green and lving tree, which has
been gradually converted into the semblance of its well-seasoned
tomb,—heard perchance gnawing out now for 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 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
Page 27. Two years and three months. Beginning July 4, 1845. Thoreau
did not publish Walden, however, until 1854.
28. Traveled a good deal in Concord. Thoreau believed in Emerson’s
maxim: “Traveling is the fool’s paradise.” Alcott said: ‘‘Thoreau
thought he lived in the center of the Universe and would annex the rest
of the planet to Concord.”
28. Brahmins. The religious upper caste of the Hindoos. The reference
here is to the various tortures which they underwent in order to gain
favor with their gods.
28. Twelve labors of Hercules. A succession of desperate undertakings
enjoined by Eurystheus. Cf. Gayley’s Classic Myths (revised edition),
pp. 216-221.
29. Augean Stables. The cleansing of these was one of the twelve
labors of Hercules.
29. Deucalion and Pyrrha. Cf. Gayley’s Classic Myths, p. 16.
29. Raleigh, Sir Walter (1552?-1618). The passage is from Ovid. Thoreau
enjoyed the vigor of Raleigh’s style.
31. Wilberforce, William (1759-1833). An English anti-slavery leader.
33. Evelyn, John (1620-1706). Famous principally as a diarist. He was
also the author of a learned work on trees entitled Sylva.
33. Hippocrates. Considered “the father of medicine’ by the ancient
world.
34. Confucius (550-478 B. c.). A celebrated Chinese philosopher. The
- founder of the chief Chinese religion.
36. Liebig, Baron Justus von (1803-1873). A famous German chemist. ;
37. Elysian. In Greek mythology, Elysium was the abode of the blessed
after death. Cf. Gayley’s Classic Myths, pp. 51, 52.
39. I long ago lost a hound, etc. This is perhaps Thoreau’s best state-
ment of his transcendental search for the unfindable, for the ideal.
42. To transact some private business. Thoreau desired to study books
and nature, and to learn to write.
42. Celestial Empire. China; used here figuratively for the spiritual
world. The reference is to the extensive trade which was being carried on
between China and the United States through the port at Salem, Massa-
chusetts. }
43. La Perouse. A famous French navigator who made discoveries in
the Far East. He was supposedly lost at sea in 1788,
327
328 WALDEN
43. Hanno. A Carthaginian navigator of the fifth century 3s. c. who
explored the west coast of Africa.
43. Neva. A river at whose mouth Petrograd (formerly St. Petersburg)
is situated.
44. If they were divested of their clothes. Thoreau in this passage is
influenced by Carlyle. Read “The World out of Clathes,’ Chapter 8,
Book I of Sartor Resartus.
44. Madam Pfeiffer (1797-1858). A celebrated Viennese traveler who
journeyed twice around the world. She published in 1850, 4 Woman's
Journey Round the World.
46. New wine in old bottles. The allusion is to Matthew, ix, 17.
46. The old philosopher. Bias, who was one of the Seven Wise Men of
Greece.
46. Fates. According to Greek mythology the three Fates, Clotho,
Lachesis, and Atropos, spun, measured, and cut the thread of human
destiny. Cf. Gayley’s Classic Myths, p. 38.
47. Egyptian wheat. Reference to stories—now discredited—of the
germination of wheat which had lain thousands of years in the tombs of
Egypt.
48. Harlequin. The conventional clown of Italian comedies and puppet
shows.
48. Samuel Laing (1780-1868). A Scottish traveler; publisher of several
works on Norway and Sweden.
' 49. Domestic. See origin of the word. From the Latin, domus, house.
51. Goodkin, Daniel (1612-1678). The quotation is from Historical Collec-
tions of the Indians of Massachusetts. y
52. Rumford fireplace. An improved fireplace, the principles of which
were first discovered by Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford (1753-1814).
53. The fathers have eaten sour grapes. This and the two following
verses are taken from Ezekiel, xviii, 2-4.
54. Suent. A dialectal word; here used in the sense of working smoothly.
54. Chapman, George. Elizabethan dramatist. The quotation is from
his tragedy, Caesar and Pompey, Act V, scene ii.
