Sounds
But while we are confined to books, though the most select and
classic, and read only particular written 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 published,
but little printed. The rays which stream through the shutter will
be no longer remembered when the shutter is wholly removed. No
method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever
on the alert. What is a course of history 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 sing around or flitted 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 fortune. 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, today, and tomorrow they have only one
word, and they express the variety of meaning by pointing backward
for yesterday forward for tomorrow, 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 itself was become my amusement and never
ceased to be novel. It was a drama of many scenes and without 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 prospect 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 bedstead making but one budget, dashed water on the floor,
and sprinkled white sand from the pond on it, and then with a broom
scrubbed it clean and white; and by the 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
uninterupted. 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 of 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, chestnut burs, and
strawberry leaves are strewn about. It looked as if this was the
way these forms came to be transferred to our furniture, to tables,
chairs, and bedsteads -- because they once stood in their midst.
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
hickories, and half a dozen rods from the pond, to which a narrow
footpath led down the hill. In my front yard grew the strawberry,
blackberry, and life-everlasting, johnswort and goldenrod, shrub
oaks and sand cherry, blueberry and groundnut. 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 goodsized
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, developed themselves as by magic into
graceful green and tender boughs, an inch in diameter; and
sometimes, as I sat at my window, so heedlessly did they grow and
tax their weak joints, I heard a fresh 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 bent down and broke the tender limbs.
As I sit at my window this summer afternoon, hawks are circling
about my clearing; the tantivy of wild pigeons, flying by two and
threes athwart my view, or perching restless on the white pine
boughs behind my house, gives a voice to the air; a fish hawk
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 Boston to the
country. For I did not live so out of the world as that boy who, as
I hear, was put out to a farmer in the east part of the town, but
ere long ran away and came home again, quite down at the heel and
homesick. He had never seen such 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 summer and
winter, sounding like the scream of a hawk sailing over some
farmer's yard, informing me that many restless city merchants are
arriving within the circle of the town, or adventurous country
traders from the other side. As they come under one horizon, they
shout their 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 independent on 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 cotton, down goes the woven cloth; up comes the silk, down
goes the woollen; up come the books, but down goes the wit that
writes them.
When I meet the engine with its train of cars moving off with
planetary motion -- or, rather, like a comet, for the beholder knows
not if with that velocity and with that direction it will ever
revisit this system, since its orbit does not look like a returning
curve -- with its steam cloud like a banner streaming behind in
golden 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 traveling demigod, this cloud-compeller, would ere long take
the sunset sky for the livery of his train; when I hear the iron
horse make the hills echo with his snort like thunder, shaking the
earth with his feet, and breathing fire and smoke from his nostrils
(what kind of winged horse or fiery dragon they will put into the
new Mythology I don't know), it seems as if the earth had got a race
now worthy to inhabit it. If all 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
elements 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 snowshoes, and, with the giant plow, plow 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
awakened by his tramp and defiant snort at midnight, when in some
remote glen in the woods he fronts the elements incased in ice and
snow; and he will reach his stall only with the morning star, to
start once more on his travels without rest or slumber. Or
perchance, at evening, I hear him in his stable blowing off the
superfluous energy of the day, that he may calm his nerves and cool
his liver and brain for a few hours of iron slumber. If the
enterprise were as heroic and commanding as it is protracted and
unwearied!
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 stopping at some brilliant station-house in town or
city, where a social crowd is gathered, the next in the Dismal
Swamp, scaring the owl and fox. The startings and arrivals of the
cars are now the epochs in the village day. They go and come with
such regularity and precision, and their whistle can be heard so
far, that the farmers set their clocks by them, and thus one
well-conducted institution regulates a whole country. Have not men
improved somewhat 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 miracles 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 byword; 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 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 enterprise 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 snowplow 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 frozen. On this morning of the Great Snow,
perchance, which is still raging and chilling men's blood, I bear
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 plowmen covered with snow and rime,
their heads peering, above the mould-board which is turning down
other than daisies and the nests of field mice, like bowlders of the
Sierra Nevada, that occupy an outside place in the universe.
Commerce is unexpectedly confident and serene, alert,
adventurous, and unwearied. It is very natural in its methods
withal, far more so than many fantastic enterprises and sentimental
experiments, and hence its singular success. I am refreshed and
expanded when the freight train rattles past me, and I smell the
stores which go dispensing their odors all the way from Long Wharf
to Lake Champlain, reminding me of foreign parts, of coral reefs,
and Indian oceans, and tropical climes, and the 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 cocoanut husks, the old junk, gunny
bags, scrap iron, and rusty nails. This carload 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 correction. Here goes lumber from
the Maine woods, which did not go out to sea in the last freshet,
risen four dollars on the thousand because of what did go out or was
split up; pine, spruce, cedar -- first, second, third, and fourth
qualities, so lately all of one quality, to wave over the bear, and
moose, and caribou. Next rolls Thomaston lime, a prime lot, which
will get far among the hills before it gets slacked. These rags in
bales, of all hues and qualities, the lowest 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 Milwaukee, as
those splendid articles, English, French, or American prints,
ginghams, muslins, etc., gathered from all quarters both of fashion
and poverty, going to become paper of one color or a few shades
only, on which, forsooth, will be written tales of real life, high
and low, and founded on fact! This closed car smells of salt fish,
the strong New England and commercial 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 speaking, 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 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 bulkhead and thinks of the last arrivals on the coast, how
they may affect the price for him, telling his customers this
moment, as he has told them twenty times before this morning, that
he expects some by the next train of prime quality. It is
advertised in the Cuttingsville Times.
While these things go up other things come down. Warned by the
whizzing sound, I look up from my book 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 carload 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; 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 pastoral life whirled past and away. But the bell rings,
and I must get off the track and let the cars go by;--
What's the railroad to me?
I never go to see
Where it ends.
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 meditations are interrupted only by the faint rattle of a
carriage or team along the distant highway.
Sometimes, on Sundays, I heard the bells, the Lincoln, 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 which it swept. All sound heard
at the greatest possible distance produces one and the same effect,
a vibration of the universal lyre, just as the intervening
atmosphere makes a distant ridge of earth interesting 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 modulated 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 melodious, and at first I would mistake
it for the voices of certain minstrels by whom I was sometimes
serenaded, who might 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
express my appreciation of those youths' singing, when I state that
I perceived clearly that it was akin to the music of the cow, and
they were at length one articulation of Nature.
