CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND GIVEN IN 1891 BY HENRY WILLIAMS SAGE Digitized by Microsoft® PS 3048.AT1899™""'' '■'"'"' WaldetKor Life in the woads,by Henry D. 3 1924 021 445 741 Digitized by Microsoft® This book was digitized by Microsoft Corporation in cooperation with Corneii University Libraries, 2007. You may use and print this copy in iimited quantity for your personai purposes, but may not distribute or provide access to it (or modified or partiai versions of it) for revenue-generating or other commerciai purposes. Digitized by Microsoft® Digitized by Microsoft® Digitized by Microsoft® ; J^Jt VYJL njx 3ucy JLVT van r Mg V TT Digitized by Microsoft® Digitized by Microsoft® ^9t^^^9i^^^^^^^^m Walden OR LIFE IN THE WOODS BY Henry D. Thoreau WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY Charles G. D. Roberts T. Y. CROWELL & COMPANY NEW YORK ^^^^^^"^^^^^^^^ Digitized by mAmoft® PS Al Copyright, 1899, By T. Y. CROWELL & COMPANY. Digitized by Microsoft® CONTENTS. I. FAGB Economy i II. Where I lived, and what I lived for . . 83 III. Reading 103 IV. Sounds 116 V. Solitude 135 VL Visitors 146 VII. The Beanfield 162 VIII. The Village 175 iii Digitized by Microsoft® iv CONTENTS. IX. fAGE The Ponds .182 X. Baker Farm 2ii XI. Higher Laws 220 XII. Brute Neighbors ....... 234 XIII. House-warming 249 XIV. Former Inhabitants; and Winter Visitors . 268 XV. Winter Animals 284 XVI. The Pond in Winter 296 XVII. Spring 314 xvm. Conclusion 336 Digitized by Microsoft® INTRODUCTION. Of all Thoreau's works the one most perfectly infused with the essence of his genius is "Walden, or Life in the Woods." Thoreau has been called "The Poet-Naturalist," "The New England Stoic," "A Modern Jaques," and many other appellations in which the coiner of phrases has sought to crystal- lize into an epithet this strange hybrid of Concord on Cathay. Though each has a germ of truth in it to keep it alive, the phrases ticket him falsely. They are misleading for two reasons. In the first place, they have the air of definition ; and Thoreau, though in a sense narrow, has boundaries too wide for any epithet to contain his qualities. The bigger part of him is sure to lie outside the lines of any epigram- matic definition. In the second place, any catch- word used, for convenience, to label a great man, should indicate the essential characteristic of his genius. It should show what he chiefly stands for. Now Thoreau is very little of a poet, though a thin ray of the true supernal fire does sometimes flash from an angle of his ragged verse. He is very much of a naturalist, of course, — a naturalist in the most vital sense ; for he has " named all the birds without Digitized by Microsoft® VI INTRODUCTION. j a gun " ; he has fulfilled the requirements of Emer- son, and discerned the souls as well as observed the bodies of Nature and her children. But it is inci- dentally, rather than primarily, that he is a naturalist. He is a naturalist, it seems to me, because through the intimacy of Nature lay the straightest road to his goal. He has the obvious ear-marks of the Stoic ; but in the last analysis he comes out a far-sighted Epicurean, finding his happiness, his indulgence, in the ascetic practice of the Stoics. Least of all is he heir to the melancholic philosopher of Arden ; for his melancholy is not a pose, but a deep, tempera- mental fact, perhaps never freely acknowledged to his own heart, and always lustily denied to the world. Moreover, Jaques knew his contemporaries, in and out ; apprehended his own times ; knew his world ; knew himself. But this modern Jaques did not know his own day and generation, — did not want to know them. It is pretty obvious that he had but a partial and distorted acquaintance with himself. He knew, however, the great works, the master minds, of old, whose message has come down to us so clarified by time that it breathes upon our souls like a pure spirit. He saw with a clear and kindred eye, he understood with his heart, the life of field and wood and water about him. The open sky, the solitudes of the windy hill-top, the sweep of the storm, the spacious changes of dark and dawn, these, it seems to me, spoke to him more clearly than to others. Nevertheless, though the customary labels on Thoreau are thus misleading, it is certainly a con- venience to have every man of genius in some Digitized by Microsoft® INTRODUCTION. vii handy way ticketed. If we call Thoreau the " Liber- ator," we remember him by what seems to me the prime function of his genius. What he chiefly sought for himself was freedom. What his life and his writ- ings chiefly do for others is to arouse them, slap cold water in their faces, prod and hustle them on toward freedom. To Thoreau freedom meant escape from the bondage of petty and pinchbeck gods, the chance to live life fully, the leisure to think, and ripen, and enjoy. His best work is full of the suggestion of escape. It invites and urges the reader forth from his thraldom. It makes for emancipation, — spiritual, mental, moral, physical. In no other of his books is this liberating and arousing force so active as in " Walden," which carries on its title-page the brave announcement — " I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as Chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up." In the pages of " Walden," therefore, we come into most direct contact with those currents of power which it is Thoreau's part to supply ; we touch his personality with the most intimate privilege that he can afford. But as I have said, Thoreau did not seem to know himself as thoroughly as he knew the wisdom of Meng or the ways of the chipmunks familiar to his door-sill. If we seek to know him merely through his work, we wrong him in many particulars, and get a picture of him which is sure to lessen his influence. He is not as unhuman as he likes to represent him- self. He IS not so perfectly self-sufBcing. Above all, Digitized by Microsoft® viii INTRODUCTION. he is not always so robustiously jubilant over thi drawing of his daily breath as he would have us believe. We wonder, now and then, if he does not protest upon this point just a shade too vehemently, as if willing to convince himself along with others. The first glance at his strong, narrow, deep-lined face, with its sensitive mouth, sympathetic eyes, and brow troubled by remembrance, belies many a cold and confident paragraph. To be fiilly open to his charm, to avoid being jarred into unreceptive antag- onism by his extravagances, we must approach him through his life as well as through his work. We must allow fully for his personal equation. Henry David Thoreau was born at Concord, Mas- sachusetts, on July 12, 1817. His grandfether was a Frenchman, his grandmother, on the father's side, a Scotchwoman. In the fabric of his character, it seems to me, these two threads run a vivid pattern upon the austere web of his New Englandism. From the grandfather he inherited a Gallic fineness, a sin- gular perception and mastery of the exact phrase, and perhaps, too, that manual dexterity which enabled him to do everything aptly and neatly that was to be done with the fingers. He could make a lead-pencil or a sentence, the one, like the other, very accurately adapted to its purpose. From his grandfether, assur- edly, he derived the curious French accent which not even forty-five years of purest Concord English could quite eradicate. From the Scotch grandmother, we may guess, he drew that inimitable admixture of the far-leaping, illuminating imagination with the frugality that could weigh fractions of a farthing. But in the Digitized by Microsoft® INTRODUCTION. ix main he was true New England, — strong, somewhat limited, reticent, unconciliatory, yet liable to surprise one with sudden irradiations of tenderness and beauty. His charm is likely to appear as does the clump of harebell on the rock, or the flushing arbutus blossom on the rough-leaved hillock ^n the stump-lot. Plain living, to the verge of deprivation, was the rule in the home of Thoreau's childhood ; but the rich compensation of high thinking was not absent. The life of the intellect and spirit was perceived at its true value in that frugal household, and the family stinted itself with self-sacrificing rigor to provide for his edu- cation at Harvard. The home was a seeding-place of abolitionist sentiment. The first daring agitators gathered there to plan their assault upon the giant evil of their day ; and thither came the fleeing slaves with their frightened faces set northward, to be hidden, and heartened, and passed on to the next refuge. It was a fit beginning, this, to Thoreau's work as a " liberator." This high enterprise of his people must have seemed to him symbolic of a larger emancipation which was afterwards to engage his efforts. At Harvard (where he took his degree in 1837, and with characteristic frugality effected a saving of five dollars by reftising his diploma), he lived a life of rigid seclusion, shunning acquaintance, and absorbed in the classics. One friendship he made, however, and such a one as to justify him in proclaiming him- self rich in friends though he should know no other. He met Emerson, and won his comradeship. He was fourteen years younger than Emerson, and tem- Digitized by Microsoft® X INTRODUCTION. peramentally fitted to receive the impress of his gen- ius, — the most penetrating and insistent force, it seems to me, that American literature has produced. The mark of Emerson is on all Thoreau's best work. After college Thoreau's life was uneventfiil, in the accepted sense of the word. He lectured a little. He taught in the Concord Academy for a time. He had a brief experience as private tutor in the family of Emerson's brother. He did some surveying for the farmers of his neighborhood. He could have earned his living by any trade which required skill of the hand, for in this direction his aptitude was mar- vellous. He was an efficient carpenter. He special- ized, as we have seen, so far as to learn to make a lead-pencil ; but as soon as he had achieved a perfect one he dropped the craft, to the astonishment of his friends, on the ground that when there was no further advance to be made he had no further interest in the effort. In a full survey of the man this does not ap- pear like caprice, but rather as consistency; and it must be remembered that late in life, when his family needed his support, he resumed the occupation of making lead-pencils, and earned a living at it. In 1845 Thoreau built himself the famous "Her- mitage" on the shore of Walden Pond. His two years in that congenial solitude resulted in this book called " Walden," — which was not published till nine years later. In 1849 h^ published "A Week on the Concord and IVIerrimac Rivers," — many-colored beads of observation, description, suggestion, apt quotation, strung upon the slenderest thread of travel. Thoreau claimed to know the world thoroughly, for he had Digitized by Microsoft® INTRODUCTION. xi " travelled many years in Concord." As a matter of fact, he went somewhat further afield than that, ven- turing into the Maine woods, over the Canadian bor- der, and even southward on a daring enterprise into the very recesses of Staten Island. In truth, how- ever, few indeed of the famous world-adventurers travelled to such advantage as he. For the perfect knowledge of his own little world about Concord supplied him with a stable point of departure and secure homing for many a voyage into the infinite. It was before the migration to Walden Pond that an episode occurred which needs to be well taken account of in any estimate of Thoreau's character. He loved a woman, fitted, it seems, to be his mate ; and he gave her up to his brother, remaining single thenceforward for her sake. It is not quite clear what part the lady had in this outcome ; but the fact that he was once honestly in love acquits him of too great remoteness from the brotherhood of men, and ex- plains in part that underlying melancholy, as from a sentiment repressed and feeding upon itself, which his face confesses and his writings too protestingly deny. Such an act of renunciation is in keeping with the rest of the man as we find him, though hardly, per- haps, with his most strenuously advocated theories. It is difficult to give this factor an exact value, be- cause it is impossible to know which, in reality, Thoreau loved best, — the girl, or the fine ecstasy of self-sacrifice. Renunciation is to some temperaments a luxury too exquisite to be denied ; and there is enough of the feminine in Thoreau's mixed make-up to let one suspect that it may have been so in his case. Digitized by Microsoft® xii INTRODUCTION. However that be, the experience scarred him deeply- It proves, moreover, that he was not so icily unre- sponsive, so coldly philosophical, so loftily aloof from the heart-beats of humanity, as he would have us believe. In the light of this knowledge, as Robert Louis Stevenson has well said, " these pages, seem- ingly so cold, are seen to be alive with feeling " ; and again — " he was affecting the Spartanism he had not ; and the old sentimental wound still bled, while he deceived himself with reasons.'' We may take it for granted, then, that when he brags, " I love my fete to the core and rind," though sincere in the main, he is sometimes like the little boy in the dark who whistles to keep up his courage. On May 6, 1862, at the early age of forty-five, this devotee of out-doors, this abstemious liver, this avoider of ilesh, wine, and tobacco, this intimate of sanity and cleanness, with Nature's own permit, it would seem, to live a hundred years, fell into an ambuscade. The scourge of his New England in- heritance came upon him, and he died of consump- tion. His grave is in Sleepy Hollow, at Concord. In appearance Thoreau bore a striking resemblance to Emerson, but with less of mastery in his face, and more of that sensitive appeal which he was forever repudiating. Also thee was a wildness, a suggestion of the untamed, quite contradictory to the repose of Emerson's features. He was of middle height, lean, long-armed, slant-shouldered, with the large, capable, nervous hands which know how to do things, and the long feet that come down noiselessly and flatly on the twig-strewn forest paths, like an Indian's. His Digitized by Microsoft® intkoduction: xiii mouth was full-lipped, sensitive, almost self-indulgent, his nose was large, enduringly forceful like his chin ; his eyes, of a blue full of light and attractive in expression, were deep set under rugged brows ; his forehead was lined, and bore creases of impatient protest between the brows. This very individual face was framed in a throat-whisker, of the unlovely pat- tern so prevalent at that day, and a dishevelled super- abundance of dark brown hair. He moved swiftly and furtively. He was not too dignified to dart through a hedge or over a neighbor's back fence, to escape an encounter which meant boredom. He was an untiring writer, an exhaustive reader, and stooped from his devotion to book and desk. Altogether, in his appearance no less than in his mental cast, he was a blend of the scholar and the woodman, the faun and the savant. However scholastic his for- mula, there is always a free, fresh impulse behind it. He is never so chilled by his book-lore but that he knows how to coax the partridge to feed at his door, the shy wood-mice to scurry up his sleeve and share his bread. In this mingling of contradictions lies, I think, no small part of the magic which gives wings to Thoreau's message. As already indicated, both the message and the magic are nowhere so adequately presented as in "Walden." The circumstances which gave rise to this work form a vital portion of the work itself, and are minutely detailed throughout its pages. But they might as well be summarized here. The- bondage which proved hardest on Thoreau was the necessity of expending his time and his best Digitized by Microsoft® xiv INTRODUCTION. forces in the mere struggle for food and shelter. When these were secured he found he had no leisure to be wise, no impulse left to carry on his growth. Looking about him he saw others in worse case than himself, in a more hopeless and grinding slavery to the mere cost of subsistence. He saw that for most others, as for himself, there was small chance of relief by a diminution of the cost of their seeming necessi- ties. " The cost of a thing," he said, " is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be ex- changed for it, immediately or in the long run." His only alternative was to reduce the necessities of sub- sistence to their lowest terms. When, therefore, he fled from the world to Walden Pond, it was not solely from a selfish desire to read, write, and cultivate his powers unhindered. In winning freedom for himself he would point others the way to freedom. He would show how very small were those needs of the body which, too often, a man spends his whole life in supplying. He would prove that in every life there might be time to be wise, opportunity to tend the growth of the spirit. He writes, " I would fain im- prove every opportunity to wonder and worship." On the shore of Walden Pond, on land which he got rent free because Emerson owned it, he built with his own hands " The Hermitage," at a cost, as he notes in an itemized memorandum, of $28. 12 J. It was well built, shingled and plastered, with an honest, capacious chimney and cheerM open hearth. Here he lived for two years, chiefly on rice, Indian corn, rye meal, and molasses, at an average cost of about twenty-seven cents a week for his food. On the land Digitized by Microsoft® INTRODUCTION. xv about his cottage he raised a crop of beans, — a crop which he found congenial exercise in cultivating. The beans yielded him a cash profit of $8.71^, and a large return in philosophic meditations. Here he got close to the life of beasts, birds, and insects. He learned to discriminate all their notes. He kept a calendar of the flowers, and knew to a day when each would open. He kept voluminous " Fact-books," recording minutely his ceaseless observations of him- self and of Nature. When, after two years of health, growth, and effective work, he felt that he had ex- hausted what this kind of life had to give him, — that he had perfected it, as he had his lead-pencil, — and that he had proved his case, he frankly and without apology gave up the experiment and returned to the mitigated distractions of Concord village. As con- cerned his own personality, the experiment had been a success; but when a few years later (1854) the book which was its concrete product appeared in print, it was seen to have been a success also as far as humanity was concerned. He had expanded the lessons of his abolitionist childhood. He had made his cabin on Walden Pond, as Stevenson suggests, a station on man's underground railway firom slavery to freedom. " Walden " is a book in which homely sense and heavenly insight jostle each other on the page. Most of its characteristics have been already conveyed, in diffusion, throughout the course of this note. It only remains to add a word as to its style, and as to the occasional extravagances of its statements. Its style is a kind of celestial homespun, plain, often harsh, Digitized by Microsoft® Xvi INTRODUCTION. but interwoven not seldom with the radiances of a white and soaring imagination. Its observations of the truths of Nature are as exact in their fidelity and beauty as its statements of higher and obscurer truths of the spirit are, sometimes at least, exaggerated. This extravagance, it must be remembered, is delib- erate and for a purpose. He himself says, " No truth, we think, was ever expressed but with this sort of em- phasis, that for the time there seemed to be no other." Recognizing that men are dull to apprehend spiritual truths, he chose to make such truths more poignant and inescapable by presenting them without qualifi- cation, in such a manner that to the temperate mind they seem like one-sided statements. The reader of "Walden," in particular, should bear in mind that Thoreau says : " I fear chiefly lest my expression may not be extra-vagant enough, may not wander fer enough beyond the narrow limits of my daily experi- ence, so as to be adequate to the truth of which I have been convinced. ... I desire to speak somewhere without bounds ; like a man in a waking moment, to men in their waking moments ; for I am convinced that I cannot exaggerate enough even to lay the foun- dation of a true expression. Who that has heard a strain of music feared then lest he should speak extravagantly any more forever?" CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS. Digitized by Microsoft® WALDEN. ECONOMY. When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only. I lived there two years and two months. At present I am a sojourner in civilized life again. I should not obtrude my affairs so much on the notice of my readers if very particular inquiries had not been made by my townsmen concerning my mode of life, which some would call impertinent, though they do not appear to me at all impertinent, but, con- sidering the circumstances, very natural and pertinent. Some have asked what I got to eat ; if I did not feel lonesome ; if I was not afraid ; and the like. Others have been curious to learn what portion of my income I devoted to charitable purposes ; and some, who have large families, how many poor children I maintained. I will therefore ask those of my readers who feel no particular interest in me to pardon me if I undertake to answer some of these questions in this book. In most books, the /, or first person, is omitted ; in this B S Digitized by Microsoft® 2 WALDEN. it will be retained ; that, in respect to egotism, is the main difference. We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking. I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience. Moreover, I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men's lives ; some such account as he would send to his kindred from a distant land ; for if he has lived sincerely, it must have been in a distant land to me. Perhaps these pages are more particularly addressed to poor students. As for the rest of my readers, they will accept such portions as apply to them. I trust that none wDl stretch the seams in putting on the coat, for it may do good service to him whom it fits. I would fain say something, not so much concerning the Chinese and Sandwich Islanders, as you who read these pages, who are said to live in New England ; something about your condition, especially your out- ward condition or circumstances in this world, in this town, what it is, whether it is necessary that it be as bad as it is, whether it cannot be improved as well as not. I have travelled a good deal in Concord ; and everywhere, in shops, and offices, and fields, the inhabitants have appeared to me to be doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways. What I have heard of Brahmins sitting exposed to four fires and looking in the face of the sun ; or hanging suspended, with their heads downward, over flames ; or looking at the heavens over their shoulders " until it becomes impos- sible for them to resume their natural position, while Digitized by Microsoft® ECONOMY. 3 from the twist of the neck nothing but liquids can pass into the stomach ; " or dwelling, chained for life, at the foot of a tree ; or measuring with their bodies, like caterpillars, the breadth of vast empires ; or stand- ing on one leg on the tops of pillars, — even these forms of conscious penance are hardly more incredible and astonishing than the scenes which I daily witness. The twelve labors of Hercules were trifling in com- parison with those which my neighbors have under- taken ; for they were only twelve, and had an end ; but I could never see that these men slew or captured any monster or finished any labor. They have no friend Tolas to burn with a hot iron the root of the hydra's head, but as soon as one head is crushed, two spring up. I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools ; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might 'have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in. Who made them serfs of the soil? Why should they eat their sixty acres, when man is con- demned to eat only his peck of dirt? Why should they begin digging their graves as soon as they are born ? They have got to live a man's life, pushing ali these things before them, and get on as well as theji can. How many a poor immortal soul have I met well-nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creep- ing down the road of life, pushing before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mow- ing, pasture, and wood-lot! The portionless, who struggle with no such unnecessary inherited encum* Digitized by Microsoft® 4 WALDEN. brances, find it labor enough to subdue and cultivate a few cubic feet of flesh. But men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon ploughed into the soil for compost. By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, the/ are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It is a fool's life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not befoie. It is said that Deucalion and Pyrrha created men by throwing stones over their heads behind them : — Inde genus durum sumus, experiensque laborura, Et documenta, damus qui simus origine nati. Or, as Raleigh rhymes it in his sonorous way, — " From thence our kind-hearted is, enduring pain and care. Approving that our bodies of a stony nature are." So much for a blind obedience to a blundering oracle, throwing the stones over their heads behind them, not seeing where they fell. Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coaree labors of life, that its finer fraits cannot be plucked by them. Their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy and tremble too much for that. Actually, the laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity dav by day ; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men ; his labor would be depreciated in the market. He has no time to be anything but a machine. How can he remember well his ignorance — which his growth requira« — who has so often to use his knowl- Digitized by Microsoft® ECONOMY. «j edge? We should feed and clothe him gratuitously sometimes, and recruit him with our cordials, before we judge of him. The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another thus tenderly. Some of you, we all know, are poor, find it hard to live, are sometimes, as it were, gasping for breath. I have no doubt that some of you who read this book are unable to pay for all the dinners which you have actu- ally eaten, or for the coats and shoes which are fast wearing or are already worn out, and have come to this page to spend borrowed or stolen time, robbing your creditors of an hour. It is very evident what mean and sneaking lives many of you live, for my sight has been whetted by experience ; always on the limits, trying to get into business and trying to get out of debt, a very ancient slough, called by the Latins ess alienum, another's brass, for some of their coins were made of brass ; still living, and dying, and buried by this others brass ; always promising to pay, promis- ing to pay, to-morrow, and dying to-day, insolvent ; seeking to curry favor, to get custom, by how many modes, only not state-prison offences ; lying, flattering, voting, contracting yourselves into a nutshell of civil- ity, or dilating into an atmosphere of thin and vapor- ous generosity, that you may persuade your neighbor to let you make his shoes, or his hat, or his coat, or his carriage, or import his groceries for him ; making yourselves sick, that you may lay up something against a sick day, something to be tucked away in an old chest, or in a stocking behind the plastering, or, more safely, in a brick bank ; no matter where, no mattei how much or how little. Digitized by Microsoft® 6 WALDEN. I sometimes wonder that we can be so frivolous, I may almost say, as to attend to the gross but some- what foreign form of servitude called Negro Slavery, there are so many keen and subtle masters that enslave both north and south. It is hard to have a southern overseer ; it is worse to have a northern one ; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself. Talk of a divinity in man! Look at the teamster on the high- way, wending to market by day or night ; does any divinity stir within him ? His highest duty to fodder and water his horses! What is his destiny to him compared with the shipping interests? Does not he drive for Squire Make-a-stir? How godlike, how im- mortal, is he ? See how he cowers and sneaks, how vaguely all the day he fears, not being immortal nor divine, but the slave and prisoner of his own opinion of himself, a fame won by his own deeds. Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate. Self- emancipation even in the West Indian provinces of the fancy and imagination, — what Wilberforce is there to bring that about ? Think, also, of the ladies of the land weaving toilet cushions against the last day, not to betray too green an interest in their fates! As if you cculd kill time without injuring eternity. The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. W^t_is called, jesignation is coafiwned^deaperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind . There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it Digitized by Microsoft® ECONOMY. 7 IS a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things. When we consider what, to use the words of the catechism, is the chief end of man, and wliat are the true necessaries and means of life, it appears as if men had deliberately chosen the common mode of living because they preferred it to any other. Yet they honestly think there is no choice left. But alert and healthy natures remember that the sun rose clear. It is never too late to give up our prejudices. No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof. What everybody echoes or in silence passes by as true to-day may turn out to be falsehood to-morrow, mere smoke of opinion, which some had trusted for a cloud that would sprinkle fertilizing rain on their fields. What old people say you cannot do you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new. Old people did not know enough once, perchance, to fetch fresh fuel to keep the fire a-going ; new people put a little dry wood under a pot, and are whirled round the globe with the speed of birds, in a way to kill old people, as the phrase is. Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost. One may almost doubt if the wisest man has learned anything of absolute value by living. Practically, the old have no very important advice_to_gjife_th©— young,- their own experience has.. been so pa.rtial, and their lives have been such miser- able failures^ for private reasons, as they must believe ; andTF may be that they have some faith left which belies that experience, and they are only less young than they were. I have lived some thirty years on/ this planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable' Digitized by Microsoft® » WALDEN. of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors They have told me nothing, and probably cannot tell me anything, to the purpose. Here is life, an exper- iment to a great extent untried by me ; but it does not -avail me that they have tried it. If I have any ex- perience which I think valuable, I am sure to reflect that this my Mentors said nothing about. One farmer says to me, " You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with ; " and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of bones, walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumber- ing plough along in spite of every obstacle. Some things are really necessaries of life in some circles, the most helpless and diseased, which in others are lux- uries merely, and in others still are entirely unknown. The whole ground of human life seems to some to have been gone over by their predecessors, both the heights and the valleys, and all things to have been cared for. According to Evelyn, "the wise Solomon prescribed ordinances for the very distances of trees ; and the Roman praetors have decided how often you may go into your neighbor's land to gather the acorns which fall on it without trespass, and what share be- longs to that neighbor." Hippocrates has even left directions how we should cut our nails ; that is, even with the ends of the fingers, neither shorter nor longer. Undoubtedly the very tedium and ennui which pre- sume to have exhausted the variety and the joys of life are as old as Adam. But man's capacities have never been measured ; nor are we to judge of what he can do by any precedents, so little has been tried. What- ever have been thy failures hitherto, " be not afflicted, Digitized by Microsoft® ECONOMY. ^ my child, for who shall assign to thee what thou hast left undone? " We might try our lives by a thousand simple tests ; as, for instance, that the same sun which ripens my beans illumines at once a system of earths like ours. If I had remembered this it would have prevented some mistakes. This v/as not the light in which I hoed them. The stars are the apexes of what won- derful triangles ! What distant and different beings in the various mansions of the universe are contem- plating the same one at the same moment ! Nature and human life are as various as our several consti- tutions. Who shall say what prospect life offers to another ? Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other's eyes for an in- stant ? We should live in all the ages of the world in an hour ; ay, in all the worlds of the ages. History, Poetry, Mythology ! — I know of no reading of another's ex- perience so startling and informing as this would be. The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of any- thing, it is very likely to be my good behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well ? You may say the wisest thing you can, old man, — you who have lived seventy years, not without honor of a kind, — I hear an irresistible voice which invites me away from all that. One generation abandons the enterprises of another like stranded vessels. I think that we may safely trust a good dea:.!,, more than we do. We may waive just so much care of ouFselves as we honestly bestow elsewhere. Nature is as well adapted to our weakness as to our strength. The incessant anxiety and strain of some is a well- nigh incurable form of disease- We are made to Digitized by Microsoft® lO WALDEN. exaggerate the importance of what work we do ; and yet how much is not done by us ! or, what if we had 1 been taken sick ? How vigilant we are ! determined I not to live by faith if we can avoid it ; all the day -■ long on the alert, at night we unwillingly say our i prayers and commit ourselves to uncertainties. So -•^\ thoroughly and sincerely are we compelled to live, f reverencing our life, and denying the possibility of change. This is the only way, we say ; but there are as many ways as there can be drawn radii from one centre. All change is a miracle to contemplate ; but it is a miracle which is taking place every instant. Confucius said, " To know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.'' When one man has reduced a fact of the imagination to be a fact to his understanding, I foresee that all men will at length establish their lives on that basis. Let us consider for a moment what most of the trouble and anxiety which I have referred to is about, and how much it is necessary that we be troubled, or, at least, careful. It would be some advantage to live a primitive and frontier life, though in the midst of an outward civilization, if only to learn what are the gross necessaries of life and what methods have been taken to obtain them ; or even to look over the old day-books of the merchants, to see what it was that men most commonly bought at the stores, what they stored, that is, what are the grossest groceries. For the improvements of ages have had but little influ- ence on the essential laws of man's existence ; as our skeletons, probably, are not to be distinguished from those of our ancestors. Digitized by Microsoft® ECONOMY. 1 1 By the words, necessary of life, I. mean .a bateaier, of all that man obtains by his own exertions, has been from the first, or from long use has become, so important to human life that few, if any, whether from savageness, or poverty, or philosophy, ever at- tempt to_do_without it. To many creatures there is iri~fhis sense but one necessary of life, Food. To the bison of the prairie it is a few inches of palatable grass, with water to drink ; unless he seeks the Shel- ter of the forest or the mountain's shadow. None of the brute creation requires more than Food and Shel- ter. The necessaries of life for man in this climate may, accurately enough, be distributed under the several heads of Food, Shelter, Clothing, and Fuel ; for not till we have secured these are we prepared to entertain the true problems of life with freedom and a prospect of success. Man has invented, not only houses, but clothes and cooked food ; and possibly from the accidental discovery of the warmth of fire, and the consequent use of it, at first a luxury, arose the present necessity to sit by it. We observe cats and dogs acquiring the same second nature. By proper Shelter and Clothing we legitimately retain our own internal heat ; but with an excess of these, or of Fuel, that is, with an external heat greater than our own internal, may not cookery properly be said to begin ? Darwin, the naturalist, says of the inhabitants of Terra del Fuego that, while his own party, who were well clothed and sitting close to a fire, were far from too warm, these naked savages, who were farther off, were observed, to his great surprise, " to be streaming with perspiration at undergoing such a roasting." So, we are told, the New Hollander goes naked with impunity, while the European shivers in his clothes. Digitized by Microsoft® 12 WALDEN. Is it impossible to combine the hardiness of these savages with the intellectualness of the civilized man? According to Liebig, man's body is a stove, and food the fuel which Iceeps up the internal combustion ia the lungs. In cold weather we eat more, in warm less. The animal heat is the result of a slow com- bustion, and disease and death take place when this is too rapid ; or for want of fuel, or from some defect in the draught, the fire goes out. Of course the vital heat is not to be confounded with fire ; but so much for analogy. It appears, therefore, from the above list, that the expression, qnima{ life,\s nearly sjmony- mous with the expression, animal heat; for while Food may be regarded as the Fuel which keeps up the fire within us, — and Fuel serves only to prepare that Food or to increase the warmth of our bodies by addition from without, — Shelter and Clothing also serve only to retain the heat thus generated and absorbed. The grand necessity, then, for our bodies is to keep warm, to keep the vital heat in us. What pains we accordingly take, not only with our Food, and Cloth- ing, and Shelter, but with our beds, which are our night-clothes, robbing the nests and breasts of birds to prepare this shelter within a shelter, as the mole has its bed of grass and leaves at the end of its burrow! The poor man is wont to complain that this is a cold world ; and to cold, no less physical than social, we refer directly a great part of our ails. The summer, in some climates, makes possible to man a sort of Elysian life. Fuel, except to cook his Food, is then unnecessary; the sun is his fire, and many of the fruits are suflSciently cooked by its rays ; while Food generally is more various, and more easily obtained. Digitized by Microsoft® ECONOMY. 13 and Clothing and Shelter are wholly or half unneces- sary. At the present day, and in this country, as I find my own experience, a few implements, a knife, an axe, a spade, a wheelbarrow, &c., and for the stu- dious, lamplight, stationery, and access to a few books, rank next to necessaries, and can all be obtained at a trifling cost. Yet some, not wise, go to the other side of the globe, to barbarous and unhealthy regions, and devote themselves to trade for ten or twenty years, in order that they may live, — that is, keep comfortably warm, — and die in New England at last. The lux- uriously rich are not simply kept comfortably warm, but unnaturally hot ; as I implied before, they are cooked, of course a la mode. Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts, of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind. With respect to luxuries and comforts, the wisest have ever lived a more simple and meagre life than the poor. The ancient philosophers, Chinese, Hindoo, Persian, and Greek, were a dass-than which none, has been poorer in outward riches,. none so rich in inward. We know not much about them. It is remarkable that we know so much of them as we do. The same is true of the more modern reformers and benefactors of their race. None can be an impartial or wise ob- server of human life but from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary poverty. Of a life of luxury the fruit is luxury, whether in agriculture, or commerce, or literature, or art. There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet It is admirable to profess because it was once admi- rable to live. To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but Digitized by Microsoft® 14 WALDEN. so to love wisdom as to live, according to its dictateSj a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of tiie problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically. The success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier- like success, not kingly, not manly. They makeshift to live merely by conformity, practically as Lheir fathers did, and are in no sense the progenitors of a nobler race of men. But why do men degenerate ever? What makes families run out? What is the nature of the luxury which enervates and destroys nations? Are we sure that there is none of it in our own lives? The philosopher is in advance of his age even in the outward form of his life. He is not fed, sheltered, clothed, warmed, like his contem- poraries. How can a man be a philosopher and not maintain his vital heat by better methods than other men? When a man is warmed by the several modes which I have described, what does he want next? Surely not more warmth of the same kind, as more and richer food, larger and more splendid houses, finer and more abundant clothing, more numerous, incessant, and hot- ter fires, and the like. When he has obtained those things which are necessary to life, there is another alternative than to obtain the superfluities ; and that is, to adventure on life now, his vacation from hum- bler toil having commenced. The soil, it appears, is suited to the seed, for it has sent its radicle down- ward, and it may now send its shoot upward also with confidence. Why has man rooted himself thus firmly in the earth, but that he may rise in the same proportion into the heavens above ? — for the nobler plants are valued for the fruit they bear at last in the Digitized by Microsoft® ECONOMY. 1 5 air and light, far from the ground, and are not treated like the humbler esculents, which, though they may be Ijigaaials, are cultivated only till they have per- fected their root, and often cut down at top for this purpose, so that most would not know them in their flowering season. I do not mean to prescribe rules to strong and val- iant natures, who will mind their own affairs whether in heaven or hell, and perchance build more magnifi- cently and spend more lavishly than the richest, with- out ever impoverishing themselves, not knowing how they live, — if, indeed, there are any such, as has been dreamed ; nor to those who find their encouragement and inspiration in precisely the present condition ot things, and cherish it with the fondness and enthusi- asm of lovers, — and, to some extent, I reckon mysell in this number ; I do not speak to those who are wel employed, in whatever circumstances, and they kno\f whether they are well employed or not ; — but mainly to the mass of men who are discontented, and idly complaining of the hardness of their lot or of the times, when they might improve them. There are some who complain most energetically and inconsol- ably of any, because they are, as they say, doing their duty. I also have in my mind that seemingly wealthy but most terribly impoverished class of all, who have accumulated dross, but know not how to use it, or get rid of it, and thius Iiave forged their own golden or silver fetters. If I should attempt to tell how I have desired to spend my life in years past, it would probably surprise those of my readers who are somewhat acquainted with its actual history ; it would certainly astonish Digitized by Microsoft® 10 WALDEN. those who know nothing about it. I will only hint at some of the enterprises which I have cherished. In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too ; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment ; to toe that line. You will par- don some obscurities, for there are more secrets in my trade than in most men's, and yet not voluntarily kept, but inseparable from its very nature. I would gladly tell all that I know about it, and never paint " No Admittance " on my gate. I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle- dove, and am still on their trail. Many are the trav- ellers I have spoken concerning them, describing their tracks and what calls they answered to. I have met one or two who had heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud, and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them themselves. To anticipate, not the sunrise and the dawn merely, but, if possible. Nature herself! How many mornings, summer and winter, before yet any neighbor was stir- ring about his business, have I been about mine! No doubt, many of my townsmen have met me returning from this enterprise, farmers starting for Boston in the twilight, or woodchoppers gomg to their work. It is true, I never assisted the sun materially in his ris- ing, but, doubt not, it was of the last importance only to be present at it. So many autumn, ay, and winter days, spent outside the town, trying to hear what was in the wind, to hear and carry it express! I well-nigh sunk all my capital in it, and lost my own breath into the bargain, run- Digitized by Microsoft® ECONOMY. 17 ning in the face of it. If it had concerned either of the political parties, depend upon it, it would have appeared in the Gazette with the earliest intelligence. At other times watching from the observatory of some cliff or tree, to telegraph any new arrival ; or waiting at evening on the hill-tops for the sky to fall, that I might catch something, though I never caught much, and that, manna-wise, would dissolve again in the sun. For a long time I was reporter to a journal, of no very wide circulation, whose editor has never yet seen fit to print the bulk of my contributions, and, as is too common with writers, I got only my labor for my pains. However, in this case my pains were their own reward. For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snow storms and rain storms, and did my duty faith- fully ; surveyor, if not of highways, then of forest patjis and all across-lot routes, keeping them open, and ravines bridged and passable at all seasons, where the public heel had testified to their utility. I have looked after the wild stock of the town, which give a faithful herdsman a good deal of trouble by leaping fences ; and I have had an eye to the un- frequented nooks and corners of the farm ; though I did not always know whether Jonas or Solomon worked in a particular field to-day ; that was none of my business. I have watered the red huckleberry, the sand cherry and the nettle tree, the red pine and the black ash, the white grape and the yellow violet, which might have withered else in dry seasons. In short, I went on thus for a long time, I may say it without boasting, faithfully minding my business, till '.t became more and more evident that my towns- men would not after all admit me into the list of town c Digitized by Microsoft® 1 8 WALDEN. officers, nor make my place a sinecure with a moderate allowance. My accounts, which I can swear to have kept faithfully, I have, indeed, never got audited, still less accepted, still less paid and settled. However, I have not set my heart on that. Not long since, a strolling Indian went to sell bas- kets at the house of a well-known lawyer in my neigh- borhood. "Do you wish to buy any baskets?" he asked. " No, we do not want any," was the reply. "What! " exclaimed the Indian, as he went out the gate, " do you mean to starve us ? " Having seen his industrious white neighbors so well off, — that the lavj- yer had only to weave arguments, and by some magic wealth and standing followed, he had said to himself: I will go into business ; I will weave baskets ; it is a thing which I can do. Thinking that when he had made the baskets he would have done his part, and then it would be the white man's to buy them. He had not discovered that it was necessary for him to make it worth the other's while to buy them, or at least make him think that it was so, or to make some- thing else which it would be worth his while to buy. I too had woven a kind of basket of a delicate texture, but I had not made it worth any one's while to buy them. Yet not the less, in my case, did I think it worth my while to weave them, and instead of study- ing how to make it worth men's while to buy my bas- kets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them. The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind. Why should we exag- gerate any one kind at the expense of the others ? Finding that my fellow-citizens were not likely to offer me any room in the court house, or any curacy or living anywhere else, but I must shift for myself, I Digitized by Microsoft® ECONOMY. 19 turned my face more exclusively than ever to the woods, where I was better known. I determined to go into business at once, and not wait to acquire the usual capital, using such slender means as I had al- ready got. Myjurgose in going Jo,_Wii!.d£iL„P,ond was not to live cheaply nor to live dearly there, but to transact some private business with the fewest ob- stacles f to be hindered frota accompllsKrng~whicK'~ foFwant of a little common sense, a little enterprise and business talent, appeared not so sad as foolish. I have always endeavored to acquire strict business habits ; they are indispensable to every man. If your trade is with the Celestial Empire, then some small counting house on the coast, in some Salem harbor, will be,fixture enough. You will export such articles as the country affords, purely native products, much ice and pine timber and a little granite, always in native bottoms. These will be good ventures. To oversee all the details yourself in person ; to be at once pilot and captain, and owner and underwriter ; to buy and sell and keep the accounts ; to read every letter re- ceived, and write or read every letter sent ; to super- intend the discharge of imports night and day ; to be upon many parts of the coast almost at the same time ; — often the richest freight will be discharged upon a Jersey shore ; — to be your own telegraph, unweariedly sweeping the horizon, speaking all passing vessels bound coastwise; to keep up a steady despatch of commodities, for the supply of such a distant and exorbitant market ; to keep yourself informed of the state of the markets, prospects of war and peace everywhere, and anticipate the tendencies of trade and civilization, — taking ad"antage of the results of all exploring expeditions, using new passages and all Digitized by Microsoft® 20 WALDEN. improvements in navigation ; — cliarts to be studied, tlie position of reefs and new ligiits and Ijuoys to be ascertained, and ever, and ever, the logarithmic tables to be corrected, for by tlie error of some calculator the vessel often splits upon a rock that should have reached a friendly pier, — there is the untold fate of La Perouse •, — universal science to be kept pace with, studying the -ives of all great discoverers and navigators, great ad- venturers and merchants, from Hanno and the Phoeni- cians down to our day ; in fine, account of stock to be taken from time to time, to know how you stand. It is a labor to task the faculties of a man, — such prob- lems of profit and loss, of interest, of tare and tret, and gauging of all kinds in it, as demand a universal knowledge. I have thought that Walden Pond wotild be a good place for business, not solely on account of the railroad and the ice trade ; it offers advantages which it may not be good policy to divulge ; it is a good post and a good foundation. No Neva marshes to be filled ; though you must everywhere build on piles of your own driving. It is said that a flood-tide, with a westerly wind, and ice in the Neva, would sweep St. Petersburg from the face of the earth. As this business was to be entered into without the usual capital, it may not be easy to conjecture where those means, that will still be indispensable to every such undertaking, were to be obtained. As for Cloth- ing, to come at once to the practical part of the ques- tion, perhaps we are led oftener by the love of novelty, and a regard for the opinions of men, in procuring it, than by a true utility. Let him who has work to do recollect that the object of clothing is, first, to retain Digitized by Microsoft® CLOTHING. 21 thejyital heat, and secondly, in this state of society, to cover nakedness, and he may judge how much of any necessary or important worlc may be accomplished without adding to his wardrobe. Kings and queens who wear a suit but once, though made by some tailor or dressmaker to their majesties, cannot know the comfort of wearing a suit that fits. They are no better than wooden horses to hang the clean clothes on. Every day our garments become more assimi- lated to ourselves, receiving the impress of the wearer's character, until we hesitate to lay them aside, without such delay and medical appliances and some such solemnity even as our bodies. No man ever stood the lower in my estimation for hav- ing a patch in his clothes ; yet I am sure that there is greater anxiety, commonly, to have fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched, clothes than to have a '.sound conscience. But even if the rent is not mended, perhaps the worst vice betrayed is improvidence. I sometimes try my acquaintances by such tests as this ; — who could wear a patch, or two extra seams only, over the knee? Most behave as if they believed that their prospects for life would be ruined if they should do it. It would be easier for them to hobble to town with a broken leg than with a broken pantaloon. Often if an accident happens to a gentleman's legs, they can be mended ; but if a similar accident happens to the legs of his pantaloons, there is no help for it ; for he considers, not what is truly respectable, but what is respected. We know but few men, a great many coats and breeches. Dress a scarecrow in your last shift, you standing shiftless by, who would not soonest salute the scarecrow? Passing a cornfield the other day, close by a hat and coat on a stake, I recognized Digitized by Microsoft® 22 WALDEN. the owner of the farm. He was only a little more weather-beaten than when I saw him last., I have heard of a dog that barked at every stranger who approached his master's premises with clothes on, but was easily quieted by a naked thief. It is an interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes. Could you, in such a case, tell surely of any company of civilized men, which belonged to the most respected class? When Madam Pfeiffer, in her adventurous travels round the world, from east to west, had got so near home as Asiatic Russia, she says that she felt the necessity of wearing other than a travelling dress, when she went to meet the authorities, for she " was now in a civilized country, where . . . people are judged of by their clothes." Even in our demo- cratic New England towns the accidental possession of wealth, and its. manifestation in dress and equipage alone, obtain for the possessor almost universal re- spect. But they who yield such respect, numerous as they are, are so far heathen, and need to have a missionary sent to them. Besides, clothes introduced sewing, a kind of work which you may call endless ; a woman's dress, at least, is never don2. A man who has at length found something to do will not need to get a new suit to do it in ; for him the old will do, that has Iain dusty in the garret for an indeterminate period. Old shoes will serve a hero longer than they have served his valet, — if a hero ever has a valet, — bare feet are older than shoes, and he can make them do. Only they who go to soirees and legislative halls must have new coats, coats to change as often as the man changes in them. But if my jacket and trousers, my hat and shoes, are fit to Digitized by Microsoft® CLOTHING. 