54. Momus. The Greek god of censure and faultfinding.
57. Aurora. The goddess of dawn.
57. Memnon. The son of Aurora. The “column of Memnon,” which was
a colossal statue at Thebes, Egypt, was supposed to give forth music
when the rays of the rising sun fell upon it.
57. Sardanapalus (668-626 zB. c.). A king of Assyria whose reign was
celebrated for its material prosperity. Cf. Byron’s Sardanapalus.
57. Jonathan. “Brother Jonathan,” the American people as a whole.
57. Malaria. Italian, mal’ aria, bad air.
58. Agri-culture. Latin, agri cultura, the tilling of a field.
59. Old Johnson. Edward Johnson (1599-1672). The author of a History
of New England entitled The Wonder-Working Providence of Zion's
Saviour in New England.
NOTES 399
60. I borrowed an axe. Of his friend, A. Bronson Alcott, one of the
leaders of the Brook Farm experiment and the father of Louisa May
Alcott.
62. Singing to myself. Thoreau here quotes from his own verses.
64. The removal of the gods of Troy. Cf. Aneid, Book ii.
64. The character of his raisers. Among these “raisers”? were Ralph
Waldo Emerson, George William Curtis, William Ellery Channing, and
A. Bronson Alcott. Cf. Homes of American Authors.
66, The ninth part of a man. The allusion is to the familiar saying, “It
takes nine tailors to make a man.”
66. Trinity Church. The reference is to the church which stands oppo-
site the head of Wall Street, New York City.
68. Squatter’s right. “Thoreau delighted to call himself a ‘squatter’
on Emerson’s land, for this nomadic term well suited his mood.’’—Marble.
69. Cambridge College. Harvard College. Thoreau lived in Hollis Hall
during his undergraduate days, where he had ‘‘many and noisy neighbors,
and a residence in the fourth story.” Cf. F. B. Sanborn’s Henry D.
Thoreau, p. 55.
71. Rogers. Joseph Rogers and Sons, cutlers of Sheffield, England.
71. Adam Smith (1723-1790), Ricardo, David (1772-1823), and Say, Jean
Baptiste (1767-1823) were leading economists.
72. Flying Childers. A famous English race horse of the eighteenth
century that was never beaten.
72. Fitchburg. A town thirty miles west from Concord; at the time,
the terminus of the Fitchburg Railroad. .
74. Arthur Young (1741-1820). An Englishman, the author of many
books dealing with scientific agriculture.
76. Bhagvat-Geeta. A sacred book of the Hindoos, supposed to date
from the first or second century of our era.
76. Thebes. This reference is to the Egyptian Thebes. Cf. Iliad, Book
ix, line 383, “the hundred gated.”
7%. Vitruvius. Marcus Vitruvius Pollia, a Roman architect of the age
of Augustus.
77. Thirty centuries. Perhaps an inexact reference to the words of
Napoleon to his soldiers when in Egypt: “From the summit of those
monuments forty centuries look down upon you.”
77. As many trades as fingers. In 1847, Thoreau wrote to the secretary
of his Harvard class: “I am a Schoolmaster, a private Tutor, a Surveyor,
a Gardener, a Farmer, a Painter (I mean House Painter), a Carpenter, a
Mason, a Day-laborer, a Pencil-maker, a Glass-paper-maker, a Writer,
and sometimes a Poetaster.”
78. Their bills have not yet been received. The washing and mending
were done at his home. Channing writes: ‘‘Some have fancied because
he moved to Walden he left his family. He bivouacked there, and really
lived at home, where he went every day.”
81. Cato. The quotation is from De Agri Cultura, chap. 74.
330 WALDEN
82. Forefathers sang. The quotation is from “New England Annoy-
ances,” one of the earliest pieces of verse produced in America.