Regularly at half-past seven, in one part of the summer, after
the evening train had gone by, the whip-poor-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 precision as a clock, within five minutes of a particular time,
referred to the setting of the sun, every evening. I had a rare
opportunity to become acquainted with their habits. Sometimes I
heard four or five at once in different parts of the wood, by
accident one a bar behind another, and so near me that I
distinguished not only the cluck after 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 as 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,
like 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 the 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-n!
sighs one on this side of the pond, and circles with the
restlessness of despair to some new perch on the gray oaks. Then --
that I never had been bor-r-r-r-n! echoes another on the farther
side with tremulous sincerity, and -- bor-r-r-r-n! comes faintly
from far in the Lincoln woods.
I was also serenaded by a hooting owl. Near at hand you could
fancy it the most melancholy sound in Nature, as if she meant by
this to stereotype and make permanent in her choir the dying moans
of a human being -- some poor weak relic of mortality who has left
hope behind, and howls like an animal, yet with human sobs, on
entering the dark valley, made more awful by a certain gurgling
melodiousness -- I find myself beginning with the letters gl when I
try to imitate it -- expressive of a mind which has reached the
gelatinous, mildewy stage in the mortification of all healthy and
courageous thought. It reminded me of ghouls and idiots and insane
howlings. But now one answers from far woods in a strain made
really melodious by distance -- Hoo hoo hoo, hoorer hoo; and indeed
for the most part it suggested only pleasing 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 represent
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 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 mean-while 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 comparison, for though there are almost no weeds, there
are frogs there -- who would fain keep up the hilarious rules of
their old festal tables, though their voices have waxed hoarse and
solemnly grave, mocking at mirth, and the wine has lost its flavor,
and become only liquor to distend their paunches, and sweet
intoxication never comes to drown the memory of the past, but mere
saturation and waterloggedness and distention. 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 of the
shores, then ejaculates the master of ceremonies, with satisfaction,
tr-r-r-oonk! and each in his turn repeats the same down to the least
distended, leakiest, and flabbiest paunched, that there be no
mistake; and then the howl goes round again and again, until the sun
disperses the morning 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 resounding 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
domestic sounds; neither the churn, nor the spinning-wheel, nor even
the singing of the kettle, 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 whip-poor-will 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 meadows, 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.
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 attract me,
all the elements are unusually congenial to me. The bullfrogs trump
to usher in the night, and the note of the whip-poor-will is borne
on the rippling wind from over the water. Sympathy with the
fluttering 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 evening wind are as remote from storm as the
smooth reflecting surface. Though it is now dark, the wind still
blows and roars in the wood, the waves still dash, and 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 rarely to the woods take some little piece of the
forest 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 railroad, 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 somewhat is always clearing, familiar and worn by
us, appropriated and fenced in some way, and reclaimed from Nature.
For what reason have I this vast 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 railroad 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 last man; unless it were in the
spring, when at long intervals some came from the village to fish
for pouts -- they plainly fished much more in the Walden Pond of
their 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
profaned 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 society 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 AEolian 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 today 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 uplands, 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 their hands
which my fellows have not, and were especially 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
solitude, 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 unpleasant. But I was at the same time conscious of a
slight 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 neighborhood 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 accustomed
to call wild and dreary, and also that the nearest of blood to me
and humanest was not a person nor a villager, that I thought no
place could ever be strange to me again.
"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 early twilight ushered in a long evening in which
many thoughts had time to take root and unfold themselves. In those
driving northeast rains which tried the village houses so, when the
maids 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 conspicuous and perfectly regular spiral groove
from top to bottom, an inch or more deep, and four or five inches
wide, as you would groove a walking-stick. I passed it again the
other day, and was struck with awe on looking up and beholding that
mark, now more distinct than ever, where a terrific and resistless
bolt came down out of the harmless sky eight years ago. Men
frequently say to me, "I should think you would feel lonesome down
there, and want to be nearer to folks, rainy and snowy days and
nights especially." I am tempted to reply to such -- This whole
earth which we inhabit is but a point in space. How far apart,
think you, dwell the two most distant inhabitants of yonder star,
the breadth of whose disk cannot be appreciated by our instruments?
Why should I feel lonely? is not our planet in the Milky Way? This
which you put seems to me not to be the most important question.
What sort of space is that which separates a man from his fellows
and makes him solitary? I have found that no exertion of the legs
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 congregate,
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 passably well; I was not joking. And so I went home
to my bed, and left him to pick his way through the darkness and the
mud to Brighton -- or Bright-town -- which place he would reach some
time in the morning.
Any prospect of awakening or coming to life to a dead man makes
indifferent all times and places. The place 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 circumstances 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 subtile powers of
Heaven and of Earth!"
"We seek to perceive them, and we do not see them; we seek to
hear them, and we do not hear them; identified with the substance of
things, they cannot be separated from them."
"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 the subjects of an experiment which is not a little
interesting to me. Can we not do without the society of our gossips
a little while under these circumstances -- have our own thoughts to
cheer us? Confucius says truly, "Virtue does not remain as an
abandoned orphan; it must of necessity have neighbors."
With thinking we may be beside ourselves in a sane sense. By a
conscious effort of the mind we can stand aloof from actions and
their consequences; and all things, good and bad, go by us like a
torrent. We are not wholly involved in Nature. I may be either the
driftwood in the stream, or Indra in the sky looking down on it. I
may be affected by a theatrical exhibition; on the other hand, I may
not be affected by an actual event which appears to concern me much
more. I only know myself as a human entity; the scene, so to speak,
of thoughts and affections; and am sensible of a certain doubleness
by which I can stand as remote from myself as from another. However
intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism
of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but
spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is
no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of
life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction,
a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned. This
doubleness may easily make us poor neighbors and friends sometimes.
I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time.
To 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 companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more
lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our
chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be
where he will. Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that
intervene between 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 recreation 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 had 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-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; especially 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
sometimes 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 bumblebee. I am no more lonely than the Mill 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 her 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
occurred 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
intelligence with the earth? Am I 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 looking 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 of this at the fountainhead 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
AEsculapius, 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, cup-bearer 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 young lady
that ever walked the globe, and wherever she came it was spring.
Visitors
I think that I love society as much as most, and am ready enough
to fasten myself like a bloodsucker for the time to any full-blooded
man that comes in my way. I am naturally no hermit, but might
possibly sit out the 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 surprising
how many great men and women a small house will contain. I have had
twenty-five or thirty souls, with their bodies, at once under my
roof, and yet we often parted without being aware that we 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 be extravagantly large for their inhabitants. They
are so vast and magnificent 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.
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 before it reaches the ear of the hearer, else it
may plow 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. Referred to this standard, speech is for
the convenience of those who are hard of hearing; but there are many
fine things which we cannot say if we have to shout. As the
conversation began to assume a loftier 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 came and sat in my house there was
nothing said about dinner, though there might be bread enough for
two, more than if eating were a forsaken habit; but we naturally
practised abstinence; and this was never felt to be an offence
against hospitality, but the most proper and considerate course.