23 \/orship God in, they will do; will they not? Who , ever saw his old clothes, — his old coat, actually worn out, resolved into its primitive elements, so that it was not a deed of charity to bestow it on some poor boy, by him perchance to be bestowed on some poorer 3till, or shall we say richer, who could do with less? I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made to fit? If you have any enterprise before you, try it in your old clothes. All men want, not some- thing to do with, but something to do, or rather some- thing to be. Perhaps we should never procure a new suit, however ragged or dirty the old, until we have so conducted, so enterprised or sailed in some way, that we feel like new men in the old, and that to retain it would be like keeping new wine in old bottles. Our moulting season, like that of the fowls, must be a crisis in our lives. The loon retires to solitary ponds to spend it. Thus also the snake casts its slough, and the caterpillar its wormy coat, by an internal industry and expansion ; for clothes are but our outmost cuticle and mortal coil. Other- wise we shall be found sailing under false colors, and be inevitably cashiered at last by our own opinion, as well as that of mankind. We don garment after garment, as if we grew like exogenous plants by addition without. Our outside and often thin and fanciful clothes are our epidermis or false skin, which partakes not of our life, and may be stripped off here and there without fatal injury ; our thicker garments, constantly worn, are our cellu- lar integument, or cortex ; but our shirts are our liber or true bark, which cannot be removed without gir- Digitized by Microsoft® 24 WALDEN. dling and so destroying the man. I believe that nL races at some seasons wear something equivalent to the shirt. It is desirable that a man be clad so simiply that he can lay his hands on himself in the dark, and that he live in all respects so compactly and pre- paredly that, if an enemy take the town, he can, like the old philosopher, walk out the gate empty-handed without anxiety. While one thick garment is, for most purposes, as good as three thin ones, and cheap clothing can be obtained at prices really to suit customers ; while a thick coat can be bought for five dollars, which will last as many years, thick panta- loons for two dollars, cowhide boots for a dollar and a half a pair, a summer hat for a quarter of a dollar, and a winter cap for sixty-two and a half cents, or a better be made at home at a nominal cost, where is he so poor that, clad in such a suit, of his own earn- ing, there will not be found wise men to do him reverence ? When I ask for a garment of a particular form, my tailoress tells me gravely, " They do not make them so now," not emphasizing the " They " at all, as if she quoted an authority as impersonal as the Fates, and I find it difficult to get made what I want, simply because she cannot believe that I mean what I say, that I am so rash. When I hear this oracular sen- tence, I am for a moment absorbed in thought, em- phasizing to myself each word separately that I may come at the meaning of it, that I may find out by what degree of consanguinity They are related to me, and what authority they may have in an aifair which affects me so nearly; and, finally, I am inclined to answer her with equal mystery, and without any more emphasis of the " they," — " It is true, they did not Digitized by Microsoft® CLOTHING. 25 make them so recently, but they do now." Of what use this measuring of me if she does not measure my character, but only the breadth of my shoulders, as it were a peg to hang the coat on? We worship not the Graces, nor the Parcae, but Fashion. She spins and weaves and cuts with full authority. The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveller's cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same. I sometimes de- spair of getting anything quite simple and honest done in this world by the help of men. They would have to be passed through a powerful press first, to squeeze their old notions out of them, so that they would not soon get upon their legs again, and then there would be some one in the company with a mag- got in his head, hatched from an egg deposited there nobody knows when, for not even fire kills these things, and you would have lost your labor. Never- theless we will not forget that some Egyptian wheat was handed down to us by a mummy. On the whole, I think that it cannot be maintained that dressing has in this or any country risen to the dignity of an art. At present, men make shift to wear what they can get. Like shipwrecked sailors, they put on what they can find on the beach, and at a little distance, whether of space or time, laugh at each other's masquerade. Every generation laughs • at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new. We are amused at beholding the costume of Henry VIII., or Queen Elizabeth, as much as if it was that of the King and Queen of the Cannibal Islands. All costume off a man is pitiful or grotesque. It is only the serious eye peering from and the sincere life passed within it, which restrain laughter and conse- crate the costume of any people. Let Harlequin be Digitized by Microsoft® 26 WALDEN. taken with a fit of colic and his trappings will have to serve that mood too. When the soldier is hit by a cannon ball, rags are as becoming as purple. The childish and savage taste of men and women for new patterns keeps how many shaking and squint- ing through kaleidoscopes that they may discover the particular figure which this generation requires to- day. The manufacturers have learned that this taste is merely whimsical. Of two patterns which differ only by a few threads more or less of a particular color, the one will be sold readily, the other lie on the shelf, though it frequently happens that after the lapse of a season the latter becomes the most fash- ionable. Comparatively, tattooing is not the hideous custom which it is called. It is not barbarous merely because the printing is skin-deep and unalterable. I cannot believe that our factory system is the best mode by which men may get clothing. The condi- tion of the operatives is becoming every day more like that of the English ; and it cannot be wondered at, since, as far as I have heard or observed, the prin- cipal object is, not that mankind may be well and honestly clad, but, unquestionably, that the corpora- tions may be enriched. In the long run men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, though they should fail immediately, they had better aim at some- thing high. As for a Shelter, I will not deny that this is now a necessary of life, though there are instances of men having done without it for long periods in colder countries than this. Samuel Laing says that " The Laplander in his skin dress, and in a skin bag which he puts over his head and shoulders, will sieep night Digitized by Microsoft® SHELTER. 27 after night on the snow ... in a degree of cold which would extinguish the life of one exposed to it in any woollen clothing." He has seen them asleep thus. Yet he adds, " They are not hardier than other peo- ple." But, probably, man did not live long on the earth without discovering the convenience which there is in a house, the domestic comforts, which phrase may have originally signified the satisfactions of the house more than of the family ; though these must be extremely partial and occasional in those climates where the house is associated in our thoughts with winter or the rainy season chiefly, and two thirds of the year, except for a parasol, is unnecessary. In our climate, in the summer, it was formerly almost solely a covering at night. In the Indian gazettes a wigwam was the symbol of a day's march, and a row of them cut or painted on the bark of a tree signified that so many times they had camped. Man was not made so large limbed and robust but that he must seek to narrow his world, and wall in a space such as fitted him. He was at first bare and out of doors ; but though this was pleasant enough in serene and warm weather, by day- light, the rainy season and the winter, to say nothing of the torrid sun, would perhaps have nipped his race in the bud if he had not made haste to clothe him- self with the shelter of a house. Adam and Eve, according to the fab'e, wore the bower before other clothes. Man wanted a home, a place of warmth, or comfort, first of physical warmth, then the warmth of the affections. We may imagine a time when, in the infancy of the human race, some enterprising mortal crept into a hollow in a rock for shelter. Every child begins the Digitized by Microsoft® 28 IVALDEN. world again, to some extent, and loves to stay out doors, even in wet and cold. It plays house, as well as horse, having an instinct for it. Who does not re- member the interest with which when young he looked at shelving rocks, or any approach to a cave ? It was the natural yearning of that portion of our most primitive ancestor which still survived in us. From the cave we have advanced to roofs of palm leaves, of bark and boughs, of linen woven and stretched, of grass and straw, of boards and shingles, of stones and tiles. At last, we know not what it is to live in the open air, and our lives are domestic in more senses than we think. From the hearth to the field is a great distance. It would be well perhaps if we were to spend more of our days and nights with- out any obstruction between us and the celestial bodies, if the poet did not speak so much from under a roof, or the saint dwell there so long. Birds do not sing in caves, nor do doves cherish their innocence in dovecots. However, if one designs to construct a dwelling house, it behooves him to exercise a little Yankee shrewdness, lest after all he find himself in a work- house, a labyrinth without a clew, a museum, an alms- house, a prison, or a splendid mausoleum instead. Consider first how slight a shelter is absolutely neces- sary. I have seen Penobscot Indians, in this town, living in tents of thin cotton cloth, while the snow was nearly a foot deep around them, and I thought that they would be glad to have it deeper to keep out the wind. Formerly, when how to get my living honestly, with freedom left for my proper pursuits, was a question which vexed me even more than it does now, for unfortunately I am become somewhat Digitized by Microsoft® SHELTER. 29 callous, I used to see a large box by the railroad, six feet long by three wide, in which the laborers loclced up their tools at night, and it suggested to me that every man who was hard pushed might get such a one for a dollar, and, having bored a few auger holes in it, to admit the air at least, get into it when it rained and at night, and hook down the lid, and so have freedom in his love, and in his soul be free. This did not appear the worst, nor by any means a despicable alternative. You could sit up as late as you pleased, and, whenever you got up, go abroad without any landlord or house-lord dogging you for rent. Many a man is harassed to death to pay the rent of a larger and more luxurious box who would not have frozen to death in such a box as this. I am far from jesting. Economy is a subject which admits of being treated with levity, but it cannot so be disposed of. A com- fortable house for a rude and hardy race, that lived mostly out of doors, was once made here almost en- tirely of such materials as Nature furnished ready to their hands. Goodkin, who was superintendent of the Indians subject to the Massachusetts Colony, writing in 1674, says, "The best of their houses are covered very neatly, tight and warm, with barks of trees, slipped from their bodies at those seasons when the sap is up, and made into great flakes, with press- ure of weighty timber, when they are green. . . . The meaner sort are covered with mats which they make of a kind of bulrush, and are also indifferently tight and warm, but not so good as the former. . . . Some I have seen, sixty or a hundred feet long and thirty feet broad. ... I have often lodged in their wigwams, and found them as warm as the best Eng- lish houses." He adds that they were commonly Digitized by Microsoft® 30 WALDEN. carpeted and lined within with well-wrought em- broidered mats, and were furnished with various utensils. The Indians had advanced so far as to regulate the effect of the wind by a mat suspended over the hole in the roof and moved by a string. Such a lodge was in the first instance constructed in a day or two at most, and taken down and put up in a few hours; and every family owned one, or its apartment in one. In the savage state every family owns a shelter as good as the best, and sufficient for its coarser and sim- pler wants ; but I think that I speak within bounds when I say that, though the birds of the air have their nests, and the foxes their holes, and the savages their wig- wams, in modern civilized society not more than one half the families own a shelter. In the large towns and cities, where civilization especially prevails, the num- ber of those who own a shelter is a very small fraction of the whole. The rest pay an annual tax for this out- side garment of all, become indispensable summer and winter, which would buy a village of Indian wigwams, but now helps to keep them poor as long as they live. I do not mean to insist here on the disadvantage of hiring compared with owning, but it is evident that the savage owns his shelter because it costs so little, while the civilized man hires his commonly because he cannot afford to own it ; nor can he, in the long run, any better afford to hire. But, answers one, by merely paying this tax the poor civilized man secures an abode which is a palace compared with the sav- age's. An annual rent of from twenty-five to a hun- dred dollars, these are the country rates, entitles him to the benefit of the improvements of centuries, spa- cious apartments, clean paint and paper, Rumford fire- Digitized by Microsoft® SHELTER. 31 place, back plastering, Venetian blinds, copper pump, spring lock, a commodious cellar, and many other things. But how happens it that he who is said to enjoy these things is so- commonly a poor civilized man, while the savage, who has them not, is rich as a savage ? If it is asserted that civilization is a real advance in the condition of man, — and I think that it is, though only the wise improve their advantages, — it must be shown that it has produced better dwell- ings without making them more costly ; and the cose of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run. An average house in this neighborhood costs perhaps eight hundred dollars, and to lay up this sum will take from ten to fifteen years of the laborer's life, even if he is not encumbered with a family ; — estimating the pecuniary value of every man's labor at one dollar a day, for if some receive more, others receive less ; — so that he must have spent more than half his life commonly before his wigwam will be earned. If we suppose him to pay a rent instead, this is but a doubtful choice of evils. Would the savage have been wise l:o exchange his wigwam for a palace on these terms ? It may be guessed that I reduce almost the whole advantage of holding this superfluous property as a fund in store against the future, so far as the indi- vidual is concerned, mainly to the defraying of fu- neral expenses. But perhaps a man is not required to bury himself. Nevertheless this points to an impor- tant distinction between the civilized man and the savage; and, no doubt, they have designs on us for our benefit, in making the life of a civilized people an institution, in which the life of the individual is to a Digitized by Microsoft® 52 WALDEN. great extent absorbed, in order to preserve and per- fect that of the race. But I wish to show at what a sacrifice this advantage is at present obtained, and to suggest that we may possibly so live as to secure aU the advantage without suffering any of the disadvan- tage. What mean ye by saying that the poor ye have always with you, or that the fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge ? " As I live, saith the Lord God, ye shall not have occasion any more to use this proverb in Israel." " Behold all souls are mine ; as the soul of the father, so also the soul of the son is mine : the soul that sinneth it shall die." When I consider my neighbors, the farmers of Concord, who are at least as well off as the other classes, I find that for the most part they have been toiling twenty, thirty, or forty years, tnat they may become the real owners of their farms, which com- monly they have inherited with encumbrances, or else bought with hired money, — and we may regard one third of that toil as the cost of their houses, — but commonly they have not paid for them yet. It is true, the encumbrances sometimes outweigh the value of the farm, so that the farm itself becomes one great encumbrance, and still a man is found to inherit it, being well acquainted with it, as he says. On apply- ing to the assessors, I am surprised to learn that they cannot at once name a dozen in the town who own their farms free and clear. If you would know the history of these homesteads, inquire at the bank where they are mortgaged. The man who has actually paid for his farm with labor on it is so rare that every neighbor can point to him. I doubt if there are three such men in Concord. What has been said of Digitized by Microsoft® SHELTER. 33 the merchants, that a very large majority, even ninety- seven in a hundred, are sure to fail, is equally true of the farmers. With regard to the merchants, however, one of them says pertinently that a great part of their failures are not genuine pecuniary failures, but merely failures to fulfil their engagements, because it is in- convenient; that is, it is the moral character that breaks down. But this puts an infinitely worse face on the matter, and suggests, besides, that probably not even the other three succeed in saving their souls, but are perchance bankrupt in a worse sense than they who fail honestly. Bankruptcy and repudiation are the spring-boards from which much of our civilization vaults and turns its somersets, but the savage stands on the unelastic plank of famine. Yet the Middlesex Cattle Show goes off here with eclat annually, as if all the joints of the agricultural machine were suent. The farmer is endeavoring to solve the problem of a livelihood by a formula more complicated than the problem itself. To get his shoestrings he speculates in herds of cattle. With consummate skill he has set his trap with a hair springe to catch comfort and inde- pendence, and then, as he turned away, got his own leg into it. This is the reason he is poor ; and for a similar reason we are all poor in respect to a thousand savage comforts, though surrounded by luxuries. As Chapman sings : — " The false society of men — — for earthly greatness All heavenly comforts rarefies to air." And when the farmer has got his house, he may not be the richer but the poorer for it, and it be the house that has got him. As I understand it, that was D Digitized by Microsoft® 34 WALDEN. a valid objection urged by Momus against the house which Minerva made, that she " had not made it movable, by which means a bad neighborhood might be avoided ; " and it may still be urged, for our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed in them ; and the bad neighborhood to be avoided is our own scurvy selves. I know one or two families, at least, in this town, who, for nearly a generation, have been wishing to sell their houses in the outskirts and move into the village, but have not been able to accomplish it, and only death will set them free. Granted that the majority are able at last either to own or hire the modern house with all its improve- ments. While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them. It has created palaces, but it was /mot so easy to create noblemen and kings. And if I : the civilized man's pursuits are no worthier than the A savage's, if he is efnployed the greater part of his I life in obtaining gross necessaries and comforts \ merely, why should we have a better dwelling than the former ? But how do the poor minority fare? Perhaps it will be found that just in proportion as some have been placed in outward circumstances above the sav- age, others have been degraded below him. The luxury of one class is counterbalanced by the indi- gence of another. On the one side is the palace, on the other are the almshouse and "silent poor." The myriads who built the pyramids to be the tombs of the Pharaohs were fed on garlic, and it may be were not decently buried themselves. The mason who finishes the cornice of the palace returns at night perchance Digitized by Microsoft® SHELTER. 35 to a hut not so good as a wigwam. It is a mistake to suppose that, in a country where the usual evidences of civilization exist, the condition of a very large body of the inhabitants may not be as degraded as that of savages. I refer to the degraded poor, not now to the degraded rich. To know this I should not need to look farther than to the shanties which everywhere border our railroads, that last improvement in civiliza- tion ; where I see in my daily walks human beings living in sties, and all winter with an open door, for the sake of light, without any visible, often imagina- ble, wood pile, and the forms of both old and young are permanently contracted by the long habit of shrink- ing from cold and misery, and the development of all their limbs and faculties is checked. It certainly is fair to look at that class by whose labor the works which distinguish this generation are accomplished. Such too, to a greater or less extent, is the condition of the operatives of every denomination in England, which is the great workhouse of the world. Or I could refer you to Ireland, which is marked as one of the white or enlightened spots on the map. Contrast the physical condition of the Irish with that of the North American Indian, or the South Sea Islander, or any other savage race before it was degraded by contact with the civilized man. Yet I have no doubt that that'people's rulers are as wise as the average of civilized rulers. Their condition only proves what squalidness may consist with civilization. I hardly need refer now to the laborers of our Southern States who produce the staple exports of this country, and are themselves a staple production of the South. £ut to confine myself to those who are said to be in moderate circumstances. Digitized by Microsoft® 36 WALDEN. Most men appear never to have considered what a house is, and are actually though needlessly poor all their lives because they think that they must have such a one as their neighbors have. As if one were to wear any sort of coat which the tailor might cut out for him, or, gradually leaving off palmleaf hat or cap of woodchuck skin, complain of hard times because he could not afford to buy him a crown ! It is possi- ble -to invent a house still more convenient and luxu- rious than we have, which yet all would admit that man could not afford to pay for. Shall we always study to obtain more of these things, and not some- times to be content with less ? Shall the respectable citizen thus gravely teach, by precept and example, the necessity of the young man's providing a certain number of superfluous glowshoes, and umbrellas, and empty guest chambers for empty guests, before he dies ? Why should not our furniture be as simple as the Arab's or the Indian's ? When I think of the benefactors of the race, whom we have apotheosized as messengers from heaven, bearers of divine gifts to man, I do not see in my mind any retinue at their heels, any car-load of fashionable furniture. Or what if I were to allow — would it not be a singular allow- ance? — that our furniture should be more complex than the Arab's, in proportion as we are morally and intellectually his superiors ! At present our houses are cluttered and defiled with it, and a good house- wife would sweep out the greater part into the dust hole, and not leave her morning's work undone. Morning work ! By the blushes of Aurora and the music of Memnon, what should be man's morning work in this world? I had three pieces of limestone on my desk, but I was terrified to find that they re- Digitized by Microsoft® SHELTER. 37 quired to be dusted daily, wlien the furniture of my mind was all undusted still, and I threw them out the window in disgust. How, then, could I have a fur- nished house ? I would rather sit in the open air, for no dust gathers on the grass, unless where man has broken ground. It is the luxurious and dissipated who set the fash- ions which the herd so diligently follow. The trav- eller who stops at the best houses, so called, soon discovers this, for the publicans presume him to be a Sardanapalus, and if he resigned himself to their ten- der mercies he would soon be completely emasculated. I think that in the railroad car we are inclined to spend more on luxury than on safety and convenience, and it threatens without attaining these to become no better than a modern drawing-room, with its divans, and ottomans, and sunshades, and a hundred other Oriental things, which we are taking west with us, in- vented for the ladies of the harem and the effeminate natives of the Celestial Empire, which Jonathan should be ashamed to know the names of. I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion. I would rather ride on earth in an ox cart with a free circulation, than go to heaven in the fancy car of an excursion train and breathe a malaria all the way. The very simplicity and nakedness of man's life in the primitive ages imply this advantage at least, that they left him still but a sojourner in nature. When he was refreshed with food and sleep, he contemplated his journey again. He dwelt, as it were, in a tent in this world, and was either threading the valleys, or crossing the plains, or climbing the mountain tops Butlo! men have becomeJbaJflols of their lools^ -The Digitized by Microsoft® 38 WALDEN. man who independently plucked the fruits when he was hungry is become a farmer : and he who stood under a tree for shelter, a housekeeper. We now no longer camp as for a night, but have settled down on earth and forgotten heaven. We have adopted Chris- tianity merely as an improved method of iz^rz-culture. We have built for this world a family mansion, and for the next a family tomb. The best works of art are the expression of man's struggle to free himself from this condition, but the effect of our art is merely to make this low state comfortable and that higher state to be forgotten. There is actually no place in this village for a work oi fine art, if any had come down to us, to stand, for our lives, our houses and streets, furnish no proper pedestal for it. There is not a nail to hang a picture on, nor a shelf to receive the bust of a hero or a saint. Whea I consider how our houses are built and paid for, or not paid for, and their in- ternal economy managed and sustained, I wonder tha: the floor does not give way under the visitor while he is admiring the gewgaws upon the mantel-piece, and let him through into the cellar, to some solid and hon- est though earthy foundation. I cannot but perceive that this so-called rich and refined life is a thing jumped at, and I do not get on in the enjoyment of the^«« arts which adorn it, my attention being wholly occupied with the jump ; for I remember that the greatest genu- ine leap, due to human muscles alone, on record is that of certain wandering Arabs, who are said to have cleared twenty-five feet on level ground. Without fac- titious support, man is sure to come to earth again be- yond that distance. The first question which 1 am tempted to put to the proprietor of such great impro- priety is, Who bolsters you? Are you one of the Digitized by Microsoft® SHELTER. 39 ninety-seven who fail, or the three who succeed? An- swer me these questions, and then perhaps I may loolc at your baubles and find them ornamental. The cart before the horse is neither beautiful nor useful. Be- fore we can adorn our houses with beautiful objects the walls must be stripped, and our lives must be stripped, and beautiful housekeeping and beautiful liv- ing be laid for a foundation : now, a taste for the beautiful is most cultivated out of doors, where there is no house and no housekeeper. Old Johnson, in his "Wonder-Working Provi- dence," speaking of the first settlers of this town, with whom he was contemporary, tells us that " they burrow themselves in the earth for their first shelter under some hillside, and, casting the soil aloft upon timber, they make a smoky fire against the earth, at the highest side." They did not "provide them houses," says he, " till the earth, by the Lord's bless- ing, brought forth bread to feed them," and the first year's crop was so light that " they were forced to cut their bread very thin for a long season." The secre- tary of the Provinc? of New Netherland, writing in Dutch, in 1650, forthe information of those who wished to take up land there, states more particularly, that "those in New Netherland, and especially in New England, who have no means to build farm houses at first according to their wishes, dig a square pit in the ground, cellar fashion, six or seven feet deep, as long and as broad as they think proper, case the earth inside with wood all round the wall, and line the wood with the bark of trees or something else to pre- vent the caving in of the earth ; floor this cellar with plank, and wainscot it overhead for a ceiling, raise a roof of spars clear up, and cover the spates with bark Digitized by Microsoft® 40 WALDEff. or green sods, so that they can live dry and warm ill these houses with their entire families for two, three, and four years, it being understood that partitions are run through those cellars, which are adapted to the size of the family. The wealthy and principal men in New England, in the beginning of the colonies, commenced their first dwelling houses in this fashion for two reasons : firstly, in order not to waste time in building, and not to want food the next season ; secondly, in order not to discourage poor laboring people whom they brought over in numbers from Fatherland. In the course of three or four years, when the country became adapted to agriculture, they built themselves handsome houses, spending on them several thousands.'' In this course which our ancestors took there was a show of prudence at least, as if their principle were to satisfy the more pressing wants first. But are the more pressing wants satisfied now? When I think of acquiring for myself one of our luxurious dwellings, I am deterred, for, so to speak, the country is not yet adapted to human culture, and we are still forced to cut our spiritual bread far thinner than our fore- fathers did their wheaten. Not that all architectural ornament is to be neglected even in the rudest period ; but let our houses first be lined with beauty, where they come in contact with our lives, like the tenement of the shellfish, and not overlaid with it. But, alas! I have been inside one or two of them, and know what they are lined with. Though we are not so degenerate but that we might possibly live in a cave or a wigwam or wear skins to-day, it certainly is better to accept the ad- vantages, though so dearly bought, which the inven- Digitized by Microsoft® BUILDING THE HOUSE. 41 tion and industry of mankind offer. In such a neighborhood as this, boards and shingles, lime and briclcs, are cheaper and more easily obtained than suitable caves, or whole logs, or bark in sufficient quantities, or even well-tempered clay or flat stones. I speak understandingly on this subject, for I have made myself acquainted with it both theoretically and practically. With a little more wit we might use these materials so as to become richer than the richest now are, and make our civilization a blessing. The civilized man is a more experienced and wiser savage. But to make haste to my own experiment. Near the end of March, 1845, I borrowed an axe and went down to the woods by Walden Pond, near- est to where I intended to build my house, and began to cut down some tall arrowy white pines, still in their youth, for timber. It is difficult to begin with- out borrowing, but perhaps it is the most generous course thus to permit your fellow-men to have an interest in your enterprise. The owner of the axe, as he released his hold on it, said that it was the apple of his eye ; but I returned it sharper than I received it. It was a pleasant hillside where I worked, covered with pine woods, through which I looked out on the pond, and a small open field in the woods where pines and hickories were springing up. The ice in the pond was not yet dissolved, though there were some open spaces, and it was all dark colored and saturated with water. There were some slight flurries of snow during the days that I worked there ; but for the most part when I came out on to the railroad, on my way home, its yellow sand heap stretched away gleaming in the hazy atmos- Digitized by Microsoft® 42 WALDEN. phere, and the rails shone in the spring sun, and t heard the lark and pewee and other birds already come to commence another year with us. They were pleasant spring days, in which the winter of man's discontent was thawing as well as the earth, and the life that had lain torpid began to stretch it- self. One day, when my axe had come off and I had cut a green hickory for a wedge, driving it with a stone, and had placed the whole to soak in a pond hole in order to swell the wood, I saw a striped snake run into the water, and he lay on the bottom, appar- ently without inconvenience, as long as I stayed there, or more than a quarter of an hour ; perhaps because he had not yet fairly come out of the torpid state. It appeared to me that for a like reason men remain in their present low and primitive condition ; but if they should feel the influence of the spring of springs arousing them, they would of necessity rise to a higher and more ethereal life. I had previously seen the snakes in frosty mornings in my path with por- tions of their bodies still numb and inflexible, waiting for the sun to thaw them. On the ist of April it rained and melted the ice, and in the early part of the day, which was very foggy, I heard a stray goose groping about over the pond and cackling as if lost, or like the spirit of the fog. So I went on for some days cutting and hewing timber, and also studs and rafters, all with my narrow axe, not having many communicable or scholar-like thoughts, singing to myself,— Men say they know many things ; But lo I they have taken wings, The arts and sciences, Digitized by Microsoft® BUILDING THE HOUSE. 43 And a thousand appliances ; The wind that biows Is all that anybody knows. I hewed the main timbers six inches square, most of the studs on two sides only, and the rafters and floor timbers on one side, leaving the rest of the bark on, so that they were just as straight and much stronger than sawed ones. Each stick was carefully mortised or tenoned by its stump, for I had borrowed other tools by this time. My days in the woods were not very long ones ; yet I usually carried my dinner of bread and butter, and read the newspaper in which it was wrapped, at noon, sitting amid the green pine boughs which I had cut off, and to my bread was imparted some of their fragrance, for my hands were covered with a thick coat of pitch. Before I had done I was more the friend than the foe of the pine tree, though I had cut down some of them, having become better acquainted with it. Sometimes a rambler in the wood was attracted by the sound of my axe, and we chatted pleasantly over the chips which I had made. By the middle of April, for I made no haste in my work, but rather made the most of it, my house was framed and ready for the raising. I had already bought the shanty of James Collins, an Irishman who worked on the P'itchburg Railroad, for boards. James Col lins' shanty was considered an uncommonly fine one. When I called to see it he was not at home. I walked about the outside, at first unobserved from within, the window was so deep and high. It was of small dimen- sions, with a peaked cottage roof, and not much else to be seen, the dirt being raised five feet all around as if it were a compost heap. The roof was the soundest Digitized by Microsoft® 44 WALDEN. part, though a good deal warped and made brittle by the sun. Door-sill there was none, but a perennial passage for the hens under the door board. Mrs. C. came to the door and asked me to view it from the inside. The hens were driven in by my approach. It was darlc, and had a dirt floor for the most part, dank, clammy, and aguish, only here a board and there a board which would not bear removal. She lighted a lamp to show me the inside of the roof and the walls, and also that the board floor extended under the bed, warning me not to step into the cellar, a sort of dust hole two feet deep. In her own words, they were " good boards overhead, good boards all around, and a good window," — of two whole squares originally, only the cat had passed out that way lately. There was a stove, a bed, and a place to sit, an infant in the house where it was born, a silk parasol, gilt-framed looking-glass, and a patent new coffee mill nailed to an oak sapling, all told. The bargain was soon con- cluded, for James had in the meanwhile returned. I to pay four dollars and twenty-five cents to-night, he to vacate at five to-morrow morning, selling to nobody else meanwhile : I to take possession at six. It were well, he said, to be there early, and anticipate certain indistinct but wholly unjust claims, on the score of ground rent and fuel. This he assured me was the only encumbrance. At six I passed him and his family on the road. One large bundle held their all, — bed, coffee mill, looking-glass, hens, — all but the cat, she took to the woods and became a wild cat, and, as I learned afterward, trod in a trap set for woodchucks, and so became a dead cat at last. I took down this dwelling the same morning, draw- ing the nails, and removed it to the pond side by Digitized by Microsoft® BUILDING THE HOUSE. 45 small cartloads, spreading the boards on the grass there to bleach and warp back again in the sun. One early thrush gave me a note or two as I drove along the woodland path. I was informed treacherously by a young Patrick that neighbor Seeley, an Irishman, in the intervals of the carting, transferred the sti)' toler- able, straight, and drivable nails, staples, and spikes to his pocket, and then stood when I came b ick to pass the time of day, and look freshly up, unconcerned with spring thoughts, at the devastation ; there being a dearth of work, as he said. He was there to repre- sent spectatordom, and help make this seemingly insig- nificant event one with the removal of the gods of Troy. I dug my cellar in the side of a hill sloping to the south, where a woodchuck had formerly dug his bur- row, down through sumach and blackberry roots, and the lowest stain of vegetation, six feet square by seven deep, to a fine sand where potatoes would not freeze in any winter. The sides were left shelving, a!nd not stoned ; but the sun having never shone on them, the sand still keeps its place. It was but two hours' work. I took particular pleasure in this breaking of ground, for in almost all latitudes men dig into the earth for an equable temperature. Under the most splendid house in the city is still to be found the cellar where they store their roots as of old, and long after the superstructure has disappeared posterity remark its dent in the earth. The house is still but a sort of porch at the entrance of a burrow. At length, in the beginning of May, with the help of some of my acquaintances, rather to improve so good an occasion for neighborliness than from any necessity, I set up the frame of my house. No man Digitized by Microsoft® 46 WALDEN. was ever more honored in the character of his raisers than I. They are destined, I trust, to assist at the raising of loftier structures one day. I began to occupy my house on the 4th of July, as soon as it was boarded and roofed, for the boards were carefiilly feather-edged and lapped, so that it was perfectly im- pervious to rain ; but before boarding I laid the foun- dation of a chimney at one end, bringing two cartloads of stones up the hill from the pond in my arms. I built the chimney after my hoeing in the fall, before a fire became necessary for warmth, doing my cooking in the meanwhile out of doors on the ground, early in the morning : which mode I still think is in some respects more convenient and agreeable than the usual one. When it stormed before my bread was baked, I fixed a few boards over the fire, and sat under them to watch my loaf, and passed some pleasant hours in that way. In those days, when my hands were much employed, I read but little, but the least scraps of paper which lay on the ground, my holder, or table- cloth, afforded me as much entertainment, in fact an- swered the same purpose, as the Iliad. It would be worth the while to build still more de- liberately than I did, considering, for instance, what foundation a door, a window, a cellar, a garret, have in the nature of man, and perchance never raising any superstructure until we found a better reason for it than our temporal necessities even. There is some of the same fitness in a man's building his own house that there is in a bird's building its own nest. Who knows but if men constructed their dwellings with their own hands, and provided food for themselves and families simply and honestly enough, the poetic faculty would Digitized by Microsoft® ARCHITECTURE. 47 oe universally developed, as birds universally sing when they are so engaged? But alas! we do like cowbirds and cuckoos, which lay their eggs in nests which other birds have built, and cheer no traveller with their chattering and unmusical notes. Shall we forever resign the pleasure of construction to the car- penter ? What does architecture amount to in the ex- perience of the mass of men ? I never in all my walks came across a man engaged in so simple and natural an occupation as building his house. We belong to the community. It is not the tailor alone who is the ninth part of a man : it is as much the preacher, and the merchant, and the farmer. Where is this division of labor to end? and what object does it finally serve? No doubt another may also think for me ; but it is not therefore desirable that he should do so to the exclusion of my thinking for myself. True, there are architects so called in this country, and I have heard of one at least possessed with the idea of making architectural ornaments have a core of truth, a necessity, and hence a beauty, as if it were a revelation to him. All very well perhaps from his point of view, but only a little better than the com- mon dilettantism. A sentimental reformer in archi- tecture, he began at the cornice, not at the foundation. It was only how to put a core of truth within the ornaments, that every sugar plum in fact might have an almond or caraway seed in it, — though I hold that almonds are most wholesome without the sugar, — and not how the inhabitant, the indweller, might build truly within and without, and let the ornaments take care of themselves. What reasonable man ever sup- posed that ornaments were something outward and in the skin merely, — that the tortoise got his spotted Digitized by Microsoft® 'm^' 48 WALDEN. shell, or the shellfish its mother-o'-pearl tints, by such a contract as the inhabitants of Broadway their Trinity Church ? But a man has no more to do with the style of architecture of his house than a tortoise with that of its shell : nor need the soldier be so idle as to try to paint the precise color of his virtue on his standard. The enemy will find it out. He may turn pale when the trial comes. This man seemed to me to lean over the cornice, and timidly whisper his half truth to the rude occupants, who really knew it better than he. What of architectural beauty I now see, I know has gradually grown from within outward, out of the necessities and character of the indweller, who is the only builder, — out of some unconscious truthfiilness, and nobleness, without ever a thought for the appear- ance ; and whatever additional beauty of this kind is destined to be produced will be preceded by a like unconscious beauty of life. The most interesting dwellings in this country, as the painter knows, are the most unpretending, humble log huts and cottages of the poor commonly ; it is the life of the inhabitants" whose shells they are, and not any peculiarity in their surfaces merely, which makes them picturesque ; and equally interesting will be the citizen's suburban box, when his life shall be as simple and as agreeable to the imagination, and there is as little straining after eifect in the style of his dwelling. A great propor- tion of architectural ornaments are literally hollow, and a September gale would strip them off, like bor- rowed plumes, without injury to the substantials. They can do without architecture who have no olives nor wines in the cellar. What if an equal ado were made about the ornaments of style in literature, and the architects of our Bibles spent as much time about Digitized by Microsoft® ARCHITECTURE. 49 their cornices as the architects of our churches do? So are made the belles-lettres and, the beaux-arts and their professors. Much it concerns a man, forsooth, how a few sticks are slanted over him or under him, and what colors are daubed upon his box. It would signify somewhat, if, in any earnest sense, he slanted them and daubed it ; but the spirit having departed out of the tenant, it is of a piece with constructing his own cofBn, — the architecture of the grave, and "carpenter" is but another name for "coffin-maker." One man says, in his despair or indifference to life, take up a handful of the earth at your feet, and paint your house that color. Is he thinking of his last and nar- row house? Toss up a copper for it as well. What an abundance of leisure he must have ! Why do you take up a handful of the dirt ? Better paint your house your own complexion ; let it turn pale or blush for you. An enterprise to improve the style of cottage architecture ! When you have got my ornaments ready I will wear them. Before winter I built a chimney, and shingled the sides of my house, which were already impervious to rain, with imperfect and sappy shingles made of the first slice of the log, whose edges I was obliged to straighten with a plane. I have thus a tight shingled and plastered house, ten feet wide by fifteen long, and eight-feet posts, with a garret and a closet, a large window on each side, two trap doors, one door at the end, and a brick fire- place opposite. The exact cost of my house, paying the usual price for such materials as I used, but not counting the work, all of which was done by myself, was as follows ; and I give the details because very few are able to tell exactly what their houses cost, and Digitized by Microsoft® 50 walden: fewer still, if any, the separate cost of the various materials which compose them : — Boards ^8 03^ | ^toLt"'' Refuse shingles for roof and sides . . 4 00 Laths 1 25 Two second-hand windows with glass 2 43 One thousand old brick ..... 4 00 Two casks of lime 2 40 That was high. ,, . ( More than I "^'' °3M needed. Mantle-tree iron 015 Nails 390 Hinges and screws 014 Latch o 10 Chalk 001 ~ _ .. (I carried a good Transportation 1401 ^ t , '^ I part on my back. In all $zS 122 These are all the materials excepting the timber, stones, and sand, which I claimed by squatter's right. I have also a small wood-shed adjoining, made chiefly of the stuff which was left after building the house. I intend to build me a house which will surpass any on the main street in Concord in grandeur and luxury, as soon as it pleases me as much and will cost me no more than my present one. I thus found that the student who wishes for a shelter can obtain one for a lifetime at an expense not greater than the rent which he now pays annually. If I seem to boast more than is becoming, my excuse is that I brag for humanity rather than for myself; and my short-comings and inconsistencies do not affect the truth of my statement. Notwithstanding much cant and hypocrisy, — chaff which I find it diflicult to Digitized by Microsoft® ECONOMY. 5 1 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 ad- vantage 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 education would be needed, because, forsooth, more would already have been acquired, but the pecuniary expense of getting an education would in a great measure vanish. 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 education which he gets by associating with the most cultivated of his contemporaries no charge is made. The mode of founding a college is, commonly, to get up a subscrip- tion of dollars and cents, and then following blindly the principles of a division of labor to its extreme, a principle which should never be followed but with circumspection, — to call in a contractor who makes this a subject of speculation, and he employs Irish- men or other operatives actually to lay the foundations, Digitized by Microsoft® 52 WALDEN. 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 them- selves. The student who secures his coveted leisure and retirement by systematically shirking any labor necessary to man obtains but an ignoble and unprof- itable leisure, defrauding himself of the experience which alone can 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 n jt pursue the common course, which is merely to send him into the neighborhood of some professor, where anything is professed and practised but the art of life ; — to survey the world through a telescope or a microscope, and never with his 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 contem- plating the monsters in a drop of vinegar. Which would have advanced the most at the end of a month, Digitized by Microsoft® ECONOMY. 53 — the boy who had made his own jackknife from the ore which he had dug and smelted, reading as much as would be necessary for this, — or the boy who had attended the lectures on metallurgy at the Institute in the meanwhile, and had received a Rogers' penknife from his father ? Which would be most likely to cut his fingers ? . . . To my astonishment I was in- formed on leaving college that I had studied naviga- tion! — why, if I had taken one turn down the harbor I should have known more about it. Even the poor student studies and is taught only political economy, while that economy of living which is synonymous with philosophy is not even sincerely professed in our colleges. The consequence is that while he is read- ing Adam Smith, Ricardo, and Say, he runs his father in debt irretrievably. As with our colleges, so with a hundred " modern improvements" • 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 investments 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 too 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. Either 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 trum- pet was put into his hand, had nothing to say. As if the main object were to talk fast and not to talk Digitized by Microsoft® 54 WALDEN. sensibly. We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new ; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough. After all, the man whose horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most important mes- sages ; he is not an evangelist, nor does he come round eating locusts and wild honey. I doubt if Flying Childers ever carried a peck of corn to mill. One says to me, " I wonder that you do not lay up money ; you love to travel ; you might take the cars and go to Fitchburg to-day and see the country." But I am wiser than that. I have learned that the swiftest traveller is he that goes afoot. I say to my friend. Suppose we try who will get there first. The distance is thirty miles ; the fare ninety cents. That is almost a day's wages. 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 ; J have travelled at that rate by the week together. You will in the meanwhile have earned your fare, and arrive there sometime to-morrow, 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 cut your acquaintance altogether. Such is the universal law, which no man can ever outwit, and with regard to the railroad eveii we may say it is as broad as it is long. To make a railroad round the world available to all mankind is equiva- Digitized by Microsoft® ECONOMY. 55 lent to grading the whole surface of the planet. Men have an indistinct notion that if they keep up this activity of joint stocks and spades long enough all will at length ride somewhere, in next to no time, and for nothing ; but though a crowd rushes to the depot, and the conductor shouts " All aboard ! " when the smoke is blown away and the vapor condensed, it will be perceived that a few are riding, but the rest are run over, — and it will be called, and will be, " A melancholy 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 to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it, reminds me of the English- man 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 start- ing up from all the shanties in the land, " is not this railroad which we have built a good thing ? " Yes, I answer, compai^atively 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 dig- ging in this dirt. Before I finishe(| ttly 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, Digitized by Microsoft® 56 WALDEN. 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 once. I got out several cords of stumps in ploughing, which supplied me with fuel for a long time, and left small circles of virgin mould, easily distinguishable through the summer by the greater luxuriance of the beans there. The dead and for the most part unmer- chantable wood behind my house, and the driftwood from the pond, have supplied the remainder of my fuel. I was obliged to hire a team and a man for the ploughing, though I held the plough myself. My farm outgoes for the first season were, for implements, seed, work, &c., $14 72J. 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 corn. The yellow corn and turnips were too late to come to anything. My whole income from the farm was S2344 Deducting the outgoes 14 72} There are left J871J 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 to-day, notwithstanding the short time occu- pied by my experiment, nay, partly even because of its transient character, I believe that that was doing better than any farmer in Concord did that year. Digitized by Microsoft® ECONOMY. 57 The next year I did better still, for I spaded up all tlie 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 crop 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 plough 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 sum- mer ; and thus he would not be tied to an ox, or horse, or cow, or pig, as at present. I desire to speak im- partially on this point, and as one not interested in the success or failure of the present economical and social arrangements. I was more independent than any farmer in Concord, for I was not anchored to a house or farm, but could follow the bent of my genius, which is a very crooked one, every moment. Besides being better off than they 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 phi- Digitized by Microsoft® 58 WALDEN. losophers, 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. How- ever, / 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 con- structed without this aid, and let man share the glory of such with the ox and horse ; does it foUow that he could not have accomplished works yet more worthy of himself in that case? When men begin to do, not merely unnecessary or artistic, but luxurious and idle work, with their assistance, it is inevitable that a few do all the exchange work with the oxen, or, in other words, become the slaves of the strongest. Man thus not only works for the animal within him, but, for a symbol of this, he works for the animal without him. Though we have many substantial houses of brick or stone, the prosperity of the farmer is still measured by the degree 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 pubUc buildings ; but there are very few halls for free worship or free speech in this county. It should 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 admir- able the Bhagvat-Geeta than all the ruins of the East ! Towers and temples are the luxury of princes. A Digitized by Microsoft® ARCHITECTURE. 59 simple and independent mind does not toil at the bid- ding 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 ambition to perpetuate the memory of themselves by the amount of ham- mered 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 vul- gar 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 civilization which are barbaric and heathenish build splendid temples ; but what you might call Christianity does not. Most of the stone a nation hammers goes toward its tomb only. It buries itself alive. As for the Pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fa,ct that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambi- tious booby, whom it v^ould 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 Bank. It costs more than it comes to. The main- spring is vanity, assisted by the love of garlic and bread and butter. Mr. Baicom, a promising young Digitized by Microsoft® 60 WALDEN. architect, designs it on the back of his Vitruvius, with hard pencil and ruler, and the job is let out to Dobson & Sons, stonecutters. When the thirty centuries be- gin to look down on it, mankind begin to look up at it. As for your high towers and monuments, there was a crazy fellow once in this town who undertook to dig through to China, and he got so far that, as he said, he heard the Chinese pots and kettles rattle; but I think that I shall not go out of my way to ad- mire 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 variotis 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 1st, the time when these estimates were made, though I lived there more than two years, — not counting potatoes, a little green corn, and some peas, which I had raised, nor considering the value ot what was on hand at the last date, was Rice . . . . ^i73i Molasses . . . I 73 Cheapest form of the saccharine Rye meal . . . I04i Indian meal . . 99i Cheaper than rye. Pork . . . . 22 Flour . . . . og Costs more than Indian meal, - both money and trouble. Sugar . . . . 080 Lard . . . . 06s Apples. . . . 25 Dried apple . . 22 Sweet potatoes . 10 One pumpkin . 006 One watermelon 02 Salt 003 Era. P Digitized by Microsoft® ECONOMY. 