82. Indians. Burroughs writes: “Doubtless the wildest man New Eng-
land has turned out since the red aborigines vacated her territory was
Henry Thoreau,—a man in whom the Indian re-appeared on the plane of
taste and morals. . .'. His whole life was a search for the wild, not
only in nature, but-in literature, in life, in morals. . . .-He, for the
most part, despised the white man; but his enthusiasm kindled at the
mention of the Indian; he coveted his knowledge, his arts, his wood-
craft. He credited him with a more ‘practical and vital science’ than
was contained in the books.”’ ‘Read also Arthur Rickett on this point in
The Vagabond in Literature.
83. Experiments. ‘Thoreau lived in an age of experimentation. In
1840 Emerson wrote to Carlyle: ‘‘We are all a little wild with numberless
projects of social reform; not a reading-man but has a draft of a new
community in his waistcoat pocket.”
8. The evil that men do. The quotation is from Julius ca III, ii, 80.
85. Bartram, William (1739-1823). An early American botanist. The
Mucclasse Indians are described in Part III, chap. 8, of his Travels through
North and South Carolina, Georgia, etc. >
86. Mexicans. Cf. Prescott’s Conquest of Mexico, Book I, chap. iv.
87. Keep the flocks of Admetus. Cf. Gayley’s Classic Myths, pp. 104, 105.
88 Each one .. . his own way. In another place, Thoreau says:
“But I say that I have no scheme about it,—no designs on man at all.”
90. Robin Goodfellow. ‘‘Puck.” Cf. Shakspere’s Midsummer-Night’s
Dream, II, i, 32-57.
91. Phaeton. Cf. Gayley’s Classic Myths, pp. 94-98.
91. Howard, John. A famous prison reformer of the latter part of the
eighteenth century. He published in 1777 his work, State of the Prisons.
91. Jesuits. “The Society of Jesus.’”” The Jesuits were zealous mission-
aries among the Indians.
93. Penn, William (1644-1718) and Fry, Elizabeth (1780-1845), were promi-
nent Quakers.
95. Our manners oe been corrupted. The allusion is to 1 Corinthians,
KV, a0:
95. Cursing of God and enduring him forever. A sarcastic reference to
the article in the Westminster Catechism, which, in answer to the ques-
tion, “What is the chief end of man?” reads, “To glorify God and to
enjoy him forever.”
95. Sheik Sadi of Shiraz (1190-1291). A famous Persian poet.
96. Thomas Carew —(1598- 1639). An English poet; the earliest of the
Cavalier singers. 7
98. I bought the Hollowell place. It is reported that Thoreau was some-
what disappointed when the owner changed his mind about the bargain.
Thoreau had intended at that time to use this farm for a place of retreat.
Later, when this failed, he chose Walden Pond.
oR:
NOTES 331
98. I am monarch of all 1 survey. Quoted from Cowper’s Verses sup-
posed to be written by Alexander Selkirk.
99. Atlas. “According to Greek mythology, Atlas held the pillars of the
sky on his shoulders. Cf. Gayley’s Classic Myths, p. 57. f
99. Old. Cato. Marcus Porcius Cato (234-149 gs. c.). Author of De Re
Rustica (Concerning Agriculture). :
99. “Cultivator.” The Boston Cultivator, an agricultural journal.
100. Experiment. Thoreau regards his life at Walden an experimen.
He had no intention of becoming permanently a hermit. See note, 83.
100. Ode to dejection. An allusion to Coleridge’s Ode to Déejection.
Thoreau here explains why he consciously exaggerates his experience.
101. A boat. The boat which Thoreau and his brother John built and
which they used during their journey which is recorded in A Week oi
the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. The boat was later owned by Haw-
thorne.
101. The Harivansa. A Sanskrit poem.
103. Damodara. A name for Krishna, a divine hero of Hindoo mythol-
ogy.
103. Pleiades or the Hyades. These are constellations.
103. Aldebaran or Altair. These are fixed stars of the first magni-
tude.
104. Aurora. The Greek Goddess of Dawn. Cf. Gayley’s Classic Myths,
pp. 39, 95.