The waste and decay of physical life, which so often needs repair,
seemed miraculously 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 whatever, as by
the parade one made about dining me, which I took 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 Plymouth 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 himself and his wife, they at the one end and we at the
other, it being only planks 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
fishes that he had shot," about thrice as big as a bream. "These
being boiled, there were at least forty looked for a share in them;
the most eat 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 use to sing themselves asleep,)" and that they 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 nothing 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 in my
life; I mean that I had some. I met several there under more
favorable circumstances than I could anywhere else. But fewer came
to see me on 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 concerned,
only the finest sediment was deposited around me. Beside, 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 woodchopper 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
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, Patroclus, like a young girl?"
"Or have you alone heard some news from Phthia?
They say that Menoetius lives yet, son of Actor,
And Peleus lives, son of AEacus, 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 existance 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 gracefully
carried, with a thick sunburnt neck, dark bushy hair, and dull
sleepy blue eyes, which were occasionally lit up with expression.
He wore a flat 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 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 bean-field, 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,
partridges -- 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 solitary 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 in Canadian
French, though he spoke English as well. 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 himself 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."
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 intellectual
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 Nature made him, she gave him a strong body and
contentment for his portion, and propped him on every side with
reverence and reliance, that he might live out his threescore years
and ten a child. He was so genuine and unsophisticated that no
introduction would serve to introduce him, more than if you
introduced 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 remarkably 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 Canadian 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
Shakespeare or as simply ignorant as a child, whether to suspect him
of a fine poetic consciousness or of stupidity. A townsman told me
that when he met him sauntering through the village 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 beside water? He had soaked hemlock leaves in water and
drank it, and thought that was better than water in warm weather.
When I asked him if he could do without money, he showed the
convenience of money in such a way as to suggest and coincide with
the most philosophical accounts of the origin of this institution,
and the very derivation of the word pecunia. If an ox were his
property, and he wished to get needles and thread at the store, he
thought it would be inconvenient and impossible soon to go on
mortgaging some portion of the creature each time to that amount.
He could defend many institutions better than any philosopher,
because, in describing them as they concerned him, he gave the true
reason for their prevalence, and speculation had not suggested to
him any other. At another time, hearing Plato's 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. May be 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 spiritual view of things; the highest that he appeared to
conceive of was a simple expediency, such as you might expect an
animal to appreciate; and this, practically, is true of most men.
If I suggested any improvement in his mode of life, he merely
answered, without expressing any regret, that it was too late. Yet
he thoroughly believed in honesty and the like virtues.
There was a certain positive originality, however slight, to be
detected in him, and I occasionally observed that he was thinking
for himself and expressing his own opinion, a phenomenon so rare
that I would any day walk ten miles to observe it, and it amounted
to the re-origination of many of the institutions of society.
Though he hesitated, and perhaps 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 permanently
humble and illiterate, who take their own view always, or do not
pretend to see at all; who are as bottomless even as Walden Pond was
thought to be, though they may be dark and 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
the annual visitation which occurs, methinks, about the first of
April, when everybody is on 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
conversation; and so was compensated. Indeed, I found some of them
to be wiser than the so-called overseers of the poor and selectmen
of the town, and thought it was time that the tables were turned.
With respect to wit, I learned that there was not much difference
between the half and the whole. One day, in particular, an
inoffensive, simple-minded pauper, whom with others I had often seen
used as fencing stuff, standing or sitting on a bushel in the fields
to keep cattle and himself from straying, visited me, and expressed
a wish to live as I did. He told me, with the utmost simplicity and
truth, quite superior, or rather inferior, to anything that is
called humility, that he was "deficient in intellect." These
were
his words. The Lord had made him so, yet he supposed the Lord cared
as much for him as for another. "I have 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 fellowman 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
intercourse of sages.
I had some guests from those not reckoned commonly among the
town's poor, but who should be; who are among the world's poor, at
any rate; guests who appeal, not to your hospitality, but to your
hospitalality; who earnestly wish to be helped, and preface their
appeal with the information that they are resolved, for one thing,
never to help themselves. I require of a visitor that he be not
actually starving, though he may have the very best appetite in the
world, however he got it. Objects of 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 plantation manners, who listened from time
to time, like the fox in the fable, as if they heard the hounds
a-baying on their track, and looked at me beseechingly, as much as
to say, --
"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 hundred
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 all over. One man proposed a book in which visitors
should write their names, as at the White Mountains; but, alas! I
have too good a memory to make that necessary.
I could not but notice some of the peculiarities of my visitors.
Girls and boys and young women generally seemed glad to be in the
woods. They looked in the pond and at the flowers, and improved
their time. Men of business, even farmers, thought only of solitude
and 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 occasionally, it was obvious that they did not. Restless
committed men, whose time was an taken up in getting 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 that it was safest to follow the beaten track of the
professions -- all these generally said that it was not possible to
do so much good in my position. Ay! there was the rub. The old and
infirm and the timid, of whatever age or sex, thought most of
sickness, and sudden accident and death; to them life seemed full of
danger -- what danger is there if you don't think of any? -- and
they thought that a prudent man would carefully select the safest
position, where Dr. B. might be on hand at a moment's warning. To
them the village was literally a community, 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 danger that he may die, though the
danger must be allowed to be less in proportion as he is
dead-and-alive to begin with. A man sits as many risks as he runs.
Finally, there were the self-styled reformers, the greatest bores of
all, who thought that I was forever singing,--
This is the house that I built;
This is the man that lives in the house that I built;
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. Children come
a-berrying, railroad men taking a Sunday morning walk in clean
shirts, fishermen and hunters, poets and philosophers; in short, all
honest pilgrims, who came out to the woods for freedom's sake, and
really left the village behind, I was ready to greet with --
"Welcome, Englishmen! welcome, Englishmen!" for I had had
communication with that race.