6 1 Yes, 1 did eat $8 74, all told ; but I should not thus anblushingly publish mv guilt, if I did not know that most of my readers were equally guilty with myself, and that their deeds would look no better in print. The next year I sometimes caught a mess of fish for my dinner, and once I went so far as to slaughter a wood- chuck which ravaged my beanfield, — effect his trans- migration, as a Tartar would say, — and devour him, partly for experiment's sake ; but though it afforded me a momentary enjoyment, notwithstanding 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 S840I Oil and some household utensils 2 00 So that all the pecuniary outgoes, excepting for wash- ing 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 House . ;jS28 12J Farm one year 14 72J Food eigh I months 874 Clothing, &c., eight months 8 40I Oil, &c., eight months 2 00 In all ^61 99i I address myself now to those of my readers who have Digitized by Microsoft® 62 WALDEN. a living to get. And to meet this I have for farm produce sold ^2344 Earned by day-labor . . . .1334 InaU ^678 which subtracted from the sum of the outgoes leaves a balance of $25 2\\ on the one side, — this being very nearly the means with which I started, and the measure of expenses to be incurred, — and on the other, 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 uninstructive they may appear, as they have a certain completeness, have a certain value also. Nothing was given me of which I have not rendered some account. It appears from the above estimate, that my food alone cost me in money about twenty-seven cents a week. It was, for nearly two years after this, rye and Indian meal without yeast, potatoes, rice, a very little salt pork, molasses, and salt, and my drink water. It was fit that I should live on rice, mainly, who loved so well the philosophy 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 frequently 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 Digitized by Microsoft® BREAD 63 use as simple a diet as the animals, and yet retain healtii and strengtli. I Iiave made a satisfactory dinner, satisfactory on several accounts, simply oif a disli of purslane {Poriulaca oleraced) which I gath- ered 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 I 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 necessaries, 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 sub- ject rather from an economic than a dietetic point of view, and he will not venture to plit my abstemious- ness 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 succession, tending and turning them as carefully as an Egyptian his hatching eggs. They were a real cereal fruit which I ripened, and they had to my senses a fragrance like that of other noble fruits, which I kept in as long as possible by wrapping them in cloths. I made a study of the Digitized by Microsoft® 64 WALDEN. ancient and indispensable art of bread-making, con- sulting 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 travelling gradually down in my studies through that accidental souring of the dough which, it is supposed, taught the leavening process, and through the various fermentations thereafter, till I came to " good, sweet, wholesome bread," the staff of life. Leaven, which some deem the soul of bread, the spiritus which fills its cellular tissue, which is religiously preserved like the vestal fire, — some pre- cious bottle-full, I suppose, first brought over in the Mayflower, did the business for America, and its influence is still rising, swelling, spreading, in cerea- lian 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 accident I discovered that even this was not indispensable, — for my discoveries were not by the synthetic but analytic process, — 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 o' carrying a bottle-full in my pocket, which would sometimes pop and dis- charge its contents to my discomfiture. It is simpler and more respectable to omit it. Man is an animal who more than any other can adapt himself to all climates and circumstances. Neither did I put any Digitized by Microsoft® BREAD. 65 sal soda, or other acid or alkali, into my bread. It would seem that 1 made it according to the recipe which Marcus Porcius Cato gave about two centuries before Christ. " Panem depsticium sic facito. Manus mor- tariumque bene lavato. Farinam in mortarium indito, aquae 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, mould it, and bake it under a cover," that is, in a baking-kettle. Not a word about leaven. But I did not always use this staff of life. At one time, owing to the emptiness of my purse, I saw none of it for more than a month. Every New Englander might easily raise all his own breadstuffs in this land of rye and Indian corn, and not depend on distant and fluctuating markets for them. Yet so far are we from simplicity and in- dependence 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, 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 con- centrated sweet, I found by experiment that I could make a very good molasses either of pumpkins or beets, and I knew that I needed only to set out a few maples to obtain it more easily still, and while these F Digitized by Microsoft® 66 WALDEN. were growing I could use various substitutes besides tiiose which I have named. " For," as the Fore- fathers sang, — "we can make liquor to sweeten our lips Of pumpkins and parsnips and walnut-tree chips." Finally, as for salt, that grossest of groceries, to ob- tain this might b": ?, 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 operative as great and memorable as that from the man to the farmer ; — and in a new country fuel is an encumbrance. As for a habitat, if I were not per- mitted still to squat, I might purchase one acre at the same price for which the land I cultivated was sold — namely, eight dollars and eight cents. But as it was, I considered that I enhanced the value of the land by squatting on it. There is a certain class of unbelievers who some- times ask me such questions as, if I think that I can live on vegetable food alone; and to strike at the root of the matter at once, — for the root is faith, — I am accustomed to answer such, that I can live on board nails. It they cannot understand that, they cannot understand much that I have to say. For my part, I am glad to hear of experiments o^this kind being tried ; as that a young man tried for a fortnight Digitized by Microsoft® FURNITURE. 6j to live on hard, raw corn on the ear, using his teeth for all mortar. The squirrel tribe tried the same and succeeded. The human race is interested in these experiments, though a few old women who are inca- pacitated 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. Fur- niture ! Thank God, I can sit and I can stand without the aid of a furniture warehouse. What man but a philosopher would not be ashamed to see bis furniture packed in a cart and going up couijtry exposed to the light of heaven and the eyes of men, a beggarly ac- count of empty boxes ? That is Spaulding's furniture. I could never tell from inspecting such a load whether it belonged to a so-called rich man or a poor one ; the owner always seemed poverty-stricken. Indeed, the more you have of such things the poorer you are. Each load looks as if it 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 moveevtr but to get rid of our furniture, our exuvicB ; 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 Digitized by Microsoft® ##? 68 WALDEN. traps were buckled to a man's belt, and he could not move over the rough country where our lines are cast without dragging them, — dragging his trap. He was a lucky fox that left his tail in the trap. The muskrat will gnaw his third leg off to be free. No wonder man has lost his 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 fol- low him. I cannot but feel compassion 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 ? " IVIy gay butterfly is entangled in a spider's web then. Even those who seem for along while not to have any, if you inquire more narrowly you will find have some stored in somebody's barn. I look upon England to-day as an old gentleman who is travelling with a great deal of baggage, trumpery which has accumulated from long housekeeping, which he has not the courage to burn ; great trunk, little trunk, bandbox, and bundle. Throw away the first three at least. It would surpass the 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 ''mmigrant tottering under a bundle which contained his all — looking like an enormous wen which had grown out of the nape of Digitized by Microsoft® FURNITURE. 69 his neck — I have pitied him, not because that was his all, but because he had all that he could carry. 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 per- chance it would be wisest never to put one's paw into it. I would observe, by the way, that it costs me noth- ing for curtains, 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 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 curtain which nature has provided, than to add a single item to the details of housekeeping. A lady once offered me a mat, but as I had no room to spare within the house, nor time to spare within or without to shake it, I declined it, preferring to wipe my feet on the sod before my door. It is best to avoid the beginnings of evil. Not long since I was present at the auction of a deacon's effects, for his life had not been ineffectual : — " The evil that men do lives after them." As usual, a great proportion was trumpery which had begun to accumulate in his father's day. Among the rest was a dried tapeworm. And now, after lying half a century in his garret and other dust holes, these things were not burned ; instead of a bonfire, or purifying destruction of them, there was an auction, or increasing of them. The neighbors eagerly collected to view them, bought them all, and carefully trans- ported them to their garrets and dust holes, to lie there till their estates are settled, when they will start again. When a man dies he kicks the dust. Digitized by Microsoft® fO WALDEN. The customs of some savage nations might, per- chance, be profitably imitated by us, for they at least go through the semblance of casting their slough an- nually ; they have the idea of the thing, whether they have the reality or not. Would it not be well if we were to celebrate such a " busk," or " feast of first fruits,'' as Bartrarn describes to have been the custom of the Mucclasse Indians ? " When a town celebrates the busk," says he, " having previously provided them- selves with new clothes, new pots, pans, and other household utensils and furniture, they coL'ect all their worn-out clothes and other despicable things, sweep and cleanse their houses, squares, and the whole town, of their filth, which with all the remaining grain and other old provisions they cast together into one com- mon heap, and consume it with fire. After having taken medicine, and fasted for three days, all the fire in the town is extinguished. During this fast they abstain from the gratification of every appetite and passion whatever. A general amnesty is proclaimed ; all malefactors may return to their town. . . . " On the fourth morning, the high priest, by rub- bing dry wood together, produces new fire in the public square, from whence every habitation in the town is supplied with the new and pure flame." They then feast on the new corn and ftuits and dance and sing for three days, " and the four follow- ing days they receive visits and rejoice with their friends from neighboring towns who have in like manner purified and prepared themselves." The Mexicans also practised a similar purification at the end of every fifty-two years, in the belief that ;t was time for the world to come to an end. I have scarcely heard of a truer sacrament, that is, Digitized by Microsoft® ECONOMY. 71 as the dictionary defines it, " outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace," than this, and I have no doubt that they were originally inspired directly from heaven to do thus, though they have no Biblical record of the revelation. For more than five years I maintained myself 1 aus solely by the labor of my hands, and I found tnat by working about six weeks in a year, I could meet all the expenses of living. The whole of my winters, as well as most of my summers, I had free and clear for study. I have thoroughly tried school- keeping, and found that my expenses were in propor- tion, or rather out of proportion, to my income, for I was obliged to dress and train, not to say think and believe, accordingly, and I lost my time into the bargain. As I did not teach for the good of my fellow-men, but simply for a livelihood, this was a failure. I have tried trade ; but I found that it would take ten years to get under way in that, and that then I should probably be on my way to the devil. I was actually afraid that I might by that time be doing what is called a good business. When formerly I was looking about to see what I could do for a living, some sad experience in conforming to the wishes of friends being fresh in my mind to tax my ingenuity, I thought often and seriously of picking huckleberries ; that surely I could do, and its small profits might suffice, — for my greatest skill has been to want but little, — so little capital it required, so little distraction from my wonted moods, I foolishly thought. While my acquaintances went unhesitatingly into trade or the professions, I contemplated this occupation as most like theirs ; ranging the hills all summer to pick the Digitized by Microsoft® 72 WALDEN. berries which came in my way, and thereafter care- lessly dispose of them; so, to keep the flocks of Admetus. I also dreamed that I might gather the wild herbs, or carry evergreens to such villagers as loved to be reminded of the woods, even to the city, by hay-cart loads. But I have since learned that trade curses everything it handles; and though you trade in messages from heaven, the whole curse of trade attaches to the business. As I preferred some things to others, and especially valued my freedom, as I could fare hard and yet suc- ceed well, I did not wish to spend my time in earning rich carpets or other fine furniture, or delicate cookery, or a house in the Grecian or the Gothic style just yet. If there are any to whom it is no interruption to acquire these things, and who know how to use them when acquired, I relinquish to them the pursuit. Some are " industrious," and appear to love labor for its own sake, or perhaps because it keeps them out of worse mischief; to such I have at present nothing to say. Those who would not know what to do with more lei- sure than they now enjoy, I might advise to work twice as hard as they do, — work till they pay for themselves, and get their free papers. For myself I found that the occupation of a day-laborer was the most independent of any, especially as it required only thirty or forty days in a year to support one. The laborer's day ends with the going down of the sun, and he is then free to devote himself to his chosen pursuit, independent of his labor; but his employer, who speculates from month to month, has no respite from one end of the year to the other. In short, I am convinced, both by faith and experi- ence, that to maintain one's self on this earth is not a Digitized by Microsoft® ECONOMY. 73 hardship but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely ; as the pursuits of the simpler nations are still the sports of the more artificial. It is not necessary that a man should earn his living by the sweat of his brow, unless he sweats easier than I do. One young man of my acquaintance, who has in- herited some acres, told me that he thought he should live as I did, if he had the means. I would not have any one adopt my mode of living on any account ; for, besides that before he has fairly learned it I may have found out another for myself, I desire that there may be as many different persons in the world as possible ; but I would have each one be very careful to find out and pursue his own way, and not his father's or his mother's or his neighbor's instead. The youth may build or plant or sail, only let him not be hindered from doing that which he tells me he would like to do. It is by a mathematical point only that we are wise, as the sailor or the fugitive s?ave keeps the polestar in his eye ; but that is sufficient guidance for all our life. We may not arrive at our port within a calculable period, but we would preserve the true course. Undoubtedly, in this case, what is true for one is truer still for a thousand, as a large house is not pro- portionally more expensive than a small one, since one roof may cover, one cellar underlie, and one wall separate several apartments. But for my part, I pre- ferred the solitary dwelling. Moreover, it will com- monly be cheaper to build the whole yourself than to convince another of the advantage of the common wall ; and when you have done this, the common partition, to be much cheaper,, must be a thin one, and that other may prove a bad neighbor, and also not keep his side in repair. The only cooperation which is commonly Digitized by Microsoft® 74 WALDEN. possible is exceedingly partial and superficial ; and what little true cooperation there is, is as if it were not, being a harmony inaudible to men. If a man has faith he will cooperate with equal faith every- where ; if he has not faith, he will continue to live like the rest of the world, whatever company he is joined to. To cooperate, in the highest as well as the lowest sense, means to get our living together. I heard it proposed lately that two young men should travel together over the world, the one without money, earn- ing his means as he went, before the mast and behind the plough, the other carrying a bill of exchange in his pocket. It was easy to see that they could not long be companions or cooperate, since one would not operate at all. They would part at the first interest- ing crisis in their adventures. Above all, as I have implied, the man who goes alone can start to-day; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready, and it may be a long time before they get off. But all this is very selfish, I have heard some of my townsmen say. I confess that I have hitherto indulged very little in philanthropic enterprises. I have made some sacrifices to a sense of duty, and among others have sacrificed this pleasure also. There are those who have used all their arts to persuade me to undertake the support of some poor family in the town ; and if I had nothing to do, — for the devil finds employment for the idle, — I might try my hand at some such pastime as that. However, when I have thought to indulge myself in this respect, and lay their Heaven under an obligation by maintaining certain poor persons in all respects as comfortably as I maintain myself, and have Digitized by Microsoft® PHILANTHROPY. 75 even ventured so far as to make them the offer, they have one and all unhesitatingly preferred to remain poor. While my townsmen and women are devoted in so many ways to the good of their fellows, I trust that one at least may be spared to other and less humane pursuits. You must have a genius for ;harity as well as for anything else. As for Doing- good, that is one of the professions which are full. Moreover, I have tried it fairly, and, strange as it may seem, am satisfied that it does not agree with my con- stitution. Probably I should not consciously and deliberately forsake my particular calling to do the good which society demands of me, to save the universe from annihilation ; and I believe that a like but infinitely greater steadfastness elsewhere is all that now preserves it. But I would not stand between any man and his genius ; and to him who does this work, which I decline, with his whole heart and soul and life, I would say. Persevere, even if the world call it doing evil, as it is most likely they will. I am iar from supposing that my case is a peculiar one ; no doubt many of my readers would make a similar defence. At doing something, — I will not engage that my neighbors shall pronounce it good, — I do not hesitate to say that I should be a capital fel- low to hire ; but what that is, it is for my employer to find out. What good I do, in the common sense of that word, must be aside from my main path, and for the most part wholly unintended. Men say, practi- cally, Begin where you are and such as you are, with- out aiming mainly to become of more worth, and with kindness aforethought go about doing good. If I were to preach at all in this strain, I should say rather, Set about being good. As if the sun should Digitized by Microsoft® 76 WALDEN. stop when he has kindled his fires up to the splendoj of a moon or a star of the sixth magnitude, and go about like a Robin Goodfellow, peeping in at every cottage window, inspiring lunatics, and tainting meats, and making darkness visible, instead of steadily in- creasing his genial heat and beneficence till he is of such brightness that no mortal can look him in the face, and then, and in the meanwhile too, going about the world in his own 6rbit, doing it good, or rather, as a truer philosophy has discovered, the world going about him getting good. When Phaeton, wishing to prove his heavenly birth by his benefi- cence, had the sun's chariot but one day, and drove out of the beaten track, he burned several blocks of houses in the lower streets of heaven, and scorched the surface of the earth, and dried up every spring, and made the great desert of Sahara, till at length Jupiter hurled him headlong to the earth with a thunderbolt, and the sun, through grief at his death, did not shine for a year. There is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness tainted. It is human, it is divine, carrion. If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life, as from that dry and parching wind of the African deserts called the simoom, which fills the mouth and nose and ears and eyes with dust till you are suifocated, for .ear that I should get some of his good done to me, — some of its virus mingled with my blood. No, — in this case I would rather suffer evil the natural way. A man is not a good man to me because he will feed me if I should be starving, or warm me if I should be freezing, or pull me out of a ditch if I should ever fall into one. I can find you Digitized by Microsoft® PHILANTHROPY. 77 a Newfoundland dog that will do as much . Philan- thropy is not love for one's fellow-man in the broad- est sense. Howard was no doubt an exceedingly kind and worthy man in his way, and has his reward ; but, comparatively speaking, what are a hundred Howards to us, if their philanthropy do not help us in cur best estate, when we are most worthy to be helped? I never heard of a philanthropic meeting in which it was sincerely proposed to do any good to me, or the like of me. The Jesuits were quite balked by those Indians who, being burned at the stake, suggested new modes of tor- ture to their tormentors. Being superior to physical suffering, it sometimes chanced that they were supe- rior to any consolation which the missionaries could offer ; and the law to do as you would be done by fell with less persuasiveness on the ears of those who, for their part, did not care how they were done by, who loved their enemies after a new fashion, and came very near freely forgiving them all they did. Be sure that you give the poor the aid they most need, though it be your examp'e which leaves them far behind. If you give money, spend yourself with it, and do not merely abandon it to them. We make curious mistakes sometimes. Often the poor man is not so cold and hungry as he is dirty and ragged and gross. It is partly his taste, and not merely his misfortune. If you give him money, he will perhaps buy more rags with it. I was wont to pity the clumsy Irish laborers who cut ice on the pond, in such mean and ragged clothes, while I shivered in my more tidy and some- what more fashionable garments, till, one bitter cold day, one who had slipped into the water came to my house to warm him, and I saw him strip off three Digitized by Microsoft® 78 WALDEN. pairs of pants and two pairs of stockings ere he got down to the skin, though they were dirty and ragged enough, it is true, and that he could afford to refuse the extra garments which I offered him, he had so many intra ones. This ducking was the very thing he needed. Then I began to pity myself, and I saw that it would be a greater charity to bestow on me a flannel shirt than a whole slop-shop on him. There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his' mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to re- lieve. It is the pious slave-breeder devoting the proceeds of every tenth slave to buy a Sunday's liberty for the rest. Some show their kindness to the poor by employing them in their kitchens. Would they not be kinder if they employed them- selves there? You boast of spending a tenth part of your income in charity ; maybe you should spend the nine tenths so, and done with it. Society recovers only a tenth part of the property then. Is this owing to the generosity of him in whose possession it is found, or to the remissness 'f the officers of justice? Philanthropy is almost the only virtue which is suf- ficiently appreciated by mankind. Nay, it is greatly overrated ; and it is our selfishness which overrates it. A robust poor man, one sunny day here in Concord, praised a fellow-townsman to me, because, as he said, he was kind to the poor ; meaning him- self. The kind uncles and aunts of the race are more esteemed than its true spiritual fathers and mothers. 1 once heard a reverend lecturer on England, a man of learning and Intelligence, after enumerating her Digitized by Microsoft® PHILANTHROPY. 79 scientific, literary, and political worthies, Shakspeare, Bacon, Cromwell, Milton, Newton, and others, speak next of her Christian heroes, whom, as if his profes- sion required it of him, he elevated to a place far above all the rest, as the greatest of the great. They were Penn, Howard, and Mrs. Fry. Every one must feel the falsehood and cant of this. The last were not England's best men and women ; only, perhaps, her best philanthropists. I would not subtract anything from the praise that is due to philanthropy, but merely demand justice for all who by their lives and works are a blessing to mankind. I do not value chiefly a man's uprightness and benevolence, which are, as it were, his stem and leaves. Those plants of whose greenness withered we make herb tea for the sick, serve but a humble use, and are most employed by quacks. I want the flower and fruit of a man ; that some fragrance be wafted over from him to me, and some ripeness flavor our intercourse. His goodness must not be a partial and transitory act, but a constant superfluity, which costs him nothing and of which he is unconscious;. This is a charity which hides a muhitude of sins,. The philanthropist too often surrounds mankind with the remembrance of his own cast-ofl" griefs as an at- mosphere, and calls it sympathy. We should impart our courage, and not our despair, our health and ease, and not our disease, and take care that this does not spread by contagion. From what southern plains comes up the voice of wailing? Under what latitudes reside the heathen to whom we would send light? Who is that intemperate and brutal man whom we would redeem? If anything ail a man, so that he does not perform his functions, if he have a pain in Digitized by Microsoft® So WALDEN-. his bowels even, — for that is the seat of sympathy,— he forthwith sets about reforming — the world. Being a microcosm himself, he discovers, and it is a true dis- covery, and he is the man to make it, — that the world has been eating green apples ; to his eyes, in fact, the globe itself is a great green apple, which there is dan- ger awful to think of that the children of men will nibble before it is ripe ; and straightway his drastic philanthropy seeks out the Esquimau and the Pata- gonian, and embraces the populous Indian and Chinese villages ; and thus, by a few years of philanthropic ac- tivity, the powers in the meanwhile using him for their own ends, no doubt, he cures himself of his dyspep- sia, the globe acquires a faint blush on one or both of its cheeks, as if it were beginning to be ripe, and life loses its crudity and is once more sweet and whole- some to live. I never dreamed of any enormity greater than I have committed. I never knew, and never shall know, a worse man than myself. I believe that what so saddens the reformer is not his sympathy with his fellows in distress, but, though he be the holiest son of God, is his private ail. Let this be righted, let the spring come to him, the morn- ing rise over his couch, and he will forsake his gener- ous companions without apology. My excuse for not lecturing against the use of tobacco is that I never chewed it ; that is a penalty which reformed tobacco- chewers have to pay ; though there are things enough I have chewed, which I could lecture against. If you should ever be betrayed into any of these philanthro- pies, do not let your left hand know what your right hand does, for it is not worth knowing. Rescue the drowning and tie your shoe-strings. Take your timej and set about some free labor. Digitized by Microsoft® PHILANTHROPY. 8 1 Our manners have been corrupted by communica- tion with the saints. Our hymn-books resound with a melodious cursing of God and enduring him forever. One would say that even the prophets and redeemers had rather consoled the fears than confirmed the hopes of man. There is nowhere recorded a simple and irre- pressible satisfaction with the gift of life, any memo- rable praise of God. All health and success does me good, however far off and withdrawn it may appear ; all disease and failure helps to make me sad and does me evil, however much sympathy it may have with me or I with it. If, then, we would indeed restore man- kind by truly Indian, botanic, magnetic, or natural means, let us first be as simple and well as Nature ourselves, dispel the clouds which hang over our own brows, and take up a little life into our pores. Do not stay to be an overseer of the poor, but endeavor to become one of the worthies of the world. I read in the Gulistan, or Flower Garden, of Sheik Sadi of Shiraz, that " They asked a wise man, saying : Of the many celebrated trees which the Most High God has created lofty and umbrageous, they call none azad, or free, excepting the cypress, which bears no fruit ; what mystery is there in this ? He replied : Each has its appropriate produce, and appointed season, during the continuance of which it is fresh and bloom- ing, and during their absence dry and withered ; to neither of which states is the cypress exposed, be- ing always flourishing; and of this nature are the azads, or religious independents. —^ Fix not thy hear t , on that which is tr ansi tory \ for the Dijlah, or Tigris, will continue to tlow tnrougn Bagdad after the race of caliphs is extinct : if thy hand has plenty, be liberal as the date tree ; but if it affords nothing to give away, be an azad, or free man, like the cypress." Digitized by Microsoft® COMPLEMENTAL VERSES. THE PRETENSIONS OF POVERTY. "Thou dost presume too much, poor needy wretch. To claim a station in the firmament, Because thy humble cottage, or thy tub, Nurses some lazy or pedantic virtue In the cheap sunshine or by shady springs, With roots and pot-herbs ; where thy right hand, Tearing those humane passions from the mind, Upon whose stocks fair blooming virtues flourish, Degradeth nature, and benumbeth sense, And, Gorgon-like, turns active men to stone. We not require the dull society Of your necessitated temperance. Or that unnatural stupidity That knows nor joy nor sorrow ; nor your forc'd Falsely exalted passive fortitude Above the active. This low abject brood. That fix their seats in mediocrity, Become your servile minds ; but we advance Such virtues only as admit excess, Brave, bounteous acts, regal magnificence. All-seeing prudence, magnanimity That knows no bound, and that heroic virtue For which antiquity hath left no name. But patterns only, such as Hercules, Achilles, Theseus. Back to thy loath'd cell ; And when thou seest the new enlightened sphere, Study to know but what those worthies were." T. Carew, 82 Digitized by Microsoft® n. WHERE I LIVED, AND WHAT I LIVED FOR. At a certain season of our life we are accustomed to consider every spot as the possible site of a house. I have thus surveyed the country on every side within a dozen miles of where I live. In imagination I have bought all the farms in succession, for all were to be bought, and I knew their price. I walked over each farmer's premises, tasted his wild apples, discoursed on husbandry with him, took his farm at his price, at any price, mortgaging it to him in my mind ; even put a higher price on it, — took everything but a deed of it, — took his word for his deed, for I dearly love to talk, — cultivated it, and him too to some extent, I trust, and withdrew when I had enjoyed it long enough, leaving him to carry it on. This expe- rience entitled me to be regarded as a sort of real- estate broker by my friends. Wherever I sat, there I might live, and the landscape radiated from me ac- cordingly. What is a house but a sedes, a seat ? — better if a country seat. I discovered many a site for a house not likely to be soon improved, which some might have thought too far from the village, but to my eyes the village was too far from it. Well, there I might live, I said ; and there I did live, for an hour, a summer and a winter life ; saw how I could 8* Digitized by Microsoft® 84 WALDEN. let the years run off, buffet the winter through, and see the spring come in. The future inhabitants of this region, wherever they may place their houses, may be sure that they have been anticipated. An afternoon sufificed to lay out the land into orchard, woodlot, and pasture, and to decide what fine oaks or pines should be left to stand before the door, and whence each blasted tree could be seen to the best advantage ; and then I let it lie, fallow perchance, fjy^. f a man is rich iji_prQportioH- to thcBumber of_ihings I which he can afford to let alone. My imagination carried me so far that I even had the refusal of several farms, — the refusal was all I wanted, — but I never got my fingers burned by actual possession. The nearest that I came to actual possession was when I bought the HoUowell place, and had begun to sort my seeds, and collected mate- rials with which to make a wheelbarrow to carry it on or off with ; but before the owner gave me a deed of it, his wife — every man has such a wife — changed her mind and wished to keep it, and he offered me ten dollars to release him. Now, to speak the truth, I had but ten cents in the world, and it surpassed my arithmetic to tell, if I was that man who had ten cents, or who had a farm, or ten dollars, or all to- gether. However, I let him keep the ten dollars and the farm too, for I had carried it far enough ; or rather, to be generous, I sold him the farm for just what I gave for it, and, as he was not a rich man, made him a present of ten dollars, and still had my ten cents, and seeds, and materials for a wheelbarrow left. I found thus that I had been a rich man with- out any damage to my property. But I retained the landscape, and I have since annually carried off what Digitized by Microsoft® WHERE I LIVED. 85 it yielded without a wheelbarrow. With respect to landscapes, — " I am monarch of all I survey. My right there is none to dispute." J have frequen tly seenanoet withdraw, having ^"J°2£a.M&4D,g§t valuable part of a farm, while Tne crusty farmer supposed that he had gora^w~wild apples on ly. Wtiy, tJie own'sTdoes notknowiTTor many years when a poet has put his farm in rhyme, the most admirable kind of invisible fence, has fairly impounded it, milked it, skimmed it, and got all the cream, and left the farmer only the skimmed milk. The real attractions of the Hollowell farm, to me, were : its complete retirement, being about two miles from the village, half a mile from the nearest neigh- bor, and separated from the highway by a broad field ; its bounding on the river, which the owner said protected it by its fogs from frosts in the spring, though that was nothing to me ; the gray color and ruinous state of the house and barn, and the dilapi- dated fences, which put such an interval between me and the last occupant ; the hollow and lichen-covered apple trees, gnawed by rabbits, showing what kind of neighbors I should have ; but above all, the recollec- tion I had of it from my earliest voyages up the river, when the house was concealed behind a dense grove of red maples, through which I heard the house-dog bark. I was in haste to buy it, before the proprietor finished getting out some rocks, cutting down the hollow apple trees, and grubbing up some young birches which had sprung up in the pasture, or, in short, had made any more of his improvements. To enjoy these advantages I was ready to carry it on; Digitized by Microsoft® '86 WALDEN. like Atlas, t g„tak£-thje-.jgor,ld on .my^hauldgi, nev^hearcTwhat compensation he^receiaed for tihat. /^ ~^ and do all those things whicTi had no other motive or excuse but that I might pay for it and be unmo- lested in my possession of it ; for I knew all the while that it would yield the most abundant crop of the kind I wanted if I could only afford to let it alone, ^ut it turned out as I have said. All that I could say, then, with respect to farming on a large scale (I have always cultivated a garden), was that I had had my seeds ready. Many think that seeds improve with age. I have no dou bt that time riisrnminatps hptwppn the?nfini anri rhp"'| ^ari • and, when atJaatI shall plant, I sh,al,l be lessJikeJ^J;a___ lie disappointed. But I wouldsajr_to_jn£,jeliaai& , once for an,~;^s-toirgrasT7g5StBIe''nve free and u ncom- twitted. It makes but littIe°°o[iBerence whether you are committed to a farm or the county jail. ■" Old Cato, whose " De Re Rustici " is my " cultiva- tor,'' says, and the only translation I have seen makes sheer nonsense of the passage, " When you think of getting a farm, turn it thus in your mind, not to buy greedily ; nor spare your pains to look at it, and do not think it enough to go round it once. The oftener you go there the more it will please you, if it is good." I thi nk I shall not buy greedily,_but go round and jound iFas long as I live, and be burie d in~it fir st, that it may pleaseTne the more at last. The present was my next experiment of this kind, which I purpose to describe more at length ; for con- venience, putting the experience of two years into one. As I have said, I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer Digitized by Microsoft® WHERE I LIVED. 87 1 the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake nhy neighbors up. I When first I toolc up my abode in the woods, that isA began to spend my nights as well as days there, wllich, by accident, was on Independence Day, or the foiurth of JylyjJiS^s^ my house was not finished fof wirVter, but was merely a defence against the rain, witTiout plastering or chimney, the walls being of rou^h weather-stained boards, with wide chinks, whicsh made it cool at night. The upright white hewm studs and freshly planed door and window cas- ings rave it a clean and airy look, especially in the morni/ng, when its timbers were saturated with dew, so thg.t I fancied that by noon some sweet gum would exut^'j from them. To my imagination it retained throljighout the day more or less of this auroral char- acter, reminding me of a certain house on a mountain which I had visited the year before. This was an airy and unplastered cabin, fit to entertain a travelling god, and where a goddess might trail her garments. The winds which passed over my dwelling were such as sweep over the ridges of mountains, bearing the broken strains, or celestial parts only, of terrestrial music. The morning wind forever blows, the poem'~7 ^Ajl^(^^ of creation is uninterrupted ; but few are the ears that I hear it. _jQiyai2i^_i§_'?^_iliS»£li^Sfe-,Sf»tJ*SL.jearA_/ _pvervwhe re. The only house I had been the owner of before, if I except a boat, was a tent, which I used occasionally when making excursions in the summer, and this is still rolled up in my garret ;_butJh£_ho.at5.a£ter_pass- ins' from hand to..hand, haslgone-dowa^the-stpeaMiof linjg. With this more substantial shelter about me, I had made some progress toward settling in the il^t - ilS^'-^'^^iA^v 88 WALDEN. world. This frame, so slightly clad, was a sort of crystallization around me, and reacted on the builder It was suggestive somewhat as a picture in outlines/ I did not need to go out doors to take the air, for tl/ie atmosphere within had lost none of its freshness. I It was not so much within doors as behind a dciior where I sat, even in the rainiest weather. The Het.ri- vansa says, "An abode without birds is like a mjeat without seasoning." Such was not my abode, fci)r I found myself suddenly neighbor to the birds ; noiit by having imprisoned one, but having caged myself /'near them. I was not only nearer to some of these Ahich commonly frequent the garden and the orchard, but to those wilder and more thrilling songsters oltf the forest which never, or rarely, serenade a village^-,— the wood-thrush, the veery, the scarlet tanager^ the field-sparrow, the whippoorwill, and many others. I was seated by the shore of a small pond, about a mile and a half south of the village of Concord and somewhat higher than it, in the midst of an extensive wood between that town and Lincoln, and about two miles south of that our only field known to fame, Concord Battle Ground ; but I was so low in the woods that the opposite shore, half a mile off, like the rest, covered with wood, was my most distant horizon. For the first week, whenever I looked out on the pond it impressed me like a tarn high up on the side of a mountain, its bottom far above the surface of other lakes, and, as the sun arose, I saw it throwing off its mighty clothing of mist, and here and there, by de- grees, its soft ripples or its smooth reflecting surface were revealed, while the mists, like ghosts, were stealthily withdrawing in every direction into the woods, as at the breaking up of some nocturnal Digitized by Microsoft® WHERE I LIVED. 85 conventicle. The very dew seemed to hang upon the trees later into the day than usual, as on the sides of mountains. This small lake was of most value as a neighbor in the intervals of a gentle rain storm in August, when, both air and water being perfectly still, but the sky overcast, mid-afternoon had all the serenity of even- ing, and the wood-thrush sang around, and was heard from sliore to shore. A lake like this is never smoother than at such a time; and the clear portion of the air above it being shallow and darkened by clouds, the water, full of light and reflections, _be- c omes a lower heaven jtgf'*^ "" nniig.k the more im- portan t. From a hill top near by, where the wood ' had recently been cut off, there was a pleasing vista southward across the pond, through a wide indenta- tion in the hills which form the shore there, where their opposite sides sloping toward each other sug- gested a stream flowing out in that direction through a wooded valley, but stream there was none. That way I looked between and over the near green hills to some distant and higher ones in the horizon, tinged with blue. Indeed, by standing on tiptoe I could catch a glimpse of some of the peaks of the still bluer and more distant mountain ranges in the north- west, those true-blue coins from heaven's own mint, and also of some portion of the "village. But in other directions, even from this point, I could not see, over or beyond the woods which surrounded me. It wp M tn have some water in your neighborhood;]^ - •^OTyj^ buoyancy to and float the earth . ^One value even/ of the smallest weirTs"iETiaF"wTTen" you look into it\ you see that the earth is not continent but insular. Thigjg ag impartarit as t hat it keeps butteT —COoL ' Digitized by Microsoft® go WALDEN. When I looked across the pond from this peak toward the Sudbury meadows, which in time of flood I dis- tinguished elevated perhaps by a mirage in their seething valley, like a coin in a basin, all the earth beyond the pond appeared like a thin crust insulated and floated even by this small sheet of intervening vjfater, and I was reminded that this on which I dwelt was but dry land. Though the view from my door was still more con- tracted, I did not feel crowded or confined in the least. There _w^_j)ag|:m-e PI!iI!!!IIlb.J2U^y imnginn tion. T he low shrub-oak plateau to which the op- posite shore arose, stretched away toward the prairies of the West and the steppes of Tartary, affording ample room for all the roving families of men. "' There are none happy in the world but beings who enjoy freely a vast horizon," — said Damodara, when >^ his herds required new and larger pastures. ' Both place and time were changed and I dwelt nearer to those parts of the universe and to those \^ ears in history which had most attracted me. Where I live was as far off as many a region viewed nightly '4 by astronomers. We are wont to imagine rare and delectable places in some remote and more celestial corner of the system, behind the constellation of Cassiopeia's Chair, far from noise and disturbance. I discovered that my house actually had its site in ) such a withdrawn, but forever new and unprofaned, : part of the universe. If it were worth the while to settle in those parts near to the Pleiades or the Hyades, to Aldebaran or Altair, then I was really there, or at an equal remoteness from the life which I had left behind, dwindled and twinkling with as fine a ray to my nearest neighbor, and to be seen Digitized by Microsoft® \ WHERE r LIVED. 91 only in moonless nights by him. Such was that part of creation where I had squatted : — " There was a shepherd that did live, And held his thoughts as high As were the mounts whereon his flocks Did hourly feed him by." What should we thinlc of the shepherd's life if his flocks always wandered to higher pastures than his thoughts ? Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make=- my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself. I have been as sincere a wor- shipper of Aurora as the Greeks. I got up early and bathed in the pond ; that was a religious exercise, and one of the best things which I did. They say that characters were engraven on the bathing tub of king Tching-thang to this effect : " Renew thyself completely each day ; do it again, and again, and for- ever again." I can understand that. Morning brings., back the heroic ages. I was as much affected by the faint hum of a mosquito making its invisible and un- imaginable tour through my apartment at earliest dawn, when I was sitting with door and windows open, as I could be by any trumpet that ever sang of fame. It was Homer's requiem ; itself an Iliad and Odyssey in the air, singing its own wrath and wander- ings. There was something cosmical about it ; a standing advertisement, till forbidden, of the ever- lasting vigor and fertility of the world. The morn- ing, which is the most memorable season of the day, is the awakening hour. Then there is least som- nolence in us ; and for an hour, at least, some part of us awakes which slumbers all the rest of the day Digitized by Microsoft® 92 walden: and night. Little is to be expected of that day, if \\ can be called a day, to which we are not awakened by our Genius, but by the mechanical nudgings of some servitor, are not awakened by our own newly acquired force and aspirations from within, accom- panied by the undulations of celestial music, instead of factory bells, and a fragrance filling the air — to a higher life than we fell asleep from ; and thus the darkness bear its fruit, and prove itself to be good, no less than the light. That man who does not believe that each day contains an earlier, more sacred, and auroral hour than he has yet profaned, has despaired of life, and is pursuing a descending and darkening way. After a partial cessation of his sensuous life, the soul of man, or its organs rather, are reinvigorated each day, and his Genius tries again what noble life it can make. All memorable events, I should say, transpire in morning time and in a morning atmospher;. The Vedas say, "All in- j telligences awake with the morning." Poetry and . art, and the fairest and most memorable of the actions \Ny of men, date from such an hour. All poets and V X 'P^™^^' ^^^ Memnon, are the children of Aurora, and \ V Ay /emit their music at sunrise. To hi m whose,plastic 1; \ ■S I and vigorous thought keeps pace mnn Ke^n. the r ^ -^ / '"gayjs-aq^ g'petnal-m-o.rning . It nSTteirsnotwfet t{ie ^ K / clocks say or the attitudes and labors of men. Morn- ^^ / ing is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me. Jv ^/ Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep. Why A / is it that men give so poor an account of their day if \ ' they have not been slumbering ? They are not such poor calculators. If they had not been overcome with drowsiness they would have performed something. The millions are awake enough for physical labor; Digitized by Microsoft® WHAT I LIVED FOR. 93 but only one in a million is awake enough for eflfective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive. Ihavenever yet met a inan who was_ quite awaKe. ^ Hpw could 1 teygJOTtetliim in "Ttie face ? ' ~~" '- We must learn to reaw'at'en"'a(lrd»«keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite ex- pectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful ; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very at- mosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To effect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the con- templation of his most elevated and critical hour. If we refused, or rather used up, such paltry information as we get, the oracles would distinctly inform us how this might be done. " — I went to the woods becausej wished loJuccdelib- eratelyj to front only the essential facts of hfe, and see if i 'could not learn what it had to teach, and not, wKen I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear ; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless - it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life,~to live so' sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cuFa^broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and Digitized by Microsoft® 94 WALDEN. genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world ; or if it were sublime, to know it by experi- ence, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. For most men, it appears to me, are in a strar.ge uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to "glorify God and enjoy him forever." Still we live meanly, like ants ; though the fable tells us that we were long ago changed into men ; like pygmies we fight with cranes ; it is error upon error, and clout upon clout, and our best virtue has for its occasion a superfluous and evitable wretchedness. Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lum.p the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity ! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hun- dred or a thousand ; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail. In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckon- ing, and h'. must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds. Simplify, simplify. Instead of three meals a day, if it be necessary eat but one ; instead of a hundred dishes, five ; and reduce other things in pro- portion. Our life is like a German Confederacy, made up of petty states, with its boundary forever fluctuating, so that even a German cannot tell you how it is bounded at any moment. The nation itself, with all its so-called internal improvements, which, Digitized by Microsoft® WHAT T LIVED FOR. 95 by the way, are all external and superficial, is just such an unwieldy and overgrown establishment, clut- tered with furniture and tripped up by its own traps, ruined by luxury and heedless expense, by want of calculation and a worthy aim, as the million house- holds in the land; and the only cure for it as for them is in a rigid economy, a stern and more than Spartan simplicity of life and elevation of purpose. It lives too fast. Men think that it is essential that the Nation have commerce, and export ice, and talk through a telegraph, and ride thirty miles an hour, without a doubt, whether they do or not ; but whether we should live like baboons or like men, is a little uncertain. If we do not get out sleepers, and forge rails, and devote days and nights to the work, but go to tinkering upon our lives to improve them, who will build railroads ? And if ra ilroads are not bj ji lty i how shall we get to heaven liTseason? But Tf we stay at ~~-huniu und mind ciu* bo»m(;ss;"'^o will want rail- roads ? We do not ride on the railroad ; it rides upon us. Did you ever think what those sleepers are that underlie the railroad? Each one is a man, an Irishman, or a Yankee man. The rails are laid on them, and they are covered with sand, and the cars run smoothly over them. They are sound sleepers, I assure you. And every few years a nevF lot is laid down and run over; so that, if some have the pleasure of riding on a rail, others have the mis- fortune to be ridden upon. And when they run over~l a man that is walking in his sleep, a supernumerary I sleeper in the wrong position, and wake him up, they I suddenly stop the cars, and make a hue and cry about I it, as if this were an exception. I am glad to knowj that it takes a gang of men for every five miles to Digitized by Microsoft® q6 WALDEH. keep the sleepers down and level in their beds as it is, for this is a sign that they may sometime get up again. Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life ? Wejire deteraunedto be starved before we a re hunj iy^ M"en~say thaT'a StltOh lii li me sa>'CQ nine, and so they take a thousand stitches to-day to save nine to-morrow. As for work, we haven't any of any consequence. We have the Saint Vitus' dance, and cannot possibly keep our heads still. If I should only give a few pulls at the parish bell-rope, as for a fire, that is, without setting the bell, there is hardly a man on his farm in the outskirts of Concord, not- withstanding that press of engagements which was his excuse so many times this morning, nor a boy, nor a woman. I might almost say, but would forsake all and follow that sound, not mainly to save property from the flames, but, if we will confess the truth, much more to see it burn, since burn it must, and we, be it known, did not set it on fire, — or to see it put out, and have a hand in it, if that is done as handsomely ; yes, even if it were the parish church itself. Hardly a man takes a half hour's nap after dinner, but when he wakes he holds up his head and asks, "What's the news?" as if the rest of mankind had stood his sentinels. Some give directions to be waked every half hour, doubtless for no other purpose ; and then, to pay for it, they tell what they have dreamed. After a night's sleep the news is as indispensable ao the breakfast. " Pray tell me anything new that has happened to a man anywhere on this globe," — and he reads it over his coffee and rolls, that a man has had his eyes gouged out this morning on the Wachito River ; never dreaming the while that he lives in the Digitized by Microsoft® WHAT I LIVED FOR. 97 dark unfathomed mammoth cave of this world, and has but the rudiment of an eye himself. For my part, I could easily do without the post- office. I think that there are very few important com- munications made through it. To speak critically, I never received more than one or two letters in my life — I wrote this some years ago — that were worth the postage. The penny-post is, commonly, an in- stitution through which you seriously offer a man that penny for his thought which is so often safely offered in jest. And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter, — we never need read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications ? To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea. Yet not a few are greedy after this gossip. There was such a rush, as I hear, the other day at one of the offices to learn the foreign news by the last arrival, that several large squares of plate glass belonging to the establishment were broken by the pressure, — news which I seriously think a ready wit might write a twelvemonth or twelve years before- hand with sufficient accuracy. As for Spain, for instance, if you know how to throw in Don Carlos and the Infanta, and Don Pedro and Seville and Granada, from time to time in the right proportions, — they may have changed the names a little since I saw the papers, — and serve up a bull-fight when other enter Digitized by Microsoft® 98 WALDEAT. tainroents fail, it will be true to the letter, and give us as good an idea of tlie exact state or ruin of things in Spain as the most succinct and lucid reports under this head in the newspapers : and as for England, almost the last significant scrap of news from that quarter was the revolution of 1649; and if you have learned the history of her crops for an average year, 'you never need attend to that thing again, unless your speculations are of a merely pecuniary character. If one may judge who rarely looks into the newspapers, nothing new does ever happen in foreign parts, a French revolution not excepted. What news! how much more important to know what that is which was never old ! " Kieou-he-yu (great dignitary of the state of Wei) sent a man to Khoung-tseu to know his news. Khoung-tseu caused the messenger to be seated near him, and questioned him in these terms: What is your master doing? The messenger answered with respect: My master desires to diminish the number of his faults, but he cannot come to the end of them. The messenger be- ing gone, the philosopher remarked : What a worthy messenger! What a worthy messenger! " The preacher, instead of vexing the ears of drowsy farmers on their day of test at the end of the week, — for Sun- day is the fit conclusion of an ill-spent week, and not the fresh and brave beginning of a new one, — with this one other draggletail of a sermon, should shout with thundering voice, — "Pause! Avast! Why so seeming fast, but deadly slow? " Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is fabulous. If men would stead- ily observe realities only, and not allow themselves to be deluded, life, to compare it with such things as we Digitized by Microsoft® WHAT I LIVED FOR. 99 know, would be like a fairy tale and the Arabian Nights' Entertainments. If we respected only what is inevitable and has a right to be, music and poetry would resound along the streets. When we are un- hurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existerxe, — that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality. This is always exhil- arating and sublime. By closing the eyes and slumber- ing, and consenting to be deceived by shows, nren establish and confirm their daily life of routine and habit everywhere, which still is built on purely illusory foundations. Children, who play life, discern its true law and relations more clearly than men, who fail to live it worthily, but who think that they are wiser by experi- ence, that is, by failure. I have read in a Hindoo book that " There was a king's son, who, being expelled in infancy from his native city, was brought up by a forester, and, growing up to maturity in that state, imagined himself to belong to the barbarous race with which he lived. One of his father's ministers having discovered him, revealed to him what he was, and the misconception of his character was removed, and he knew himself to be a prince. So soul," continues the Hindoo philosopher, "from the circumstances in which it is placed, mistakes its own character, until the truth is revealed to it by some holy teacher, and then it knows itself to be Brahme.'''' I perceive that we in- habitants of New England live this mean life that we do because our vision does not penetrate the surface- of things. We think that that is which appears to be^ If a man should walk through this town and see only the reality, where, think ^ ou, would the " Mill-dam '•' go to? If he should give us an account of the realities Digitized by Microsoft® lOO WALDEN. he beheld there, we should not recognize the place in his description. Look at a meeting-house, or a court- house, or a jail, or a shop, or a dwelling-house, and say what that thing really is before a true gaze, and they would all go to pieces in your account of them. Men esteem truth remote, in the outskirts of the sys- tem, behind the farthest star, before Adam and after the last man. In eternity there is indeed something true and sublime. But all these times and places and occasions are now and here. God Himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages. And we are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us. The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions ; whether we travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us. Let us spend our lives in conceiving then. The poet or the artist never yet had so fair and noble a design but some of his posterity at least could accomplish it. Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito's wing that falls on the rails. Let us rise early and fast, or break fast, gently and without per- turbation ; let company come and let company go, let the bells ring and the children cry, — determined to make a day of it. Why should we knock under and go with the stream ? Let us not be upset and over- whelmed in that terrible rapid and whirlpool called a dinner, situated in the meridian shallows. Weather this danger and you are safe, for the rest of the way is down hill. With unrelaxed nerves, with morning vigor, sail by it, looking anoaier way, tied to the mast like Ulysses. If the engine whistles, let it whistle till Digitized by Microsoft® WHAT I LIVED FOR. 101 it is hoarse for its pains. If the bell rings, why should we run? We will consider what kind of music they are like. Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opin- ion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through church and state, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say-. This is, and no mistake ; and then begin, having a point cfappui, below freshet and frost and fire, a place where you might found a wall or a state, or set a lamp-post safely, or perhaps a gauge, not a Nilometer, but a Realometer, that future ages might know how deep a freshet of shams and appear- ances had gathered from time to time. If you stand right fronting and face to face to a fact, you will see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces, as if it were a cimeter, and feel its sweet edge dividing you through the heart and marrow, and so you will happily con- clude your mortal career. Be it life or death, we crave only reality. If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel cold in the extremities ; if we are alive, let us go about our business. Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it ; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet, I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born. The intellect is a cleaver ; it discerns and rifts its way into the secret of things. I Digitized by Microsoft® I02 WALDEN. do not wish to be any more busy with my hands than . is necessary. My head is hands and feet. I feel all my best faculties concentiated in it. My instinct tells me that my head is an organ for burrowing, as some creatures use their snout and fore-paws, and with it I would mine and burrow my way through these hills. I think that the richest vein is somewhere hereabouts ; so by the divining rod and thin rising vapors I judge ; and here I will begin to mine. Digitized by Microsoft® HI. READING. With a little more deliberation in the choice oi their pursuits, all men would perhaps become essen- tially students and observers, for certainly their nature and destiny are interesting to all alike. In accu- mulating property for ourselves or our posterity, in founding a family or a state, or acquiring fame even, we are mortal ; but in dealing with truth we are im- mortal, and need fear no change nor accident. The oldest Egyptian or Hindoo philosopher raised a cor- ner of the veil from the statue of the divinity ; and still the trembling robe remains raised, and I gaze upon as fresh a glory as he did, since it was I in him that was then so bold, and it is he in me that now re- views the vision. No dust has settled on that robe ; no time has elapsed since that divinity was revealed. That time which we really improve, or which is im- provable, is neither past, present, nor future. My residence was more favorable, not only to thought, but to serious reading, than a university ; and though I was beyond the range of the ordinary circulating library, I had more than ever come within the influence of those books which circulate round the world, whose sentences were first written on bark, and are now merely copied from time to time on to linen paper. Says the poet Mir Camar Uddin Mast, " Be- ing seated to run through the region of the spiritual 103 Digitized by Microsoft® 104 WALDEN. world ; I have had this advantage in books. To be intoxicated by a single glass of wine ; I have experi- enced this pleasure when I have drunk the liquor of the esoteric doctrines." I kept Homer's Iliad on my table through the summer, though I looked at his page only now and then. Incessant labor with my hands, at first, for I had my house to finish and my beans to hoe at the same time, made more study im- possible. Yet I sustained myself by the prospect of such reading in future. I read one or two shallow books of travel in the intervals of my work, till that employment made me ashamed of myself, and I asked where it was then that / lived. The student may read Homer or ^schj'lus in the Greek without danger of dissipation or luxuriousness, for it implies that he in some measure emulate their heroes, and consecrate morning hours to their pages. The heroic books, even if printed in the character of our mother tongue, will always be in a language dead to degenerate times ; and we must laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line, conjecturing a larger sense than common use permits out of what wisdom and valor and generosity we have. The modern cheap and fertile press, with all its translations, has done little to bring us nearer to the heroic writers of antiq- uity. They seem as solitary, and the letter in which they are printed as rare and curious, as ever. It is worth the expense of youthful days and costly hours, if you learn only some words of an ancient language, which are raised out of the trivialness of the street, to be perpetual suggestions and provocations. It is not in vain that the farmer remembers and repeats the few Latin words which he has heard. Men sometimes speak as if the study of the classics would at length Digitized by Microsoft® READING. lOS make way for more modern and practical studies ; but the adventurous student will always study clas- sics, in whatever language they may be written and however ancient they may be. For what are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man? They are the only oracles which are not decayed, and there are such answers to the most modern inquiry in them as Delphi and Dodona never gave. We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old. To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whoH life to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written. It is not enough even to be able to speak the language of that nation by which they are written, for there is a memorable interval between the spoken and the written language, the language heard and the language read. The one is commonly transitory, a sound, a tongue, a dialect merely, almost brutish, and we learn it unconsciously, like the brutes, of our mothers. The other is the maturity and experience of that ; if that is our mother tongue, this is our father tongue, a reserved and select expression, too significant to be heard by the ear, which we must be born again in order to speak. The crowds of men v/ho merely spoke the Greek and Latin tongues in the Middle Ages were not entitled by the accident of birth to read the works of genius written in those languages ; for these were not written in that Greek or Latin which they knew, but in the select lan- guage of literature. They had not learned the nobler dialects of Greece and Rome, but the very materials Digitized by Microsoft® I06 WALDEN, on which they were written were waste paper to them, and they prized instead a cheap contemporary litera- ture. But when the several nations of Europe had acquired distinct though rude written languages of their own, sufficient for the purposes z'. their rising literatures, then first learning revived, and scholars were enabled to discern from that remoteness the treasures of antiquity. What the Roman and Grecian multitude could not hear, after the lapse of ages a few scholars read, and a few scholars only are still read- ing it. However much we may admire the orator's occa- sional bursts of eloquence, the noblest written words are commonly as far behind or above the fleeting spoken language as the firmament with its stars is behind the clouds. There are the stars, and they who can may read them. The astronomers forever com- ment on and observe them. They are not exhalations like our daily colloquies and vaporous breath. What is called eloquence in the forum is commonly found to be rhetoric in the study. The orator yields to the in- spiration of a transient occasion, and speaks to the mob before him, to those who can hear him ; but the writer, whose more equable life is his occasion, and who would be distracted by the event and the crowd which inspire the orator, speaks to the intellect and heart of mankind, to all in any age who can understand him. No wonder that Alexander carried the Iliad with him on his expeditions in a precious casket. A writ- ten word is the choicest of relics. It is so"mething at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself. It may be translated into every language, and not only be read but actually breathed from all Digitized by Microsoft® READING. 107 human lips ; — not be represented on canvas or in marble only, but be carved out of the breath of life it- self. The symbol of an ancient man's thought be- comes a modern man's speech. Two thousand sum- mers have imparted to the monuments of Grecian lit- erature, as to her marbles, only a maturer golden and autumnal tint, for they have carried their own serene and celestial atmosphere into all lands to protect them against the corrosion of time. Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of genera- tions and nations. Books, the oldest and the best, stand naturally and rightfully on the shelves of every cottage. They have no cause of their own to plead, but while they enlighten and sustain the reader his common sense will not refuse them. Their authors are a natural and irresistible aristocracy in every soci- ety, and, more than kings or emperors, exert an influ- ence on mankind. When the illiterate and perhaps scornful trader has earned by enterprise and industry his coveted leisure and independence, and is admitted to the circles of wealth and fashion, he turns inevita- bly at last to those still higher but yet inaccessible circles of intellect and genius, and is sensible only of the imperfection of his culture and the vanity and in- sufficiency of all his riches, and further proves his good sense by the pains which he takes to secure for his children that intellectual culture whose want he so keenly feels ; and thus it is that he becomes the founder of a family. Those who have not learned to read the ancient classics in the language in which they were written must have a very imperfect knowledge of the history of the human race ; for it is remarkable that no tran- script of them has ever been made into any modern Digitized by Microsoft® ip8 walden. tongue, unless our civilization itself may be regarded as s!>ch a transcript. Homer has never yet been printed in English, nor ^schylus, nor Virgil even, — works as refined, as solidly done, and as beautiful al- most as the morning itself; for later writers, say what we will of their genius, have rarely, if ever, equalled the elaborate beauty and finish and the lifelong and heroic literary labors of the ancients. They only talk of forgetting them who never knew them. It will be soon enough to forget them when we have the learn- ing and the genius which will enable us to attend to and appreciate them. That age will be rich indeed when those relics which we call Classics, and the still older and more than classic but even less known Scrip- tures of the nations, shall have still further accumulated, when the Vaticans shall be filled with Vedas and Zend- avestas and Bibles, with Homers and Dantes and Shakspeares, and all the centuries to come shall have successively deposited their trophies in the forum of the world. By such a pile we may hope to scale heaven at last. The works of the great poets have never yet been read by mankind, for only great poets can read them. They have only been read as the multitude read the stars, at most astrologically, not astronomically. Most men have learned to read to serve a paltry con- venience, as they have learned to cipher in order to keep accounts and not be cheated in trade ; but of reading as a noble intellectual exercise they know lit- tle or nothing ; yet this only is reading, in a high sense, not that which lulls us as a luxury and suffers the nobler faculties to sleep the while, but what we have to stand on tiptoe to read and devote our most alert and wakeful hours to. Digitized by Microsoft® READING. 109 I think that having learned our letters we should read the best that is in literature, and not be forever repeating our a b abs, and words of one syllable, in the fourth or fifth classes, sitting on the lowest and foremost form all our lives. Most men are satisfied if they read or hear read, and perchance have been con- victed by the wisdom of one good book, the Bible, and for the rest of their lives vegetate and dissipate their faculties in what is called easy reading. There is a work in several volumes in our Circulating Library entitled Little Reading, which I thought referred to a town of that name which I had not been to. There are those who, like cormorants and ostriches, can di- gest all sorts of this, even after the fullest dinner of meats and vegetables, for they suffer nothing to be wasted. If others are the machines to provide this provender, they are the machines to read it. They read the nine thousandth tale about Zebulon and Se- phronia, and how they loved as none had ever loved before, and neither did the course of their true love run smooth, — at any rate, how it did run and stum- ble, and get up again and go on ! how some poor un- fortunate got up on to a steeple, who had better never have gone up as far as the belfry ; and then, having needlessly got him up there, the happy novelist rings the bell for all the world to come together and hear, O dear ! how he did get down again ! For my part, I think that they had better metamorphose all such as- piring heroes of universal noveldom into man weather- cocks, as they used to put heroes among the constella- tions, and let them swing round there till they are rusty, and not come down at all to bother honest men with their pranks. The next time the novelist rings the bell I will not stir though the meeting-house burn Digitized by Microsoft® 1 10 WALDEH. down. " The Skip of the Tip-Toe-Hop, a Romance of the Middle Ages, by the celebrated author of ' Tit- tle-Tol-Tan,' to appear in monthly parts ; a great rush ; don't all come together.'' All this they read with saucer eyes, and erect and primitive curiosity, and with unwearied gizzard, whose corrugations even yet need no sharpening, just as some little four-year-old bencher his two-cent gilt-covered edition of Cinder- ella, — without any improvement, that I can see, in the pronunciation, or accent, or emphasis, or any more skill in extracting or inserting the moral. The result is dulness of sight, a stagnation of the vital circulations, and a general deliquium and sloughing off of all the intellectual faculties. This sort of gingerbread is baked daily and more sedulously than pure wheat or rye-and-Indian in almost every oven, and finds a surer market. The best books are not read even by those who are called good readers. What does our Concord culture amount to ? There is in this town, with a very few ex- ceptions, no taste for the best or for very good books even in English literature, whose words all can read and spell. Even the college-bred and so called liber- ally educated men here and elsewhere have really little or no acquaintance with the English classics ; and as for the recorded wisdom of mankind, the ancient clas- sics and Bibles, which are accessible to all who will know of them, there are the feeblest efforts anywhere made to become acquainted with them. I know a woodchopper, of middle age, who takes a French paper, not for news as he says, for he is above that, but to " keep himself in practice," he being a Canadian by birth ; and when I ask him what he considers the best thing he can do in this world, he says, besides Digitized by Microsoft® READING. 1 1 1 this, to keep up and add to his English. This is about as much as the college-bred generally do or aspire to do, and they take an English paper for the purpose. One who has just come from reading perhaps one of the best English books will find how many with whom he can converse about it.? Or suppose he comes from reading a Greek or Latin classic in the original, whose praises are familiar even to the so-called illiterate ; he will find nobody at all to speak to, but must keep si- lence about it. Indeed, there is hardly the professor in our colleges who, if he has mastered the difficulties . of the language, has proportionally mastered the diffi- culties of the wit and poetry of a Greek poet, and has any sympathy to impart to the alert and heroic reader ; and as for the sacred Scriptures, or Bibles of man- kind, who in this town can tell me even their titles ? Most men do not know that any nation but the He- brews have had a scripture. A man, any man, will go considerably out of his way to pick up a silver dollar ; but here are golden words, which the wisest men of antiquity have uttered, and whose worth the wise of every succeeding age have assured us of; — and yet we learn to read only as far as Easy Reading, the primers and class-books, and when we leave school, the " Little Reading,'' and story books, which are for boys and beginners ; and our reading, our conversa- tion and thinking, are all on a very low level, worthy only of pygmies and manikins. I aspire to be acquainted with wiser men than this our Concord soil has produced, whose names are hardly known here. Or shall I hear the name of Plato and never read his book ? As if Plato were my towns- man and I never saw him, — my next neighbor and I never heard him speak or attended to the wisdom of Digitized by Microsoft® 112 WALDEN. his words. But how actually is it? His Dialogues, which contain what was immortal in him, lie on the next shelf, and yet I never read them. We are under- bred and low-lived and illiterate ; and in this respect I confess I do not make any very broad distinction between the illiterateness of my townsman who can- not read at all, and the illiterateness of him who has learned to read only what is for children and feeble intellects. We should be as good as the worthies of antiquity, but partly by first knowing how good they were. We are a race of tit-men, and soar but little higher in our intellectual flights than the columns of the daily paper. It is not all books that are as dull as their readers. There are probably words addressed to our condition exactly, which, if we could really hear and understand, would be more salutary than the morning or the spring to our lives, and possibly put a new aspect on the face of things for us. How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book. The book exists for us perchance which will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered. These same questions that disturb and puzzle and confound us have in their turn occurred to all the wise men ; not one has been omitted ; and each has answered them, according to his ability, by his words and his hfe. Moreover, with wisdom we shall learn liberality. The solitary hired man on a farm in the outskirts of Con- cord, who has had his second birth and peculiar re- ligious experience, and is driven as he believes into silent gravity and exclusiveness by his faith, may think it is not true ; but Zoroaster, thousands of years ago, travelled the same road and had the same experi- Digitized by Microsoft® READING. 1 1 3 ence ; but he, being wise, Icnew it to be universal, and treated his neighbors accordingly, and is even said to have invented and established viforship among men. Let him humbly commune with Zoroaster then, and, through the liberalizing influence of all the worthies, with Jesus Christ Himself, and let " our church " go by the board. We boast that we belong to the nineteenth century and are making the most rapid strides of any nation. But consider how little this village does for its own culture. I do not wish to flatter my townsmen, nor to be flattered by them, for that will not advance either of us. We need to be provoked, — goaded like oxen, as we are, into a trot. We have a com- paratively decent system of common schools, schools for infants only ; but excepting the half-starved Ly- ceum in the winter, and latterly the puny beginning of a library suggested by the state, no school for our- selves. We spend more on almost any article of bodily aliment or ailment than on our mental aliment. It is time that we had uncommon schools, that we did not leave off our education when we begin to be men and women. It is time that villages were universities, and their elder inhabitants the fellows of universities, with leisure — if they are indeed so well off — to pur- sue liberal studies the rest of their lives. Shall the world be confined to one Paris or one Oxford forever ? Cannot students be boarded here and get a liberal education under the skies of Concord ? Can we not hire some Abelard to lecture to us ? Alas ! what with foddering the cattle and tending the store, we are kept from school too long, and our education is sadly neglected. In this country, the village should in some respects take the place of the nobleman of Europe. Digitized by Microsoft® 1 14 WALDEN. It should be the patron of the fine arts. It is rich enough. It wants only the magnanimity and refine- ment. It can spend money enough on such things as farmers and traders value, but it is thought Utopian to propose spending money for things which more intelligent men know to be of far more worth. This town has spent seventeen thousand dollars on a town- house, thank fortune or politics, but probably it will not spend so much on living wit, the true meat to put into that shell, in a hundred years. The one hundred and twenty-five dollars annually subscribed for a Ly- ceum in the winter is better spent than any other equal sum raised in the town. If we live in the nine- teenth century, why should we not enjoy the advan- tages which the nineteenth century offers? Why should our life be in any respect provincial ? If we will read newspapers, why not skip the gossip of Bos- ton and take the best newspaper in the world at once? — not be sucking the pap of " neutral family " papers, or browsing " Olive Branches " here in New England. Let the reports of all the learned societies come to us, and we wUl see if they know anything. Why should we leave it to Harper & Brothers and Redding & Co. to select our reading ? As the nobleman of cultivated taste surrounds himself with whatever conduces to his culture, — genius — learning — wit — books — paint- ings — statuary — music — philosophical instruments, and the like ; so let the village do, — not stop short at a pedagogue, a parson, a sexton, a parish library, and three selectmen, because our pilgrim forefathers got through a cold winter once on a bleak rock with these. To act collectively is according to the spirit of our institutions ; and I am confident that, as our circumstances are more flourishing, our means are Digitized by Microsoft® READING. 115 greater than the nobleman's. New England can hire all the wise men in the world to come and teach her, and board them round the while, and not be provin- cial at all. That is the uncommon school we want. Instead of noblemen, let us have noble villages of men. If it is necessary, omit one bridge over the river, go round a little there, and throw one arch at least over the darker gulf of ignorance which sur- rounds us. Digitized by Microsoft® IV. SOUNDS. But while we are confined to books, though the most select and classic, and read only particular writ- ten languages, which are themselves but dialects and provincial, we are in danger of forgetting the language which all things and events speak without metaphor, which alone is copious and standard. Much is pub- lished, but little printed. The rays which stream through the shutter will be no longer remembered when the shutter is wholly removed. No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen? Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer ? Read your fate, see what is before you, and walk on into futurity. I did not read books the first summer; I hoed beans. Nay, I often did better than this. There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or hands. I love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sang around or flitted ii6 Digitized by Microsoft® SOUNDS. 117 noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some traveller's wagon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time. I grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of the hands would have been. They were not time subtracted from my life, but so much over and above my usual allowance. I realized what the Orientals mean by contemplation and the forsaking of works. For the most part, I minded not how the hours went. The day advanced as if to light some work of mine ; it was morning, and lo, now it is evening, and nothing memorable is accomplished. Instead of singing like the birds, I silently smiled at my incessant good for- tune. As the sparrow had its trill, sitting on the hickory before my door, so had I my chuckle or suppressed warble which he might hear out of my nest. My days were not days of the week, bearing the stamp of any heathen deity, nor were they minced into hours and fretted by the ticking of a clock ; for I lived like the Puri Indians, of whom it is said that "for yesterday, to-day, and to-morrow they have only one word, and they express the variety of meaning by pointing backward for yesterday, forward for to- morrow, and overhead for the passing day." This was sheer idleness to my fellow-townsmen, no doubt ; but if the birds and flowers had tried me by their standard, I should not have been found wanting. A man must find his occasions in himself, it is true. The natural day is very calm, and will hardly reprove his indolence. I had this advantage, at least, in my mode of life, over those who were obliged to look abroad for amusement, to society and the theatre, that my life Digitized by Microsoft® Il8 WALDEN. itself was become my amusement and never ceased to be novel. It was a drama of many scenes and with- out an end. If we were always indeed getting our living, and regulating our lives according to the last and best mode we had learned, we should never be troubled with ennui. Follow your genius closely enough, and it will not fail to show you a fresh pros- pect every hour. Housework was a pleasant pastime. When my floor was dirty, I rose early, and, setting all my furniture out of doors on the grass, bed and bed- stead making but one budget, dashed water on the floor, and sprinkled white sand from the pond on it, and then with a brocm scrubbed it clean and white ; and by the time the villagers had broken their fast the morning sun had dried my house sufficiently to allow me to move in again, and my meditations were almost uninterrupted. It was pleasant to see my whole household effects out on the grass, making a little pile like a gypsy's pack, and my three-legged table, from which I did not remove the books and pen and ink, standing amid the pines and hickories. They seemed glad to get out themselves, and as if unwilling to be brought in. I was sometimes tempted to stretch an awning over them and take my seat there. It was worth the while to see the sun shine on these things, and hear the free wind blow on them ; so much more interesting most familiar objects look out doors than in the house. A bird sits on the next bough, life-everlasting grows under the table, and blackberry vines run round its legs ; pine cones, chest- nut burs, and strawberry leaves are strewn about. It looked as if this was the way these forms came to be transferred to our furniture, to tables, chairs, and bedstead, — because they once stood in their midst. Digitized by Microsoft® SOUNDS. 119 My house was on the side of a hill, immediately on the edge of the larger wood, in the midst of a young forest of pitch pines and hiclcories, and half a dozen rods from the pond, to which a narrow footpath led down the hill. In my front yard grew the straw- berry, blackberry, and life-everlasting, johnswort and goldenrod, shrub-oaks and sand-cherry, blueberry and ground-nut. Near the end of May, the sand-cherry {cerasus pumila) adorned the sides of the path with its delicate flowers arranged in umbels cylindrically about its short stems, which last, in the fall, weighed down with good-sized and handsome cherries, fell over in wreaths like rays on every side. I tasted them out of compliment to Nature, though they were scarcely palatable. The sumach {rhus glabra) grew luxuriantly about the house, pushing up through the embankment which I had made, and growing five or six feet the first season. Its broad pinnate tropical leaf was pleasant though strange to look on. The large buds, suddenly pushing out late in the spring from dry sticks which had seemed to be dead, devel- oped themselves as by magic into graceful green and tender boughs, an inch in diameter ; and sometimes, as I sat at my window, so heedlessly did they grow and tax their weak joints, I heard afresh and tender bough suddenly fall like a fan to the ground, when there was not a breath of air stirring, broken off by its own weight. In August, the large masses of berries, which, when in flower, had attracted many wild bees, gradually assumed their bright velvety crimson hue, and by their weight again ben(: down and broke the tender limbs. Digitized by Microsoft® I20 WALDEN. As I sit at my window this summer afternoon, hawks are circling about my clearing ; the tantivy of wild pigeons, flying by twos and threes athwart my view, or perching restless on the white-pine boughs behind my house, gives a voice to the air ; a fishhawk dimples the glassy surface of the pond and brings up a fish ; a mink steals out of the marsh before my door and seizes a frog by the shore ; the sedge is bending under the weight of the reed-birds flitting hither and thither ; and for the last half hour I have heard the rattle of railroad cars, now dying away and then reviving like the beat of a partridge, conveying travellers from Bos- ton to the country. For I did not live so out of the world as that boy who, as I hear, was put out to a farmer in the east part of the town, but erelong ran away and came home again, quite down at the heel and homesick. He had never seen such a dull and out-of-the-way place ; the folks were all gone off; why, you couldn't even hear the whistle ! I doubt if there is such a place in Massachusetts now : — " In truth, our village has become a butt For one of those fleet railroad shafts, and o'er Our peaceful plain its soothing sound is — Concord." The Fitchburg Railroad touches the pond about a hundred rods south of where I dwell. I usually go to the village along its causeway, and am, as it were, related to society by this link. The men on the freight trains, who go over the whole length of the road, bow to me as to an old acquaintance, they pass me so often, and apparently they take me for an employee ; and so I am. I too would fain be a track-repairer somewhere in the orbit of the earth. The whistle of the locomotive penetrates my woods Digitized by Microsoft® SOUNDS. 121 summer and winter, sounding like the scream of a liawk sailing over some farmer's yard, informing me that many restless city merchants are arriving within the circle of the town, or adventurous country traders from the other side. As they come under one hori- zon, they shout their warning to get off the track to the other, heard sometimes through the circles of two towns. Here come your groceries, country ; your rations, countrymen ! Nor is there any man so inde- pendent en his farm that he can say them nay. And here's your pay for them ! screams the countryman's whistle ; timber like long battering rams going twenty miles an hour against the city's walls, and chairs enough to seat all the weary and heavy laden that dwell within them. With such huge and lumbering civility the country hands a chair to the city. All the Indian huckleberry hills are stripped, all the cranberry meadows are raked into the city. Up comes the cot- ton, down goes the woven cloth ; up comes the silk, down goes the woollen ; up come the books, but down goes the wit that writes them. When I meet the engine with its train of cars mov- ing oflF with planetary motion, — or, rather, like a comet, for the beholder knows not if with that velocity and with that direction it will ever revisit this system, since its orbit does not look like a returning curve, — with its steam cloud like a banner streaming behind in golden and silver wreaths, like many a downy cloud which I have seen, high in the heavens, unfolding its masses to the light, — as if this travelling demigod, this cloud-compeller, would erelong take the sunset sky for the livery of his train ; when I hear the iron horse make the hills echo with his snort like thunder, shaking the earth with his feet, and breathing fire and Digitized by Microsoft® 122 WALDEN. smoke from his nostrils (what kind of winged horse or fiery dragon they will put into the new Mythology I don't know), it seems as if the earth had got a race now worthy to inhabit it. If all were as it seems, and men made the elements their servants for noble ends ! . If the cloud that hangs over the engine were the perspiration of heroic deeds, or as beneficent as that which floats over the farmer's fields, then the ele- ments and Nature herself would cheerfully accompany men on their errands and be their escort. I watch the passage of the morning cars with the same feeling that I do the rising of the sun, which is hardly more regular. Their train of clouds stretching far behind and rising higher and higher, going to heaven while the cars are going to Boston, conceals the sun for a minute and casts my distant field into the shade, a celestial train beside which the petty train of cars which hugs the earth is but the barb of the spear. The stabler of the iron horse was up early this winter morning by the light of the stars amid the mountains, to fodder and harness his steed. Fire, too, was awakened thus early to put the vital heat in him and get him off. If the enterprise were as innocent as it is early ! If the snow lies deep, they strap on his snow-shoes, and with the giant plough plough a furrow from the mountains to the seaboard, in which the cars, like a following drill-barrow, sprinkle all the restless men and floating merchandise in the country for seed. All day the fire-steed flies over the country, stopping only that his master may rest, and I am awak- ened by his tramp and defiant snort at midnight, when in some remote glen in the woods he fronts the ele- ments incased in ice and snow ; and he will reach his stall only with the morning star, to start once more on Digitized by Microsoft® SOUNDS. 123 his travels without rest or slumber. Or perchance, at evening, I hear him in his stable blowing off the super- fluous energy of the day, that he may calm his nerves and cool his liver and brain for a few hours of iron slumber. If the enterprise were as heroic and com- manding as it is protracted and unwearied ! Far through unfrequented woods on the confines of towns, where once only the hunter penetrated by day, in the darkest night dart these bright saloons without the knowledge of their inhabitants ; this moment stop- ping at some brilliant station-house in town or city, where a social crowd is gathered, the next in the Dis- mal Swamp, scaring the owl and fox. The startings and arrivals of the cars are now the epochs in the vil- lage day. They go and come with such regularity and precision, and their whistle can be heard so far, that the farmers set their clocks by them, and thus one well-conducted institution regulates a whole country. Have not men improved somewhat in punctuality since the railroad was invented ? Do they not talk and think faster in the depot than they did in the stage-office? There is something electrifying in the atmosphere of the former place. I have been astonished at the mira- cles it has wrought ; that some of my neighbors, who, I should have prophesied, once for all, would never get to Boston by so prompt a conveyance, are on hand when the bell rings. To do things " railroad fashion " is now the by-word ; and it is worth the while to be warned so often and so sincerely by any power to get off its track. There is no stopping to read the riot act, no firing over the heads of the mob, in this case. We have constructed a fate, an Atropos, that never turns aside. (Let that be the name of your engine.) Men are advertised that at a certain hour and minute Digitized by Microsoft® 124 WALDEN. these bolts will be shot toward particular points of the compass ; yet it interferes with no man's business, and the children go to school on the other track. We live the steadier for it. We are all educated thus to be sons of Tell. The air is full of invisible bolts. Every path but your own is the path of fate. Keep on your own track, then. What recommends commerce to me is its enter- prise and bravery. It does not clasp its hands and pray to Jupiter. I see these men every day go about their business with more or less courage and content, doing more even than they suspect, and perchance better employed than they could have consciously devised. I am less affected by their heroism who stood up for half an hour in the front line at Buena Vista, than by the steady and cheerful valor of the men who inhabit the snow-plough for their winter quarters ; who have not merely the three o'clock in the morning courage, which Bonaparte thought was the rarest, but whose courage does not go to rest so early, who go to sleep only when the storm sleeps or the sinews of their iron steed are fi-ozen. On this morning of the Great Snow, perchance, which is still raging and chilling men's blood, I hear the muffled tone of their engine bell from out the fog bank of their chilled breath, which announces that the cars are coming, without long delay, notwithstanding the veto of a New England northeast snow storm, and I behold the ploughmen covered with snow and rime, their heads peering above the mould-board which is turning down other than daisies and the nests of field-mice, like boulders of the Sierra Nevada, that occupy an outside place in the universe. Commerce is unexpectedly confident and serene, Digitized by Microsoft® SOUNDS. 125 alert, adventurous, and unwearied. It is very natural in its methods withal, far more so than many fan- tastic enterprises and sentimental experiments, and hence its singular success. I am refreshed and ex- panded when the freight train rattles past me, and I smell the stores which go dispensing their odors all the way from Long Wharf to Lake Champlain, re- minding me of foreign parts, of coral reefs, and Indian oceans, and tropical climes, and the extent of the globe. I feel more like a citizen of the world at the sight of the palm-leaf which will cover so many flaxen New England heads the next summer, the Manilla hemp and cocoa-nut husks, the old junk, gunny bags, scrap iron, and rusty nails. This car- load of torn sails is more legible and interesting now than if they should be wrought into paper and printed books. Who can write so graphically the history of the storms they have weathered as these rents have done ? They are proof-sheets which need no correc- tion. Here goes lumber from the Maine woods, which did not go out to sea in the last freshet, risen four dollars on the thousand because of what did go out or was split up : pine, spruce, cedar, — first, second, third, and fourth qualities, so lately all of one quality, to wave over the bear, and moose, and cari- bou. Next rc]is Thomaston lime, a prime lot, which will get far among the hills before it gets slacked. These rags in bales, of all hues and qualities, the low- est condition to which cotton and linen descend, the final result of dress, — of patterns which are now no longer cried up, unless it be in Milwaukie, as those splendid articles, English, French, or American prints, ginghams, muslins, &c., gathered from all quarters both of fashion and poverty, going to be- Digitized by Microsoft® 126 WALDEN. come paper of one color or a few shades only, on which forsooth will be written tales of real life, high and low, and founded on fact! This closed car smells of salt fish, the strong New England and com- mercial scent, reminding me of the Grand Banks and the fisheries. Who has not seen a salt fish, thoroughly cured for this world, so that nothing can spoil it, and putting the perseverance of the saints to the blush? with which you may sweep or pave the streets, and split your kindlings, and the teamster shelter himself and his lading against sun, wind, and rain behind it, — and the trader, as a Concord trader once did, hang it up by his door for a sign when he commences business, until at last his oldest customer cannot tell surely whether it be animal, vegetable, or mineral, and yet it shall be as pure as a snowflake, and if it be put into a pot and boiled, will come out an excellent dun fish for a Saturday's dinner. Next Spanish hides, with the tails still preserving their twist and the angle of elevation they had when the oxen that wore them were careering over the pampas of the Spanish main, — a type of all obstinacy, and evincing how almost hopeless and incurable are all constitutional vices. I confess that, practically speak- ing, when I have learned a man's real disposition, I have no hopes of changing it for the better or worse in this state of existence. As the Orientals say, " A cur's tail may be warmed, and pressed, and bound round with ligatures, and after a twelve years' labor bestowed upon it, still it will retain its natural form." The only effectual cure for such inveteracies as these tails exhibit is to make glue of them, which I believe is what is usually done with them, and then they will stay put and stick. Here is a hogshead of molasses Digitized by Microsoft® SOUNDS. 127 or of brandy directed to John Smith, Cuttingsville, Vermont, some trader among the Green Mountains, who imports for the farmers near his clearing, and now perchance stands over his bulk-head and thinks of the last arrivals on the coast, how they may aifect the price for him, telling his customers this moment, as he has told them twenty times before this morn- ing, that he expects some by the next train of prime quality. It is advertised in the Cuttingsville Times. While these things go up other things come down. Warned by the whizzing sound, I look up from my book and see some tall pine, hewn on far northern hills, which has winged its way over the Green Mountains and the Connecticut, shot like an arrow through the township within ten minutes, and scarce another eye beholds it ; going ** to be the mast Of some great ammiral." And hark ! here comes the cattle-train bearing the cattle of a thousand hills, sheepcots, stables, and cow-yards in the air, drovers with their sticks, and shepherd boys in the midst of their flocks, all but the mountain pastures, whirled along like leaves blown from the mountains by the September gales. The air is filled with the bleating, of calves and sheep, and the hustling of oxen, as if a pastoral valley were going by. When the old bell-wether at the head rattles his bell, the mountains do indeed skip like rams and the little hills like lambs. A car-load of drovers, too, in the midst, on a level with their droves now, their vocation gone, but still clinging to their useless sticks as their badge of office. But their dogs, where are they? It is a stampede to them; Digitized by Microsoft® 128 walden: they are quite thrown out ; they have lost the scent. Methinks I hear them barking behind the Peterboro' Hills, or panting up the western slope of the Green Mountains. They will not be in at the death. Their vocation, too, is gone. Their fidelity and sagacity are below par now. They will slink back to their kennels in disgrace, or perchance run wild and strike a league with the wolf and the fox. So is your pas- toral life whirled past and away. But the bell rings, and I must get oiT the track and let the cars go by ; — What's the railroad to me? I never go to see Where it ends. It fills a few hollows, And makes banks for the swallows, It sets the sand a-blowing, And the blackberries a-growing, • but I cross it like a cart-path in the woods. I will not have my eyes put out and my ears spoiled by its smoke and steam and hissing. Now that the cars are gone by and all the restless world with them, and the fishes in the pond no longer feel their rumbling, I am more alone than ever. For the rest of the long afternoon, perhaps, my medita- tions are interrupted only by the faint rattle of a carriage or team along the distant highway. Sometimes, on Sundays, I heard the bells, the Lin- coln, Acton, Bedford, or Concord bell, when the wind was favorable, a faint, sweet, and, as it were, natural melody, worth importing into the wilderness. At a sufficient distance over the woods this sound acquires a certain vibratory hum, as if the pine needles in the horizon were the strings of a harp Digitized by Microsoft® SOUNDS. 129 which it swept. All sound heard at the greatest possible distance produces one and the same eflFect, a vibration of the universal lyre, just as the interven- ing atmosphere makes a distant ridge of earth inter- esting to our eyes by the azure tint it imparts to it. There came to me in this case a melody which the air had strained, and which had conversed with every leaf and needle of the wood, that portion of the sound which the elements had taken up and modu- lated and echoed from vale to vale. The echo is, to some extent, an original sound, and therein is the magic and charm of it. It is not merely a repetition of what was worth repeating in the bell, but partly the voice of the wood ; the same trivial words and notes sung by a wood-nymph. At evening, the distant lowing of some cow in the horizon beyond the woods sounded sweet and melo- dious, and at first I would mistake it for the voices of certain minstrels by whom I was sometimes sere- naded, who migkt be straying over hill and dale ; but soon I was not unpleasantly disappointed when it was prolonged into the cheap and natural music of the cow. I do not mean to be satirical, but to ex- press my appreciation of those youths' singing, when I state that I perceived clearly that it was akin to the music of the cow, and they were at length one articulation of Nature. Regularly at half-past seven, in one part of the sum- mer, after the evening train had gone by, the whippoor- wills chanted their vespers for half an hour, sitting on a stump by my door, or upon the ridge pole of the house. They would begin to sing almost with as much pre- cision as a clock, within five minutes of a particular time, referred to the setting of the sun, every evening. Digitized by Microsoft® I30 WALDEN. I had a rare opportunity to become acquainted with their habits. Sometimes I heard four or five at once in different parts of the wood, by accident one a bar behind another, and so near me that I distinguished not only the cluclc after each note, but often that singular buzzing sound like a fly in a spider's web, only proportionally louder. Sometimes one would circle round and round me in the woods a few feet distant ar if tethered by a string, when probably I was near its eggs. They sang at intervals throughout the night, and were again as musical as ever just before and about dawn. When other birds are still the screech owls take up the strain, Hke mourning women their ancient u-lu-lu. Their dismal scream is truly Ben Jonsonian. Wise midnight hags! It is no honest and blunt tu-whit tu-who of the poets, but, without jesting, a most solemn graveyard ditty, the mutual consolations of suicide lovers remembering the pangs and delights of supernal love in the infernal groves. Yet I love to hear their wailing, their doleful responses, trilled along the woodside ; reminding me sometimes of music and singing birds ; as if it were the dark and tearful side of music, the regrets and sighs that would fain be sung. They are the spirits, the low spirits and melancholy forebodings, of fallen souls that once in human shape night-walked the earth and did the deeds of darkness, now expiating their sins with their wailing hymns or threnodies in the scenery of their transgressions. They give me a new sense of the variety and capacity of that nature which is our common dwelling. Oh-o-o-o-o that I never had been bor-r-r-r-nl sighs one on this side of the pond, and circles with the restlessness of despair to some new Digitized by Microsoft® SOUNDS. 131 perch on the gray oaks. 'X\i%n — that I never had been bor-r-r-r-n ! echoes another on the farther side with tremulous sincerity, and — bor-r-r-r-n! comes faintly from far in the Lincoln woods. I was also serenaded by a hooting owl. Near at hand you could fancy it the most melancholy sound in Nature, as if she meant by this to stereotype and make permanent in her choir the dying moans of a human being, — some poor weak relic of mortality who has left hope behind, and howls like an animal, yet with human sobs, on entering the dark valley, made more awful by a certain gurgling melodious- ness, — I find myself beginning with the letters gl when I try to imitate it, — expressive of a mind which has reached the gelatinous mildewy stage in the mortification of all healthy and courageous thought. It reminded me of ghouls and idiots and insane bowlings. But now one answers from far woods in a strain made really melodious by distance, — Hoo hoo hoo hoorer hoo; and indeed for the most part it suggested only pleasing associations, whether heard by day or night, summer or winter. I rejoice that there are owls. Let them do the idiotic and maniacal hooting for men. It is a sound admirably suited to swamps and twilight woods which no day illustrates, suggesting a vast and undeveloped nature which men have not recognized. They repre- sent the stark twilight and unsatisfied thoughts which all have. All day the sun has shone on the surface of some savage swamp, where the single spruce stands hung with usnea lichens, and small hawks circulate above, and the chickadee lisps amid the evergreens, and the partridge and rabbit skulk beneath ; but now a more dismal and fitting day dawns, and a Digitized by Microsoft® 132 WALDEN. different race of creatures awakes to express the meaning of Nature there. Late in the evening I heard the distant rumbling of wagons over bridges, — a sound heard farther than almost any other at night, — the baying of dogs, and sometimes again the lowing of some disconsolate cow in a distant barn-yard. In the meanwhile all the shore rang with the trump of bullfrogs, the sturdy spirits of ancient wine-bibbers and wassailers, still unrepentant, trying to sing a catch in their Stygian lake, — if the Walden nymphs will pardon the com- parison, for though there are almost no weeds, there are frogs there, — who would fain keep up the hilari- ous rules of their old festal tables, though their voices have waxed hoarse and solemnly grave, mocking at mirth, and the wine has lost its flavor, and become only liquor to distend their paunches, and sweet in- toxication never comes to drown the memory of the past, but mere saturation and waterlogged ness and distention. The most aldermanic, with his chin upon a heart-leaf, which serves for a napkin to his drooling chaps, under this northern shore quaffs a deep draught of the once scorned water, and passes round the cup with the ejaculation tr-r-r-oonk, tr-r-r-oonk, tr-r-r-oonk ! and straightway comes over the water from some distant cove the same password repeated, where the next in seniority and girth has gulped down to his mark ; and when this observance has made the circuit ofthe shores, then ejaculates the master of ceremonies, witji satisfaction, ir-r-r-oonk! and each in his turn repeats the same down to the least distended, leakiest, and f^biest-paunched, that there be no mistake ; and then the bowl goes round again and again, until the sun disperses the morning Digitized by Microsoft® SOUNDS. 133 mist, and only the patriarch is not under the pond, but vainly bellowing troonk from time to time, and pausing for a reply. I am not sure that I ever heard the sound of cock- crowing from my clearing, and I thought that it might be worth the while to keep a cockerel for his music merely, as a singing bird. The note of this once wild Indian pheasant is certainly the most remarkable of any bird's, and if they could be naturalized without being domesticated, it would soon become the most famous sound in our woods, surpassing the clangor of the goose and the hooting of the owl ; and then imagine the cackling of the hens to fill the pauses when their lords' clarions rested! No wonder that man added this bird to his tame stock, — to say nothing of the eggs and drumsticks. To walk in a winter morning in a wood where these birds abounded, their native woods, and hear the wild cockerels crow on the trees, clear and shrill for miles over the re- sounding earth, drowning the feebler notes of other birds, — think' of it! It would put nations on the alert. Who would not be early to rise, and rise earlier and earlier every successive day of his life, till he became unspeakably healthy, wealthy, and wise? This foreign bird's note is celebrated by the poets of all countries along with the notes of their native songsters. All climates agree with brave Chanticleer. He is more indigenous even than the natives. His health is ever good, his lungs are sound, his spirits never flag. Even the sailor on the Atlantic and Pacific is awakened by his voice ; but its shrill sound never roused me from my slumbers. I kept neither dog, cat, cow, pig, nor hens, so that you would have said there was a deficiency of domes' Digitized by Microsoft® 134 WALDEN. tic sounds ; neither the churn, nor the spinning-wheel, nor even the singing of the Icettle, nor the hissing of the urn, nor children crying, to comfort one. An old- fashioned man would have lost his senses or died of ennui before this. Not even rats in the wall, for they were starved out, or rather were never baited in, — only squirrels on the roof and under the floor, a whippoorwill on the ridge pole, a blue-jay screaming beneath the window, a hare or woodchuck under the house, a screech-owl or a cat-owl behind it, a flock of wild geese or a laughing loon on the pond, and a fox to bark in the night. Not even a lark or an oriole, those mild plantation birds, ever visited my clearing. No cockerels to crow nor hens to cackle in the yard. No yard! but unfenced Nature reaching up to your very sills. A young forest growing up under your windows, and wild sumachs and blackberry vines breaking through into your cellar ; sturdy pitch-pines rubbing and creaking against the shingles for want of room, their roots reaching quite under the house. Instead of a scuttle or a blind blown off in the gale, — a pine tree snapped off or torn up by the roots behind your house for fuel. Instead of no path to the front-yard gate in the Great Snow, — ;no gate — no front-yard, — and no path to the civilized world! Digitized by Microsoft® SOLITUDE. This is a delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense, and imbibes delight through every pore. I go and come with a strange liberty in Nature, a part of herself. As I walk along the stony shore of the pond in my shirt sleeves, though it is cool as well as cloudy and windy, and I see nothing special to at- tract me, all the elements are unusually congenial to me. The bullfrogs trump to usher in the night, and the note of the whippoorwill is borne on the rippling wind from over the water. Sympathy with the flut- tering alder and poplar leaves almost takes away my breath ; yet, like the lake, my serenity is rippled but not ruffled. These small waves raised by the even- ing wind are as remote from storm as the smooth re- flecting surface. Though it is now dark, the wind still blows and roars in the wood, the waves still dash, and some creatures lull the rest with their notes. The repose is never complete. The wildest animals do not repose, but seek their prey now ; the fox, and skunk, and rabbit, now roam the fields and woods without fear. They are Nature's watchmen, — links which connect the days of animated life. When I return to my house I find that visitors have been there and left their cards, either a bunch of flowers, or a wreath of evergreen, or a name in pencil on a yellow walnut leaf or a chip. They who come Digitized by Microsoft® 136 WALDEN. rarely to the woods take some little piece of the for est into their hands to play with by the way, which they leave, either intentionally or accidentally. One has peeled a willow wand, woven it into a ring, and dropped it on my table. I could always tell if visitors had called in my absence, either by the bended twigs or grass, or the print of their shoes, and generally of what sex or age or quality they were by some slight trace left, as a flower dropped, or a bunch of grass plucked and thrown away, even as far off as the rail- road, half a mile distant, or by the lingering odor of a cigar or pipe. Nay, I was frequently notified of the passage of a traveller along the highway sixty rods off by the scent of his pipe. There is commonly sufficient space about us. Our horizon is never quite at our elbows. The thick wood is not just at our door, nor the pond, but some- what is always clearing, familiar and worn by us, ap- propriated and fenced in some way, and reclaimed from Nature. For what reason have I this vast range and circuit, some square miles of unfrequented forest, for my privacy, abandoned to me by men? My nearest neighbor is a mile distant, and no house is visible from any place but the hill tops within half a mile of my own. I have my horizon bounded by woods all to myself; a distant view of the raUroad where it touches the pond on the one hand, and of the fence which skirts the woodland road on the other. But for the most part it is as solitary where I live as on the prairies. It is as much Asia or Africa as New England. I have, as it were, my own sun and moon and stars, and a little world all to myself. At night there was never a traveller passed my house, or knocked at my door, more than if I were the first or Digitized by Microsoft® SOLITUDE. 