105. The Vedas. The early religious books of India.
105. Memmon. See note, p. 57.
105. I went to the woods, etc. “The writer in this surely ranges himseli
with the prophets,—with Ruskin and Emerson and Carlyle; in the very
essence of the matter with Goethe, the clearest sighted of all modern
men.”—Payne.
106. Spartan-like. The Spartans trained themselves in hardy simplicity
for the service of the State.
106. Next excursion. The next or future life. .
106. Glorify God and enjoy him forever. Sce note, p. 95.
106. Let your affairs be as two or three. The entire passage is broadly
parallel to The Sermon on the Mount.
108. Setting the bell. Ringing a bell so hard that it balances in an in-
verted position.
108. Wachito River. Rises in Arkansas and empties into the Red River
in Louisiana.
108. Rudiment of an eye. The fishes in the Mammoth Cave of Kentucky
are blind.
111. Mill-dam. “The center of Concord village, where the postoffice
and shops are—so called from an old mill-dam where now is a street.”—
F. B. Sanborn. ‘
1i2. Tied to the mast like Ulysses. In passing the Sirens, Ulysses ha
332 WALDEN
the ears of the sailors stopped with wax, and had himself tied to the
mast. Cf. Gayley’s Classic Myths, pp. 328, 329.
112. Point d’ appui. French, meaning “basis, support.”
112. Nilometer. An instrument for gauging the height of the water in
the Nile River. Thoreau here makes a pun on the word as though it
were derived from the Latin nil, and in this meaning, sets the word in
contrast with Realometer, a word of his own coining.
115. Noblest recorded thoughts of man. Matthew, Arnold called the
classics “the best that has been thought and said in the world.”
115. Delphi and Dodona. The oracle of Apollo was at Delphi; thé oracle
of Zeus, at Dodona.
117. Alexander. Alexander the Great. There is a tradition that he
slept nightly with his sword and with a copy of the I/iad under his pillow.
118. Vedas. See note, p. 105.
118. Zendavestas. The bible of Zoroastrianism, the ancient national
religion of Persia.
119. Referred to a town. Reading and North Reading are towns in
Massachusetts, not far from Concord.
120. A woodchopper. Alek Therien. He is described at length in chap-
ter VI. '
121. Tit-men. Small men, pygmies.
122. Zoroaster. The founder of Zoroastrianism. See note above.
123. Abelard (1079-1142). A learned French scholar.
123. Utopian. Ideal but impracticable. An adjective from Utopia, a
book by Sir Thomas More.
123. “Olive Branches.” The Olive Branch was a Methodist weekly
magazine which was published in Boston.
123. Redding and Co. Of Boston. Publishers of popular fiction.
126. Puri Indians. A Brazilian tribe. See previous note on Indians,
p. 82.
128. Partridge. The ruffed grouse, commonly called a partridge in
America.
128. In truth, our village has become a butt. The quotation is from
William Ellery Channing’s poem entitled Walden Spring.
131. Atropos. The Fate whose business it was to cut the thread of
man’s life. ;
132. Buena Vista. A battle fought February 22 and 23, 1847, in which
the Americans had a great victory over the Mexicans.
132. Daisies and the nests of fieldmice. The reference is to Robert
Burns’s poems, To a Mountain Daisy and To a Mouse.
132. Long Wharf. In Boston.
133. Thomaston lime. Lime from Thomaston, Maine.
134. To be the mast. Quoted from Milton’s Paradise Lost, Bk. i, 293, 294.
134. Cattle of a thousand hills. The allusion is to Psalms, 1, 10.
135. Mountains do indeed skip like rams. The allusion is to Psalms,
cxiv, 4.
NOTES 233
oo
135. Peterboro’ Hills. These are visible on the northwestern horizon,
from Concord.
137. Ben Jonsonian. Thoreau perhaps had in mind the witches’ scene
in Ben Jonson’s Masque of Queens.
138. Illustrates. Illuminates.
138. Stygian. Of the lower world. From the River Styx.
139. Aldermanic. The conventional alderman is noticeably corpulent.
139. Down to his mark. The reference is to the peg-tankard. A series
of marks was placed on the inside of the cup in order to gauge the
draughts, as it was passed from hand to hand.