The Bean-Field
Meanwhile my beans, the length of whose rows, added together,
was seven miles already planted, were impatient to be hoed, for the
earliest had grown considerably before the latest were in the
ground; indeed they were not easily to be put off. What was the
meaning of this 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 summer -- to make this portion
of the earth's surface, which had yielded only cinquefoil,
blackberries, johnswort, and the like, before, sweet wild fruits and
pleasant flowers, produce instead this pulse. What shall I learn of
beans or beans of me? I cherish them, I hoe them, early and late I
have an eye to them; and this is my day's work. It is a fine broad
leaf to look on. My auxiliaries are the dews and rains which water
this dry soil, and what fertility is in the soil itself, which for
the most part is lean and effete. My enemies are worms, cool days,
and most of all woodchucks. The last have nibbled for me a quarter
of an acre clean. But what right had I to oust johnswort and the
rest, and break up their ancient herb garden? Soon, however, the
remaining beans will be too tough for them, and go 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 on
my 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 presence 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
arrowheads 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 bean-field and throw dust upon
their heads. Early in the morning I worked barefooted, dabbling
like a plastic artist in the dewy and crumbling sand, but later in
the day the sun blistered my feet. There the sun lighted me to hoe
beans, pacing slowly 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 husbandry, I
was much slower, and became much more intimate with my beans than
usual. But labor of the hands, even when pursued to the verge of
drudgery, is perhaps never the worst form of idleness. It has a
constant and imperishable moral, and to the scholar it yields a
classic result. A very agricola laboriosus was I to travellers
bound westward through Lincoln and Wayland to nobody knows where;
they sitting at their ease in gigs, with elbows on knees, and reins
loosely hanging in festoons; I the home-staying, laborious native of
the soil. But soon my homestead was out of their sight and thought.
It was the only open and 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 travellers' gossip and comment
than was meant for his ear: "Beans so late! peas so late!"
-- for I
continued to plant when others had begun to hoe -- the ministerial
husbandman had not suspected it. "Corn, my boy, for fodder; corn
for fodder." "Does he live there?" asks the black bonnet
of the
gray coat; and the hard-featured farmer reins up his grateful 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 estimates 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 calculated,
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 barbarous, so my field was,
though not in a bad sense, a half-cultivated field. They were beans
cheerfully returning to their wild and primitive state that I
cultivated, and my hoe played the 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 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 soil 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 accompaniment to my
labor which yielded an instant and immeasurable crop. It was no
longer beans that I hoed, nor I that hoed beans; and I remembered
with as much pity as pride, if I remembered at all, my acquaintances
who had gone to the city to attend the oratorios. The nighthawk
circled overhead 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 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,
alternately soaring and descending, approaching, and leaving one
another, as if they were the embodiment of my own thoughts. Or I
was attracted by the passage of wild pigeons from this wood to that,
with a slight quivering winnowing sound and carrier haste; or from
under a rotten stump my hoe turned up a sluggish portentous and
outlandish spotted salamander, a trace of Egypt and the Nile, yet
our contemporary. 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 bean-field at the other
end of the town, the big guns sounded as if a puffball 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 information 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 domestic utensils, were endeavoring
to call them down into the hive again. And when the sound died
quite away, and the hum had ceased, and the most favorable 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 Massachusetts and of
our fatherland were in such safe keeping; and as I turned to my
hoeing again I 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 horizon, 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 growing, 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
curious acquaintance one makes with various kinds of weeds -- it
will bear some iteration in the account, for there was no little
iteration in the labor -- disturbing 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 Hector, that towered a whole foot above
his crowding comrades, fell before my weapon and rolled in the dust.
Those summer days which some of my contemporaries devoted to the
fine arts in Boston or Rome, and others 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 exchanged 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, continued too long,
might have become a dissipation. Though I gave them no manure, and
did not hoe them all once, I hoed them unusualy well as far as I
went, and was paid for it in the end, "there being in truth,"
as
Evelyn says, "no compost or laetation whatsoever comparable to
this
continual motion, repastination, and turning of the mould with the
spade." "The earth," he adds elsewhere, "especially
if fresh, has a
certain magnetism in it, by which it attracts the salt, power, or
virtue (call it either) which gives it life, and is the logic of all
the labor and stir we keep about 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 experiments of gentlemen farmers,
my outgoes were,--
For a hoe ................................... $ 0.54
Plowing, harrowing, and furrowing ............ 7.50 Too much.
Beans for seed ............................... 3.12+
Potatoes for seed ............................ 1.33
Peas for seed ................................ 0.40
Turnip seed .................................. 0.06
White line for crow fence .................... 0.02
Horse cultivator and boy three hours ......... 1.00
Horse and cart to get crop ................... 0.75
--------
In all .................................. $14.72+
My income was (patrem familias vendacem, non emacem esse
oportet), from
Nine bushels and twelve quarts of beans sold .. $16.94
Five " large potatoes ..................... 2.50
Nine " small .............................. 2.25
Grass ........................................... 1.00
Stalks .......................................... 0.75
-------
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, innocence, and the like, and see if they will not
grow in this soil, even with less toil and manurance, and sustain
me, for surely it has 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, and so did not come up.
Commonly men will only be brave as their fathers were brave, or
timid. This generation is very sure to plant corn and beans each
new year precisely as the Indians did centuries ago and taught the
first settlers to do, as if there were a fate 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 ourselves
so much about our beans for seed, and not be concerned at all about
a new generation of men? We should really be fed and cheered if
when we met a man we 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 instructed to send home such seeds as
these, and Congress help to distribute them over all the land. We
should never stand upon ceremony with sincerity. We 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 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 he meant to fly, then close again --"
so that we should suspect that we might be conversing with an angel.
Bread may not always nourish us; but it always does us good, it even
takes stiffness out of our joints, and makes us supple and buoyant,
when we knew 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
reminded 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 degraded
with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows Nature
but as a robber. Cato says that the profits of agriculture are
particularly pious or just (maximeque pius quaestus), and according
to Varro the old Romans "called the same earth Mother and Ceres,
and
thought that they who cultivated it led a pious and useful life, and
that they alone were left of the race of King Saturn."
We are wont to forget that the sun looks on our cultivated
fields and on the prairies and forests without 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
woodchucks 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 little comparatively whether the
fields fill the farmer's barns. The true husbandman will cease from
anxiety, 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.
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 squirrels, so
I walked in the village to see the men and boys; instead of the wind
among the pines I heard the carts rattle. In one direction from my
house there was a colony of muskrats in the river meadows; under the
grove of elms and buttonwoods in the other horizon was a village of
busy men, as curious to me as if they had been prairie-dogs, each
sitting at the mouth of its burrow, or running over to a neighbor's
to gossip. 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 groceries. 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 inhaling ether, it
only producing numbness and insensibility to pain -- otherwise it
would often be painful to bear -- without affecting the
consciousness. I hardly ever failed, when I rambled through the
village, to see a row of such worthies, either sitting on a ladder
sunning themselves, with their bodies inclined forward and their
eyes glancing along the line this way and that, from time to time,
with a voluptuous expression, 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 traveller had to run the
gauntlet, and every man, woman, and child might get a lick at him.