137 last man ; unless it werj in tlie spring, when at long intervals some came from the village to fish for pouts, — they plainly fished much more in the Walden Pond of their own natures, and baited their hooks with darkness, — but they soon retreated, usually with light baskets, and left " the world to darkness and to me," and the black kernel of the night was never profancci by any human neighborhood. I believe that men are generally still a little afraid of the dark, though the witches are all hung, and Christianity and candles have been introduced. Yet I experienced sometimes that the most sweet and tender, the most innocent and encouraging so- ciety may be found in any natural object, even for the poor misanthrope and most melancholy man. There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of Nature and has his senses still. There was never yet such a storm but it was ^olian music to a healthy and innocent ear. Nothing can rightly compel a simple and brave man to a vulgar sadness. While I enjoy the friendship of the seasons I trust that nothing can make life a burden to me. The gentle rain which waters my beans and keeps me in the house to-day is not drear and melancholy, but good for me, too. Though it prevents my hoeing them, it is of far more worth than my hoeing. If it should continue so long as to cause the seeds to rot in the ground and destroy the potatoes in the low lands, it would still be good for the grass on the up- lands, and, being good for the grass, it would be good for me. Sometimes, when I compare myself with other men , it seems as if I were more favored by the gods than they, beyond any deserts that I am conscious of; as if I had a warrant and surety at Digitized by Microsoft® 138 WALDEIV. their hands which my fellows have not, and were es- pecially guided and guarded. I do not flatter myself, but if it be possible they flatter me. I have never felt lonesome, or in the least oppressed by a sense of soli- tude, but once, and that was a few weeks after I came to the woods, when, for an hour, I doubted if the near neighborhood of man was not essential to a serene and healthy life. To be alone was something un- pleasant. But I was at the same time conscious of a shght insanity in my mood, and seemed to foresee my recovery. In the midst of a gentle rain while these thoughts prevailed, I was suddenly sensible of such sweet and beneficent society in Nature, in the very pattering of the drops, and in every sound and sight around my house, an infinite and unaccountable friendliness all at once like an atmosphere sustaining me, as made the fancied advantages of human neigh- borhood insignificant, and I have never thought of them since. Every little pine needle expanded and swelled with sympathy and befriended me. I was so distinctly made aware of the presence of something kindred to me, even in scenes which we are accus- tomed to call wild and dreary, and also that the near- est of blood to me and humanest was not a person nor a villager, that I thought no place could ever be strange to me again. — " Mourning untimely consumes the sad ; Few are their days in the land of the living. Beautiful daughter of Toscar." Some of my pleasantest hours were during the long rain storms in the spring or fall, which confined me to the house for the afternoon as well as the forenoon, soothed by their ceaseless roar and pelting ; when an Digitized by Microsoft® SOLITUDE. 139 early twilight ushered in a long evening in which many thoughts had time to take root and unfold them- selves. In those driving northeast rains which tried the village houses so, when the maids stood ready with mop and pail in front entries to keep the deluge out, I sat behind my door in my little house, which was all entry, and thoroughly enjoyed its protection. In one heavy thunder shower the lightning struck a large pitch-pine across the pond, making a very conspicu- ous and perfecdy regular spiral groove from top to bottom, an inch or more deep, and four or five inches wide, as you would groove a walking-stick. I passed it again the other day, and was struck with awe on looking up and beholding that mark, now more dis- tinct than ever, where a terrific and resistless bolt came down out of the harmless sky eight years ago. Men frequently say to me, " I should think you would feel lonesome down there, and want to be nearer to folks, rainy and snowy days and nights especially." I am tempted to reply to such, — This whole earth which we inhabit is but a point in space. How far apart, think you, dwell the two most distant inhabit- ants of yonder star, the breadth of whose disk cannot be appreciated by our instruments? Why should I feel lonely? is not our planet in the Milky Way? This which you put seems to me not to be the most important question. What sort of space is that which separates a man from his fellows and makes him soli- tary? I have found that no exertion of the legs can bring two minds much nearer to one another. What do we want most to dwell near to? Not to many men surely, the depot, the post-office, the bar-room, the meeting-house, the school-house, the grocery, Beacon Hill, or the Five Points, where men most con- Digitized by Microsoft® I40 WALDEN. gregate, but to the perennial source of our life, whence in all our experience we have found that to issue, as the willow stands near the water and sends out its roots in that direction. This will vary with different natures, but this is the place where a wise man will dig his cellar. ... I one evening overtook one of my townsmen, who has accumulated what is called " a handsome property," — though I never got a fair view of it, — on the Walden road, driving a pair of cattle to market, who inquired of me how I could bring my mind to give up so many of the comforts of life. I answered that I was very sure I liked it passa- bly well ; I was not joking. And so I went home to my bed, and left him to pick his way through the dark- ness and the mud to Brighton, — or Bright-town, — which place he would reach sometime in the morning Any prospect of awakening or coming to life to a dead man makes indifferent all times and places. The place where that may occur is always the same, and indescribably pleasant to all our senses. For the most part we allow only outlying and transient cir- cumstances to make our occasions. They are, in fact, the cause of our distraction. Nearest to all things is that power which fashions their being. Next to us the grandest laws are continually being executed. Next to us is not the workman whom we have hired, with whom we love so well to talk, but the workman whose work we are. " How vast and profound is the influence of the sub- tile powers of Heaven and of Earth ! " "We seek to perceive them, and we do not see them ; we seek to hear them, and we do not hear them ; identified with the substance of things, theji cannot be separated from them." Digitized by Microsoft® SOLITUDE. 141 *' They cause that in all the universe men purify and sanctify their hearts, and clothe themselves in their holiday garments to offer sacrifices and oblations to their ancestors. It is an ocean of subtile intelligences. They are everywhere, above us, on our left, on our right ; they environ us on all sides." We are '.he subjects of an experiment which is not a little interesting to me. Can we not do without the society of our gossips a little while under these circum- stances, — have our own thoughts to cheer us ? Con- fucius says truly, " Virtue does not remain as an aban- doned orphan ; it must of necessity have neighbors." With thinking we may be beside ourselves in a sane sense. By a conscious effort of the mind we can stand aloof from actions and their consequences ; and all things, good and bad, go by us like a torrent. We are not wholly involved in Nature. I may be either the driftwood in the stream, or Indra in the sky look- ing down on it. I may be affected by a theatrical exhibition ; on the other hand, I may not be affected by an actual event which appears to concern me much more. I only know myself as a human entity ; the scene, so to speak, of thoughts and affections ; and am sensible of a certain doubleness by which I can stand as remote from myself as from another. How- ever intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence of and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but spectator, sharing nc experience, but taking note of it ; and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so fai as he was concerned. This doubleness may easily make us poor neighbors and friends sometimes. Digitized by Microsoft® 142 WALDEN. I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companion- able as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will. Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene be- tween a man and his fellows. The really diligent student in one of the crowded hives of Cambridge College is as solitary as a dervish in the desert. The farmer can work alone in the field or the woods all day, hoeing or chopping, and not feel lonesome, because he is employed ; but when he comes home at night he cannot sit down in a room alone, at the mercy of his thoughts, but must be where he can " see the folks," and recreate, and as he thinks remunerate, himself for his day's solitude ; and hence he wonders how the student can sit alone in the house all night and most of the day without ennui and " the blues " ; but he does not realize that the student, though in the house, is still at work in his field, and chopping in his woods, as the farmer in his, and in turn seeks the same recre- ation and society that the latter does, though it may be a more condensed form of it. Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other. We meet at meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are. We have to agree on a certain set of rules, called etiquette and politeness, to make this frequent meeting tolerable and that we need not come to open war. We meet at the post Digitized by Microsoft® SOLITUDE. 143 office, and at the sociable, and about the fireside every night; we live thick and are in each other's way, and stumble over one another, and I think that we thus lose some respect for one another. Certainly less frequency would suffice for all important and hearty communications. Consider the girls in a factory, — never alone, hardly in their dreams. It would be better if there were but one inhabitant to a square mile, as where I live. The value of a man is not in his skin, that we should touch him. I have heard of a man lost in the woods and dying of famine and exhaustion at the foot of a tree, whose loneliness was relieved by the grotesque visions with which, owing to bodily weakness, his diseased imagination surrounded him, and which he believed to be real. So also, owing to bodily and mental health and strength, we may be continually cheered by a like but more normal and natural society, and come to know that we are never alone. I have a great deal of company in my house ; es- pecially in the morning, when nobody calls. Let me suggest a few comparisons, that some one may convey an idea of my situation. I am no more lonely than the loon in the pond that laughs so loud, or than Walden Pond itself. What company has that lonely lake, I pray ? And yet it has not the blue devils, but the blue angels in it, in the azure tint of its waters. The sun is alone, except in thick weather, when there some- times appear to be two, but one is a mock sun. God is alone, — but the devil, he is far from being alone ; he sees a great deal of company ; he is legion. I am no more lonely than a single mullein or dandelion in a pasture, or a bean leaf, or sorrel, or a horse-fly, or a humble-bee. I am no more lonely than the Mil) Digitized by Microsoft® 144 WALDEN. Brook, or a weathercock, or the north star, or the south wind, or an April shower, or a January thaw, or the first spider in a new house. I have occasional visits in the long winter evenings, when the snow falls fast and the wind howls in the wood, from an old settler and original proprietor, who is reported to have dug Walden Pond, and stoned it, and fringed it with pine woods ; who tells me stories of old time and of new eternity ; and between us we manage to pass a cheerful evening with social mirth and pleasant views of things, even without apples or cider, — a most wise and humorous friend, whom I love much, who keeps himself more secret than ever did Goffe or Whalley ; and though he is thought to be dead, none can show where he is buried. An elderly dame, too, dwells in my neighborhood, invisible to most persons, in whose odorous herb garden I love to stroll sometimes, gathering simples and listening to ter fables ; for she has a genius of unequalled fertility, and her memory runs back farther than mythology, and she can tell me the original of every fable, and on what fact every one is founded, for the incidents oc- curred when she was young. A ruddy and lusty old dame, who delights in all weathers and seasons, and is likely to outlive all her children yet. The indescribable innocence and beneficence of Nature, — of sun and wind and rain, of summer and winter, — such health, such cheer, they afford forever! and such sympathy have they ever with our race, that all Nature would be affected, and the sun's brightness fade, and the winds would sigh humanely, and the clouds rain tears, and the woods shed their leaves and put on mourning in midsummer, if any man should ever for a just cause grieve. Shall I not have intelli- Digitized by Microsoft® SOLITUDE. 145 gence with the earth? Am 1 not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself? What is the pill which will keep us well, serene, contented? Not my or thy great-grandfather's, but our great-grandmother Nature's universal, vegetable, botanic medicines, by which she has kept herself young always, outlived so many old Parrs in her day, and fed her health with their decaying fatness. For my panacea, instead of one of those quack vials of a mixture dipped from Acheron and the Dead Sea, which come out of those long shallow black-schooner- boking wagons which we sometimes see made to carry bottles, let me have a draught of undiluted morning air. Morning air! If men will not drink oi this at the fountain-head of the day, why, then, we must even bottle up some and sell it in the shops, for the benefit of those who have lost their subscription ticket to morning time in this world. But remember, it will not keep quite till noonday even in the coolest cellar, but drive out the stopples long ere that and follow westward the steps of Aurora. I am no worshipper of Hygeia, who was the daughter of that old herb-doctor yEsculapius, and who is represented on monuments holding a serpent in one hand, and in the other a cup out of which the serpent sometimes drinks ; but rather of Hebe, cupbearer to Jupiter, who was the daughter of Juno and wild lettuce, and who had the power of restoring gods and men to the vigor of youth. She was probably the only thoroughly sound-conditioned, healthy, and robust ynung lady that ever walked the globe, and wherever she came it was spring. L Digitized by Microsoft® VI. VISITORS. I THINK that I love society as much as most, and am ready enough to fasten myself like a bloodsucker for the time to any full-blooded man that comes in my way. I am naturally no hermit, but might pos- sibly sit out the sturdiest frequenter of the bar-room, if my business called me thither. I had three chairs in my house : one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society. When visitors came in larger and unexpected numbers, there was but the third chair for them all, but they generally economized the room by standing up. It is surpris- ing how many great men and women a small house will contain. I have had twenty-five or thirty souls, with their bodies, at once under my roof, and yet we often parted without being aware that we had come very near to one another. Many of our houses, both public and private, with their almost innumerable apartments, their huge halls and their cellars for the storage of wines and other munitions of peace, appear to me extravagantly large for their inhabitants. They are so vast a^^^ magniiicent that the latter seem to be only vermin which infest them. I am surprised when the herald blows his summons before some Tremont or Astor or Middlesex House, to see come creeping out over the piazza for all inhabitants a ridiculous mouse, which soon again slinks into some hole in the pavement. 146 Digitized by Microsoft® VISITORS. 147 One inconvenience I sometimes experienced in so small a house, the difficulty of getting to a sufficient distance from my guest when we began to utter the big thoughts in big words. You want room for your thoughts to get into sailing trim and run a course or two before they make their port. The bullet of your thought must have overcome its lateral and ricochet motion and fallen into its last and steady course be- fore it reaches the ear of the hearer, else it may plough out again through the side of his head. Also, our sentences wanted room to unfold and form their columns in the interval. Individuals, like nations, must have suitable broad and natural boundaries, even a considerable neutral ground, between them. I have found it a singular luxury to talk across the pond to a companion on the opposite side. In my house we were so near that we could not begin to hear, — we could not speak low enough to be heard ; as when you throw two stones into calm water so near that they break each other's undulations. If we are merely loquacious and loud talkers, then we can afford to stand very near together, cheek by jowl, and feel each other's breath ; but if we speak reservedly and thoughtfully, we want to be farther apart, that all animal heat and moisture may have a chance to evaporate. If we would enjoy the most intimate society with that in each of us which is without, or above, being spoken to, we must not only be silent, but commonly so far apart bodily that we cannot possibly hear each other's voice in any case. Re- ferred to this standard, speech is for the convenience of those who are hard of hearing; but there are many fine things which we cannot say if we have to shout. As the conversation began to assume a loftier Digitized by Microsoft® 148 WALDEN. and grander tone, we gradually shoved our chairs, farther apart till they touched the wall in opposite corners, and then commonly there was not room enough. My " best " room, however, my withdrawing room, always ready for company, on whose carpet the sun rarely fell, was the pine wood behind my house. Thither in summer days, when distinguished guests came, I took them, and a priceless domestic swept the floor and dusted the furniture and kept the things in order. If one guest came he sometimes partook of my frugal meal and it was no interruption to conversation to be stirring a hasty-pudding, or watching the rising and maturing of a loaf of bread in the ashes, in the meanwhile. But if twenty cam3 and sat in my house, there was nothing said about dinner, though there might be bread enough for two, more than if eating were a forsaken habit ; but we naturally practised abstinence ; and this was never felt to be an offence against hospitality, but the most proper and con- siderate course. The waste and decay of physical life, which so often needs repair, seemed miraculously retarded in such a case, and the vital vigor stood its ground. I could entertain thus a thousand as well as twenty ; and if any ever went away disappointed or hungry from my house when they found me at home, they may depend upon it that I sympathized with them at least. So easy is it, though many housekeepers doubt it, to establish new and better customs in the place of the old. You need not rest your reputation on the dinners you give. For my own part, I was never so effectually deterred from frequenting a man's house, by any kind of Cerberus Digitized by Microsoft® VISITORS. 149 whatever, as by the parade one made about dining me, which I toolc to be a very polite and roundabout hint never to trouble him so again. I think I shall never revisit those scenes. I should be proud to have for the motto of my cabin those lines of Spenser which one of my visitors inscribed on a yellow walnut leaf for a card : — " Arrived there, the little house they fill, Ne looke for entertainment where none was; Rest is their feast, and all things at their will : The noblest mind the best contentment has." When Winslow, afterward governor of the Plym- outh Colony, went with a companion on a visit of ceremony to Massasoit on foot through the woods, and arrived tired and hungry at his lodge, they were well received by the king, but nothing was said about eating that day. When the night arrived, to quote their own words, — " He laid us on the bed with him- self and his wife, they at the one end and we at the other, it being only plank, laid a foot from the ground, and a thin mat upon them. Two more of his chief men, for want of room, pressed by and upon us ; so that we were worse weary of our lodging than of our journey." At one o'clock the next day Massasoit " brought two fishis that he had shot," about thrice as big as a bream ; " these being boiled, there were at least forty looked for a share in them. The most ate of them. This meal only we had in two nights and a day ; and had not one of us bought a partridge, we had taken our journey fasting." Fearing that they would be light-headed for want of food and also sleep, owing to " the savages' barbarous singing (for they used to sing themselves asleep)," and that they Digitized by Microsoft® ISO WALDEN. might get home while they had strength to travel, they departed. As for lodging, it is true they were but poorly entertained, though what they found an inconvenience was no doubt intended for an honor ; but as far as eating was concerned, I do not see how the Indians could have done better. They had noth- ing to eat themselves, and they were wiser than to think that apologies could supply the place of food to their guests ; so they drew their belts tighter and said nothing about it. Another time when Winslow visited them, it being a season of plenty with them, there was no deficiency in this respect. As for men, they will hardly fail one anywhere. I had more visitors while I lived in the woods than at any other period of my life ; I mean that I had some. I met several there under more favorable circum- stances than I could anywhere else. But fewer came to see me upon trivial business. In this respect, my company was winnowed by my mere distance from town. I had withdrawn so far within the great ocean of solitude, into which the rivers of society empty, that for the most part, so far as my needs were con- cerned, only the finest sediment was deposited around me. Besides, there were wafted to me evidences of unexplored and uncultivated continents on the other side. Who should come to my lodge this morning but a true Homeric or Paphlagonian man, — he had so suitable and poetic a name that I am sorry I cannot print it here, — a Canadian, a wood-chopper and post-maker, who can hole fifty posts in a day, who made his last supper on a woodchuck which his dog caught. He, too, has heard of Homer, and, "if it were not for books," would "not know what to do Digitized by Microsoft® VISITORS. 1 5 1 rainy days," though perhaps he has not read one wholly through for many rainy seasons. Some priest who could pronounce the Greek itself taught him to read his verse in the testament in his native parish far away ; and now I must translate to him, while he holds the book, Achilles' reproof to Patroclus, for his sad countenance. — " Why are you in tears, Patro- clus, like a young girl ? " — " Or have you alone heard some news from Phthia ? They say that Menoetius hves yet, son of Actor, And Peleus lives, son of ^acus, among the Myrmidons, Either of whom having died, we should greatly grieve. " He says, " That's good." He has a great bundle of white-oak bark under his arm for a sick man, gathered this Sunday morning. " I suppose there's no harm in going after such a thing to-day," says he. To him Homer was a great writer, though what his writing was about he did not know. A more simple and natural man it would be hard to find. Vice and disease, which cast such a sombre moral hue over the world, seemed to have hardly any existence for him. He was about twenty-eight years old, and had left Canada and his father's house a dozen years before to work in the States, and earn money to buy a farm with at last, perhaps in his native country. He was cast in the coarsest mould ; a stout but sluggish body, yet grace- fully carried, with a thick sunburnt neck, dark iDushy hair, and dull sleepy blue eyes, which were occasion- ally lit up with expression. He wore a fiat gray cloth cap, a dingy wool-colored greatcoat, and cowhide boots. He was a great consumer of meat, usually carrying his dinner to his work a couple of miles past my house, — for he chopped all summer, — in a tin Digitized by Microsoft® 152 WALDEN. pail ; cold meats, often cold woodchucks, and coffee in a stone bottle which dangled by a string from his belt ; and sometimes he offered me a drink. He came along early, crossing my beaniield, though without anxiety or haste to get to his work, such as Yankees exhibit. He wasn't a-going to hurt himself. He didn't care if he only earned his board. Frequently he would leave his dinner in the bushes, when his dog had caught a woodchuck by the way, and go back a mile and a half to dress it and leave it in the cellar of the house where he boarded, after deliberating first for half an hour whether he could not sink it In the pond safely till nightfall, — loving to dwell long upon these themes. He would say, as he went by in the morning : " How thick the pigeons are ! If working every day were not my trade, I could get all the meat I should want by hunting, — pigeons, woodchucks, rabbits, par- tridges, — by gosh ! I could get all I should want for a week in one day." He was a skilful chopper, and indulged in some flourishes and ornaments in his art. He cut his trees level and close to the ground, that the sprouts which came up afterward might be more vigorous and a sled might slide over the stumps ; and instead of leaving a whole tree to support his corded wood, he would pare it away to a slender stake or splinter which you could break off with your hand at last. He interested me because he was so quiet and soli- tary and so happy withal : a well of good humor and contentment which overflowed at his eyes. His mirth was without alloy. Sometimes I saw him at his work in the woods, felling trees, and he would greet me with a laugh of inexpressible satisfaction, and a salutation jn Canadian French, though he spoke English as well. Digitized by Microsoft® VISITORS. 153 When I approached him he would suspend his work, and with half-suppressed mirth lie along the trunk of a pine which he had felled, and, peeling off the inner bark, roll it up into a ball and chew it while he laughed and talked. Such an exuberance of animal spirits had he that he sometimes tumbled down and rolled on the ground with laughter at anything which made him think and tickled him. Looking round upon the trees he would exclaim, — " By George ! I can enjoy myself well enough here chopping ; I want no better sport.'' Sometimes, when at leisure, he amused him- self all day in the woods with a pocket pistol, firing salutes to himself at regular intervals as he walked. In the winter he had a fire by which at noon he warmed his coffee in a kettle ; and as he sat on a log to eat his dinner the chickadees would sometimes come round and alight on his arm and peck at the potato in his fingers ; and he said that he " liked to have the little fellers about him." - i > '■ : In him the animal man chiefly was developed. In physical endurance and contentment he was cousin to the pine and the rock. I asked him once if he was not sometimes tired at night, after working all day ; and he answered with a sincere and serious look, "Gorrappit, I never was tired in my life." But the in- tellectual and what is called spiritual man in him were slumbering as in an infant. He had been instructed only in that innocent and ineffectual way in which the Catholic priests teach the aborigines, by which the pupil is never educated to the degree of consciousness, but only to the degree of trust and reverence, and a child is not made a man, but kept a child. When Na- ture made him, she gave him a strong body and con- tentment for his portion, and propped him on every Digitized by Microsoft® 154 WALDEN. side with reverence and reliance, that he might live uut his threescore years and ten a child. He was so genuine and unsophisticated that no introduction would serve to introduce him, more than if you intro- duced a woodchuck to your neighbor. He had got to find him out as you did. He would not play any part. Men paid him wages for work, and so helped to feed and clothe him ; but he never exchanged opinions with them. He was so simply and naturally humble — if he can be called humble who never aspires — that humility was no distinct quality in him, nor could he conceive of it. Wiser men were demigods to him. If you told him that such a one was coming, he did as if he thought that anything so grand would expect nothing of himself, but take all the responsibility on itself, and let him be forgotten still. He never heard the sound of praise. He particularly reverenced the writer and the preacher. Their performances were miracles. When I told him that I wrote considerably, he thought for a long time that it was merely the handwriting which I meant, for he could write a re- markably good hand himself. I sometimes found the name of his native parish handsomely written in the snow by the highway, with the proper French accent, and knew that he had passed. I asked him if he ever wished to write his thoughts. He said that he had read and written letters for those who could not, but he never tried to write thoughts, — no, he could not, he could not tell what to put first, it would kill him, and then there was spelling to be attended to at the same time ! I heard that a distinguished wise man and reformer asked him if he did not want the world to be changed ; but he answered with a chuckle of surprise in his Cana- Digitized by Microsoft® VISITORS. 155 dian accent, not knowing that the question had ever been entertained before, " No, I like it well enough." It would have suggested many things to a philosopher to have dealings with him. To a stranger he appeared to know nothing of things in general ; yet I sometimes saw in him a man whom I had not seen before, and I did not know whether he was as wise as Shakspeare or as simply ignorant as a child, whether to suspect him of a fine poetic consciousness or of stupidity. A townsman told me that when he met him sauntering through the village in his small close-fitting cap, and whistling to himself, he reminded him of a prince in disguise. His only books were an almanac and an arithmetic, in which last he was considerably expert. The former was a sort of cyclopaedia to him, which he supposed to contain an abstract of human knowledge, as indeed it does to a considerable extent. I loved to sound him on the various reforms of the day, and he never failed to look at them in the most simple and practical light. He had never heard of such things before. Could he do without factories? I asked. He had worn the home-made Vermont gray, he said, and that was good. Could he dispense with tea and coffee? Did this country afford any beverage besides water? He had soaked hemlock leaves in water and drunk it, and thought that was better than water in warm weather. When I asked him if he could do without money, he showed the convenience of money in such a way as to suggest and coincide with the most philosophical accounts of the origin of this institution, and the very derivation of the word pecunia. If an ox were his property, and he wished to get needles and thread at the store, he thought it would be inconvenientj and Digitized by Microsoft® 1 56 WALDEN. impossible soon, to go on mortgaging some portion of the creature each time to that amount. He could defend many institutions better than any philosopher, because, in describing them as they concerned him, he gave the true reason for their prevalence, and specu- lation had not suggested to him any other. At an- other time, hearing Plato's definition of a man, — a biped without feathers, — and that one exhibited a cock plucked and called it Plato's man, he thought it an important difference that the knees bent the wrong way. He would sometimes exclaim : " How I love to talk! By George, I could talk all day! " I asked him once, when I had not seen him for many months, if he had got a new idea this summer. " Good Lord," said he, "a man that has to work as I do, if he does not forget the ideas he has had, he will do well. Maybe the man you hoe with is inclined to race ; then, by gorry, your mind must be there ; you think of weeds." He would sometimes ask me first, on such occasions, if I had made any improvement. One winter day I asked him if he was always satisfied with himself, wishing to suggest a substitute within him for the priest without, and some higher motive for living. " Satisfied ! " said he ; " some men are satisfied with one thing, and some with another. One man, perhaps, if he has got enough, will be satisfied to sit all day with his back to the fire and his belly to the table, by George! " Yet I never, by any manoeuvring, could get him to take the spirit- ual view of things ; the highest that he appeared to conceive of was a simple expediency, such as you might expect an animal to appreciate ; and this, practically, is true of most men. If I suggested any improvement in his mode of life, he merely answered, without expressing any regret, that it was too late. Yet Digitized by Microsoft® VISITORS. 157 he thoroughly believed in honesty and the like virtues. There was a certain positive originality, however slight, to be detected in him, and 1 occasionally ob- served that he vifas thinking for himself and express- ing his own opinion, a phenomenon so rare that I would any day walk ten miles to observe it, and it amounted to the reorigination of many of the insti- tutions of society. Though he hesitated, and per- haps failed to express himself distinctly, he always had a presentable thought behind. Yet his thinking was so primitive and immersed in his animal life, that, though more promising than a merely learned man's, it rarely ripened to anything which can be reported. He suggested that there might be men of genius in the lowest grades of life, however perma- nently humble and illiterate, who take their own view always, or do not pretend to see at all ; who are as bottomless even as Walden Pond was thought to be, though they may be dark and muddy. Many a traveller came out of his way to see me and the inside of my house, and, as an excuse for calling, asked for a glass of water. I told them that I drank at the pond, and pointed thither, offering to lend them a dipper. Far off as I lived, I was not exempted from that annual visitation which occurs, methinks, about the first of April, when everybody is op the move ; and I had my share of good luck, though there were some curious specimens among my visitors. Half- witted men from the almshouse and elsewhere came to see me ; but I endeavored to make them exercise all the wit they had, and make their confessions to me ; in such cases making wit the theme of our con- Digitized by Microsoft® 158 WALDEN. versation ; and so was compensated. Indeed, I found some of them to be wiser than the so-called overseers of the poor and selectmen of the town, and thought it was time that the tables were turned. With respect to wit, I learned that there was not much difference between the half and the whole. One day, in particu- lar, an inoffensive, simple-minded pauper, whom with others I had often seen used as fencing stuff, standing or sitting on a bushel in the fields to keep cattle and himself from straying, visited me, and expressed a wish to live as I did. He told me, with the utmost simplic- ity and truth, quite superior, or rather inferior, to anything that is called humility, that he was " defi- cient in intellect." These were his words. The Lord had made him so, yet he supposed the Lord cared as much for him as for another. " I have always been so," said he, " from my childhood ; I never had much mind ; I was not like other children ; I am weak in the head. It was the Lord's will, I suppose." And there he was to prove the truth of his words. He was a metaphysical puzzle to me. I have rarely met a fellow-man on such promising ground, — it was so simple and sincere and so true, all that he said. And, true enough, in proportion as he appeared to humble himself was he exalted. I did not know at first but it was the result of a wise policy. It seemed that from such a basis of truth and frankness as the poor weak-headed pauper had laid, our intercourse might go forward to something better than the inter- course of sages. I had some guests from those not reckoned com- monly among the town's poor, but who should be ; who are among the world's poor, at any rate ; guests who appeal, not to your hospitality, but to your hospital- Digitized by Microsoft® VISITORS. 159 ality; who earnestly wish to be helped, and preface their appeal with the information that they are re- solved, for one thing, never to help themselves. I require of a visitor that he be not actually starving, though he may have the very best appetite in the world, however he got it. Objects of charity are not guests. Men who did not know when their visit had terminated, though I went about my business again, answering them from greater and greater remoteness. Men of almost every degree of wit called on me in the migrating season. Some who had more wits than they knew what to do with ; runaway slaves with planta- tion manners, who listened from time to time, like the fox in the fable, as if they heard the hounds a-baying on their track, and looked at me beseechingly, as much as to say, — " O Christian, will you send me back ? " One real runaway slave, among the rest, whom I helped to forward toward the north star. Men of one idea, like a hen with one chicken, and that a duckling ; men of a thousand ideas, and unkempt heads, like those hens which are made to take charge of a hun- dred chickens, all in pursuit of one bug, a score of them lost in every morning's dew, — and become frizzled and mangy in consequence ; men of ideas instead of legs, a sort of intellectual centipede that made you crawl a!': over. One man proposed a book in which visitors should write their names, as at the White Mountains ; but, alas ! I have too good a memory to make that necessary. I could not but notice some of the peculiarities of my visitors. Girls and boys and young women gen- erally seemed glad to be in the woods. They looked Digitized by Microsoft® l6o WALDEN. in the pond and at the flowers, and improved their time. Men of business, even farmers, thought only of solitude and employment, and of the great distance at which I dwelt from something or other ; and though they said that they loved a ramble in the woods occa- sionally, it was obvious that they did not. Restless committed men, whose time was all taken up in get- ting a living or keeping it ; ministers who spoke of God as if they enjoyed a monopoly of the subject, who could not bear all kinds of opinions ; doctors, lawyers, uneasy housekeepers who pried into my cupboard and bed when I was out, — how came Mrs. to know that my sheets were not as clean as hers ? — young men who had ceased to be young, and had concluded Ihat it was safest to follow the beaten track of the pro- fessions, — all these generally said that it was not pos- sible to do so much good in my position. Ay ! there was the rub. The old and infirm and the timid, of whatever age or sex, thought most of sickness, and sud- den accident and death ; to them life seemed fiiU of danger, — what danger is there if you don't think of any ? — and they thought that a prudent man would carefully select the safest position, where Dr. B. might be on hand at a moment's warning. To them the village was literally a com-munity, a league for mutual defence, and you would suppose that they would not go a-huckleberrying without a medicine chest. The amount of it is, if a man is alive, there is always dan- ger that he may die, though the danger must be allowed to be less in proportion as he is dead-and- alive to begin with. A man sits as many risks as he runs. Finally, there were the self-styled reformers, the greatest bores of all, who thought that I was for- ever singing, — Digitized by Microsoft® VISITORS. l6l This is the house that I built; This is the man that lives in the house that I built; but they did not know that the third line was, — These are the folks that worry the man That lives in the house that I built. I did not fear the hen-harriers, for I kept no chickens ; but I feared the men-harriers rather. I had more cheering visitors than the last. Chil- dren come a-berrying, railroad men taking a Sunday morning walk in clean shirts, fishermen and hunters, poets and philosophers, in short, all honest pilgrims, who came out to the woods for freedom's sake, and really left the village behind, I was ready to greet with, — " Welcome, Englishmen ! welcome. English- men! " for I had had communication with that race. Digitized by Microsoft® VII. THE BEANFIELD. Meanwhile my beans, the length of whose rows, added together, was seven miles already planted, were impatient to be hoed, for the earliest had grown con- siderably before the latest were in the ground ; Indeed, they were not easily to be put off. What was the meaning of this so steady and self-respecting, this small Herculean labor, I knew not. I came to love my rows, my beans, though so many more than I wanted. They attached me to the earth, and so I got strength like Antaeus. But why should I raise them? Only Heaven knows. This was my curious labor all sum- mer, — to make this portion of the earth's surface, which had yielded only cinquefoil, blackberries, johns- wort, and the like, before, sweet wild fruits and pleasant flowers, produce instead this pulse. What shall I learn of beans or beans of me? I cherish them, I hoe them, early and late I have an eye tr them ; and this is my day's work. It is a fine broad leaf to look on. My auxiliaries are the dews and rains which water this dry soil, and what fertility is in the soil itself, which for the most part is lean and effete. My enemies are worms, cool days, and most of all woodchucks. The last have nibbled for me a quarter of an acre clean. But what right had I to oust johnswort and the rest, and break up their ancient herb garden? Soon, however, the remaining beans 162 Digitized by Microsoft® THE. BEANPIELL). 163 will be too tough for them, and go forward to meet new foes. When I was four years old, as I well remember, I was brought from Boston to this my native town, through these very woods and this field, to the pond. It is one of the oldest scenes stamped onmy memory. And now to-night my flute has waked the echoes over that very water. The pines still stand here older than I; or, if some have fallen, I have cooked my supper with their stumps, and a new growth is rising all around, preparing another aspect for new infant eyes. Almost the same johnswort springs from the same perennial root in this pasture, and even I have at length helped to clothe that fabulous landscape of my infant dreams, and one of the results of my pres- ence and influence is seen in these bean leaves, corn blades, and potato vines. I planted about two acres and a half of upland ; and as it was only about fifteen years since the land was cleared, and I myself had got out two or three cords of stumps, I did not give it any manure; but in the course of the summer it appeared by the arrow-heads which I turned up in hoeing, that an extinct nation had anciently dwelt here and planted corn and beans ere white men came to clear the land, and so, to some extent, had exhausted the soil for this very crop. Before yet any woodchuck or squirrel had run across the road, or the sun had got above the shrub- oaks, while all the dew was on, though the farmers warned me against it, — I would advise you to do all your work if possible while the dew is on, — I began to level the ranks of haughty weeds in my beanfield and throw dust upon their heads. Early in the morn- ing I worked barefooted, dabbling like a plastic artist Digitized by Microsoft® 1 64 WALDEN. in the dewy and crumbling sand, but later in the day the sun blistered my feet. There the sun lighted me to hoe beans, pacing slowly backward and forward over that yellow gravelly upland, between the long green rows, fifteen rods, the one end terminating in a shrub-oak copse where I could rest in the shade, the other in a blackberry field where the green berries deepened their tints by the time I had made another bout. Removing the weeds, putting fresh soil about the bean stems, and encouraging this weed which I had sown, making the yellow soil express its summer thought in bean leaves and blossoms rather than in wormwood and piper and millet grass, making the earth say beans instead of grass, — this was my daily work. As I had little aid from horses or cattle, or hired men or boys, or improved implements of hus- bandry, I was much slower, and became much more intimate with my beans than usual. But labor of the hands, even when pursued to the verge of drudgery, is perhaps never the worst form of idleness. It has a constant and imperishable moral, and to the scholar it yields a classic result. A very agricola laboriosus was 1 to travellers bound westward through Lincoln and Wayland to nobody knows where ; they sitting at their ease in gigs, with elbows on knees, and reins loosely hanging in festoons ; I the home-staying la- borious native of the soil. But soon my homestead was out of their sight and thought. It was the only open and cultivated field for a great distance on either side of the road; so they made the most of it; and sometimes the man in the field heard more of trav- ellers' gossip and comment than was meant for his ear : " Beans so late ! peas so late ! " — for I continued to plant when others had begun to hoe, — the minis- Digitized by Microsoft® THE BEANFIELD. 165 terial husbandman had not suspected it. " Com, my boy, for fodder; corn for fodder." "Does he livi there ? " asks the black bonnet of the gray coat ; and the hard-featured farmer reins up his grateful dobbin to inquire what you are doing where he sees no manure in the furrow, and recommends a little chip dirt, or any little waste stuff, or it may be ashes or plaster. But here were two acres and a half of furrows, and only a hoe for cart and two hands to draw it, — there being an aversion to other carts and horses, — and chip dirt far away. Fellow-travellers as they rattled by compared it aloud with the fields which they had passed, so that I came to know how I stood in the agricultural world. This was one field not in Mr. Coleman's report. And, by the way, who esti- mates the value of the crop which Nature yields in the still wilder fields unimproved by man ? The crop of English hay is carefully weighed, the moisture calcu- lated, the silicates and the potash ; but in all dells and pond holes in the woods and pastures and swamps grows a rich and various crop only unreaped by man. Mine was, as it were, the connecting link between wild and cultivated fields ; as some states are civilized, and others half-civilized, and others savage or bar- barous, so my field was, though not in a bad sense, a half-cultivated field. They were beans cheerfully re- turning to their wild and primitive state that I culti- vated, and my hoe played the Rans des Vaches for them. Near at hand, upon the topmost spray of a birch, sings the brown-thrasher — or red mavis, as some love to call him — all the morning, glad of your society, that would find out another farmer's field if yours were not here. While you are planting the Digitized by Microsoft® 1 66 WALDEN. seed, he cries, — " Drop it, drop it,— cover it up, cover it up, — pull it up, pull it up, pull it up." But this was not corn, and so it was safe from such enemies as he. You may wonder what his rigmarole, his amateur Paganini performances on one string or on twenty, have to do with your planting, and yet prefer it to leached ashes or plaster. It was a cheap sort of top dressing in which I had entire faith. As I drew a still fresher soU about the rows with my hoe, I disturbed the ashes of unchronicled nations who in primeval years lived under these heavens, and their small implements of war and hunting were brought to the light of this modern day. They lay mingled with other natural stones, some of which bore the marks of having been burned by Indian fires, and some by the sun, and also bits of pottery and glass brought hither by the recent cultivators of the soil. When my hoe tinkled against the stones, that music echoed to the woods and the sky, and was an accom- paniment to my labor which yielded an instant and immeasurable crop. It was no longer beans that I hoed, nor I that hoed beans ; and I remembered with as much pity as pride, if I remembered at all, my acquaintances who had gone to the city to attend the oratorios. The night-hawk circled over- head in the sunny afternoons — for I sometimes made a day of it — like a mote in the eye, or in heaven's eye, falling from time to time with a swoop and a sound as if the heavens were rent, torn at last to very rags and tatters, and yet a seamless cope remained ; small imps that fill the air and lay their eggs on the ground on bare sand or rocks on the tops of hills, where few have found them ; graceful and slender, like ripples caught up from the pond, as leaves are Digitized by Microsoft® THE BEANFIELD. \f] raised by the wind to float in the heavens ; such kindredship is in Nature. The hawk is aerial brother of the wave which he sails over and surveys, those his perfect air-inflated wings answering to the elemental unfledged pinions of the sea. Or sometimes I watched a pair of hen-hawks circling high in the sky, alter- nately soaring and descending, approaching and leav- ing one another, as if they were the embodiment of my own thoughts. Or I was attracted by the pas- sage of wild pigeons from this wood to that, with a slight quivering winnowing sound and carrier haste ; or from under a rotten stump my hoe turned up a sluggish, portentous, and outlandish spotted sala- mander, a trace of Egypt and the Nile, yet our con- temporary. When I paused to lean on my hoe, these sounds and sights I heard and saw anywhere in the row, a part of the inexhaustible entertainment which the country offers. On gala days the town fires its great guns, which echo like popguns to these woods, and some waifs of martial music occasionally penetrate thus far. To me, away there in my beanfield at the other end of the town, the big guns sounded as if a puff ball had burst ; and when there was a military turnout of which I was ignorant, I have sometimes had a vague sense all the day of some sort of itching and disease in the horizon as if some eruption would break out there soon, either scarlatina or canker-rash, until at length some more favorable puff of wind, making haste over the fields and up the Wayland road, brought me in- formation of the " trainers." It seemed by the distant hum as if somebody's bees had swarmed, and that the neighbors, according to Virgil's advice, by a faint tintinnabulum upon the most sonorous of their do- Digitized by Microsoft® 1 68 WALDEN. mestic utensils, were endeavoring to call them down into the hive again. And when the sound died quite away, and the hum had ceased, and the most favor- able breezes told no tale, I knew that they had got the last drone of them all safely into the Middlesex hive, and that now their minds were bent on the honey with which it was smeared. I felt proud to know that the liberties of Massachu- setts and of our fatherland were in such safe keeping ; and as I turned to my hoeing again! was filled with an inexpressible confidence, and pursued my labor cheerfully with a calm trust in the future. When there were several bands of musicians, it sounded as if all the village was a vast bellows, and all the buildings expanded and collapsed alternately with a din. But sometimes it was a really noble and inspiring strain that reached these woods, and the trumpet that sings of fame, and I felt as if I could spit a Mexican with a good relish, — for why should we always stand for trifles? — and looked round for a woodchuck or a skunk to exercise my chivalry upon. These martial strains seemed as far away as Palestine, and reminded me of a march of crusaders in the hori- zon, with a slight tantivy and tremulous motion of the elm-tree tops which overhang the village. This was one of the great days ; though the sky had from my clearing only the same everlastingly great look that it wears daily, and I saw no difference in it. It was a singular experience, that long acquaintance which I cultivated with beans, what with planting, and hoeing, and harvesting, and threshing, and picking over, and selling them, — the last was the hardest of all, — I might add eating, for I did taste. I was determined to know beans. When they were grow- Digitized by Microsoft® THE BEAN FIELD. 169 mg, I used to hoe from five o'clock in the morning till noon, and commonly spent the rest of the day about other affairs. Consider the intimate and curi- ous acquaintance one makes with various kinds of weeds, — it will bear some iteration in the account, for there was no little iteration in the labor, — disturb- ing their delicate organizations so ruthlessly, and making such invidious distinctions with his hoe, levelling whole ranks of one species, and sedulously cultivating another. That's Roman wormwood, — that's pigweed, — that's sorrel, — that's piper-grass, ■ — have at him, chop him up, turn his roots upward to the sun, don't let him have a fibre in the shade, if you do he'll turn himself t'other side up and be as green as a leek in two days. A long war, not with cranes, but with weeds, those Trojans who had sun and rain and dews on their- side. Daily the beans saw me come to their rescue armed with a hoe, and thin the ranks of their enemies, filling up the trenches with weedy dead. Many a lusty crest-waving Hec- tor, that towered a whole foot above his crowding comrades, fell before my weapon and rolled in the dust. Those summer days which some of my contem- poraries devoted to the fine arts in Boston and Rome, and others to contemplation in India, and others to trade in London or New York, I thus, with the other farmers of New England, devoted to husbandry. Not that I wanted beans to eat, for I am by nature a Pythagorean, so far as beans are concerned, whether they mean porridge or voting, and ex- changed them for rice ; but, perchance, as some must work in fields if only for the sake of tropes and expression, to serve a parable-maker one day. It was on the whole a rare amusement, which, con- Digitized by Microsoft® 1 70 WALDEN. tinued too long, might have become a dissipation. Though I gave them no manure, and did not hoe them all once, I hoed them unusually well as far as I went, and was paid for it in the end, " there being in truth," as Evelyn says, " no compost or tetaticn whatsoever comparable to this continual motion, repastination, and turning of the mould with the spade." " The earth," he adds elsewhere, " espe- cially if fresh, has a certain magnetism in it, by which it attracts the salt, power, or virtue (call it either) which gives it life, and is the logic of all the labor and stir we keep about it, to sustain us ; all dungings and other sordid temperings being but the vicars succedaneous to this improvement." Moreover, this being one of those "worn-out and exhausted lay fields which enjoy their sabbath," had perchance, as Sir Kenelm Digby thinks likely, attracted "vital spirits " from the air. I harvested twelve bushels of beans. But to be more particular, for it is complained that Mr. Coleman has reported chiefly the expensive ex- periments of gentlemen farmers, my outgoes were, — For a hoe 3o 54 Ploughing, harrowing, and furrowing . 