142. Pouts. Hornpouts, bullheads.
142. “The world to darkness and to me.” Quoted from Gray’s Elegy in
A Country Churchyard.
143. AEolian. Wind music. From Zolus, god of the winds. Cf. Gayley’s
Classic Myths, p. 39.
144. Mourning untimely consumes the sad. Quoted from Macpherson’s
alleged translation of Ossian’s Gaelic poem, Croma.
145. Beacon Hill. In Boston. The State House now occupies the sum-
mit of this hill.
145. The Five Points. In New York City. Named because of the
peculiar intersection of the streets.
145. Brighton. Now a part of Boston. In Thoreau’s day it was the
center of the local cattle market. Concord was situated on the direct
trade route between New Hampshire and Boston.
146. Indra. In Hindoo Mythology, Indra was the chief of the gods of
the air.
148. Blue devils. Apparitions supposed to be seen by persons suffering
with delirium tremens; hence, very low spirits.
148. Mock sun. Sun-dog.
148. Legion. The allusion is to Mark v, 9.
148. Mill Brook. A brook which flowed through Concord.
148. Goffe or Whalley. These Englishmen were members of the Court
which condemned King Charles I. They escaped to Cambridge, Massa-
chusetts, and from there fled to New Haven, Connecticut, and later to
Hadley, Massachusetts, in both of which places they lived in concealment.
See Hawthorne’s The Gray Champion.
149. Simples. Medicinal herbs.
149. Old Parrs. Thomas Parr. At his death in 1635, he was reputed to
be one hundred and fifty-two years of age.
149. Acheron. A river in Hades. Cf. Gayley’s Classic Myths, p. 47.
149. Dead Sea. In Palestine. This is one of the saltiest bodies of water
in the world.
150. Wild lettuce. The reference is to the myth that the birth of Hebe
was due to the fact that Juno, her mother, at a banquet given by Jupiter,
ate heartily of wild lettuce. Cf. Ovid, Metomorphoses, IX.
334 WALDEN
151. Tremont or Astor or Middlesex House. The Tremont House was in
Boston; the Astor, in New York City; the Middlesex, in Concord.
152. Ricochet motion. The motion sucli as a skipping stone makes over
the surface of the water.
153. Cerberus. The three-headed, serpent-tailed watch dog that stood
guard at the entrance to Hades. Cf. Gayley’s Classic Myths, p. 47.
153. Arrived there, etc. The quotation is from the Faerie Queen, I, 1, 35.
153. Winslow, Edward (1595-1655). One of the settlers who came in the
Mayflower. The quotation is from Alexander Young’s Chronicles of the
Pilgrim Fathers of the Colony of Plymouth.
153. Visit of ceremony. This visit was made in 1621.
155. Paphlagonian man. Paphlagonia was an ancient mountainous dis-
trict of Asia Minor, incorporated into the Roman Empire in 65 s.c. The
rulers of the country bore the. name Pylaemenes to show that they claimed
descent from the chieftain of that name who figures in Homer’s Iliad as
the leader of the Paphlagonians.
155. Wood-chopper. In his Journal Thoreau writes: “‘Who should come
to my lodge but a true Homeric boor, one of those Paphlagonian men.
Alek Therien, he called himself.’’ (Vol. I, p. 365.) '
155. Why are you in tears. Iliad, opening verse of Book XVI.
159. Pecunia. From the Latin pecus, cattle.
162. Proposed a book. In his Journal (Vol. III, pp. 215, 216), Thoreau
writes: ‘“‘As if it were any use, when a man failed to make any memorable
impression on you, for him to leave his name. . . . . No! I kept a
book to keep their fames in.”
163. Com-munity. Thoreau infers that the origin of the word is from
the Latin munire, to fortify.
163. “Welcome Englishmen.”” These words were uttered by the Indian
Chief, Samoset, when he entered Plymouth, March 16, 1621.
164. Antaeus. Antaeus received his strength from contact with the
Earth. For Hercules’s contest with him cf. Gayley’s Classic Myths, p. 220.