Of course, those who were stationed nearest to the head of the line,
where they could most see and be seen, and have the first blow at
him, paid the highest prices for their places; and the few
straggling inhabitants in the outskirts, where long gaps in the line
began to occur, and the traveller could get over walls or turn aside
into cow-paths, and so escape, paid a very slight ground or window
tax. Signs were hung out on all sides to allure him; some to catch
him by the appetite, as the tavern and victualling cellar; some by
the fancy, 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 wonderfully
from these dangers, either by proceeding at once boldly and without
deliberation to the goal, as is recommended to those who run the
gauntlet, 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 a
fence. I was even accustomed to make an irruption into some houses,
where I was well entertained, and after learning the kernels and
very last sieveful of news -- what had subsided, the prospects of
war and peace, and whether the world was likely to hold together
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 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. Sometimes, after coming home thus
late in a dark and muggy night, when my feet felt the path which my
eyes could not see, dreaming and absent-minded all the way, until I
was aroused by having to raise my hand to lift the latch, I have not
been able to recall a single step of my walk, and I have thought
that perhaps my body would find its way home if its master should
forsake it, as the hand finds its way to the mouth without
assistance. Several times, when a visitor chanced to stay into
evening, 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, 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 outskirts, having come to town
a-shopping in their wagons, 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 experience, 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, steering like pilots by certain well-known
beacons and headlands, and if we go beyond our usual course we still
carry in our minds the bearing of some neighboring cape; and not
till we are completely lost, or turned round -- for a man needs only
to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost
-- do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of nature. Every
man has to learn the points of compass again as often as be 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.
One afternoon, near the end of the first summer, when I went to
the village to get a shoe from the cobbler's, I was seized and put
into jail, because, as I have elsewhere related, I did not pay a tax
to, or recognize the authority of, the State which buys and sells
men, women, and children, like cattle, at the door of its
senate-house. I had gone down to the woods for other purposes.
But, wherever a man goes, men will pursue and paw him with their
dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to
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 huckleberries 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 prospect 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 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.
"Nec 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 -- I the grass, when the wind passes over it,
bends."
The Ponds
Sometimes, having had a surfeit of human society and gossip, and
worn out all my village friends, I rambled still farther westward
than I habitually dwell, into yet more unfrequented parts of the
town, "to fresh woods and pastures new," or, while the sun
was
setting, made my supper of huckleberries and blueberries on Fair
Haven Hill, and laid up a store for several days. The fruits do not
yield their true flavor to the purchaser of them, nor to him who
raises them for the market. There is but one way to obtain it, yet
few take that way. If you would know the flavor of huckleberries,
ask the cowboy or the partridge. It is a vulgar error to suppose
that you have tasted huckleberries who never plucked them. A
huckleberry never reaches Boston; they have not been known there
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 concluded
commonly, by the time I arrived, that he belonged 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 many words passed between
us, for he had grown deaf in his later years, but he occasionally
hummed a psalm, which harmonized well enough with my philosophy.
Our intercourse was thus altogether one of unbroken harmony, far
more pleasing to remember than if it had been carried on by speech.
When, as was 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
hillside.
In warm evenings I frequently sat in the boat playing the flute,
and saw the perch, which I seem 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 skyrockets, which, coming
down into the pond, were quenched with a loud hissing, and we were
suddenly groping in total darkness. Through this, whistling a tune,
we took our way to the haunts of men again. But now I had made my
home by the shore.
Sometimes, after staying in a village parlor till the family had
all retired, I have returned to the woods, and, partly with a view
to the next day's dinner, spent the hours of midnight fishing from a
boat by moonlight, serenaded by owls and foxes, and hearing, from
time to time, the creaking note of some unknown bird close at hand.
These experiences were very memorable and valuable to me -- anchored
in forty feet of water, and twenty or thirty rods from the shore,
surrounded sometimes by thousands of small 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 purpose there, and slow to make up its mind. At length
you slowly raise, pulling hand over hand, some horned pout squeaking
and squirming to the upper air. It was very queer, especially in
dark nights, when your thoughts had wandered to vast and cosmogonal
themes in other spheres, to feel this faint jerk, which came to
interrupt your dreams and link you to Nature again. It seemed as if
I might next cast my line upward into the air, as well as downward
into this element, which was scarcely more dense. Thus I caught two
fishes as it were with one hook.
The scenery of Walden is on a humble scale, and, though very
beautiful, does not approach to grandeur, nor can it much concern
one who has not long frequented it or lived by its shore; yet this
pond is so remarkable for its depth and purity as to merit a
particular description. It is a clear and deep green well, half a
mile long and a mile and three quarters in circumference, and
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 hilltop it reflects the color of the sky; but near at
hand it is of a yellowish tint next the shore where you can see the
sand, then a light green, which gradually deepens to a uniform dark
green in the body of the pond. In some lights, viewed even from a
hilltop, it is of a vivid green next the shore. Some have referred
this to the reflection of the verdure; but it is equally green there
against the railroad sandbank, and in the spring, before the leaves
are expanded, and it may be simply the result of the prevailing blue
mixed with the yellow of the sand. Such is the color of its iris.
This is that portion, also, where in the spring, the ice being
warmed by the heat of the sun reflected from the bottom, and also
transmitted through the earth, melts first and forms a narrow 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 indescribable 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 will have a green tint, owing, as the makers say, to its
"body," but a small piece of the same will be colorless. How
large
a body of Walden water would be required to reflect a green tint I
have never proved. The water of our river is black or a very dark
brown to one looking directly down on it, and, like that of most
ponds, imparts to the body of 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 distorted withal, produces a
monstrous effect, making fit studies for a Michael Angelo.
The water is so transparent that the bottom can easily be
discerned at the depth of twenty-five or thirty feet. 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 hole directly over it
with an ice chisel which I had, and cutting down the longest birch
which I could find in the neighborhood with my knife, I made a
slip-noose, which I attached to its end, and, letting it down
carefully, passed it over the knob of the handle, and drew it by a
line along the birch, and so pulled the axe out again.
The shore is composed of a belt of smooth rounded white stones
like paving-stones, excepting one or two short sand beaches, and is
so steep that in many places a single leap will carry you into water
over your head; and were it not for its remarkable transparency,
that would be the last to be seen of its bottom till it rose on the
opposite side. Some think it is bottomless. It is nowhere muddy,
and a casual observer would say that there were no weeds at all in
it; and of noticeable plants, except in the little meadows recently
overflowed, which do not properly belong to it, a closer scrutiny
does not detect a flag nor a bulrush, nor even a lily, yellow or
white, but only a few small heart-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 westerly; but, though I am
acquainted with most of the ponds within a dozen miles of this
centre I do not know a third of this pure and well-like character.
Successive nations perchance have drank 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 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 southerly wind, and covered with myriads
of ducks and geese, which had not heard of the fall, when still such
pure lakes sufficed them. Even then it had commenced to rise and
fall, and had clarified its waters and colored them of the hue they
now wear, and obtained a patent of Heaven to be the only Walden Pond
in the world and distiller of celestial dews. Who knows in how many
unremembered nations' literatures this has been the Castalian
Fountain? or what nymphs presided over it in the Golden Age? It is
a gem of the first water which Concord wears in her coronet.