7 50 Too much. Beans for seed 3 12J Potatoes " 1 33 Peas " .,.,,,040 Turnip seed o 06 White line for crow fence . . . . o 02 Horse cultivator and boy three hours . i 00 Horse and cart to get crop . , , o 75 In all §14 72i My income was (patrem familias vendacem, non emacem esse oportet), from Digitized by Microsoft® THE BEANFIELD. 171 Nine bushels and twelve quarts of beans sold . . $16 94 Five " large potatoes 2 50 Nine " small " 2 25 Grass ...•••••••100 Stalks 075 In all ;^23 44 Leaving a pecuniary profit, as I have elsewhere said, of ^8,71}. This is the result of my experience in raising beans. Plant the common small white bush bean about the first of June, in rows three feet by eighteen inches apart, being careful to select fresh round and unmixed seed. First look out for worms, and supply vacancies by planting anew. Then look out for woodchucks, if it is an exposed place, for they will nibble off the earliest tender leaves almost clean as they go ; and again, when the young tendrils make their appearance, they have notice of it, and will shear them off with both buds and young pods, sitting erect like a squirrel. But above all, harvest as early as possible, if you would , escape frosts and have a fair and salable crop ; you may save much loss by this means. This further experience also I gained. I said to myself, I will not plant beans and corn with so much industry another summer, but such seeds, if the seed Is not lost, as sincerity, truth, simplicity, faith, inno- cence, and the like, and see if they will not grow in this soil, even with less toil and manurance, and sus- tain me, for surely it has not been exhausted for these crops. Alas! I said this to myself; but now another summer is gone, and another, and another, and I am obliged to say to you. Reader, that the seeds which I planted, if indeed they were the seeds of those virtues, were wormeaten or had lost their vitality Digitized by Microsoft® 172 WALDEN. and so did not come up. Commonly men will onlj be brave as their fathers were brave, or timid. This generation is very sure to plant corn and beans each new year precisely as the Indians did centu-ies ago, and taught the first settlers to do, as if there /vere a fate in it. I saw an old man the other day, to my astonishment, making the holes with a hoe for the seventieth time at least, and not for himself to lie down in! But why should not the New Englander try new adventures, and not lay so much stress on his grain, his potato and grass crop, and his orchards, — raise other crops than these ? Why concern our- selves so much about our beans for seed, and not be concerned at all about a new generation of men? We should really be fed and cheered if when we met a man we were sure to see that some of the qualities which I have named, which we all prize more than those other productions, but which are for the most part broadcast and floating in the air, had taken root and grown in him. Here comes such a subtile and ineffable quality, for instance, as truth or justice, though the slightest amount or new variety of it, along the road. Our ambassadors should be in- structed to send home such seeds as these, and Con- gress help to distribute them over all the land. We should never stand upon ceremony with sincerity. We should never cheat and insult and banish one another by our meanness, if there were present the kernel of worth and friendliness. We should not meet thus in haste. Most men I do not meet at all, for they seem not to have time ; they are busy about their beans. We would not deal with a man thus plodding ever, leaning on a hoe or a spade as a staff between his work, not as a mushroom, but partially Digitized by Microsoft® THE BEANFIELD. 173 risen out of the earth, something more than erect, like swallows alighted and walking on the ground : — "And as he spake, his wings would now and then Spread, as lie meant to fly, then close again," so that we should suspect that we might be convers- ing with an angel. Bread may not always nourish us ; but it always does us good, it eVen takes stiffness out of our joints, and makes us supple and buoyant, when we knew not what ailed us, to recognize any generosity in man or Nature, to share any unmixed and heroic joy. Ancient poetry and mythology suggest, at least, that husbandry was once a sacred art ; but it is pursued with irreverent haste and heedlessness by us, our object being to have large farms and large crops merely. We have no festival, nor procession, nor ceremony, not excepting our Cattle-shows and so- called Thanksgivings, by which the farmer expresses a sense of the sacredness of his calling, or is re- minded of its sacred origin. It is the premium and the feast which tempt him. He sacrifices not to Ceres and the Terrestrial Jove, but to the infernal Plutus rather. By avarice and selfishness, and a grovelling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is de- graded with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows Nature but as a robber. Cato says that the profits of agriculture are particularly pious or just (jnaximeque pius quiesttts), and according to Varro, the old Romans " called the same earth Mother and Ceres, and thought that they who cul- Digitized by Microsoft® 174 WALDEN. tivated it led a pious and useful life, and that they alone were left of the race of King Saturn." We are wont to forget that the sun looks on our cultivated fields and on the prairies and forests with- out distinction. They all reflect and absorb his rays alike, and the former make but a small part of the glorious picture which he beholds in his daily course. In his view the earth is all equally cultivated like a garden. Therefore we should receive the benefit of his light and heat with a corresponding trust and magnanimity. What though I value the seed of these beans, and harvest that in the fall of the year? This broad field which I have looked at so long looks not to me as the principal cultivator, but away from me to influences more genial to it, which water and make it green. These beans have results which are not harvested by me. Do they not grow for wood- chucks partly? The ear of wheat (in Latin spica, obsoletely speca, from spe, hope) should not be the only hope of the husbandman ; its kernel or grain (granum, from gerendo, bearing) is not all that it bears. How, then, can our harvest fail? Shall I not rejoice also at the abundance of the weeds whose seeds are the granary of the birds ? It matters litfle comparatively whether the fields fill the farmer's barns. The true husbandman will cease from anx- iety, as the squirrels manifest no concern whether the woods will bear chestnuts this year or not, and finish his labor with every day, relinquishing all claim to the produce of his fields, and sacrificing in his mind not only his first but his last fruits also. Digitized by Microsoft® VIII. THE VILLAGE. After hoeing, or perhaps reading and writing, in the forenoon, I usually bathed again in the pond, swimming across one of its coves for a stint, and washed the dust of labor from my person, or smoothed out the last wrinkle which study had made, and for the afternoon was absolutely free. Every day or two I strolled to the village to hear some of the gossip which is incessantly going on there, circulating either from mouth to mouth, or from newspaper to newspaper, and which, taken in homoeopathic doses, was really as refreshing in its way as the rustle of leaves and the peeping of frogs. As I walked in the woods to see the birds and squir- rels, so I walked in the village to see the men and boys ; instead of the wind among the pines I heard the carts rattle. In one direction from my house there was a colony of muskrats in the river mead- ows ; under the grove of elms and buttonwoods in the other horizon was a village of busy men, as curi- ous to me as if they had been prairie dogs, each sitting at the mouth of its burrow, or running over to a neighbor's to gossip. I went there frequently to observe their habits. The village appeared to me a great news room ; and on one side to support it, as once at Redding & Company's on State Street, they kept nuts and raisins, or salt and meal and other gro- 175 Digitized by Microsoft® 176 WALDEN. ceries. Some have such a vast appetite for the former commodity, that is, the news, and such sound digestive organs, that they can sit forever in public avenues without stirring, and let it simmer and whisper through them like the Etesian winds, or as if inhal- ing ether, it only producing numbness and insensi- bility to pain, — otherwise it would be often painful to hear, — without affecting the consciousness. I hardly ever failed, when I rambled through the village, to see a row of such worthies, either sitting on a ladder sunning themselves, with their bodies inclined for- ward and their eyes glancing along the line this way and that, from time to time, with a voluptuous ex- pression, or else leaning against a barn with their hands in their pockets, like caryatides, as if to prop it up. They, being commonly out of doors, heard whatever was in the wind. These are the coarsest mills, in which all gossip is first rudely digested or cracked up before it is emptied into finer and more delicate hoppers within doors. I observed that the vitals of the village were the grocery, the bar-room, the post-office, and the bank ; and, as a necessary part of the machinery, they kept a bell, a big gun, and a fire-engine, at convenient places ; and the houses were so arranged as to make the most of mankind, in lanes and fronting one another, so that every trav- eller had to run the gantlet, and every man, woman, and child might get a lick at him. Of course, those who were stationed nearest to the head of the line, where they could most see and be seen, and have the first blow at him, paid the highest prices for their places ; and the few straggling inhabitants in the out- skirts, where long gaps in the line began to occur, and the traveller could get over walls or turn aside Digitized by Microsoft® THE VILLAGE. 177 into cow paths, and so escape, paid a very slight ground or window tax. Signs were hung out on all sides to allure him ; some to catch him by the appe- tite, as the tavern and victualling^ cellar; some by the fancy, as the dry goods store and the jeweller's ; and others by the hair or the feet or the skirts, as the barber, the shoemaker, or the tailor. Besides, there was a still more terrible standing invitation to call at every one of these houses, and company expected about these times. For the most part I escaped won- derfully from these dangers, either by proceeding at once boldly and without deliberation to the goal, as is recommended to those who run the gantlet, or by keeping my thoughts on high things, like Orpheus, who, " loudly singing the praises of the gods to his lyre, drowned the voices of the Sirens, and kept out of danger." Sometimes I bolted suddenly, and nobody could tell my whereabouts, for I did not stand much about gracefulness, and never hesitated at a gap in the fence. I was even accustomed to make an irrup- tion into some houses, where I was well entertained, and after learning the kernels and very last sieve-ful of news, what had subsided, the prospects of war and peace, and whether the world was likely to hold to- gether much longer, I was let out through the rear avenues, and so escaped to the woods again. It was very pleasant, when I stayed late in town, to launch myself into the night, especially if it was dark and tempestuous, and set sail from some bright village parlor or lecture room, with a bag of rye or Indian meal upon my shoulder, for my snug harbor in the woods, having made all tight without and withdrawn under hatches with a merry crew of thoughts, leaving only my outer man at the helm, or even tying up the N Digitized by Microsoft® 178 WALDEN. helm when it was plain sailing. I had many a genial thought by the cabin fire "as I sailed." I was never cast away nor distressed in any weather, though I encountered some severe storms. It is darker in the woods, even in common nights, than most suppose. I frequently had to look up at the opening between the trees above the path in order to learn my route, and, where there was no cart-path, to feel with my feet the faint track which I had worn, or steer by the known relation of particular trees which I felt with my hands, passing between two pines for instance, not more than eighteen inches apart, in the midst of the woods, invariably in the darkest night. Some- times, after coming home thus late in a dark and muggy night, when my feet felt the path which my eyes could not see, dreaming and absent-minded all the way, until I was aroused by having to raise my hand to lift the latch, I have not been able to recall a single step of my walk, and I have thought that per- haps my body would find its way home if its master should forsake it, as the hand finds its way to the mouth without assistance. Several times, when a visitor chanced to stay into evening, and it proved a dark night, I was obliged to conduct him to the cart-path in the rear of the house, and then point out to him the direction he was to pursue, and in keeping which he was to be guided rather by his feet than his eyes. One very dark night I directed thus on their way two young men who had been fishing in the pond. They lived about a mile off through the woods, and were quite used to the route. A day or two after one of them told me that they wandered about the greater part of the night, close by their own premises, and did not get home till toward morning, Digitized by Microsoft® THE VILLAGE. 179 by which time, as there had been several heavy showers in the meanwhile, and the leaves were very wet, they were drenched to their skins. I have heard of many going astray even in the village streets, when the darkness was so thick that you could cut it with a knife, as the saying is. Some who live in the out- skirts, having come to town a-shopping in their wag- ons, have been obliged to put up for the night ; and gentlemen and ladies making a call have gone half a mile out of their way, feeling the sidewalk only with their feet, and not knowing when they turned. It is a surprising and memorable, as well as valuable ex- perience, to be lost in the woods any time. Often in a snow storm, even by day, one will come out upon a well-known road and yet find it impossible to tell which way leads to the village. Though he knows that he has travelled it a thousand times, he cannot recognize a feature in it, but it is as strange to him as if it were a road in Siberia. By night, of course, the perplexity is infinitely greater. In our most trivial walks, we are constantly, though unconsciously, steer- ing like pilots by certain well-known beacons and head-lands, and if we go beyond our usual course we still carry in our minds the bearing of some neigh- boring cape ; and not till we are completely lost, or turned round, — for a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost, — do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of Nature. Every man has to learn the points of com- pass again as often as he awakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction. Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations. Digitized by Microsoft® l80 WALDEN. One afternoon, near the end of the first summer, when I went to the village to get a shoe from the cob- bler's, I was seized and put into jail, because, as I have elsewhere related, I did not pay a tax to, or recognize the authority of, the state, which buys and sells men, women, and children, like cattle at the door of its senate-house. I had gone down to the woods for other purposes. But, wherever a man goes, men will pursue and paw him with their dirty insti- tutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society. It is true, I might have resisted forcibly with more or less effect, might have run " amok " against society ; but I preferred that society should run " amok " against me, it being the desperate party. However, I was released the next day, obtained my mended shoe, and returned to the woods in season to get my dinner of huckle- berries on Fair-Haven Hill. I was never molested by any person but those who represented the state. I had no lock nor bolt but for the desk which held my papers, not even a nail to put over my latch or windows. I never fastened my door night or day, though I was to be absent several days ; not even when the next fall I spent a fortnight in the woods of Maine. And yet my house was more respected than if it had been surrounded by a file of soldiers. The tired rambler could rest and warm himself by my fire, the literary amuse himself with the few books on my table, or the curious, by opening my closet door, see what was left of my dinner, and what pros- pect I had of a supper. Yet, though many people of every class came this way to the pond, I suffered no serious inconvenience from these sources, and I never missed anything but one small book, a volume Digitized by Microsoft® THE VILLAGE. l8l of Homer, which perhaps was improperly gilded, and this I trust a soldier of our camp has found by this time. I am convinced that if all men were to live as simply as I then did, thieving and robbery would be unknown. These take place only in communities where some have got more than is sufficient while others have not enough. The Pope's Homers would soon get properly distributed. — " Nee bella fuerunt, Faginus astabat dum scyphus ante dapes." " Nor wars did men molest, When only beechen bowls were in request." " You who govern public affairs, what need have you to employ punishments ? Love virtue, and the people will be virtuous. The virtues of a superior man are like the wind ; the virtues of a common man are like the grass ; the grass, when the wind passes over it, bends." Digitized by Microsoft® IX. THE PONDS. Sometimes, having had a surfeit of human society and gossip, and worn out all my village friends, I rambled still farther westward than I habitually dwell, into yet more unfrequented parts of the town, "to fresh woods and pastures new," or, while the sun was setting, made my supper of huckleberries and blue- berries on Fair-Haven Hill, and laid up a store for several days. The fruits do not yield their true flavor to the purchaser of them, nor to him who raises them for the market. There is but one way to obtain it, yet few take that way. If you would know the flavor of huckleberries, ask the cow-boy or the partridge. It is a vulgar error to suppose that you have tasted huckleberries who never plucked them. A huckle- berry never reaches Boston ; they have not been known there since they grew on her three hills. The ambrosial and essential part of the fruit is lost with the bloom which is rubbed off in the market cart, and they become mere provender. As long as Eternal Justice reigns, not one innocent huckleberry can be transported thither from the country's hills. Occasionally, after my hoeing was done for the day, I joined some impatient companion who had been fishing on the pond since morning, as silent and motionless as a duck or a floating leaf, and, after practising various kinds of philosophy, had con- 182 Digitized by Microsoft® THE PONDS. 183 eluded commonly, by the time I arrived, that he be- longed to the ancient sect of Coenobites. There was one older man, an excellent fisher and skilled in all kinds of woodcraft, who was pleased to look upon my house as a building erected for the convenience of fishermen ; and I was equally pleased when he sat in my doorway to arrange his lines. Once in a while we sat together on the pond, he at one end of the boat, and I at the other ; but not m.any words passed between us, for he had grown deaf in his later years, but he occasionally hummed a psalm, which harmo- nized well enough with my philosophy. Our inter- course was thus altogether one of unbroken harmony, far more pleasing to remember than if it had been carried on by speech. When, as was commonly the case, I had none to commune with, I used to raise the echoes by striking with a paddle on the side of my boat, filling the surrounding woods with circling and dilating sound, stirring them up as the keeper of a menagerie his wild beasts, until I elicited a growl from every wooded vale and hill side. In warm evenings I frequently sat in the boat play- ing the flute, and saw the perch, which I seemed to ■have charmed, hovering around me, and the moon travelling over the ribbed bottom, which was strewed with the wrecks of the forest. Formerly I had come to this pond adventurously, from time to time, in dark summer nights, with a companion, and making a fire close to the water's edge, which we thought attracted the fishes, we caught pouts with a bunch of worms strung on a thread ; and when we had done, far in the night, threw the burning brands high into the air like sky-rockets, which, coming down into the pond, ivere quenched with a loud hissing, and we were Digitized by Microsoft® 1 84 WALDEN. suddenly groping in total darkness. Through this, whistling a tune, we toolc our way to the haunts of men again. But now I had made my home by the shore. Sometimes, after staying in a village parlor till the family had all retired, I have returned to the woods, and, partJy with a view to the next day's dinner, spent the hours of midnight fishing from a boat by moon- light, serenaded by owls and foxes, and hearing, from time to time, the creaking note of some unknown bird close at hand. These experiences were very memo- rable and valuable to me, — anchored in forty feet of water, and twenty or thirty rods from the shore, sur- rounded sometimes by thousands of small perch and shiners, dimpling the surface with their tails in the moonlight, and communicating by a long flaxen line with mysterious nocturnal fishes which had their dwelling forty feet below, or sometimes dragging sixty feet of line about the pond as I drifted in the gentle night breeze, now and then feeling a slight vibration along it, indicative of some life prowling about its extremity, of dull uncertain blundering pur- pose there, and slow to make up its mind. At length you slowly raise, pulling hand over hand, some horned pout squeaking and squirming to the upper air. It was very queer, especially in dark nights, when your thoughts had wandered to vast and cosmogonal themes in other spheres, to feel this feint jerk, which came to interrupt your dreams and link you to Nature again. It seemed as if I might next cast my line upward into the air, as well as downward into this element which was scarcely more dense. Thus I caught two fishes as it were with one hook. Digitized by Microsoft® THE PONDS. 185 The scenery of Walden is on a humble scale, and, though very beautiful, does not approach to grandeur, nor can it much concern one who has not long fre- quented it, or lived by its shore ; yet this pond is so remarkable for its depth and purity as to merit a par- ticular description. It is a clear and deep green well, half a mile long and a mile and three quarters in cir- cumference, and contains about sixty-one and a half acres ; a perennial spring in the midst of pine and oak woods, without any visible inlet or outlet except by the clouds and evaporation. The surrounding hills rise abruptly from the water to the height of forty to eighty feet, though on the southeast and east they attain to about one hundred and one hundred and fifty feet respectively, within a quarter and a third of a mile. They are exclusively woodland. All our Concord waters have two colors at least, one when viewed at a distance, and another, more proper, close at hand. The first depends more on the light, and follows the sky. In clear weather, in summer, they appear blue at a little distance, especially if agitated, and at a great distance all appear alike. In stormy weather they are sometimes of a dark slate color. The sea. however, is said to be blue one day and green another without any perceptible change in the atmosphere. I have seen our river, when, the landscape being covered with snow, both water and ice were almost as green as grass. Some consider blue' "to be the color of pure water, whether liquid or solid." But, looking directly down into our waters from a boat, they are seen to be of very different colors. Walden is blue at one time and green at another, even from the same point of view. Lying between the earth and the heavens, it partakes of the color of both. Viewed from a hill top it reflects the Digitized by Microsoft® 1 86 WALDEN. color of trie sky, but near at hand it is of a yellowish tint next the shore where you can see the sand, then a light green, which gradually deepens to a uniform dark green in the body of the pond. In some lights, viewed even from a hill top, it is of a vivid green next the shore. Some have referred this to the reflection of the verdure ; but it is equally green there against the railroad sand-bank, and in the spring, before the leaves are expanded, and it may be simply the result of the prevailing blue mixed with the yellow of the sand. Such is the color of its iris. This is that portion, also, where in the spring, the ice being warmed by the heat of the sun reflected from the bottom, and also trans- mitted through the earth, melts first and forms a nar- row canal about the still frozen middle. Like the rest of our waters, when much agitated, in clear weather, so that the surface of the waves may reflect the sky at the right angle, or because there is more light mixed with it, it appears at a little distance of a darker blue than the sky itself; and at such a time, being on its surface, and looking with divided vision, so as to see the reflection, I have discerned a matchless and in- describable light blue, such as watered or changeable silks and sword blades suggest, more cerulean than the sky itself, alternating with the original dark green on the opposite sides of the waves, which last appeared but muddy in comparison. It is a vitreous greenish blue, as I remember it, like those patches of the winter sky seen through cloud vistas in the west before sundown. Yet a single glass of its water held up to the light is as colorless as an equal quantity of air. It is well- known that a large plate of glass wiU have a green tint, owing, as the makers say, to its " body," but a small piece of the same will be colorless. How large a body Digitized by Microsoft® THE PONDS. 187 of Walden water would be required to reflect a green tint I have never proved. The water of our river is black or a very dark brown to one looking directly down on it, and like that of most ponds, imparts to the body of one bathing in it a yellowish tinge ; but this water is of such crystalline purity that the body of the bather appears of an alabaster whiteness, still more unnatural, which, as the limbs are magnified and dis- torted withal, produces a monstrous effect, making fit studies for a Michael Angelo. The water is so transparent that the bottom can easily be discerned at the depth of twenty-five or thirty feet. Paddling over it, you may see many feet beneath the surface the schools of perch and shiners, perhaps only an inch long, yet the former easily distinguished by their transverse bars, and you think that they must be ascetic fish that find a subsistence there. Once, in the winter, many years ago, when I had been cutting holes through the ice in order to catch pickerel, as I stepped ashore I tossed my axe back on to the ice, but, as if some evil genius had directed it, it slid four or five rods directly into one of the holes, where the water was twenty-five feet deep. Out of curiosity, I lay down on the ice and looked through the hole, until I saw the axe a little on one side, standing on its head, with its helve erect and gently swaying to and fro with the pulse of the pond ; and there it might have stood erect and swaying till in the course of time the handle rotted off, if I had not disturbed it. Making another bole directly over it with an ice chisel which I had, and cut- ting down the longest birch which I could find in the neighborhood with my knife, I made a slip-noose, which I attached to its end, and, letting it down care- Sully, passed it over the knob of the handle, and drew Digitized by Microsoft® 1 88 WALDEN. it by a line along the birch, and so pulled the axe out again. The shore is composed of a belt of smooth rounded white stones like paving stones, exceptingfone or two short sand beaches, and is so steep that in many places a single leap will carry you into water over your head ; and were it not for its remarkable transparency, that would be the last to be seen of its bottom till it rose on the opposite side. Some think it is bottomless. It is nowhere muddy, and a casual observer would say that there were no weeds at all in it ; and of notice- able plants, except in the little meadows recently over- flowed, which do not properly belong to it, a closer scrutiny does not detect a flag nor a bulrush, nor even a lily, yellow or white, but only a few small heart-leaves and potamogetons, and perhaps a water-target or two ; all which however a bather might not perceive ; and these plants are clean and bright like the element they grow in. The stones extend a rod or two into the water, and then the bottom is pure sand, except in the deepest parts, where there is 'usually a little sediment, probably from the decay of the leaves, which have been wafted on to it so many successive falls, and a bright green weed is brought up on anchors even in midwinter. We have one other pond just like this. White Pond in Nine Acre Corner, about two and a half miles wes- terly ; but, though I am acquainted with most of the ponds within a dozen miles of this centre, I do not know a third of this pure and well-like character. Successive nations perchance have drunk at, admired, and fathomed it, and passed away, and still its water is green and pellucid as ever. Not an intermitting spring ! Perhaps on that spring morning when Adam Digitized by Microsoft® THE PONDS. 189 and Eve were driven out of Eden Walden Pond was already in existence, and even then breaking up in a gentle spring rain accompanied with mist and a south- erly wind, i, they seemed not to have fed me essentially. It was in- significant 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, &c. ; 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 ap- peared more beautiful to live low and fare hard in many respects ; and though I never did so, I went far enough to please my imagination. I believe that every man who has ever been earnest to preserve his higher or poetic faculties in the best condition has been particularly inclined to abstain from animal food, and from much food of any kind. It is a signifi- cant fact, stated by entomologists, I find it in Kirby and Spence, that " some insects 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 larvae. The voracious caterpillar when transformed into a butterfly," . . . "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 ; and there are whole nations in that condition, nations without fancy or imagination, whose vast abdomens betray them. Q Digitized by Microsoft® 226 WALDEN. It is hard to provide and cook so simple and clean a diet as will not oflfend 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 temperately need not make us ashamed of our appetites, nor interrupt 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 preparing 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 certainly 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 car- nivorous 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 wiU go to snar- ing rabbits, or slaughtering lambs, may learn, — and he will be regarded as a benefactor of his race who shall teach man to confine himself to a more inno- cent and wholesome diet. Whatever my own prac- tice may be, I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improve- ment, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the sav- age tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized. If one listens to the faintest but constant sugges- tions of his genius, which are certainly true, he sees not to what extremes, or even insanity, it may lead him ; and yet that way, as he grows more resolute Digitized by Microsoft® HtGHER LAWS. 227 and faithful, his road lies. The faintest assured ob- jection 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 bodily weakness, yet perhaps no one can say that the consequences were to be re- gretted, 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 astounding and most real are never com- municated by man to man. The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable 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. I 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 drunkenness. I believe that water is the only drink for a wise man; wine is not so noble a liquor; and think of dashing the hopes of a morning with a cup of warm coffee, or of an evening with a dish of tea ! Ah, how low I fall when I am tempted by them ! Even music may be intoxicating. Such apparently Digitized by Microsoft® 228 WALDEN. 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, however much it is to be regretted, with years I have grown more coarse and indifferent. Perhaps these questions are entertained only in youth, as most believe of poetry. My practice is "nowhere,'' my opinion is here. Nevertheless I am far from 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 Omnipresent Supreme Being may eat all that exists," that is, is not bound to inquire what is his food, or who prepares it ; and even in their case it is to be observed, as a Hindoo commentator 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 commonly 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 can Digitized by Microsoft® HIGHER LAWS. 229 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 devotion 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 mUl-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 instant's truce between virtue and vice. Good- ness is the only investment that never fails. In the music of the harp which trembles round the world it is the insisting on this which thrills us. The harp is the travelling patterer for the Universe's Insurance Company, recommending its laws, and our little good- ness is all the assessment that we pay. Though the youth at last grows indifferent, the laws of the uni- verse 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 unfortu- nate who does not hear it. We cannot touch a string or move a stop but the charming moral trans- fixes 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 Digitized by Microsoft® 230 WALDEN. awakens in proportion 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, occupy our bodies. Possibly we may withdraw from it, but never change its nature. I fear that it may enjoy a certain health of its own ; that we may be well, yet not pure. The 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 at- tained to purity? If I knew so wise a man as could teach me purity I would go to seek him forthwith. "A command over our passions, and over the ex- ternal senses of the body, and good acts, are declared by the Ved to be indispensable in the mind's approxi- mation 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 inspires us. Chastity is the flowering of man ; and what are called Genius, Heroism, Holiness, and the like, are but various fruits which succeed it. Man flows at once to God when the channel of purity is open. By 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 Digitized by Microsoft® HIGHER LAWS. 23 1 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 I 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 sen- sualist he is. The impure can neither stand nor sit with purity. When the reptile is attacked at one mouth of his burrow, he shows himself at another. If you would be chaste, you must be temperate. What is chastity ? How shall a man know if he is chaste ? He shall hot 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 student sensuality is a sluggish habit of mind. An unclean person is universally a slothful one, one who sits by a stove, whom the sun shines on prostrate, who reposes with- out being fatigued. If you would avoid uncleanness, Digitized by Microsoft® 232 WALDEN. and all the sins, work earnestly, though it be at clean- ing a stable. Nature is hard to be overconne, but she must be overcome. What avails it that you are Christian, if you are not purer than the heathen, if you deny yourself no more, if you are not more reli- gious ? 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 subject, — I care not how obscene my words are, — But because I cannot speak of them without betraying my impurity. We discourse 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 of- fensive 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 can he get off by hammering marble instead. We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones. Any nobleness begins at once to refine a man's features, any mean- ness or sensuality to imbrute them. John Farmer sat at his door one September even- ing, 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 Digitized by Microsoft® HIGHER LAWS. 233 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 work ; but the burden of his thought was that though this kept run- ning in his head, and he found himself planning and contriving it against his will, yet it concerned him very little. It was no more than the scurf of his skin, which was constantly shuffled off. But the notes of the flute came home to his ears out of a different sphere from that he worked in, and suggested work for certain faculties which slumbered in 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 mi- grate thither ? All that he could think of was to practise some new austerity, to let his mind descend into his body and redeem it, and treat himself with ever increasing respect. Digitized by Microsoft® XII. BRUTE NEIGHBORS. Sometimes I had a companion in my fishing, who came through the village to my house from the other side of the town, and the catching of the dinner was as much a social exercise as the eating of it. Hermit. I wonder what the world is doing now. 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 can 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 day ! Better not keep a house. Say, some hollow tree ; and then for morn- ing calls 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 234 Digitized by Microsoft® BRUTE NEIGHBORS. 235 comes on apace ; my sumachs and sweet-briers trem- ble. — Eh, Mr. Poet, is it you? How do you like the world to-day ? Poet. See those clouds ; how they hang! That's the greatest thing I have seen to-day. There's nothing like it in old paintings, nothing like it in foreign lands, — unless when we were off the coast of Spain . That's a true Mediterranean sky. I thought, as I have my living to get, and have not eaten to-day, that I might go a-iishing. That's the true industry for poets. It is the only trade I have learned. Come, let's along. Hermit. I cannot resist. My brown bread will soon be gone. I will go with you gladly soon, but I am just concluding a serious meditation. I think that I am near the end of it. Leave me alone, then, for a while. But that we may not be delayed, you shall be digging the bait 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 to-day. 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 distance" Hermit alone. Let me see, where was I? Me- thinks I was nearly in this frame of mind ; the world lay about at this angle. Shall I go to heaven or a-fish- ing ? If I should scon bring this meditation to an end, Digitized by Microsoft® 236 WALDEN. would another so sweet occasion be likely to offer ? 1 was as near being resolved into the essence of things as ever I was in my life. I fear my thoughts will not come back to me. If 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; they may fetch that state about again. I know not whether it was the dumps or a budding ecstasy. Mem. There never is but one opportunity of a kind. Poet. How now. Hermit, is it too soon ? I have got just thirteen whole ones, besides several which are im- perfect or undersized ; but they will do for the smaller fry ; they do not cover up the hook so much. Those village worms are quite too large ; a shiner may make a meal off one without finding the skewer. 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 com- mon ones, which are said to have been introduced into the country, but a wild native kind not found in the vil- lage. I sent one to a distinguished naturalist, and it in- terested him much. When I was building, one of these Digitized by Microsoft® BRUTE NEIGHBORS. 23f 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 crumbs at my feet. It probably had never seen a man before ; and it soon became quite familiar, and would run over my shoes and up my clothes. It could readily ascend the sides of the room by short impulses, like a squirrel, which it resembled in its motions. At length, as I leaned with my elbow on the bench one day, it ran up my clothes, and along my sleeve, and round and round the paper which held my dinner, while I kept the latter close, and dodged and played at bo-peep with it ; and when at last I held still a piece of cheese between my thumb and finger, it came and nibbled it, sitting in my hand, and afterward cleaned its face and paws, like a fly, and walked away. A phoebe soon built in my shed, and a robin for pro- tection 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 in the rear to the front of my house, clucking and call- ing to them like a hen, and in all her behavior proving herself the hen of the woods. The young suddenly dis- perse 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 trav- eller 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 suspecting their neigh- borhood. 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 Digitized by Microsoft® 238 rVALDEN. under a leaf, and mind only their mother's directions given from a distance, nor will your approach make them run again and betray themselves. You may even tread on them, or have your eyes on them for a minute, without discovering them. I have held them in my open hand at such a time, and still their only care, obedient to their mother and their instinct, was to squat there without fear or trembling. So perfect is 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 developed and precocious even than chickens. The remarkably adult yet innocent expression of their open and serene eyes is very memorable. All intelligence seems reflected in them. They suggest not merely the purity of in- fancy, but a wisdom clarified by experience. Such an eye was not born when the bird was, but is coeval with the sky it reflects. The woods do not yield an- other such gem. The traveller does not often look into such a Umpid well. The ignorant 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 retired the otter manages to Digitized by Microsoft® BRUTE NEIGHBORS. 239 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 descending grassy hollows, full of young pitch-pines, into a larger wood about the swamp. There, in a very secluded and shaded spot, under a spreading white-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 midsummer, 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 be- neath ; 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 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 inquisitive. You only need sit still long enough in some attractive Digitized by Microsoft® 240 WALDEN. spot in tne 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 ray 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 farther, 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 fre- quently 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 rag- ing; 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 foughf so resolutely. I watched a couple that were fast locked in- each other's embraces, in a little sunny valley amid the chips, now at noon- day prepared to fight till the sun went down, or life went out. The smaller red champion had fastened himself like a vice to his adversary's front, and through all the tumblings on that field never for an instant ceased to gnaw at one of his feelers near the root, having already caused the other to go by the board ; while the stronger black one dashed him from side to side, and, as I saw on looking nearer, Digitized by Microsoft® BRUTE NEIGHBORS. 24 1 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 despatched his foe, or had not yet taken part in the battle ; probably the latter, for he had lost none of his limbs ; whose mother had charged him to return with his shield or upon it. Or perchance he was some Achilles, who had nourished his 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 warrior, and commenced his operations near the root of his right fore-leg, leaving the foe to select among his own members ; and so there were three united for life, as if a new kind of at- traction 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 eminent chip, and playing their national airs the while, to excite the slow and cheer the dying combatants. I was myself excited somewhat even as if they had been men. The more you think of it, the less the difference. And certainly there is not the fight recorded in Con- cord 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 Digitized by Microsoft® 242 WALDEN. for carnage it was an Austerlitz or Dresden. Concord Fight ! Two killed on the patriots' side, and Luther Blanchard wounded ! Why, here every ant was a Buttrick, — " Fire ! for God's sake fire ! " — and thou- sands shared the fate of Davis and Hosmer. There was not one hireling there. I have no doubt that it was a principle they fought for, as much as our ancestors, and not to avoid a three-penny tax on their tea ; and the results of this battle will be as impor-. tant 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 partic- ularly 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 w'^s apparently too thick for him to pierce ; and the dark carbuncles of the sufferer's eyes shone with ferocity such as war only could excite. They strug- gled 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 tro- phies 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 Digitized by Microsoft® BRUTE NEIGHBORS. 243 crippled state. Whetlier he finally survived that com- bat, 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 wit- nessing the struggle, the ferocity and carnage, of a human battle before my door. Kirby and Spence tell us that the battles of ants have long been celebrated and the date of them recorded, though they say that Huber is the only modern author who appears to have witnessed them. " yEneas Sylvius," say they, " after giving a very cir- cumstantial account of one contested with great ob- stinacy by a great and small species o'n the trunk of a pear tree," adds that " ' This action was fought in the pontificate of Eugenius the Fourth, in the presence of Nicholas Pistoriensis, an eminent lawyer, who re- lated 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 Bill. Many a village Bose, fit only to course a mud-turtle in a victualling cellar, sported his heavy quarters in the woods, without the knowledge of his master, and ineffectually smelled at old fox burrows and wood- Digitized by Microsoft® 244 WALDEN. chucks' holes ; led perchance by some slight cut which nimbly threaded the wood, and might still inspire a natural terror in its denizens ; now far be- hind his guide, barking like a canine bull toward some small squirrel which had treed itself for scrutiny, then, cantering oif, bending the bushes with his weight, imagining that he is on the track of some stray mem- ber 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 sur- prise was mutual. Nevertheless the most domestic cat, which has lain on a rug all her days, appears quite at home in the' woods, and, by her sly and stealthy behavior, proves herself more native there than the regular inhabitants. Once, when berrying, I met with a cat 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 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-hunt- ing in the woods, as was her wont (I am not sure whether it was a male pr 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 Digitized by Microsoft® BRUTE NEIGHBORS. 24S 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 cat. 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 {Cofymbus 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 omnipres- ent ; 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 generously rise and dash angrily, taking sides with all waterfowl, and our sportsmen must beat a retreat to town and shop and unfinished jobs. But they were too often success- ful. 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 manoeuvre, he would dive and be completely lost, so Digitized by Microsoft® 246 WALDEN. 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, hav- ing 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 miscalculated 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 ma- noeuvred 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 appar- ently 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 surpris- ing 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 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- Digitized by Microsoft® BRUTE NEIGHBORS. 247 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 eightv 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 ap- peared 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 sur- face, just put his head out to reconnoitre, and instantly dived again. I found that it was as well for me to rest on my oars and wait his reappearing as to en- deavor 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 display- ing 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 surprisiu^ to see how serenely he sailed off with unrufHed breast when he came to the surface, doing all the work with his webbed feet be- neath. His usual note was this demoniac laughter, yet somewhat like that of a water-fowl ; but occasion- ally, when he had balked me most successfully and Digitized by Microsoft® 248 WALDEN. come up a long way off, he uttered a long-drawn un- earthly howl, probably more like that of a wolf than any bird ; as when a beast puts his muzzle to the ground and deliberately howls. This was his loon- ing, — perhaps the wildest sound that is ever heard here, making the woods ring far and wide. I con- cluded that he laughed in derision of my efforts, con- fident 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 smoothness of the water were all against him. At length, having come up fifty rods off, he uttered one of those prolonged howls, as if calling on the god of loons to aid him, and immediately there came a wind from the east and rippled the surface, and fiUed 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 disappear- ing far away on the tumultuous surface. For hours, in fall days, I watched the ducks cun- ningly tack and veer and hold the middle of the pond, far from the sportsman ; tricks which they will have less need to practice in Louisiana bayous. When compelled to rise they would sometimes circle round and round and over the pond at a considerable height, from which they could easily see to other ponds and the river, like black motes in the sky ; and when I thought they had gone off thither long since, they would settle down by a slanting flight 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. Digitized by Microsoft® 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 ad- mired, 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 \>^ jajnmed, 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 barberry'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 travellers had overlooked. When chestnuts were ripe I laid up half a bushel for winter. It was very exciting at that season to roam the then boundless chestnut woods of 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 sometimes stole, for the burrs which they had selected were sure to contain sound ones. Occasionally I 249 Digitized by Microsoft® 250 WALDEN. climbed and shook the trees. They grew also behind my house, and one large tree which almost overshad- owed it was, when in flower, a bouquet which scented the whole neighborhood, but the squirrels and the jays got most of its fruit ; the last coming in flocks early in the morning and picking the nuts out of the burrs before they fell. 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 fish- worms I discovered the ground-nut {Apios tuberosd) 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 crim- pled red velvety blossom supported by the stems of other plants without knowing it to be the same. Cul- tivation has well-nigh exterminated it. It has a sweet- ish taste, much like that of a frostbitten potato, and I found it better boiled than roasted. This tuber seemed like a faint promise of Nature to rear her own children and feed them simply here at some future period. In these days of fatted cattle and waving grain-fields, this humble root, which was once the totem of an Indian tribe, is quite forgotten, or known only by its flowering vine ; but let wild Nature reign here once more, and the tender and 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 in the southwest, whence he is said to have brought it ; but the now almost extermi- nated ground-nut will perhaps revive and flourish in Digitized by Microsoft® HO USE- WARMING. 2 5 I 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 Mi- nerva 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 oui works of art. Already, by the first of September, I had seen two or three small maples turned scarlet across the pond, beneath where the white stems of three aspens di- verged, 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 Octo- ber, 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 seri- ously, though they bedded with me ; and they gradu- ally disappeared, into what crevices I do not know, avoiding winter and unspeakable cold. Like the wasps, before I finally went into winter quarters in November, I used to resort to the north- east side of Walden, which the sun, reflected from the pitch-pine woods and the stony shore, made the fire- side of the pond j it is so much pleasanter and whole- Digitized by Microsoft® 252 WALDEN. somer to be warmed by the sun while you can 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 ma- sonry. 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 say- ings which men love to repeat whether they are true or not. Such sayings themselves grow harder and adhere more firmly with age, and it would take many blows with a trowel to clean an old wiseacre of them. Many of the villages of Mesopotamia are built o£ 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 be- fore, though I did not read the name of Nebuchad- nezzar on them, I picked out as many fireplace bricks as I could find, to save work aijd 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 morn- ing, 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 Digitized by Microsoft® HOUSE-WARMING. 253 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 independent 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 have a fire at evening, before I plastered my house, the chimney carried smoke particularly well, because 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 over- head. 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 apart- ment 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 Digitized by Microsoft® 254 WALDEN. I had got a couple of old fire-dogs to keep the wood from the hearth, and it did me good to see the soot form on the back of the chimney which I had built, and I poked the fire with more right and more satis- faction 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 con- centrated in one room ; it was kitchen, chamber, parlor, and keeping-room ; and whatever satisfaction parent or child, master or servant, derive from living in a house, I enjoyed it all. Cato says, the master of a family {patremfamilias) must have in his rustic villa "cellam oleariam, vinariam, dolia multa, uti lubeat caritatem expectare, et rei, et virtuti, et glorias erit," that is, "an oil and wine cellar, many casks, so that it may be pleasant to expect hard times ; it will be for his advantage, and virtue, and glory." I had in my cellar a firkin of potatoes, about two quarts of peas with the weevil in them, and on my shelf a little rice, a jug of molasses, and of rye and Indian meal a peck each. I sometimes dream of a larger and more populous house, standing in a golden age, of enduring materi- als, and without gingerbread-work, which shall still consist of only one room, a vast, rude, substantial, primitive hall, without ceiling or plastering, with bare rafters and purlins 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 cavernous house, wherein you must reach up a torch upon a pole to see the roof; where some Digitized by Microsoft® HOUSE-WARMING. 255 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 traveller 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 essentials of a house, and nothing for house-keeping, where you can see all the treasures of the house at one view, and everything hangs upon its peg that a man should use ; at once kitchen, pantry, parlor, chamber, store-house, and garret ; where you can see so 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 orna- ments ; 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 cannot go in at the front door and out at the back without seeing some of its inhabitants ; where to be a guest is to be presented with the freedom of the house, and not to be carefully excluded from seven eighths of it, shut up in a particular cell, and told to make yourself at home there, — in solitary confinement. Nowadays the host does not admit you to his hearth, but has got the mason to build one for yourself somewhere in his Digitized by Microsoft® 256 WALDEN. 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 sym- bols, 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 Territory 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 if 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 Digitized by Microsoft® HOUSE-WARMING. 