164. Brought from Boston. Thoreau’s father moved from Boston to
Concord in 1823. See Sanborn’s Henry D. Thoreau, p. 4.
165. ‘My flute. Thoreau played skilfully on the flute. Cf. Louisa M.
Alcott’s poem, Thoreau’s Flute. ,
166. Agricola laboriosus. Hardworking farmer.
166. Lincoln and Wayland. Small towns within five or ten miles of
Concord.
166. Mr. Coleman’s report. The Reverend Henry Coleman (1785-1849), was
State Commissioner for the Agricultural Survey of Massachusetts. He
published four reports. :
167. Rans des Vaches. Literally, “chime of the cows.” A Swiss air
played by herdsmen to call the cattle.
167. Paganini, Nicolo (1784-1840). A celebrated Italian violinist. Espe-
cially famous for making music on a single string.
NOTES 995,
168. Tintinnabulum. Virgil’s word is tinnitus, jingling. Cf. Georgics,
Book IV. '
169. Spit a Mexican. Impale a Mexican soldier. Thoreau was living
at Walden during the timé the Mexican War was in progress (1846-1847). .
170. Not with cranes. An allusion to the annual struggle between the
pygmies and the cranes. See Classical Dictionary.
170. A Pythagorean. Pythagoras was a Greek philosopher of the sixth
century B.c., who prohibited his followers from eating meat and fish and
beans.
170. Evelyn, John. See note p. 33.
171. Sir Kenelm Digby (1603-1665), was the first to observe the im -
portance of atmospheric oxygen to the growth of plants. His work, Con-
cerning the Vegetation of Plants, was published in 1661.
171. Patrem familias . .. esse oportet. A householder must be a
seller, not a buyer. The quotation is from Cato’s De Re Rustica, chap. 2.
171. Plant the common small white bush bean. This paragraph is a
half-playful imitation of the kind of advice that was given in farm
journals.
173. Ceres. The goddess of agriculture. Cf. Gayley’s Classic Myths, p. 43.
173. Terrestrial Jove. Thus designated to distinguish him from Pluto,
the Infernal Jove.
173. Plutus. God of wealth.
174. Varro. Marcus Terentius (116-28 B.c.), wrote Rerum Rusticarum.
175. State Street. In Boston.
175. Etesian winds. The regular northerly summer winds. The refer-
ence is from ancient Greek and Latin literature.
176. The vitals of the village were the grocery, etc. “All this does not
mean that Thoreau was a shy and faun-like creature; still less that he
was a victim of misanthropy; it means only that often he found himself
his own best companion, and was determined to resist those social im-
portunities which, if a man submit to them, leave him no time for the
development of the inner life and for quiet intellectual growth.’—Payne.
177. Orpheus. This incident occurred while Orpheus was sailing home
with the Argonauts from capturing the golden fleece. Cf. The Life and
Death of Jason by Morris.
179. Elsewhere related. In “‘Resistance to Civil Government” (1849).
179. Amok. Amuck. 2 ,
- 180. Nec bella fuerunt. Quoted from the elegies of Tribullus, I, x 7.
181. To fresh woods and pastures new. Quoted from Milton’s Lycidas.
181. Conobites. Members of religious orders living in convents or
communities. A pun.
185. Michael Angelo. Referring to the characteristic over-development
of the muscles in this artist’s figures.
187. Castalian Fountain. A spring sacred to Apollo and the Muses.
189. Divining-rod. A forked stick which was used to discover the
presence of an underground vein of water.
336 WALDEN
19@. The paver. The glacier which deposited the rocks.
192, Fair-Haven. Fairhaven Pond, which is a widening of the Sudbury
River in Concord.
193. Invert your head. Thoreau was fond of this method of viewing
landscape.
198. Moore of Moore Hall. According to the old ballad, the knight who
slew the Dragon of Wantley.
202. Icarian Sea. Named from the flight of Icarus. Cf. Gayley’s'
Classic Myths, p. 246.