Yet perchance the first who came to this well have left some
trace of their footsteps. I have been surprised to detect
encircling the pond, even where a thick wood has just been cut down
on the shore, a narrow shelf-like path in the steep hillside,
alternately rising and falling, approaching and receding from the
water's edge, as old probably as the race of man here, worn by the
feet of aboriginal hunters, and still from time to time unwittingly
trodden by the present occupants of the land. This is particularly
distinct to one standing on the middle of the pond in winter, just
after a light snow has fallen, appearing as a clear undulating white
line, unobscured by weeds and twigs, and very obvious a quarter of a
mile off in many places where in summer it is hardly distinguishable
close at hand. The snow reprints it, as it were, in clear white
type alto-relievo. The ornamented grounds of villas which will one
day be built here may still preserve some trace of this.
The pond rises and falls, but whether regularly or not, and
within what period, nobody knows, though, as usual, many pretend to
know. It is commonly higher in the winter and lower in the summer,
though not corresponding to the general wet and dryness. I can
remember when it was a foot or two lower, and also when it was at
least five feet higher, than when I lived by it. There is a narrow
sand-bar running into it, with very deep water on one side, on which
I helped boil a kettle of chowder, some six rods from the main
shore, about the year 1824, which it has not been possible to do for
twenty-five years; and, on the other hand, my friends used to listen
with incredulity when I told them, that a few years later I was
accustomed to fish from a boat in a secluded cove in the woods,
fifteen rods from the only shore they knew, which place was long
since converted into a meadow. But the pond has risen steadily for
two years, and now, in the summer of '52, is just five feet higher
than when I lived there, or as high as it was thirty years ago, and
fishing goes on again in the meadow. This makes a difference of
level, at the outside, of six or seven feet; and yet the water shed
by the surrounding hills is insignificant in amount, and this
overflow must be referred to causes which affect the deep springs.
This same summer the pond has begun to fall again. It is remarkable
that this fluctuation, whether periodical or not, appears thus to
require many years for its accomplishment. I have observed one rise
and a part of two falls, and I expect that a dozen or fifteen years
hence the water will again be as low as I have ever known it.
Flint's Pond, a mile eastward, allowing for the disturbance
occasioned by its inlets and outlets, and the smaller intermediate
ponds also, sympathize with Walden, and recently attained their
greatest height at the same time with the latter. The same is true,
as far as my observation goes, of White Pond.
This rise and fall of Walden at long intervals serves this use
at least; the water standing at this great height for a year or
more, though it makes it difficult to walk round it, kills the
shrubs and trees which have sprung up about its edge since the last
rise -- pitch pines, birches, alders, aspens, and others -- and,
falling again, leaves an unobstructed shore; for, unlike many ponds
and all waters which are subject to a daily tide, its shore is
cleanest when the water is lowest. On the side of the pond next my
house a row of pitch pines, fifteen feet high, has been killed and
tipped over as if by a lever, and thus a stop put to their
encroachments; and their size indicates how many years have elapsed
since the last rise to this height. By this fluctuation the pond
asserts its title to a shore, and thus the shore is shorn, and the
trees cannot hold it by right of possession. These are the lips of
the lake, on which no beard grows. It licks its chaps from time to
time. When the water is at its height, the alders, willows, and
maples send forth a mass of fibrous red roots several feet long from
all sides of their stems in the water, and to the height of three or
four feet from the ground, in the effort to maintain themselves; and
I have known the high blueberry bushes about the shore, which
commonly produce no fruit, bear an abundant crop under these
circumstances.
Some have been puzzled to tell how the shore became so regularly
paved. My townsmen have all heard the tradition -- the oldest
people tell me that they heard it in their youth -- that anciently
the Indians were holding a pow-wow upon a hill here, which rose as
high into the heavens as the pond now sinks deep into the earth, and
they used much profanity, as the story goes, though this vice is one
of which the Indians were never guilty, and while they were thus
engaged the hill shook and suddenly sank, and only one old squaw,
named Walden, escaped, and from her the pond was named. It has been
conjectured that when the hill shook these stones rolled down its
side and became the present shore. It is very certain, at any rate,
that once there was no pond here, and now there is one; and this
Indian fable does not in any respect conflict with the account of
that ancient settler whom I have mentioned, who remembers so well
when he first came here with his divining-rod, saw a thin vapor
rising from the sward, and the hazel pointed steadily downward, and
he concluded to dig a well here. As for the stones, many still
think that they are hardly to be accounted for by the action of the
waves on these hills; but I observe that the surrounding hills are
remarkably full of the same kind of stones, so that they have been
obliged to pile them up in walls on both sides of the railroad cut
nearest the pond; and, moreover, there are most stones where the
shore is most abrupt; so that, unfortunately, it is no longer a
mystery to me. I detect the paver. If the name was not derived
from that of some English locality -- Saffron Walden, for instance
-- one might suppose that it was called originally Walled-in Pond.
The pond was my well ready dug. For four months in the year its
water is as cold as it is pure at all times; and I think that it is
then as good as any, if not the best, in the town. In the winter,
all water which is exposed to the air is colder than springs and
wells which are protected from it. The temperature of the pond
water which had stood in the room where I sat from five o'clock in
the afternoon till noon the next day, the sixth of March, 1846, the
thermometer having been up to 65x or 70x some of the time, owing
partly to the sun on the roof, was 42x, or one degree colder than
the water of one of the coldest wells in the village just drawn.
The temperature of the Boiling Spring the same day was 45x, or the
warmest of any water tried, though it is the coldest that I know of
in summer, when, beside, shallow and stagnant surface water is not
mingled with it. Moreover, in summer, Walden never becomes so warm
as most water which is exposed to the sun, on account of its depth.
In the warmest weather I usually placed a pailful in my cellar,
where it became cool in the night, and remained so during the day;
though I also resorted to a spring in the neighborhood. It was as
good when a week old as the day it was dipped, and had no taste of
the pump. Whoever camps for a week in summer by the shore of a
pond, needs only bury a pail of water a few feet deep in the shade
of his camp to be independent of the luxury of ice.