257 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 ham- mer, and it was my ambition to transfer the plaster from the board to the wall neatly and rapidly. I re- membered 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 sub- stitute deeds for words, he turned up his cuffs, seized a plasterer's board, and having loaded his trowel with- out mishap, with a complacent look toward the lath- ing 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 plasterer is liable. I was surprised to see how thirsty the bricks were, which drank up all the moisture in my plaster before I had smoothed it, and how many pailfuls of water it takes to christen a new hearth. I had the previous winter made a small quantity of lime by burning the shells of the Unio fluviatilis, which our river affords, for the sake of the experiment ; so that I knew where my materials came from. I might have got good limestone within a mile or two and burned it myself, if I had cared to do so. The pond had in the meanwhile skimmed over in the 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 aifords the best opportunity that ever offers for examining the bottom where it is shallow ; for you can lie at your length on ice only s Digitized by Microsoft® 2S8 WALDEN. 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 necessarily always smooth then. There are many furrows in the sand where some creature has travelled about and doubled on its tracks; and, for wrecks, it is strewn with the cases of cadis worms made of minute grains of white quartz. Perhaps these have creased it, for you find some of their cases in the furrows, though they are deep and broad for them to make. But the ice itself is the object of most interest, though you must im- prove 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 its under surface, and that more are continually rising firom 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 in diameter, very clear and beautifiil, and you see your face reflected in them through the ice. There may be thirty or forty of them to a square inch. There are also already within the ice narrow oblong perpendicular bubbles about half an inch long, sharp cones with the apex upward ; or oftener, if the ice is quite fresh, minute spherical bubbles, one directly above another, like a string of beads. But these within the ice are not so numerous nor obvious as those beneath. I sometimes used to cast on stones to try the strength of the ice, and those which broke through carried in air with them, which formed very large and conspicuous white bubbles beneath. One day when I came to the same place forty-eight Digitized by Microsoft® HOUSE-WARMING. 259 hours afterward, I found that those large bubbles were still perfect, though an inch more of ice had formed, as I could see distinctly by the seam in the edge of a cake. But as the last two da^s had been very warm, like an Indian summer, the ice was not now transparent, showing the dark green color of the water, and the bottom, but opaque and whitish or gray, and though twice as thick was hardly stronger than before, for the air bubbles had greatly expanded under this heat and run together, and lost their regularity ; they were no longer one directly over another, but often like silvery coins poured from a bag, one overlapping another, or in thin flakes, as if occupying slight cleavages. The beauty of the ice was gone, and it was too late to study the bottom. Being curious to know what position my great bub- bles 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 be- tween the two ices. It was wholly in the lower ice, but close against the upper, and was flattish, or per- haps slightly lenticular, with a rounded edge, a quarter of an inch deep by four inches in diameter ; and I was surprised to find that directly under the bubble the ice was melted with great regularity in the form of a saucer reversed, to the height or five- eighths of an inch in the middle, leaving a thin parti- tion 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 down- ward, 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 Digitized by Microsoft® 26o WALDEN. which I had first seen against the under surface oi the ice were now frozen in likewise, and that each, in its degree, had operated like a burning-glass on the ice beneath to rtelt and rot it. These are the little air guns which contribute to make the ice crack and whoop. At length the winter set in in good earnest, just as I had finished plastering, and the wind began to howl around the house as if it had not had permission to do so till then. Night after night the geese came lumbering in in the dark with a clangor and a whist- ling 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 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 i6th ; in '49, about the 31st; and in '50, about the 27th of December; in '52, the sth of January ; in '53, the 31st of December. The snow had already covered the ground since the 25th of November, and surrounded me suddenly with the scenery of winter. I withdrew yet farther into my shell, and endeavored to keep a bright fire both within my house and within my breast. My employ- ment 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 Digitized by Microsoft® HO USE- WARMING. 261 under each arm to my shed. An old forest fencL which had seen its best days was a great haul for me. I sacrificed it to Vulcan, for it was past serving the god Terminus. How much more interesting an event is that man's supper who has just been forth in the snow to hunt, nay, you may say, steal, the fuel tc 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 water- logged past drying. I amused myself one winter day with sliding this piece-meal 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 that they burned better for the soak- ing, as if the pitch, 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 trespass- ers, 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 Digitized by Microsoft® 262 WALDEN. punished under the name of purprestures, as tend- ing ad terror em ferarum — ad nocumentum forestce, &c.," to the frightening of the game and the detriment of the forest. But I was interested in the preserva- tion of the venison and the vert more than the hunt- ers 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 inconsolable than that of the proprietors ; nay, I grieved when it was cut down by the proprietors themselves. I would that our farmers when they cut down a forest felt some of that awe which the old Romans did when they came to thin, or let in the light to, a consecrated grove (Jucum 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, &c. 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 ancestors. If they made their bows of it, we make our gun-stocks of it. Michaux, more than thirty years ago, says that the price of wood for fuel in New York and Philadelphia " nearly equals, and sometimes exceeds, that of the best wood in Paris, though this immense capital annually re- quires more than three hundred thousand cords, and is surrounded to the distance of three hundred miles by cultivated plains." In this town the price of wood Digitized by Microsoft® HO USE- WARMING. 263 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 privi- lege 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 Eng- lander 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 re- quire 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 chips the better to remind me of my pleasing work. I had an old axe which nobody claimed, with which by spells in winter days, on the sunny side of the house, I played about the stumps which I had got out of my beanfield. As my driver prophesied when I was ploughing, 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 interesting 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 " ovei Digitized by Microsoft® 264 WALDEN. 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 mould, as appears by the scales of the thick bark forming a ring level with the earth four or five inches distant from the heart. With axe and shovel you explore this mine, and follow the marrowy store, yellow as beef tallow, 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 kind- lings, 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 oat 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. I sometimes left a good fire when I went to take a walk in a winter afternoon ; and when I returned, Digitized by Microsoft® HO USE- WARMING. 265 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 trustworthv. 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 remem- ber to have been particularly anxious on this score ; so I looked and saw that a spark had caught my bed, and I went in and extinguished it when it had burned a place as big as my hand. But my house occupied so sunny and sheltered a position, and its roof was so low, that I could afford to let the fire go out in the middle of almost any winter day. The moles nested in my cellar, nibbling every third potato, and making a snug bed even there of some hair left after plastering and of brown paper; for even the 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 apartment, and warms that, instead of robbing himself, makes that his bed, in which he can move about divested of more cumbrous clothing, maintain a kind of summer in the midst of winter, and by 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 Digitized by Microsoft® 266 WALDEN. 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 luxu- riously 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 exist- ence 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. Cook- ing was then, for the most part, no longer a poetic, but merely a chemic process. It will soon be forgot- ten, 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 can always see a face in the fire. The laborer, looking into it at evening, purifies his thoughts of the dross and earthiness which they have accumulated during the day. But I could no longer sit and look into the fire, and the pertinent words of a poet recurred to me with new force. — " Never, bright flame, may be denied to me Thy dear, hfe 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? Digitized by Microsoft® HO USE- WARMING. 267 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." Digitized by Microsoft® XIV. FORMER INHABITANTS; AND WINTER VISITORS. I WEATHERED some merry snow-storms, and spent some cheerful winter evenings by my fire-side, while the snow whirled wildly without, and even the hoot- ing 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 remembrance, the pines would scrape both sides of a chaise at once, and women and chil- dren 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 268 Digitized by Microsoft® FORMER INHABITANTS. 269 humble route to neighboring villages, or for the woodman's team, it once amused the traveller 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 dusty highway, from the Stratten, now the Alms House, Farm, to Brister's Hill. East of my beanfield, across the road, lived Cato Ingraham, slave of Duncan Ingraham, Esquire, gen- tleman of Concord village ; who built his slave a house, and gave him permission to live in Walden Woods ; — Cato, not Uticensis, but Concordiensis. Some say that he 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 nar- row house at present. Cato's half-obliterated cellar hole still remains, though known to few, being con- cealed from the traveller by a fringe of pines. It is now filled with the smooth sumach {Rhus glabra), and one of the earliest species of goldenrod {Solidago stricta) grows there luxuriantly. Here, by the very corner of my field, still nearer to town, Zilpha, a colored woman, had her litde 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 sol- diers, 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 Digitized by Microsoft® 2^o WALDEN. 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 once, — there where grow still the apple trees which Brister planted and tended ; large old trees now, but their fruit still wild and cider- ish to my taste. Not long since I read his epitaph in the old Lincoln burying-ground, a little on one side, near the unmarked graves of some British grenadiers who fell in the retreat 6iom Concord, — where he is styled " Sippio Briste^' — Scipio Africanus he had some title to be called, — " a man of color," as if he were discolored. It also told me, with staring empha- sis, 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 night, such a dusky orb as never rose on Concord before or since. Farther down the hill, on the left, on the old road in the woods, are marks of some homestead of the Stratten family ; whose orchard once covered all the slope of Brister's Hill, 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 Digitized by Microsoft® FORMER INHABITANTS. 27 1 prominent and astounding part in our New England life, and deserves, as much as any mythological char- acter, 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 Eng- land Rum. But history must not yet tell the trage- dies enacted here ; let time intervene in some meas- ure 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 tem- pered the traveller's beverage and refreshed his steed. Here then men saluted one another, and heard and told the news, and went their ways again. Breed's hut was standing only a dozen years ago, though it had long been unoccupied. It was about the size of mine. It was set on fire by mischievous boys, one Election night, if I do not mistake. I lived on the edge of the village then, and had just lost my- self 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 uncle 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' collec- tion of English poetry without skipping. It fairly overcame my Nervii. I had just sunk my head on this when the bells rang fire, and in hot haste the en- gines 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," aflSrmed Digitized by Microsoft® 272 WALDEN. 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 Com- pany, 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 has witnessed, including Bascom's shop, and, between ourselves, we thought that, were we there in season with our " tub " and a full frog-pond by, we could turn that threatened last and universal one into another 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 raost of mankind are strangers to wit, as Indians are to powder." It chanced 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 Digitized by Microsoft® FORMER INHABITANTS. 273 interested in this burning, lying on \i\% stomach and looking over the cellar wall at the still smouldering cin- ders beneath, muttering to himself, as is his wont. He had been working far off in the river meadow all day, and had improved the iirst moments that he could 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, con- cealed 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 im- plied, 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 cut 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 convince me that it was no common "rider." I felt it, and still remark it almost daily in my walks, for by it hangs the history of a family. Once more, on the left, where are seen the well and lilac bushes by the wall, in the now open field, lived Nutting and Le Grosse. But to return toward Lincoln. Farther in the woods than any of these, where the road approaches nearest to the pond, Wyman the pot- ter 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 Digitized by Microsoft® 274 WALDEN. being nothing else that he could lay his hands on. On« day in midsummer, when I was hoeing, a man who was carrying a load of pottery to market stopped his horse against my field and inquired concerning Wyman the younger. He had long ago bought a potter's wheel of him, and wished to know what had become of him. I had read of the potter's clay and wheel in Scripture, but it had never occurred to me that the pots we use were not such as had come down unbroken from those days, or grown on trees like gourds somewhere, and I was pleased to hear that so fictile an art was ever prac- tised in my neighborhood. The last inhabitant of these woods before me was an Irishman, Hugh Quoil (if I have spelt his name with coil enough), who occupied Wyman's tenement, — Col. Quoil, he was called. Rumor said that he had been a soldier at Waterloo. If he had lived I should have made him fight his battles over again. His trade here was that 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 de- lirium, 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 remem- bered 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 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 nevei have been the symbol of his death, for he confessed Digitized by Microsoft® FORMER INHABITANTS. 275 to me that, though he had heard of Brister's Spring, he had never seen it ; and soiled cards, kings of dia- monds, 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 Reynard, still went to roost in the next apartment. In the rear there was the dim outline of a garden, which had been planted but had never re- ceived 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 wood- chuck was fireshly 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 de- serted 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 di- alect 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 Digitized by Microsoft® 276 walden: edifying as the history of more famous schools of philosophy. Still grows the vivacious lilac a generation after the door and lintel and the sill are gone, unfolding its sweet-scented flowers each spring, to be plucked by the musing traveller; planted and tended once by children's hands, 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 sur- vivor 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 Concord keeps its ground? Were there no natural advantages, — no water privileges, for- sooth ? 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 inher'ted 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, Digitized by Microsoft® WINTER VISITORS. 277 Nature will try, with me for a first settler, and my house raised last spring to be the oldest in the hamlet. I am not aware that any man has ever built on the spot which I occupy. Deliver me from a city built on the site of a more ancient city, whose materials are ruins, whose gardens cemeteries. The soil is blanched and accursed there, and before that becomes necessary the earth itself will be destroyed. With such reminis- cences 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 1 7 1 7 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 cut down the shade trees before their houses, and when the crust was harder cut off the trees in the swamps ten feet from the ground, as it appeared the next spring. In the deepest snows, the path which I used from the highway to my house, about half a mile long, might have 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, Digitized by Microsoft® 278 WALDEN. 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, 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 creeping 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 nebulosd) 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 cronched the snow with my feet, but could not plainly see me. When I made most noise he would stretch out his neck, and erect his neck feathers, and open his eyes wide ; but their lids soon fell 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 cat, winged brother of the cat. There was only a narrow slit left between their lids, by which he pre- served 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 Digitized by Microsoft® WINTER VISITORS. 279 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 neigh- borhood 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 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 traveller. 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 rab- bit'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 re- turned 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 Sun- Digitized by Microsoft® 28o WALDEN. day afternoon, if I chanced to be at home, I heard the cronching 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 " frack " ; one of the few of his vocation who are " men on their farms " ; who donned a frock instead of a professor's gown, and is as ready to extract the moral out of church 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 can predict his comings and goings? His business calls him out at all hours, even when doc- tors 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 com- bined the advantages of conviviality with the clear- headedness which philosophy requires. I should not forget that during my last winter at the pond there was another welcome visitor, who at Digitized by Microsoft® WINTER VISITORS. 28 1 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 pres- ent. 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 1 " A true friend of man ; almost the only friend of human progress. An Old Mortality, say rather an Immortality, with unwearied patience and faith mak- ing plain the image engraven in men's bodies, the God of whom they are but defaced and leaning monu- ments. With his hospitable intellect he embraces children, beggars, insane, and scholars, and enter- tains the thought of all, adding to it commonly some breadth and elegance. I think that he should keep a caravansary on the world's highway, where philoso- phers of all nations might put up, and on his sign should be printed : " Entertainment for man, but not for his beast. Enter ye that have leisure and a quiet mind, who earnestly seek the right road." He is perhaps the sanest man and has the fewest crotchets Digitized by Microsoft® 282 WALDEN. of any I chance to know ; the same yesterday and to-morrow. Of yore we had sauntered and talked, and effectually put the world behind us ; for he was pledged to no institution in it, freeborn, ingenuus. Whichever way we turned, it seemed that the heavens and the earth had met together, since he enhanced the b^auty of the landscape. A blue-robed man, whose fittest roof is the overarching sky which re- flects his serenity. I do not see how he can ever die; Nature cannot spare him. Having each some shingles of thought well dried, we sat and whittled them, trying our knives, and admiring the clear yellowish grain of the pumpkin pine. We waded so gently and reverently, or we pulled together so smoothly, that the fishes of thought were not scared fron- the stream, nor feared any angler on the bank, but came and went grandly, like the clouds which float through the western sky, and the mother-o'-pearl flocks which sometimes form and dis- solve there. There we worked, revising mythology, rounding a fable here and there, and building castles in the air for which earth offered no worthy founda- tion. Great Looker! Great Expecter! to converse with whom was a New England Night's Entertain- ment. Ah! such discourse we had, hermit and phi- losopher, and the old settler I have spoken of, — we three, — it expanded and racked my little house ; I should not dare to say how many pounds' weight there was above the atmospheric pressure on every circular inch ; it opened its seams so that they had to be calked with much dulness thereafter to stop the consequent leak ; — but I had enough of that kind of oakum already picked. There was one other with w hom I had " solid sea- Digitized by Microsoft® WINTER VISITORS. 283 sons," long to be remembered, at his house in the village, and who looked in upon me from time to time ; but I had no more for society there. There too, as everywhere, I sometimes expected the Visitor who never comes. The Vishnu Purana says, " The house-holder is to remain at eventide in his courtyard as long as it takes to milk a cow, or longer if he pleases, to await the arrival of a guest." I often performed this duty of hospitality, waited long enough to milk a whole herd of cows, but did not see the man approaching from the town. Digitized by Microsoft® XV. WINTER ANIMALS. When the ponds were firmly frozen, they afforded not only new and shorter routes to many points, but new views from their surfaces of the familiar landscape around them. When I crossed Flint's Pond, after it was covered with snow, though I had often paddled about and skated over it, it was so unexpectedly wide and so strange that I could think of nothing but Baffin's Bay. The Lincoln hills rose up around me at the extremity of a snowy plain, in which I did not remember to have stood before ; and the fishermen, at an indeterminable distance over the ice, moving slowly about with their wolfish dogs, passed for sealers or Esquimaux, or in misty weather loomed like fabu- lous creatures, and I did not know whether they were giants or pygmies. I took this course when I went to lecture in Lincoln in the evening, travelling in no road and passing no house between my own hut and tne lecture room. In Goose Pond, which lay in my way, a colony of muskrats dwelt, and raised their cabins high above the ice, though none could be seen abroad when I crossed it. Walden, being like the rest usually bare of snow, or with only shallow and interrupted drifts on it, was my yard, where I could walk freely when the snow was nearly two feet deep on a level elsewhere and the villagers were confined to their streets. There, far from the village street, 284 Digitized by Microsoft® WINTER ANIMALS. 285 and, except at very long intervals, from the jingle of sleigh-bells, I slid and skated, as in a vast moose-yard well trodden, overhung by oak woods and solemn pines bent down with snow or bristling with icicles. For sounds in winter nights, and often in winter days, I heard the forlorn but melodious note oi a hooting owl indefinitely far; such a sound as the frozen earth would yield if struck with a suitable plec- trum, the very lingua vernacula of Walden Wood, and quite familiar to me at last, though I never saw the bird while it was making it. I seldom opened my door in a winter evening without hearing it ; Hoo hoo hoo, hoorer hoo, sounded sonorously, and the first three syllables accented somewhat like how der do ; or sometimes hoo hoo only. One night in the begin- ning of winter, before the pond froze over, about nine o'clock, I was startled by the loud honking of a goose, and, stepping to the door, heard the sound of their wings like a tempest in the woods as they flew low over my house. They passed over the pond toward Fair-Haven, seemingly deterred from settling by my light, their commodore honking all the while with a regular beat. Suddenly an unmistakable cat-owl from very near me, with the most harsh and tremendous voice I ever heard from any inhabitant of the woods, responded at regular intervals to the goose, as if de- termined to expose and disgrace this intruder from Hudson's Bay by exhibiting a greater compass and volume of voice in a native, and boo-hoo him out of Concord horizon. What do you mean by alarming the citadel at this time of night consecrated to me? Do you think I am ever caught napping at such an hour, and that I have not got lungs and a larynx as well as yourself? Boo-hoo, boo-hoo, boo-hoo! It was Digitized by Microsoft® 286 WALDEN.- one of the most thrilling discords I ever heard. And yet, if you had a discriminating ear, there were in it the elements of a concord such as these plains never saw nor heard. I also heard the whooping of the ice in the pond, my great bed-fellow in that part of Concord, as if it were restless in its bed and would fain turn over, were troubled with flatulency and bad dreams ; or I was waked by the cracking of the ground by the frost, as if some one had driven a team against my door, and in the morning would find a crack in the earth a quarter of a mile long and a third of an inch wide. Sometimes I heard the foxes as they ranged over the snow crust, in moonlight nights, in search of a partridge or other game, barking raggedly and demo- niacally like forest dogs, as if laboring with some anx- iety, or seeking expression, struggling for light and to be dogs outright and run freely in the streets ; for if we take the ages into our account, may there not be a civilization going on among brutes as well as men ? They seemed to me to be rudimental, burrowing men, still standing on their defence, awaiting their trans- formation. Sometimes one came near to my window, attracted by my light, barked a vulpine curse at me, and then retreated. Usually the red squirrel ( Sciurus Hudsonius ) waked me in the dawn, coursing over the roof and up and down the sides of the house, as if sent out of the woods for this purpose. In the course of the winter I threw out half a bushel of ears of sweet-corn, which had not got ripe, on to the snow crust by my door, and was amused by watching the motions of the various animals which were baited by it. In the twilight and the night the rabbits came regularly and Digitized by Microsoft® WINTER ANIMALS. 287 made a hearty meal. All day long the red squirrels came and went, and afforded me much entertainment by their manoeuvres. One would approach at first warily through the shrub.oaks, running over the snow crust by fits and starts like a leaf blown by the wind, now a few paces this way, with wonderful speed and waste of energy, making inconceivable haste with his " trotters," as if it were for a wager, and now as many paces that way, but never getting on more than half a rod at a time ; and then sud- denly pausing with a ludicrous expression and a gratuitous somerset, as if all the eyes in the universe were fixed on him, — for all the motions of a squirrel, even in the most solitary recesses of the forest, imply spectators as much as those of a dancing girl, — ■ wasting more time in delay and circumspection than would have sufficed to walk the whole distance, — I never saw one walk, — and then suddenly, before you could say Jack Robinson, he would be in the top of a young pitch-pine, winding up his clock and chid- ing all imaginary spectators, soliloquizing and talk- ing to all the universe at the same time, — for no reason that I could ever detect, or he himself was aware of, I suspect. At length he would reach the corn, and selecting a suitable ear, brisk about in the same uncertain trigonometrical way to the tor. most stick of my wood-pile, before my window, where he looked me in the face, and there sit for hours, supply- ing himself with a new ear from time to time, nibbling at first voraciously and throwing the half-naked cobs about ; till at length he grew more dainty still and played with his food, tasting only the inside of the kernel, and the ear, which was held balanced over the stick by one paw, slipped from his careless grasp Digitized by Microsoft® 288 WALDEN. and fell to the ground, when he would look over at it with a ludicrous expression of uncertainty, as if sus- pecting that it had life, with a mind not made up whether to get it again, or a new one, or be off ; now thinking of corn, then listening to hear what was in the wind. So the little impudent fellow would waste many an ear in a forenoon ; till at last, seizing some longer and plumper one, considerably bigger than himself, and skilfully balancing it, he would set out with it to the woods, like a tiger with a buffalo, by the same zigzag course and frequent pauses, scratch- ing along with it as if it were too heavy for him and falling all the whUe, making its fall a diagonal be- tween a perpendicular and horizontal, being deter- mined to put it through at any rate; — a singularly frivolous and whimsical fellow ; — and so he would get off with it to where he lived, perhaps carry it to the top of a pine tree forty or fifty rods distant, and I would afterwards find the cobs strewed about the woods in various directions. At length the jays arrive, whose discordant screams were heard long before, as they were warily making their approach an eighth of a mile off; and in a stealthy and sneaking manner they flit from tree to tree, nearer and nearer, and pick up the kernels which the squirrels have dropped. Then, sitting on a pitch-pine bough, they attempt to swallow in their haste a kernel which is too big for their throats and chokes them ; and after great labor they disgorge it, and spend an hour in the endeavor to crack it by repeated blows with their bills. They were manifestly thieves, and I had not much respect for them ; but the squirrels, though at first shy, went to work as if they were taking what was their own. Digitized by Microsoft® WINTER ANIMALS. 289 Meanwhile also came the chickadees in flocks, which, picking up the crumbs the squirrels had dropped, flew to the nearest twig, and, placing them under their claws, hammered away at them with their little bills, as if it were an insect in the bark, till they were suf- ficiently reduced for their slender throats. A little flock of these titmice came daily to pick a dinner out of my wood-pile, or the crumbs at my door, with faint flitting lisping notes, like the tinkling of icicles in the grass, or else with sprightly day day day, or more rarely, in spring-like days, a wiry summery phe-be from the wood-side. They were so familiar that at length one alighted on an armful of wood which I was carrying in, and pecked at the sticks without fear. I once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance than I should have been by any epaulet I could have worn. The squirrels also grew at last to be quite familiar, and occasionally stepped upon my shoe, when that was the nearest way. When the ground was not yet quite covered, and again near the end of winter, when the snow was melted on my south hill side and about my wood-pile, the partridges came out of the woods morning and evening to feed there. Whichever side you walk in the woods the partridge bursts away on whirring wings, jarring the snow from the dry leaves and twigs on high, which comes sifting down in the sunbeams like golden dust ; for this brave bird is not to be scared by winter. It is frequently covered up by drifts, and, it is said, " sometimes plunges from on wing into the soft snow, where it remains concealed for a day or two.'' I used to start them in the open u Digitized by Microsoft® 290 WALDEN. iand also, where they had come out of the woods at sunset to "bud" the wild apple trees. They will come regularly every evening to particular trees, where the cunning sportsman lies in wait for them, and the distant orchards next the woods suffer thus not a lit- tle. I am glad that the partridge gets fed, at any rate. It is Nature's own bird which lives on buds and diet-drink. In dark winter mornings, or in short winter after- noons, I sometimes heard a pack of hounds threading all the woods with hounding cry and yelp, unable to resist the instinct of the chase, and the note of the hunting horn at intervals, proving that man was in the rear. The woods ring again, and yet no fox bursts forth on to the open level of the pond, nor following pack pursuing their Actaeon. And perhaps at evening I see the hunters returning with a single brush trail- ing from their sleigh for a trophy, seeking their inn. They tell me that if the fox would remain in the bosom of the frozen earth he would be safe, or if he would run in a straight line away no fox-hound could overtake him ; but, having left his pursuers far be- hind, he stops to rest and listen till they come up, and when he runs he circles round to his old haunts, where the hunters await him. Sometimes, however, he will run upon a wall many rods, and then leap off far to one side, and he appears to know that water will not retain his scent. A hunter told me that he once saw a fox pursued by hounds burst out on to Walden when the ice was covered with shallow puddles, run part way across, and then return to the same shore. Erelong the hounds arrived, but here they lost the scent. Sometimes a pack hunting by themselves would pass my door, and circle round my house, and yelp and Digitized by Microsoft® WINTER ANIMALS. 29! hound without regarding me, as if afflicted by a species of madness, so that nothing could divert them from the pursuit. Thus they circle until they fall upon the recent trail of a fox, for a wise hound will forsake every- thing else for this. One day a man came to my hut from Lc:rington to inquire after his hound that made a large track, and had been hunting for a week by him- self. But I fear that he was not the wiser for all I told him, for every time I attempted to answer his questions he interrupted me by asking, "What do you do here? " He had lost a dog, but found a man. One old hunter who has a dry tongue, who used to come to bathe in Walden once every year when the water was warmest, and at such times looked in upon me, told me that many years ago he took his gun one afternoon and went out for a cruise in Walden Wood, and as he walked the Wayland road he heard the cry of hounds approaching, and erelong a fox leaped the wall into the road, and as quick as thought leaped the other wall out of the road, and his swift bullet had not touched him. Some way behind came an old hound and her three pups in full pursuit, hunting on their own account, and disappeared again in the woods. Late in the afternoon, as he was resting in the thick woods south of Walden, he heard the voice of the '^ounds far over toward Fair-Haven still pursuing the fox; and on they came, their hounding cry which made all the woods ring sounding nearer and nearer, now from Well-Meadow, now from the Baker Farm. Fc a long time he stood still and listened to their music, so sweet to a hunter's ear, when suddenly the fox appeared, threading the solemn aisles with an easy coursing pace, whose sound was concealed by a sym- pathetic rustle of the leaves, swift and still, keeping Digitized by Microsoft® 293 WALDEN. the ground, leaving his pursuers far behind ; and, leaping upon a rock amid the woods, he sat erect and listening, with his back to the hunter. For a moment compassion restrained the latter's arm ; but that was a short-lived mood, and as quick as thought can fol- low thought his piece was levelled, and whang'. — the fox rolling over the rock lay dead on the ground. The hunter still kept his place and listened to the hounds. Still on they came, and now the near woods resounded through all their aisles with their demoniac cry. At length the old hound burst into view with muzzle to the ground, and snapping the air as if pos- sessed, and ran directly to the rock ; but spying the dead fox she suddenly ceased her hounding, as if struck dumb with amazement, and walked round and round him in silence ; and one by one her pups arrived, and, like their mother, were sobered into silence by the mystery. Then the hunter came for- ward and stood in their midst, and the mystery was solved. They waited in silence while he skinned the fox, then followed the brush awhile, and at length turned off into the woods again. That evening a Weston Squire came to the Concord hunter's cottage to inquire for his hounds, and told how for a week they had been hunting on their own account from Weston woods. The Concord hunter told him what he knew and offered him the skin ; but the other de- clined it and departed. He did not find his hounds that night, but the next day learned that they had crossed the river and put up at a farm-house for the' night, whence, having been well fed, they took their departure early in the morning. The hunter who told me this could remember one Sam Nutting, who used to hunt bears on Fair-Haven Digitized by Microsoft® WINTER ANIMALS. 293 Ledges, and exchange th'eir skins for rum in Concord village ; who told him, even, that he had seen a moose there. Nutting had a famous fox-hound named Bur- goyne, — he pronounced it Bugine, — which my in- formant used to borrow. In the " Wast Book " of an old trader of this town, who was also a captain, town- clerk, and representative, I find the following entry : Jan. i8th, 1742-3, "John Melven Cr. by i Grey Fox 0—2—3 ; " they are not found here ; and in his ledger, Feb. 7th, 1743, Hezekiah Stratton has credit " by J a Catt skin o — i — 4J ; " of course a wild-cat, for Strat- ton was a sergeant in the old French war, and would not have got credit for hunting less noble game. Credit is given for deerskins also, and they were daily sold. One man still preserves the horns of the last deer that was killed in this vicinity, and another has told me the particulars of the hunt in which his uncle was engaged. The hunters were formerly a numerous and merry crew here. I remember well one gaunt Nimrod who would catch up a leaf by the road-side and play a strain on it wilder and more melodious, if my memory serves me, than any hunt- ing horn. At midnight, when there was a moon, I sometimes met with hounds in my path prowling about the woods, which would skulk out of my way, as if afraid, and stand silent amid the bushes till I had passed. Squirrels and wild mice disputed for my store of nuts. There were scores of pitch-pines around my house, from one to four inches in diameter, which had been gnawed by mice the previous winter, — a Nor- wegian winter for them, for the snow lay long and deep, and they were obliged to mix a large proportion of pine bark with their other diet. These trees were Digitized by Microsoft® 294 WALDEN. alive and apparently flourishing at mid-summer, and many of them had grown a foot, though completely girdled ; but after another winter such were without exception dead. It is remarkable that a single mouse should thus be allowed a whole pine tree for its din- ner, gnawing round instead of up and down it ; but perhaps it is necessary in order to thin these trees, which are wont to grow up densely. The hares (Lepus Americanus) were very familiar. One had her form under my house all winter, sepa- rated from me only by the flooring, and she startled me each morning by her hasty departure when I be- gan to stir, — thump, thump, thump, striking her head against the floor timbers in her hurry. They used to come round my door at dusk to nibble the potato parings which I had thrown out, and were so nearly the color of the ground that they could hardly be distinguished when still. Sometimes in the twi- light I alternately lost and recovered sight of one sit- ting motionless under my window. When I opened my door in the evening, off they would go with a squeak and a bounce. Near at hand they only ex- cited my pity. One evening one sat by my door two paces from me, at first trembling with fear, yet un- willing to move ; a poor wee thing, lean and bony, with ragged ears and sharp nose, scant tail and slen- der paws. It looked as if Nature no longer contained the breed of nobler bloods, but stood on her last toes. Its large eyes appeared young and unhealthy, almost dropsical. I took a step, and lo, away it scudded with an elastic spring over the snow crust, straightening its body and its limbs into graceful length, and soon put the forest between me and itself, — the wild free venison, asserting its vigor Digitized by Microsoft® Winter animals. 29s and the dignity of Nature. Not without reason was its slenderness. Such then was its nature. {Lepus, levipes, lightfoot, some think.) What is a country without rabbits and partridges? They are among the most simple and indigenous ani- mal products ; ancient and venerable families known to antiquity as to modern times ; of the very hue and substance of Nature, nearest allied to leaves and to the ground, — and to one another ; it is either winged or it is legged. It is hardly as if you had seen a wild creature when a rabbit or a partridge bursts away, only a natural one, as much to be expected as rustling leaves. The partridge and the rabbit are still sure to thrive, like true natives of the soil, whatever revolu- tions occur. If the forest is cut off, the sprouts and bushes which spring up afford them concealment, and they become more numerous than ever. That must be a poor country indeed that does not support a hare. Our woods teem with them both, and around every swamp may be seen the partridge or rabbit walk, beset with twiggy fences and horse-hair snares, which some cow-boy tends. Digitized by Microsoft® XVI. THE POND IN WINTER. After a still winter night I awoke with the im- pression that some question had been put to me, which I had been endeavoring in vain to answer in my sleep, as what — how — when — where ? But there was dawn- ing Nature, in whom all creatures live, looking in at my broad windows with serene and satisfied face, and no question on her lips. I awoke to an answered question, to Nature and daylight. The snow lying deep on the earth dotted with young pines, and the very slope of the hill on which my house is placed, seemed to say. Forward! Nature puts no question and answers none which we mortals ask. She has long ago taken her resolution. " O Prince, our eyes con- template with admiration and transmit to the soul the wonderful and varied spectacle of this universe. The night veils without doubt a part of this glorious crea- tion ; but day comes to reveal to us this great work, which extends from earth even into the plains of the ether." Then to my morning work. First I take an axe and pail and go in search of water, if that be not a dream. After a cold and snowy night it needed a divining rod to find it. Every winter the liquid and trembling sur- face of the pond, which was so sensitive to every breath, and reflected every light and shadow, becomes solid to the depth of a foot or a foot and a half, so that it will 296 Digitized by Microsoft® THE POND IN WINTER. 297 support the heaviest teams, and perchance the snow covers it to an equal depth, and it is not to be distin- guished from any level field. Like the marmots in the surrounding hills, it closes its eyelids and becomes dormant for three months or more. Standing on the snow-covered plain, as if in a pasture amid the hills, I cut my way first through a foot of snow, and then a foot of ice, and open a window under my feet, where, kneeling to drink, I look down into the quiet parlor of the fishes, pervaded by a softened light as through a window of ground glass, with its bright sanded floor the same as in summer; there a perennial waveless serenity reigns as in the amber twilight sky, cor- responding to the cool and even temperament of the inhabitants. Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads. Early in the morning, while all things are crisp with frost, men come with fishing reels and slender lunch, and let down their fine lines through the snowy field to take pickerel and perch ; wild men, who instinc- tively follow other fashions and trust other authorities than their townsmen, and by their goings and com- ings stitch towns together in parts where else they would be ripped. They sit and eat their luncheon in stout fear-naughts on the dry oak leaves on the shore, as wise in natural lore as the citizen is in artificial. They never consulted with books, and know and can tell much less than they have done. The things which they practise are said not yet to be known. Here is one fishing for pickerel with grown perch for bait. You look into his pail with wonder as into a summer pond, as if he kept summer locked up at home, or knew where she had retreated. How, pray, did he get these in mid-winter? Oh, he got worms Digitized by Microsoft® 298 WALDEN. out of rotten logs since the ground froze, and so he caught them. His life itself passes deeper in Nature than the studies of the naturalist penetrate ; himself a subject for the naturalist. The latter raises the moss and bark gently with his knife in search of insects ; the former lays open logs to their core with his axe, and moss and bark fly far and wide. He gets his living by barking trees. Such a man has some right to fish, and I love to see Nature carried out in him. The perch swallows the grub-worm, the pickerel swal- lows the perch, and the fisherman swallows the pick- erel ; and so all the chinks in the scale of being are filled. When I strolled around the pond in misty weather I was sometimes amused by the primitive mode which some ruder fisherman had adopted. He would per- haps have placed alder branches over the narrow holes in the ice, which were four or five rods apart and an equal distance from the shore, and having fastened the end of the line to a stick to prevent its being pulled through, have passed the slack line over a twig of the alder, a foot or more above the ice, and tied a dry oak leaf to it, which, being pulled down, would show when he had a bite. These alders loomed through the mist at regular intervals as you walked halfway round the pond. Ah, the pickerel of Walden ! when I see them lying on the ice, or in the well which the fisherman cuts in the ice, making a little hole to admit the water, I am always surprised by their rare beauty, as if they were fabulous fishes, they are so foreign to the streets, even to the woods, foreign as Arabia to our Concord life. They possess a quite dazzling and transcendent beauty which separates them by a wide interval from the ca- Digitized by Microsoft® THE POND IN WINTER. 299 daverous cod and haddock whose fame is trumpeted in our streets. They are not green like the pines, nor gray like the stones, nor blue like the sky ; but they have, to my eyes, if possible, yet rarer colors, like flowers and precious stones, as if they were the pearls, the animalized nuclei or crystals of the Walden water. They, of course, are Walden all over and all through ; are themselves small Waldens in the ani- mal kingdom, Waldenses. It is surprising that they are caught here, — that in this deep and capacious spring, far beneath the rattling teams and chaises and tinkling sleighs that travel the Walden road, this great gold and emerald fish swims. I never chanced to see its kind in any market ; it would be the cyno- sure of all eyes there. Easily, with a few convulsive quirks, they give up their watery ghosts, like a mortal translated before his time to the thin air of heaven. As I was desirous to recover the long-lost bottom of Walden Pond, I surveyed it carefully, before the ice broke up, early in '46, with compass and chain and sounding line. There have been many stories told about the bottom, or rather no bottom, of this pond, which certainly had no foundation for them- selves. It is remarkable how long men will believe in the bottomlessness of a pond without taking the trouble to sound it. I have visited two such Bottom- less Ponds in one walk in this neighborhood. Many have believed that Walden reached quite through to the other side of the globe. Some who have lain flat on the ice for a long time, looking down through the illusive medium, perchance with watery eyes into the bargain, and driven to hasty conclusions by the fear of catching cold in their breasts, have seen vast Digitized by Microsoft® Digitized by Microsoft® THE POND IN WINTER. 30 1 holes " into which a load of hay might be driven," it there were anybody to drive it, the undoubted source of the Styx and entrance to the Infernal Regions from these parts. Others have gone down from the village with a " fifty-six " and a wagon load of inch rope, but yet have failed to find any bottom ; for while the "fifty-six" was resting by the way, they were paying out the rope in the vain attempt to fathom their truly immeasurable capacity for marvellousness. But I can assure my readers that Walden has a reasonably tight bottom at a not unreasonable, though at an unusual, depth. I fathomed it easily with a cod-line and a stone weighing about a pound and a half, and could tell accurately when the stone left the bottom, by having to pull so much harder before the water got underneath to help me. The greatest depth was ex- actly one hundred and two feet ; to which may be added the five feet which it has risen since, making one hundred and seven. This is a remarkable depth for so small an area; yet not an inch of it can be spared by the imagination. What if all ponds were shallow ? Would it not react on the minds of men ? I am thankful that this pond was made deep and pure for a symbol. While men believe in the infinite some ponds will be thought to be bottomless. A factory owner, hearing what depth I had found, 'fought that it could not be true, for, judging from his acquaintance with dams, sand would not lie at so steep an angle. But the deepest ponds are not so deep in proportion to their area as most suppose, and, if drained, would not leave very remarkable valleys. They are not like cups between the hills; for this one, which is so unusually deep for its area, appears in a vertical section through its centre not Digitized by Microsoft® 302 WALDEN. deeper than a shallow plate. Most ponds, emptied, would leave a meadow no more hollow than we fre- quently see. William Gilpin, who is so admirable in all that relates to landscapes, and usually so correct, standing at the head of Loch Fyne, in Scotland, which he describes as " a bay of salt water, sixty or seventy fathoms deep, four miles in breadth," and about fifty miles long, surrounded by mountains, ob- serves, " If we could have seen it immediately after the diluvian crash, or whatever convulsion of Nature occasioned it, before the waters gushed in, what a horrid chasm it must have appeared ! " So high as heaved the tumid hills, so low Down sunk a hollow bottom, broad, and deep, Capacious bed of waters " But if, using the shortest diameter of Loch Fyne, we apply these proportions to Walden, which, as we have seen, appears already in a vertical section only like a shallow plate, it will appear four times as shallow. So much for the increased horrors of the chasm of Loch Fyne when emptied. No doubt many a smiling valley with its stretching cornfields occupies exactly such a " horrid chasm," from which the waters have receded, though it requires the insight and the far sight of the geologist to convince the unsuspecting inhabitants of this fact. Often an inquisitive eye may detect the shores of a primitive lake in the low horizon hills, and no subsequent elevation of the plain have been necessary to conceal their history. But it is easiest, as they who work on the highways know, to find the hollows by the puddles after a shower. The amount of it is, the imagination, give it the least license, dives deeper and soars higher Digitized by Microsoft® THE POND IN WINTER. 303 than Nature goes. So, probably, the depth of the ocean will be found to be very inconsiderable com- pared with its breadth. As I sounded through the ice I could determine the shape of the bottom with greater accuracy than is possible in surveying harbors which do not freeze over, and I was surprised at its general regularity. In the deepest part there are several acres more level than almost any field which is exposed to the sun, wind, and plough. In one instance, on a line arbi- trarily chosen, the depth did not vary more than one foot in thirty rods ; and generally, near the middle, I could calculate the variation for each one hundred feet in any direction beforehand within three or four inches. Some are accustomed to speak of deep and dangerous holes even in quiet sandy ponds like this, but the effect of water under these circumstances is to level all inequalities. The regularity of the bottom and its conformity to the shores and the range of the neighboring hills were so perfect that a distant prom- ontory betrayed itself in the soundings quite across the pond, and its direction could be determined by observ- ing the opposite shore. Cape becomes bar, and plain shoal, and valley and gorge deep water and channel. When I had mapped the pond by the scale of ten rods to an inch, and put down the soundings, more than a hundred in all, I observed this remarkable coincidence. Having noticed that the number indi- cating the greatest depth was apparently in the centre of the map, I laid a rule on the map lengthwise, and then breadthwise, and founds^to my surprise, that the line of greatest length intersected the line of greatest breadth exactly at the point of greatest depth, not- withstanding that the middle is so nearly level, the Digitized by Microsoft® 304 WALDEN. outline of the pond far from regular, and the extreme length and breadth were got by measuring into the coves ; and I said to myself, Who knows but this hint would conduct to the deepest part of the ocean as well as of a pond or puddle ? Is not this the rule also for the height of mountains, regarded as the opposite of valleys ? We know that a hill is not highest at its narrowest part. Of five coves, three, or all which had been sounded, were observed to have a bar quite across their mouths and deeper water within, so that the bay tended to be an expansion of water within the land not only hori- zontally but vertically, and to form a basin or inde- pendent pond, the direction of the two capes showing the course of the bar. Every harbor on the sea-coast, also, has its bar at its entrance. In proportion as the mouth of the cove was wider compared with its length, the water over the bar was deeper compared with that in the basin. Given, then, the length and breadth of the cove, and the character of the surrounding shore, and 3'ou have almost elements enough to make out a formula for all cases. In order to see how nearly I could guess, with this experience, at the deepest point in a pond, by observ- ing the outlines of its surface and the character of its shores alone, I made a plan of White Pond, which contains about forty-one acres, and, like this, has no island in it, nor any visible inlet or outlet; and as the line of greatest breadth fell very near the line of least breadth, where two opposite capes approached each other and two opposite bays receded, I ventured to mark a point a short distance from the latter line, but still on the line of greatest length, as the deepest. The deepest part was found to be within one hundred Digitized by Microsoft® THE POND IN WINTER. 