204. Kohinoor. A large diamond belonging to the British Crown.
206. Valhalla. The hall of Odin the abode of the Norse gods.
207. Benvenuto Cellini (1500-1571). A celebrated Italian goldsmith and
sculptor.
208. Thy entry is a pleasant field, etc. Quoted from William Ellery
Channing’s poem, Baker Farm.
208. Musquash. Muskrat.
208. And here a poet builded, etc. This quotation is also from Chan-
ning’s Baker Farm.
212. Landscape where, etc. The quotation is again from Channing’s
Baker Farm.
213. Talaria. Wings.
714. Except for that wildness. For a discussion of this side of Thoreau’s
nature, read John Burrough’s essay, Thoreau’s Wildness.
215. A finer way of studying ornithology. Read in this connection
Emerson’s' Forbearance.
216. Chaucer’s nun. Should be Chaucer’s monk. The quotation is from
the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, lines 177, 178.
216. Algonquins. A number of tribes of Indians that roved over the
country north of the St. Lawrence River.
216. Philanthropic. Characterized by love of mankind. Thoreau here
means to indicate that hé does not distinguish between his love for man
and his love for animals.
218. Kirby and Spence. William Kirby and William Spence. Authors
of an Imtroduction to Entomology, which was published 1826.
221. Ved. Veda. Cf. note, p. 105.
221. Vedant, or Vedanta. The philosophy founded on the Veda.
221. Thseng-tseu. A follower of Confucius.
221. Not that food .. . defileth. An inexact quotation from Mattheur
CVs Ths
222. Mencius. Latinized from Meng-Tse. “A Chinese philosopher of
the third century B.c. He was a leading teacher of Confucianism.
223. How happy ’s he, etc. Quoted from Dr. John Donne’s Epistle
To Str Edward Herbert, since Lord Herbert of Cherbury.
226. A companion. William Ellery Channing, the poet, an intimate
friend of Thoreau.
226. Hermit. Thoreau himself.
NOTES 337
226. Bose. The farm dog.
227. Con-fut-see. Confucius.
228. Mem. Memorandum.
228. Pilpay & Co. Pilpay and other makers of fables. Pilpay (or Bidpai)
is not a proper name but a title applied to a scholar and teller of tales in
an Indian court.
228. A wild native kind. White-footed or deer mouse.
231. Not a duellum but a bellum. Not a duel but a war.
231. Myrmidons. The followers of Achilles.
232. Achilles . . . Patroclus. Because of a quarrel with Agamemnon,
Achilles sulked in his tent. When he heard that Patroclus was killed,
however, he hastened into the thick of the battle to avengé him.
232. Austerlitz. In this battle, which was fought Decémber 2, 1805,
Napoleon defeated the forces of Russia and Austria.
232. Dresden. In this battle, which was fought August 26, 27, 1813,
Napoleon defeated thé combined forces of Russia, Austria, and Prussia.
233. Hotel des Invalides. A home for disabled soldiers, which is main-
tained by the government of France.
233. Kirby and Spence. See note, p. 218.
234. Huber, Francois (1750-1831). A Swiss naturalist who was cele-
brated for his observations on the honey bee.
234. ZEneas Sylvius (1405-1464). Occupied the Papal throne as Pius II.
234. Olaus Magnus (1490-1558). A Swedish historian.
234. Christiern the Second (1481-1559). King of Denmark and Norway.
Often called Christian the Cruel.
234. Fugitive-Slave Bill. Was made a law as a part of Clay’s “‘Com-
promise Bill” in 1850. This Bill had the support of Daniel Webster, to
the great disgust of his friends.
235. Horse. Pegasus. Cf. Gayley’s Classic Myths, pp. 214, 215.
240. Totem. Each Indian tribe had its distinguishing symbolical natural
objects and animals. These the tribe carvéd on its totem poles.
240. Ceres. The Roman goddess of agriculture.
240. Minerva. The Greeks received through this Goddess thé olive tree
and the plow.
242. A poet to board for a fortnight. Channing. Cf. note, p. 226.
243. Keeping-room. Sitting-room.
245. Parlaver. Flattery, deceptien.
246. Unio fluviatilis. A variety of fresh-water clam.
249. Vulcan. The god of fire, especially of terrestrial fire, Cf. Gayley’s
Classic Myths, p. 24-26.