There have been caught in Walden pickerel, one weighing seven
pounds -- to say nothing of another which carried off a reel with
great velocity, which the fisherman safely set down at eight pounds
because he did not see him -- perch and pouts, some of each weighing
over two pounds, shiners, chivins or roach (Leuciscus pulchellus), a
very few breams, and a couple of eels, one weighing four pounds -- I
am thus particular because the weight of a fish is commonly its only
title to fame, and these are the only eels I have heard of here; --
also, I have a faint recollection of a little fish some five inches
long, with silvery sides and a greenish back, somewhat dace-like in
its character, which I mention here chiefly to link my facts to
fable. Nevertheless, this pond is not very fertile in fish. Its
pickerel, though not abundant, are its chief boast. I have seen at
one time lying on the ice pickerel of at least three different
kinds: a long and shallow one, steel-colored, most like those caught
in the river; a bright golden kind, with greenish reflections and
remarkably deep, which is the most common here; and another,
golden-colored, and shaped like the last, but peppered on the sides
with small dark brown or black spots, intermixed with a few faint
blood-red ones, very much like a trout. The specific name
reticulatus would not apply to this; it should be guttatus rather.
These are all very firm fish, and weigh more than their size
promises. The shiners, pouts, and perch also, and indeed all the
fishes which inhabit this pond, are much cleaner, handsomer, and
firmer-fleshed than those in the river and most other ponds, as the
water is purer, and they can easily be distinguished from them.
Probably many ichthyologists would make new varieties of some of
them. There are also a clean race of frogs and tortoises, and a few
mussels in it; muskrats and minks leave their traces about it, and
occasionally a travelling mud-turtle visits it. Sometimes, when I
pushed off my boat in the morning, I disturbed a great mud-turtle
which had secreted himself under the boat in the night. Ducks and
geese frequent it in the spring and fall, the white-bellied swallows
(Hirundo bicolor) skim over it, and the peetweets (Totanus
macularius) "teeter" along its stony shores all summer. I have
sometimes disturbed a fish hawk sitting on a white pine over the
water; but I doubt if it is ever profaned by the wind of a gull,
like Fair Haven. At most, it tolerates one annual loon. These are
all the animals of consequence which frequent it now.
You may see from a boat, in calm weather, near the sandy
eastern shore, where the water is eight or ten feet deep, and also
in some other parts of the pond, some circular heaps half a dozen
feet in diameter by a foot in height, consisting of small stones
less than a hen's egg in size, where all around is bare sand. At
first you wonder if the Indians could have formed them on the ice
for any purpose, and so, when the ice melted, they sank to the
bottom; but they are too regular and some of them plainly too fresh
for that. They are similar to those found in rivers; but as there
are no suckers nor lampreys here, I know not by what fish they could
be made. Perhaps they are the nests of the chivin. These lend a
pleasing mystery to the bottom.
The shore is irregular enough not to be monotonous. I have in
my mind's eye the western, indented with deep bays, the bolder
northern, and the beautifully scalloped southern shore, where
successive capes overlap each other and suggest unexplored coves
between. The forest has never so good a setting, nor is so
distinctly beautiful, as when seen from the middle of a small lake
amid hills which rise from the water's edge; for the water in which
it is reflected not only makes the best foreground in such a case,
but, with its winding shore, the most natural and agreeable boundary
to it. There is no rawness nor imperfection in its edge there, as
where the axe has cleared a part, or a cultivated field abuts on it.
The trees have ample room to expand on the water side, and each
sends forth its most vigorous branch in that direction. There
Nature has woven a natural selvage, and the eye rises by just
gradations from the low shrubs of the shore to the highest trees.
There are few traces of man's hand to be seen. The water laves the
shore as it did a thousand years ago.
A lake is the landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature.
It is earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the
depth of his own nature. The fluviatile trees next the shore are
the slender eyelashes which fringe it, and the wooded hills and
cliffs around are its overhanging brows.
Standing on the smooth sandy beach at the east end of the pond,
in a calm September afternoon, when a slight haze makes the opposite
shore-line indistinct, I have seen whence came the expression, "the
glassy surface of a lake." When you invert your head, it looks like
a thread of finest gossamer stretched across the valley, and
gleaming against the distant pine woods, separating one stratum of
the atmosphere from another. You would think that you could walk
dry under it to the opposite hills, and that the swallows which skim
over might perch on it. Indeed, they sometimes dive below this
line, as it were by mistake, and are undeceived. As you look over
the pond westward you are obliged to employ both your hands to
defend your eyes against the reflected as well as the true sun, for
they are equally bright; and if, between the two, you survey its
surface critically, it is literally as smooth as glass, except where
the skater insects, at equal intervals scattered over its whole
extent, by their motions in the sun produce the finest imaginable
sparkle on it, or, perchance, a duck plumes itself, or, as I have
said, a swallow skims so low as to touch it. It may be that in the
distance a fish describes an arc of three or four feet in the air,
and there is one bright flash where it emerges, and another where it
strikes the water; sometimes the whole silvery arc is revealed; or
here and there, perhaps, is a thistle-down floating on its surface,
which the fishes dart at and so dimple it again. It is like molten
glass cooled but not congealed, and the few motes in it are pure and
beautiful like the imperfections in glass. You may often detect a
yet smoother and darker water, separated from the rest as if by an
invisible cobweb, boom of the water nymphs, resting on it. From a
hilltop you can see a fish leap in almost any part; for not a
pickerel or shiner picks an insect from this smooth surface but it
manifestly disturbs the equilibrium of the whole lake. It is
wonderful with what elaborateness this simple fact is advertised --
this piscine murder will out -- and from my distant perch I
distinguish the circling undulations when they are half a dozen rods
in diameter. You can even detect a water-bug (Gyrinus) ceaselessly
progressing over the smooth surface a quarter of a mile off; for
they furrow the water slightly, making a conspicuous ripple bounded
by two diverging lines, but the skaters glide over it without
rippling it perceptibly. When the surface is considerably agitated
there are no skaters nor water-bugs on it, but apparently, in calm
days, they leave their havens and adventurously glide forth from the
shore by short impulses till they completely cover it. It is a
soothing employment, on one of those fine days in the fall when all
the warmth of the sun is fully appreciated, to sit on a stump on
such a height as this, overlooking the pond, and study the dimpling
circles which are incessantly inscribed on its otherwise invisible
surface amid the reflected skies and trees. Over this great expanse
there is no disturbance but it is thus at once gently smoothed away
and assuaged, as, when a vase of water is jarred, the trembling
circles seek the shore and all is smooth again. Not a fish can leap
or an insect fall on the pond but it is thus reported in circling
dimples, in lines of beauty, as it were the constant welling up of
its fountain, the gentle pulsing of its life, the heaving of its
breast. The thrills of joy and thrills of pain are
undistinguishable. How peaceful the phenomena of the lake! Again
the works of man shine as in the spring. Ay, every leaf and twig
and stone and cobweb sparkles now at mid-afternoon as when covered
with dew in a spring morning. Every motion of an oar or an insect
produces a flash of light; and if an oar falls, how sweet the echo!