305 feet of this, still farther in the direction to which I had inclined, and was only one foot deeper, namely sixty feet. Of course, a stream running through, or an isl- and in the pond, would make the problem much more complicated. If we knew all the laws of Nature, we should need only one fact, or the description of one actual phenome- non, to infer all the particular results at that point. Now we know only a few laws, and our result is viti- ated, not, of course, by any confusion or irregularity in Nature, but by our ignorance of essential elements in the calculation. Our notions of law and harmony are com- monly confined to those instances which we detect ; but the harmony which results from a far greater number of seemingly conflicting, but really concurring, laws, which we have not detected, is still more wonderful. The particular laws are as our points of view, as, to the traveller, a mountain outline varies with every step, and it has an infinite number of profiles, though absolutely but one form. Even when cleft or bored through it is not comprehended in its entireness. What I have observed of the pond is no less true in ethics. It is the law of average. Such a rule of the two diameters not only guides us toward the sun in the system and the heart in man ; but draw lines through the length and breadth of the aggregate of a man's par- ticular daily behaviors and waves of life into his coves and inlets, and where they intersect will be the height or depth of his character. Perhaps we need only to know how his shores trend and his adjacent coun- try or circumstances, to infer his depth and concealed bottom. If he is surrounded by mountainous circum- stances, an Achillean shore, whose peaks overshadow and are reflected in his bosom, they suggest a cor- Digitized by Microsoft® 3o6 WALDEN. responding depth in him. But a low and smooth shore proves him shallow on that side. In our bodies, a bold projecting brow falls oif to and indicates a cor- responding depth of thought. Also there is a bar across the entrance of our every cove, or particular inclina- tion ; each is our harbor for a season, in which we are detained and partially land-locked. These inclinations are not whimsical usually, but their form, size, and di- rection are determined by the promontories of the shore, the ancient axes of elevation. When this bar is gradu- ally increased by storms, tides, or currents, or there is a subsidence of the waters, so that it reaches to the surface, that which was at first but an inclination in the shore in which a thought was harbored becomes an individual lake, cut off from the ocean, wherein the thought secures its own conditions, changes, perhaps, from salt to fresh, becomes a sweet sea, dead sea, or a marsh. At the advent of each individual into this life, may we not suppose that such a bar has risen to the surface somewhere ? It is true, we are such poor navi- gators that our thoughts, for the most part, stand off and on upon a harborless coast, are conversant only with the bights of the bays of poesy, or steer for the public ports of entry, and go into the dry docks of science, where they merely refxi for this world, and no natural currents concur to individualize them. As for the inlet or outlet of Walden, I have not dis- covered any but rain and snow and evaporation, though perhaps, with a thermometer and a line, such places may be found, for where the water flows into the pond it will probably be coldest in summer and warmest in winter. When the ice-men were at work here in '46-7, the cakes sent to the shore were one day rejected by those who were stacking them up there, not being Digitized by Microsoft® THE POND IN WINTER. 307 thick enough to lie side by side with the rest; and the cutters. thus discovered that the ice over a small space was two or three inches thinner than elsewhere, which made them think that there was an inlet there. They also showed me in another place what they thought was a " leach hole," 'through which the pond leaked out under a hill into a neighboring meadow, pushing me out on a cake of ice to see it. It was a small cavity under ten feet of water ; but I think that I can warrant the pond not to need soldering till they find a worse leak than that. One has suggested that if such a "leach hole" should be found, its connection with the meadow, if any existed, might be proved by con- veying some colored powder or sawdust to the mouth of the hole, and then putting a strainer over the spring in the meadow, which would catch some of the parti- cles carried through by the current. While I was surveying, the ice, which was sixteen inches thick, undulated under a slight wind like water. It is well known that a level cannot be used on ice. At one rod from the shore its greatest fluctuation, when observed by means of a level on land directed toward a graduated staff on the ice, was three quarters of an inch, though the ice appeared firmly attached to the shore. It was probably greater in the middle. Who knows but if our instruments were delicate enough we might detect an undulation in the crust of the earth ? When two legs of my level were on the shore and the third on the ice, and the sights were directed over the latter, a rise or fall of the ice of an almost infinitesimal amount made a difference of several feet on a tree across the pond. When I began to cut holes for sounding, there were three or four inches of water on the ice under a deep snow which had sunk it thus far ; but the Digitized by Microsoft® 3o8 WALDEN. water began immediately to run into these holes, and continued to run for two days in deep streams, which wore away the ice on every side, and contributed es- sentially, if not mainly, to dry the surface of the pond ; for, as the water ran in, it raised and floated the ice. This was somewhat like cutting a hole in the bottom of a ship to let the water out. When such holes freeze, and a rain succeeds, and (inally a new freezing forms a fresh smooth ice over all, it is beautifully mottled inter- nally by dark figures, shaped somewhat like a spider's web, what you may call ice rosettes, produced by the channels worn by the water flowing from all sides to a centre. Sometimes, also, when the ice was covered with shallow puddles, I saw a double shadow of myself, one standing on the head of the other,, one on the ice, the other on the trees or hill side. While yet it is cold January, and snow and ice are thick and solid, the prudent landlord comes from the vil- lage to get ice to cool his summer drink ; impressively, even pathetically wise, to foresee the heat and thirst of July now in January, — wearing a thick coat and mit- tens! when so many things are not provided for. It may be that he lays up no treasures in this world which will cool his summer drink in the next. He cuts and saws the solid pond, unroofs the house of fishes, and carts off' their very element and air, held fast by chains and stakes like corded wood, through the favor- ing winter air, to wintry cellars,- to underlie the sum- mer there. It looks like solidified azure, as, far off, it is drawn through the streets. These ice-cutters are a merry race, full of jest and sport, and when I went among them they were wont to invite me to saw pit- fashion with them, I standing underneath. Digitized by Microsoft® THE POND IN WINTER. 309 In the winter of '46-7 there came a hundred men of Hyperborean extraction swoop down on to our pond one morning, with many car-loads of ungainly- looking farming tools, sleds, ploughs, drill-barrows, turf-knives, spades, saws, rakes, and each man was armed with a double-pointed pike-staff, such as '3 not described in the New England Farmer or the Culti- vator. I did not know whether they had come to sow a crop of winter rye, or some other kind of grain re- cently introduced from Iceland. As I saw no manure, I judged that they meant to skim the land, as I had done, thinking the soil was deep and had lain fallow long enough. They said that a gentleman farmer, who was behind the scenes, wanted to double his money, which, as I understood, amounted to half a million already ; but, in order to cover each one of his dollars with another, he took off the only coat, ay, the skin itself, of Walden Pond in the midst of a hard winter. They went to work at once, ploughing, harrowing, rolling, furrowing, in admirable order, as if they were bent on making this a model farm ; but when I was looking sharp to see what kind of seed they dropped into the furrow, a gang of fellows by my side suddenly began to hook up the virgin mould itself, with a pecu- liar jerk, clean down to the sand, or rather the water, — tor it was a very springy soil, — indeed, all the terra fir ma there was, — and haul it away on sleds, and then I guessed that they must be cutting peat in a bog. So they came and went every day, with a peculiar shriek from the locomotive, from and to some point of the polar regions, as it seemed to me, like a flock of arctic snow-birds. But sometimes Squaw Walden had her revenge, and a hired man, walking behind his team, slipped through a crack in the ground Digitized by Microsoft® 3IO WALDEN. down toward Tartarus, and he who was so brave before suddenly became but the ninth part of a man, almost gave up his animal heat, and was glad to take refuge in my house, and acknowledged that there was some virtue in a stove ; or sometimes the frozen soil took a piece of steel out of a ploughshare, or a plough got set in the furrow and had to be cut out. To speak literally, a hundred Irishmen, with Yankee overseers, came from Cambridge every day to get out the ice. They divided it into cakes by methods too well known to require description, and these, being sledded to the shore, were rapidly hauled off on to an ice platform, and raised by grappling irons and block and tackle, worked by horses, on to a stack, as surely as so many barrels of flour, and there placed evenly side by side, and row upon row, as if they formed the solid base of an obelisk designed to pierce the clouds. They told me that in a good day they could get out a thousand tons, which was the yield of about one acre. Deep ruts and " cradle holes " were worn in the ice, as on terra firma, by the passage of the sleds over the same track, and the horses invariably ate their oats out of cakes of ice hollowed out like buckets. They stacked up the cakes thus in the open air in a pile thirty-five feet high on one side and six or seven rods square, putting hay between the outside layers to exclude the air ; for when the wind, though never so cold, finds a passage through, it will wear large cavities, leaving slight supports or studs only here and there, and finally topple it down. At first it looked like a vast blue fort or Valhalla ; but when they began to tuck the coarse meadow hay into the crevices, and this became covered with rime and icicles, it looked like a venerable moss-grown and hoary ruin, built of Digitized by Microsoft® THE POND IN WINTER. 311 azure-tinted marble, the abode of Winter, that old man we see in the almanac, — his shanty, as if he had a design to estivate with us. They calculated that not twenty-five per cent of this would reach its desti- nation, and that two or three per cent would be wasted in the cars. However, a still greater part of this heap had a different destiny from what intended ; for, either because the ice was found not to keep so well as was expected, containing more air than usual, or for some other reason, it never got to market. This heap, made in the winter of '46-7 and estimated to contain ten thousand tons, was finally covered with hay and boards ; and though it was unroofed the fol- lowing July, and a part of it carried off, the rest remain- ing exposed to the sun, it stood over that summer and the next winter, and was not quite melted till Septem- ber, 1848. Thus the pond recovered the greater part. Like the water, the Walden ice, seen near at hand, has a green tint, but at a distance is beautifully blue, and you can easily tell it from the white ice of the river, or the merely greenish ice of some ponds, a quarter of a mile off. Sometimes one of those great cakes slips from the ice-man's sled into the village street, and lies there for a week like a great emerald, an object of interest to all passers. I have noticed that a portion of Walden which in the state of water was green will often, when frozen, appear from the same point of view blue. So the hollows about this pond will, sometimes, in the winter, be filled with a green- ish water somewhat like its own, but the next day will have frozen blue. Perhaps the blue color of water and ice is due to the light and air they contain, and the most transparent is the bluest. Ice is an interest- ing subject for contemplation. They told me that Digitized by Microsoft® 312 WALDEN. they had some in the ice-houses at Fresh Pond five years old which was as good as ever. Why is it that a buclcet of water soon becomes putrid, but frozen remains sweet forever ? It is commonly said that this is the difference between the affections and the in- tellect. Thus for sixteen days I saw from my window a hun- dred men at work like busy husbandmen, with teams and horses and apparently all the implements of farm- ing, such a picture as we see on the first page of the almanac ; and as often as I looked out I was reminded of the fable of the lark and the reapers, or the parable of the sower, and the like ; and now they are all gone, and in thirty days more, probably, I shall look from the same window on the pure sea-green Walden water there, reflecting the clouds and the trees, and sending up its evaporations in solitude, and no traces will appear that a man has ever stood there. Per- haps I shall hear a solitary loon laugh as he dives and plumes himself, or shall see a lonely fisher in his boat, like a floating leaf, beholding his form reflected in the waves, where lately a hundred men securely labored. Thus it appears that the sweltering inhabitants of Charleston and New Orleans, of Madras and Bombay and Calcutta, drink at my well. In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat Geeta, since whose com- position years of the gods have elapsed, and in com- parison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial ; and I doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its sublimity from our conceptions. I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and Jo ! there I meet the servant of the Brahmin, priest of Digitized by Microsoft® THE POND IN WINTER. 313 Brahma and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water jug. I meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in the same well. The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges. With favoring Vvinds it is wafted past the site of the fabulous islands of Atlan- tis and the Hesperides, makes the periplus of Hanno, and, floating by Ternate and Tidore and the mouth of the Persian Gulf, melts in the tropic gales of the Indian seas, and is landed in ports of which Alexan- der only heard the names. Digitized by Microsoft® XVII. SPRING. The opening of large tracts by the ice-cutters com- monly causes a pond to break up earlier; for the water, agitated by the wind, even in cold weather, wears away the surrounding ice. But such was not the effect on Walden that year, for she had soon got a thick new garment to take the place of the old. This pond never breaks up so soon as the others in this neighborhood, on account both of its greater depth and its having no stream passing through it to melt or wear away the ice. I never knew it to open in the course of a winter, not excepting that of '52-3, which gave the ponds so severe a trial. It commonly opens about the first of April, a week or ten days later than Flint's Pond and Fair-Haven, beginning to melt on the north side and in the shallower parts where it began to freeze. It indicates better than any water hereabouts the absolute progress of the season, being least affected by transient changes of temperature. A severe cold of a few days' duration in March may very much retard the opening of the former ponds, while the temperature of Walden increases almost uninterruptedly. A thermometer thrust into the mid- dle of Walden on the 6th of March, 1847, stood at 32°, or freezing point ; near the shore at 33° ; in the middle of Flint's Pond, the same day, at 32^° ; at a dozen rods from the shore, in shallow water, under 314 Digitized by Microsoft® SPJilNG. 315 ice a foot thick, at 36°. This difference of three and a half degrees between the temperature of the deep water and the shallow in the latter pond, and the fact that a great proportion of it is comparatively shallow, show why it should break up so much sooner than Walden. The ice in the shallowest part was at this time several inches thinner than in the middle. In mid-winter the middle had been the warmest and the ice thinnest there. So, also, every one who has waded about the shores of a pond in summer must have perceived how much warmer the water is close to the shore, where only three or four inches deep, than a little distance out, and on the surface where it is deep, than near the bottom. In spring the sun not only exerts an influence through the increased tem- perature of the air and earth, but its heat passes through ice a foot or more thick, and is reflected from the bottom in shallow water, and so also warms the water and melts the under side of the ice, at the same time that it is melting it more directly above, making it uneven, and causing the air bubbles which it con- tains to extend themselves upward and downward until it is completely honeycombed, and at last dis- appears suddenly in a single spring rain. Ice has its grain as well as wood, and when a cake begins to rot or " comb," that is, assume the appearance of honey- comb, whatever may be its position, the air cells are at right angles with what was the water surface. Where there is a rock or a log rising near to the surface the ice over it is much thinner, and is fre- quently quite dissolved by this reflected heat ; and 1 have been told that in the experiment at Cambridge to freeze water in a shallow wooden pond, though the cold air circulated underneath, and so had access to Digitized by Microsoft® 3l6 WALDEN. both sides, the reflection of the sun from the bottoin more than counterbalanced this advantage. When a warm rain in the middle of the winter melts off the snow-ice from Walden, and leaves a hard, dark, or transparent ice on the middle, there will be a strip of rotten though thicker white ice, a rod or more wide, about the shores, created by this reflected heat. Also, as I have said, the bubbles themselves within the ice operate as burning-glasses to melt the ice beneath. The phenomena of the year take place every day in a pond on a small scale. Every morning, generally speaking, the shallow water is being warmed more rapidly than the deep, though it may not be made so warm after all, and every evening it is being cooled more rapidly until the morning. The day is an epitome of the year. The night is the winter, the morning and evening are the spring and fall, and the noon is the summer. The cracking and booming o^ the ice indicate a change of temperature. One pleas- ant morning after a cold night, February 24th, 1850, having gone to Flint's Pond to spend the day, I noticed with surprise that when I struck the ice with the head of my axe, it resounded like a gong for many rods around, or as if I had struck on a tight drum- head. The pond began to boom about an hour after sunrise, when it felt the influence of the sun's rays slanted upon it from over the hills ; it stretched itself and yawned like a waking man with a gradually in- creasing tumult, which was kept up three or four hours. It took a short siesta at noon, and boomed once more toward night, as the sun was withdrawing his influence. In the right stage of the weather a pond fires its evening gun with great regularity. But Digitized by Microsoft® SPRING. 317 in the middle of the day, being full of cracks, and the air also being less elastic, it had completely lost its resonance, and probably fishes and muskrats could not then have been stunned by a blow on it. The fishermen say that the " thundering of the pond " scares the fishes and prevents their biting. The pond does not thunder every evening, and I cannot tell surely when to expect its thundering ; but though I may perceive no difference in the weather, it does. Who would have suspected so large and cold and thick-skinned a thing to be so sensitive? Yet it has its law to which it thunders obedience when it should as surely as the buds expand in the spring. The earth is all alive and covered with papills. The largest pond is as sensitive to atmospheric changes as the globule of mercury in its tube. One attraction in coming to the woods to live was that I should have leisure and opportunity to see the spring come in. The ice in the pond at length be- gins to be honeycombed, and I can set my heel in it as I walk. Fogs and rains and warmer suns are gradually melting the snow; the days have grown sensibly longer ; and I see how I shall get through the winter without adding to my wood-pile, for large fires are no longer necessary. I am on the alert for the first signs of spring, to hear the chance note of some arriving bird, or the striped squirrel's chirp, for his stores must be now nearly exhausted, or see the woodchuck venture out of his winter quarters. On the 13th of March, after I had heard the bluebird, song-sparrow, and red-wing, the ice was still nearly a foot thick. As the weather grew warmer, it was not sensibly worn away by the water, nor broken up Digitized by Microsoft® 3i8 WALDEN. and floated off as in rivers, but, though it was com- pletely melted for half a rod in width about the shore, the middle was merely honeycombed and saturated with water, so that you could put your foot through it when six inches thick ; but by the next day evening, perhaps, after a warm rain followed by fog, it would have wholly disappeared, all gone off with the fog, spirited away. One year I went across the middle only iive days before it disappeared entirely. In 1845 Walden was first completely open on the ist of April ; in '46, the 25th of March ; in '47, the 8th of April ; in '51, the 28th of March ; in '52, the iSth of April ; in ■53, the 23rd of March ; in '54, about the 7th of April. Every incident connected with the breaking up of the rivers and ponds and the settling of the weather is particularly interesting to us who live in a climate of so great extremes. When the warmer days come, they who dwell near the river hear the ice crack at night with a startling whoop as loud as artillery, as if its icy fetters were rent from end to end, and within a few days see it rapidly going out. So the alligator comes out of the mud with quakings of the earth. One old man, who has been a close observer of Na- ture, and seems as thoroughly wise in regard to all her operations as if she had been put upon the stocks when he was a boy, and he had helped to lay her keel, — who has come to his growth, and can hardly acquire more of natural lore if he should live to the age of Methuselah, — told me, and I was surprised to hear him express wonder at any of Nature's operations, for I thought that there were no secrets between them, that one spring day he took his gun and boat, and thought that he would have a little sport with the ducks. There was ice still on the meadows, but it Digitized by Microsoft® SPRING. 319 was all gone out of the river, and he dropped down without obstruction from Sudbury, where he lived, to Fair-Haven Pond, which he found, unexpectedly, cov- ered for the most part with a firm field of ice. It was a warm day, and he was surprised to see so great a body of ice remaining. Not seeing any ducks, he hid his boat on the north or back side of an island in the pond, and then concealed himself in the bushes on the south side, to await them. The ice was melted for three or four rods from the shore, and there was a smooth and warm sheet of water, with a muddy bot- tom, such as the ducks love, within, and he thought it likely that some would be along pretty soon. After he had lain still there about an hour he heard a low and seemingly very distant sound, but singularly grand and impressive, unlike anything he had ever heard, gradually swelling and increasing as if it would have a universal and memorable ending, a sullen rush and roar, which seemed to him all at once like the sound of a vast body of fowl coming in to settle there, and, seizing his gun, he started up in haste and excited ; t)ut he found, to his surprise, that the whole body of the ice had started while he lay there, and drifted in to the shore, and the sound he had heard was made by its edge grating on the shore, — at first gently nibbled and crumbled off, but at length heaving up and scattering its wrecks along the island to a consid- erable height before it came to a standstill. At length the sun's rays have attained the right angle, and warm winds blow up mist and rain and melt the snow-banks, and the sun dispersing the mist smiles on a checkered landscape of russet and white smoking with incense, through which the traveller picks his way from islet to islet, cheered by the music Digitized by Microsoft® 320 WALDEN. of a thousand tinkling rills and rivulets whose veins are filled with the blood of winter which they are bearing oiT. Few phenomena gave me more delight than to ob- serve the forms which thawing sand and clay assume in flowing down the sides of a deep cut on the rail- road through which I passed on my way to the vil- lage, a phenomenon not very common on so large a scale, though the number of freshly exposed banks of the right material must have been greatly multiplied since railroads were invented. The material was sand of every degree of fineness and of various rich colors, commonly mixed with a little clay. When the frost comes out in the spring, and even in a thawing day in the winter, the sand begins to flow down the slopes like lava, sometimes bursting out through the snow and overflowing it where no sand was to be seen before. Innumerable little streams overlap and inter- lace one with another, exhibiting a sort of hybrid product, which obeys halfway the law of currents, and halfway that of vegetation. As it flows it takes the forms of sappy leaves or vines, making heaps of pulpy sprays a foot or more in depth, and resembling, as you look down on them, the laciniated, lobed, and imbricated thalluses of some lichens ; or you are re- minded of coral, of leopards' paws or birds' feet, of brains or lungs or bowels, and excrements of all kinds. It is a truly grotesque vegetation, whose forms and color we see imitated in bronze, a sort of architectural foliage more ancient and typical than acanthus, chic- cory, ivy, vine, or any vegetable leaves ; destined per- haps, under some circumstances, to become a puzzle to future geologists. The whole cut impressed me as if it were a cave with its stalactites laid open to Digitized by Microsoft® SPUING. 321 the light. The various shades of the sand are singu- larly rich and agreeable, embracing the different iron colors, brown, gray, yellowish, and reddish. When the flowing mass reaches the drain at the foot of the bank it spreads out flatter into strands, the separate streams losing their semi-cylindrical form and gradually becoming more flat and broad, running together as they are more moist, till they form an almost flat sand, still variously and beautifully shaded, but in which you can trace the original forms of vegetation ; till at length, in the water itself, they are converted into banks, like those formed off' the mouths of rivers, and the forms of vegetation are lost in the ripple marks on the bottom. The whole bank, which is from twenty to forty feet high, is sometimes overlaid with a mass of this kind of foliage, or sandy rupture, for a quarter of a mile on one or both sides, the produce of one spring day. What makes this sand foliage remarkable is its springing into existence thus suddenly. When I see on the one side the inert bank, — for the sun acts on one side first, — and on the other this luxuri- ant foliage, the creation of an hour, I am affected as if in a peculiar sense I stood in the laboratory of the Artist who made the world and me — had come to where he was still at work, sporting on this bank, and with excess of energy strewing his fresh designs about. I feel as if I were nearer to the vitals of the globe, for this sandy overflow is something such a foliaceous mass as the vitals of the animal body. You find thus in the very sands an anticipation of the vegetable leaf. No wonder that the earth ex- presses itself outwardly in leaves, it so labors with the idea inwardly. The atoms have already learned Digitized by Microsoft® 322 WALDEN. this law, and are pregnant by it. The overhanging leaf sees here its prototype. Internally, whether in the globe or animal body, it is a moist thick lobe, a word especially applicable to the liver and lungs and the haves of fat {Xtijiu), labor, lapsus, to flow or slip downward, a lapsing ; Xo^oi, globus, lobe, globe ; also lap, flap, and many other words), externally a dry thin leaf, even as the /and v are a pressed and dried b. The radicals of lobe are lb, the soft mass of the b (single lobed, or B, double lobed), with a liquid / behind it pressing it forward. In globe, gib, the guttural g adds to the meaning the capacity of the throat. The feathers and wings of birds are still drier and thinner leaves. Thus, also, you pass from the lumpish grub in the earth to the airy and flutter- ing butterfly. The very globe continually transcends and translates itself, and becomes winged in its orbit. Even ice begins with delicate crystal leaves, as if it had flowed into moulds which the fronds of water plants have impressed on the watery mirror. The whole tree itself is but one leaf, and rivers are still vaster leaves whose pulp is intervening earth, and towns and cities are the ova of insects in their axils. When the sun withdraws the sand ceases to flow, but in the morning the streams will start once more and branch and branch again into a myriad of others. You here see perchance how blood vessels are formed. If you look closely you observe that first there pushes forward from the thawing mass a stream of softened sand with a drop-like point, like the ball of the finger, feeling its way slowly and blindly downward, until at last with more heat and moisture, as the sun gets higher, the most fluid por- tion, in its eff'ort to obey the law to which the most Digitized by Microsoft® SPRING. 323 inert also yields, separates from tiie latter and forms for itself a meandering channel or artery within that, in which is seen a little silvery stream glancing like lightning from one stage of pulpy leaves or branches to another, and ever and anon swallowed up in the sand. It is wonderful how rapidly yet perfectly the sand organizes itself as it flows, using the best mate- rial its mass affords to form the sharp edges of its channel. Such are the sources of rivers. In the silicious matter which the water deposits is perhaps the bony system, and in the still finer soil and organic matter the fleshy fibre or cellular tissue. What is man but a mass of thawing clay? The ball of the human finger is but a drop congealed. The fingers and toes flow to their extent from the thawing mass of the body. Who knows what the human body would expand and flow out to under a more genial heaven? Is not the hand a spreading /a/»2 leaf with its lobes and veins? The ear may be regarded, fancifully, as a lichen, umbilicaria, on the side of the head, with its lobe or drop. The lip — labium, from labor (?) — laps or lapses from the sides of the cavernous mouth. The nose is a manifest congealed drop or stalactite. The chin is a still larger drop, the confluent dripping of the face. The cheeks are a slide from the brows into the valley of the face, opposed and diffused by the cheek bones. Each rounded lobe of the vegetable leaf, too, is a thick and now loitering drop, larger or smaller ; the lobes are the fingers of the leaf; and as many lobes as it has, in so many directions it tends to flow, and more heat or other genial influences would have caused it to flow yet farther. Thus it seemed that this one hill side illustrated the Digitized by Microsoft® 324 WALDEN. principle of all the operations of Nature. The Maker of this earth but patented a leaf. What ChampoUion will decipher this hieroglyphic for us, that we may turn over a new leaf at last? This phenomenon is more exhilarating to me than the luxuriance and fer- tility of vineyards. True, it is somewhat excrementi- tious in its character, and there is no end to the heaps of liver, lights, and bowels, as if the globe were turned wrong side outward ; but this suggests at least that Nature has some bowels, and there again is mother of humanity. This is the frost coming out of the ground ; this is Spring. It precedes the green and flowery spring, as mythology precedes regular poetry. I know of nothing more purgative of winter fumes and indigestions. It convinces me that Earth is still in her swaddling clothes, and stretches forth baby fingers on every side. Fresh curls spring from the baldest brow. There is nothing inorganic. These foliaceous heaps lie along the bank like the slag of a furnace, showing that Nature is "in full blast" within. The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit, — not a fossil earth, but a living earth ; compared with whose great cen- tral life all animal and vegetable life is merely para- sitic. Its throes will heave our exuviae from their graves. You may melt your m'etals and cast them into the most beautiful moulds you can ; they will never excite me like the forms which this molten earth flows out into. And not only it, but the insti- tutions upon it, are plastic like clay in the hands of the potter. Digitized by Microsoft® SPRING. 325 Ere long, not only on these banks, but on every hill and plain and in every hollow, the frost comes out of the ground like a dormant quadruped from its burrow, and seeks the sea with music, or migrates to other climes in clouds. Thaw with his gentle per- suasion is more powerful than Thor with his hammer. The one melts, the other but breaks in pieces. When the ground was partially bare of snow, and a few warm days had dried its surface somewhat, it was pleasant to compare the first tender signs of the infant year just peeping forth with the stately beauty of the withered vegetation which had withstood the winter, — life-everlasting, goldenrods, pinweeds, and graceful wild grasses, more obvious and interesting frequently than in summer even, as if their beauty was not ripe till then ; even cotton-grass, cattails, mulleins, Johnswort, hardhack, meadow-sweet, and other strong stemmed plants, those unexhausted granaries which entertain the earliest birds, — decent weeds, at least, which widowed Nature wears. I am particularly attracted by the arching and sheaf-like top of the wool-grass ; it brings back the summer to our winter memories, and is among the forms which art loves to copy, and which, in the vegetable king- dom, have the same relation to types already in the mind of man that astronomy has. It is an antique style older than Greek or Egyptian. Many of the phenomena of Winter are suggestive of an inex- pressible tenderness and fragile delicacy. We are ac- customed to hear this king described as a rude and boisterous tyrant ; but with the gentleness of a lover he adorns the tresses of Summer. 1 At the approach of spring the red squirrels got under my house, two at a time, directly under my feet Digitized by Microsoft® 326 WALDEN. js I sat reading or writing, and kept up the queerest chuckling and chirruping and vocal pirouetting and gurgling sounds that ever were heard ; and when I stamped they only chirruped the louder, as if past all fear and respect in their mad pranks, defying human- ity to stop them. No you don't — • chickaree — chick- aree. They were wholly deaf to my arguments, or failed to perceive their force, and fell into a strain of invective that was irresistible. The first sparrow of spring ! The year beginning with younger hope than ever ! The faint silvery warblings heard over the partially bare and moist fields from the bluebird, the song-sparrow, and the red-wing, as if the last flakes of winter tinkled as they fell ! What at such a time are histories, chronologies, traditions, and all written revelations ? The brooks sing carols and glees to the spring. The marsh-hawk sailing low over the meadow is already seeking the first slimy life that awakes. The sinking sound of melting snow is heard in all dells, and the ice dis- solves apace in the ponds. The grass flames up on the hill sides like a spring fire, — " et primitus orbitur herba imbribus primoribus evocata," — as if the earth sent forth an inward heat to greet the returning sun ; not yellow but green is the color of its flame ; — the symbol of perpetual youth, the grass-blade, like a long green ribbon, streams from the sod into the summer, checked indeed by the frost, but anon push- ing on again, lifting its spear of last year's hay with the fresh life below. It grows as steadily as the rill oozes out of the ground. It is almost identical with that, for in the growing days of June, when the rills are dry, the grass-blades are their channels, and from year to year the herds drink at this perennial green Digitized by Microsoft® SPRING. 327 stream, and the mower draws from it betimes their winter supply. So our human life but dies down to its root, and still puts forth its green blade to eternity. Walden is melting apace. There is a canal two rods wide along the northerly and westerly sides, and wider still at the east end. A great field of ice has cracked off from the main body. I hear a song- sparrow singing from the bushes on the shore, — olit, olit, olit, — chip, chip, chip, eke, char, — che wiss, wiss, wiss. He too is helping to crack it. How handsome the great sweeping curves in the edge of the ice, answering somewhat to those of the shore, but more regular! It is unusually hard, owing to the recent severe but transient cold, and all watered or waved like a palace floor. But the wind slides east- ward over its opaque surface in vain, till it reaches the living surface beyond. It is glorious to behold this ribbon of water sparkling in the sun, the bare face of the pond full of glee and youth, as if it spoke the joy of the fishes within it, and of the sands on its shore, — a silvery sheen as from the scales of a leuciscics, as it were all one active fish. Such is the contrast between winter and spring. Walden was dead and is alive again. But this spring it broke up more steadily, as I have said. The change from storm and winter to serene and mild weather, from dark and sluggish hours to bright and elastic ones, is a memorable crisis which all things proclaim. It is seemingly instantaneous at last. Suddenly an influx of light filled my house, though the evening was at hand, and the clouds of winter still overhung it, and the eaves were dripping with sleety rain. I looked out the window, and lo! Digitized by Microsoft® 328 WALDEN. where yesterday was cold gray ice there lay the trans- parent pond already calm and full of hope as in a summer evening, reflecting a summer evening sky in its bosom, though none was visible overhead, as if it had intelligence with some remote horizon. I heard a robin iii the distance, the first I had heard for many a thousand years, methought, whose note I shall not forget for many a thousand more, — the same sweet and powerful song as of yore. O the evening robin, at the end of a New England summer day ! If I could ever find the twig he sits upon ! I mean he; I mean the twig. This at least is not the Turdus tni- gratorius. The pitch-pines and shrub-oaks about my house, which had so long drooped, suddenly re- sumed their several characters, looked brighter, greener, and more erect and alive, as if effectually cleansed and restored by the rain. I knew that it would not rain any more. You may tell by looking at any twig of the forest, ay, at your very wood-pile, whether its winter is past or not. As it grew darker, I was startled by the honking of geese flying low over the woods, like weary travellers getting in late from southern lakes, and indulging at last in unrestrained complaint and mutual consolation. Standing at my door, I could hear the rush of their wings ; when, driving toward my house, they suddenly spied my light, and with hushed clamor wheeled and settled in the pond. So I came in, and shut the door, and passed my first spring night in the woods. In the morning I watched the geese from the door through the mist, sailing in the middle of the pond, fifty rods off, so large and tumultuous that Walden appeared like an artificial pond for their amusement. But when I stood on the shore they at once rose up Digitized by Microsoft® SPRING. 329 with a great flapping of wings at tlie signal of their commander, and when they had got into rank, circled about over my head, twenty-nine of them, and then steered straight to Canada, with a regular honk from the leader at intervals, trusting to break their fast in muddier pools. A " plump " of ducks rose at the same time and took the route to the north in the wake of their noisier cousins. For a week I heard the circling groping clangor of some solitary goose in the foggy mornings, seeking its companion, and still peopling the woods with the sound of a larger life than they could sustain. In April the pigeons were seen again flying express in small flocks, and in due time I heard the martins twittering over my clearing, though it had not seemed that the township contained so many that it could afford me any, and I fancied that they were peculiarly of the ancient race that dwelt in hollow trees ere white men came. In almost all climes the tortoise and the frog are among the precursors and heralds of this season, and birds fly with song and glancing plumage, and plants spring and bloom, and winds blow, to correct this slight oscillation of the poles and preserve the equilibrium of Nature. As every season seems best to us in its turn, so the coming in of spring is like the creation of Cosmos out of Chaos and the realization of the Golden Age.— " Eurus ad Auroram, Nabafhacaque regna recessit, Persidaque, et radiis juga subdita matutinis." " The East-Wind withdrew to Aurora and the Nabathasan kingdom, And the Persian, and the ridges placed under the morning rays. Digitized by Microsoft® 330 WALDEN. Man was born. Whether that Artificer of things, The origin of a better world, made him from the divine seed ; Or the earth being recent and lately sundered from the high Ether, retained some seeds of cognate heaven." A single gentle rain makes the grass many shades greener. So our prospects brighten on the influx of better thoughts. We should be blessed if we lived in the present always, and took advantage of every acci- dent that befell us, like the grass which confesses the influence of the slightest dew that falls on it; and did not spend our time in atoning for the neglect of past opportunities, which we call doing our duty. We loiter in winter while it is already spring. In a pleasant spring morning all men's sins are forgiven. Such a day is a truce to vice. While such a stm holds out to burn, the vilest sinner may return. Through our own recovered innocence we discern the inno- cence of our neighbors. You may have known your neighbor yesterday for a thief, a drunkard, or a sen- sualist, and merely pitied or despised him, and de- spaired of the world ; but the sun shines bright and warm this first spring morning, recreating the world, and you meet him at some serene work, and see how his exhausted and debauched veins expand with still joy and bless the new day, feel the spring influence with the innocence of infancy, and all his faults are forgotten. There is not only an atmosphere of good will about, him, but even a savor of holiness groping for expression, blindly and ineffectually perhaps, like a new-born instinct, and for a short hour the south hill side echoes to no vulgar jest. You see some innocent fair shoots preparing to burst from his Digitized by Microsoft® SPRING. 331 gnarled rind and try another year's life, tender and fresh as the youngest plant. Even he has entered into the joy of his Lord. Why the jailer does not leave open his prison doors, — why the judge does not dismiss his case, — why the preacher does not dismiss his congregation! It is because they do not obey the hint which God gives them, nor accept the pardon which he freely offers to all. " A return to goodness produced each day in the tranquil and beneficent breath of the morning, causes that in respect to the love of virtue and the hatred of vice, one approaches a little the primitive nature of man, as the sprouts of the forest which has been felled. In like manner the evil which one does in the inter- val of a day prevents the germs of virtues which began to spring up again from developing themselves and destroys them. "After the germs of virtue have thus been pre- vented many times from developing themselves, then the beneficent breath of evening does not sufl5ce to preserve them. As soon as the breath of evening does not suffice longer to preserve them, then the nature of man does not diflFer much from that of the brute. Men seeing the nature of this man like that of the brute, think that he has never possessed the innate faculty of reason. Are those the true and natural sentiments of man ? " " The Golden Age was first created, which without any avenger Spontaneously without law cherished fidelity and rectitude. Punishment and fear were not ; nor were threatening words read On suspended brass ; nor did the suppliant crowd fear The words of their judge ; but were safe without an avenger. Not yet the pine felled on its mountains had descended Digitized by Microsoft® 332 WALDEN. To the liquid waves that it might see a foreign world. And mortals knew no shores but their own. # * « « 4t * There was eternal spring, and placid zephyrs with warm Blasts soothed the flowers born without seed." On the 29th of April, as I was fishing from the bank of the river near the Nine-Acre-Corner bridge, standing on the quaking grass and willow roots, where the muskrats lurk, I heard a singular rattling sound, somewhat like that of the sticks which boys play with their fingers, when, looking up, I observed a very slight and graceful hawk, like a night-hawk, alternately soaring like a ripple and tumbling a rod or two over and over, showing the underside of its wings, which gleamed like a satin ribbon in the sun, or like the pearly inside of a shell. This sight re- minded me of falconry and what nobleness and poetry are associated with that sport. The Merlin it seemed to me it might be called : but I care not for its name. It was the most ethereal flight I had ever witnessed. It did not simply flutter like a butterfly, nor soar like the larger hawks, but it sported with proud reliance in the fields of air ; mounting again and again with its strange chuckle, it repeated its free and beautiful fall, turning over and over like a kite, and then re- covering from its lofty tumbling, as if it had never set its foot on terra firma. It appeared to have no companion in the universe, — sporting there alone, — and to need none but the morning and the ether with which it played. It was not lonely, but made all the earth lonely beneath it. Where was the parent which hatched it, its kindred, and its father in the heavens ? The tenant of the air, it seemed related to the earth but by an egg hatched sometime in the crevice of a Digitized by Microsoft® SPRING. 333 crag; — or was its native nest made in the angle of a cloud, woven of the rainbow's trimmings and the sun- set sky, and lined with some soft midsummer haze caught up from earth ? Its eyry now some cliffy cloud. Besides this I got a rare mess of golden and silver and bright cupreous fishes, which looked like a string of jewels. Ah! I have penetrated to those meadows on the morning of many a first spring day, jumping from hummock to hummock, from willow root to wil- low root, when the wild river valley and the woods were bathed in so pure and bright a light as would have waked the dead, if they had been slumbering in their graves, as some suppose. There needs no stronger proof of immortality. All things must live in such a light. O Death, where was thy sting .? O Grave, where was thy victory, then ? Our village life would stagnate if it were not for the unexplored forests and meadows which surround it. We need the tonic of wildness, — to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe ; to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground. At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we re- quire that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of Nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and Titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder- cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and pro- Digitized by Microsoft® 334 WALDEN. duces freshets. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander. We are cheered when we observe the vulture feeding on the carrion which disgusts and dis- heartens us, and deriving health and strength from the repast. There was a dead horse in the hollow by the path to my house, which compelled me sometimes to go out of my way, especially in the night when the air was heavy, but the assurance it gave me of the strong appetite and inviolable health of Nature was my com- pensation for this. I love to see that Nature is so rife with life that myriads can be afforded to be sacrificed and suffered to prey on one another ; that tender or- ganizations can be so serenely squa.shed out of existence like pulp, — tadpoles which herons gobble up, and tor- toises and toads run over in the road ; and that some- times it has rained flesh and blood ! With the liabil- ity to accident, we must see how little account is to be made of it. The impression made on a wise man is that of universal innocence. Poison is not poisonous after all, nor are any wounds fatal. Compassion is a very untenable ground. It must be expeditious. Its pleadings will not bear to be stereotyped. Early in May, the oaks, hickories, maples, and other trees, just putting out amidst the pine woods around the pond, imparted a brightness like sunshine to the landscape, especially in cloudy days, as if the sun were breaking through mists and shining faintly on the hill sides here and there. On the third or fourth of May I saw a loon in the pond, and during the first week of the month I heard the whippoorwill, the brown thrasher, the veery, the wood-pewee, chewink, and other birds. I had heard the wood-thrush long before. The phcebe had already come once more and Digitized by Microsoft® SPRING. 335 looked in at my door and window, to see if my house was cavern-like enough for her, sustaining herself on humming wings with clinched talons, as if she held by the air, while she surveyed the premises. The sul- phur-like pollen of the pitch-pine soon covered the pond and the stones and rotten wood along the shore, so that you could have collected a barrelful. This is the '' sulphur showers " we hear of. Even in Calidasa's drama of Sacontala, we read of " rills dyed yellow with the golden dust of the lotus." And so the seasons went rolling on into summer, as one rambles into higher and higher grass. Thus was my first year's life in the woods com- pleted ; and the second year was similar to it. I finally left Walden September 6th, 1847. Digitized by Microsoft® 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 Eng- land, 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 Colo- rado 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 cannot 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 taiFerel of our craft, like curious passengers, and not make the voy- age like stupid sailors picking oakum. The other side of the globe is but the home of our correspondent. Our voyage is only great circle-sailing, and the doc- tors 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? 336 Digitized by Microsoft® CONCLUSION. 337 Snipes and woodcocks also may afford rare sport ; but I trust it would be nobler game to shoot one's self. — " Direct your eye right inward, and you'll find A thousand regions in your mind Yet undiscovered. Travel them, and be 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 dis- covered. 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 Clarke 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 chan- nels, 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 patriotic who have no self-xe.- spect, and sacrifice the greater to the less. They love the soil which makes their graves, but have no sym- pathy 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 recog- Digitized by Microsoft® 338 WALDEN. nition 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 cold and storm and cannibals, in a government ship, with five hun- dred men and boys to assist one, than it is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one's being alone. — " Erret, et extremes alter scrutetur Iberos. Plus habet hie vitae, plus habet ille viae." " 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 cats in Zanzibar. Yet do this even till you can do better, and you may perhaps find some " Symmes' Hole " by which to get at the inside at last. England and France, Spain and Portugal, Gold Coast •and Slave Coast, all front on this priv?te 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 travellers, 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. Digitized by Microsoft® CONCLUSION. 339 It is said that Mirabeau took to highway robbery "to ascertain what degree of resolution was necessary in order to place one's self in formal opposition to the most sacred laws of society." He declared that " a soldier who fights in the ranks does not require half so much courage as a foot-pad," — " that honor and religion have never stood in the way of a well-con- sidered 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 resolution with- out going out of his way. It is not for a man to put himself in such an attitude to society, but to maintain himself in whatever attitude he find himself through obedience to the laws of his being, which will never be one of opposition to a just government, if he should chance to meet with such. ' I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one. It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a 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 con- formity! I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but Digitized by Microsoft® 340 WALDEN. 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 themselves around and within him ; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will ap- pear less complex, and solitude will not be sohtude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost ; that is where they should be. Now put the foun- dations under them. It is a ridiculous demand which England and Amer- ica make, that you shall speak so that they can under- stand 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 wlw, which Bright can understand, were the best English. As if there were safety in stupidity alone. I fear chiefly lest my ex- pression may not be extra-vagant enough, may not wander far enough beyond the narrow limits of my daily experience, so as to be adequate to the truth of which I have been convinced. Extravagance', it de- Digitized by Microsoft® CONCLUSION. 341 pends on how you are yarded. The migrating buffalo which seelcs new pastures in another latitude, is no 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 convinced that I can- not 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 siae ; as our shadows reveal an insensible perspiration toward the sun. The volatile truth of our words should continually betray the inadequacy of the residual statement. Their truth is instantly translated; its literal monument alone re- mains. The words which express our faith and piety are not definite ; yet they are significant and fragrant like frankincense to superior natures. Why level downward to our dullest perception al- ways, and praise that as common sense? The com- monest sense is the sense of men asleep, which they express by snoring. Sometimes we are inclined to class those who are once-and-a- half-witted with the half- witted, because we 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 doc- trine 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 Eng- land endeavors to cure the potato-rot, will not any Digitized by Microsoft® 342 ivalden: 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 com- pared 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 suc- ceed, 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 music 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. Shall he turn his spring into summer? If the condition of things which we were made for is not yet, what were any reality which we can substitute? We will not be 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? Digitized by Microsoft® CONCLUSION. 343 There was an artist in the city of Kouroo who was disposed to strive after perfection. One day it came into his mind to malce a staff. Having considered that in an imperfect worlc time is an ingredient, but into a perfect worlc 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 resolution, and his elevated piety, endowed him, without his knowledge, with perennial youth. As he made no compromise with Time, Time kept out of his way, and only sighed at a distance because he could not overcome him. Before he had found a stock in all respects suitable the city of Kouroo was a hoary ruin, and he sat on one of its mounds to peel the stick. Before he had given it the proper shape the dynasty of the Candahars was at an end, and with the point of the stick he wrote the name of the last of that race in the sand, and then resumed his work. By the time he had smoothed and polished the staff Kalpa was no longer the pole-star ; and ere he had put on the ferule and the head adorned with precious stones, Brahma had awoke and slumbered many times. But why do I stay to mention these things ? When the 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 Digitized by Microsoft® 344 WALDEN. old cities and dynasties had passed away, fairer an6 more glorious ones had taken their places. And now he saw by the heap of shavings still fresh at his feet, that, for him and his work, the former lapse of time had been an illusion, and that no more time had "elapsed than is required for a single scintillation from the brain of Brahma to fall on and inflame the tinder of a mortal brain. The material was pure, and his art was pure; how could the result be other than wonderful ? No face which we can give to a matter will stead us so 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 diiificult to get out. In sane moments wei 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 call 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. [ do not see but a quiet mind may live as contentedly Digitized by Microsoft® CONCLUSION. 345