249. Terminus. The god of boundaries. Cf. Gayley’s Classic Myths, p. 89.
250. Gilpin, William (1724-1804). An English clergyman who wrote ex-
tensively on the natural scenery of England.
250. Vert. “‘woods, lawns,” etc.
250. Michaux, Andre (1746-1802). A French botanist who traveled in
America and wrote a work on forest trees of the United States.
395 WALDEN
251. Goody Blake and Harry Gill. The reference is to the characters
of Wordsworth’s poem of the same name.
251. Jump it. Hammer out the blade to a sharper edge.
252. Light-winged Smoke. This is one of Thoreau’s best poems. It was
first published in the Dial for April, 1843.
254. Never, bright flame. Quoted from Ellen H. Hooper’s poem,
The Wood-Fire.
257. Scipio Africanus (237-183 B.c.). One ot Rome’s greatest generals.
After his defeat of Hannibal, the surname Africanus was bestowed upon
him by the Roman people.
258. Gondibert. A long, tedious, epic poem, published in 1651.
258. An uncle who goes to sleep shaving. See description in Chan-
ning’s Thoreau the Poet-Naturalist, pp. 22, 23.
258. Chalmers’ collection. An enlarged edition of Johnson’s Collection
of the English Poets, with some additional lives, 21 vols., published in
1810. Thoreau mastered this collection of poetry while in college.
258. Nervii. The warlike inhabitants of Ancient Belgic Gaul conquered
by Caesar.
261. Bowl broken at the fountain. An allusion to Ecclesiastes, xii, 6.
261. Reynard. The fox; the hero of the beast epics.
261. Fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute. Quoted from Milton’s
Paradise Lost, Bk. ii, line 560.
265. Woodchopper. Alek Therien. Cf. note, p. 120.
265. Lon_-headed farmer. Edmond Hosmer of Concord, a good friend
of both Thoreau and Emerson. A descendant of one of ‘he oldest families -
of Ccncord.
265. Crack. A cozy, comfortable chat.
265. Tried our teeth on many a nut. Tried to find a solution for some of
the unsolved problems of the world.
265. A poet. The reference is still to Channing.
266. Last of the philosophers. Amos Bronson Alcott. See note, p. 60.
267. Ingenuus. Latin, * -e-born, candid, ingenuous.
267. Pumpkin pine. Used in Maine to designate a certain quality a
white pine which is clear and soft and destitute of resin.
267. Flocks. Of wool.
267. The old settler. Dame Nature.
268. One other. Ralph Waldo Emerson.
268. The Visitor who never comes. A vague, mystical, ideal person
for whom Thoreau was ev r searching.
268. Vishnu Purana. The best known of the later writings of the
Hindoos. An illuminating manual of sectarian Brahmanism.
268. Moose-yard. When the snow is deep the moose come together in
herds, and trample the snow down so that they may the easier feed.
270. Lingua vernacula. The language of the common people.
270. Alarming the citadel. An allusion to the cackling of the geese,
when the Gauls captured Rome in 390 B.c.
NOTES 339
274. Actwon. An allusion to the Greek myth of how a hunter sur-
prised Diana at her bath, and of how he was changed into a stag by the
injured goddess, and pursued and killed by his own hounds.
276. Wast (Waste) Book. Day Book. The book was used by Ephraim
Jones during the year 1742. Thoreau describes at length in his Journal
many of the quaint entries which he found in this day book. Cf. Journal,
Vol. VI., pp. 77-80, 94-96.
276. 0-2-3. The figures indicate the price paid in pounds, shillings, pence.
278. Lepus, levipes. A fanciful etymology.
279. Nature puts no question. Cf. Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach.
279. Marmots. Woodchucks.
281. Trumpeted. The fish vender commonly blew a horn to call the
attention of his customers to his approach.
282. Two such Bottomless Ponds. White Pond and Pratt’s Pond.
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