In such a day, in September or October, Walden is a perfect
forest mirror, set round with stones as precious to my eye as if
fewer or rarer. Nothing so fair, so pure, and at the same time so
large, as a lake, perchance, lies on the surface of the earth. Sky
water. It needs no fence. Nations come and go without defiling it.
It is a mirror which no stone can crack, whose quicksilver will
never wear off, whose gilding Nature continually repairs; no storms,
no dust, can dim its surface ever fresh; -- a mirror in which all
impurity presented to it sinks, swept and dusted by the sun's hazy
brush -- this the light dust-cloth -- which retains no breath that
is breathed on it, but sends its own to float as clouds high above
its surface, and be reflected in its bosom still.
A field of water betrays the spirit that is in the air. It is
continually receiving new life and motion from above. It is
intermediate in its nature between land and sky. On land only the
grass and trees wave, but the water itself is rippled by the wind.
I see where the breeze dashes across it by the streaks or flakes of
light. It is remarkable that we can look down on its surface. We
shall, perhaps, look down thus on the surface of air at length, and
mark where a still subtler spirit sweeps over it.
The skaters and water-bugs finally disappear in the latter part
of October, when the severe frosts have come; and then and in
November, usually, in a calm day, there is absolutely nothing to
ripple the surface. One November afternoon, in the calm at the end
of a rain-storm of several days' duration, when the sky was still
completely overcast and the air was full of mist, I observed that
the pond was remarkably smooth, so that it was difficult to
distinguish its surface; though it no longer reflected the bright
tints of October, but the sombre November colors of the surrounding
hills. Though I passed over it as gently as possible, the slight
undulations produced by my boat extended almost as far as I could
see, and gave a ribbed appearance to the reflections. But, as I was
looking over the surface, I saw here and there at a distance a faint
glimmer, as if some skater insects which had escaped the frosts
might be collected there, or, perchance, the surface, being so
smooth, betrayed where a spring welled up from the bottom. Paddling
gently to one of these places, I was surprised to find myself
surrounded by myriads of small perch, about five inches long, of a
rich bronze color in the green water, sporting there, and constantly
rising to the surface and dimpling it, sometimes leaving bubbles on
it. In such transparent and seemingly bottomless water, reflecting
the clouds, I seemed to be floating through the air as in a balloon,
and their swimming impressed me as a kind of flight or hovering, as
if they were a compact flock of birds passing just beneath my level
on the right or left, their fins, like sails, set all around them.
There were many such schools in the pond, apparently improving the
short season before winter would draw an icy shutter over their
broad skylight, sometimes giving to the surface an appearance as if
a slight breeze struck it, or a few rain-drops fell there. When I
approached carelessly and alarmed them, they made a sudden splash
and rippling with their tails, as if one had struck the water with a
brushy bough, and instantly took refuge in the depths. At length
the wind rose, the mist increased, and the waves began to run, and
the perch leaped much higher than before, half out of water, a
hundred black points, three inches long, at once above the surface.
Even as late as the fifth of December, one year, I saw some dimples
on the surface, and thinking it was going to rain hard immediately,
the air being fun of mist, I made haste to take my place at the oars
and row homeward; already the rain seemed rapidly increasing, though
I felt none on my cheek, and I anticipated a thorough soaking. But
suddenly the dimples ceased, for they were produced by the perch,
which the noise of my oars had seared into the depths, and I saw
their schools dimly disappearing; so I spent a dry afternoon after
all.
An old man who used to frequent this pond nearly sixty years
ago, when it was dark with surrounding forests, tells me that in
those days he sometimes saw it all alive with ducks and other
water-fowl, and that there were many eagles about it. He came here
a-fishing, and used an old log canoe which he found on the shore.
It was made of two white pine logs dug out and pinned together, and
was cut off square at the ends. It was very clumsy, but lasted a
great many years before it became water-logged and perhaps sank to
the bottom. He did not know whose it was; it belonged to the pond.
He used to make a cable for his anchor of strips of hickory bark
tied together. An old man, a potter, who lived by the pond before
the Revolution, told him once that there was an iron chest at the
bottom, and that he had seen it. Sometimes it would come floating
up to the shore; but when you went toward it, it would go back into
deep water and disappear. I was pleased to hear of the old log
canoe, which took the place of an Indian one of the same material
but more graceful construction, which perchance had first been a
tree on the bank, and then, as it were, fell into the water, to
float there for a generation, the most proper vessel for the lake.
I remember that when I first looked into these depths there were
many large trunks to be seen indistinctly lying on the bottom, which
had either been blown over formerly, or left on the ice at the last
cutting, when wood was cheaper; but now they have mostly
disappeared.
When I first paddled a boat on Walden, it was completely
surrounded by thick and lofty pine and oak woods, and in some of its
coves grape-vines had run over the trees next the water and formed
bowers under which a boat could pass. The hills which form its
shores are so steep, and the woods on them were then so high, that,
as you looked down from the west end, it had the appearance of an
amphitheatre for some land of sylvan spectacle. I have spent many
an hour, when I was younger, floating over its surface as the zephyr
willed, having paddled my boat to the middle, and lying on my back
across the seats, in a summer forenoon, dreaming awake, until I was
aroused by the boat touching the sand, and I arose to see what shore
my fates had impelled me to; days when idleness was the most
attractive and productive industry. Many a forenoon have I stolen
away, preferring to spend thus the most valued part of the day; for
I was rich, if not in money, in sunny hours and summer days, and
spent them lavishly; nor do I regret that I did not waste more of
them in the workshop or the teacher's desk. But since I left those
shores the woodchoppers have still further laid them waste, and now
for many a year there will be no more rambling through the aisles of
the wood, with occasional vistas through which you see the water.
My Muse may be excused if she is silent henceforth. How can you
expect the birds to sing when their groves are cut down?
Now the trunks of trees on the bottom, and the old log canoe,
and the dark surrounding woods, are gone, and the villagers, who
scarcely know where it lies, instead of going to the pond to bathe
or drink, are thinking to bring its water, which should be as sacred
as the Ganges at least, to the village in a pipe, to wash their
dishes with! -- to earn their Walden by the turning of a cock or
drawing of a plug! That devilish Iron Horse, whose ear-rending
neigh is heard throughout the town, has muddied the Boiling Spring
with his foot, and he it is that has browsed off all the woods on
Walden shore, that Trojan horse, with a thousand men in his belly,
introduced by mercenary Greeks! Where is the country's champion,
the Moore of Moore Hill, to meet him at the Deep Cut and thrust an
avenging lance between the ribs of the bloated pest?
Nevertheless, of all the characters I have known, perhaps Walden
wears best, and best preserves its purity. Many men have been
likened to it, but few deserve that honor. Though the woodchoppers
have laid bare first this shore and then that, and the Irish have
built their sties by it, and the railroad has infringed on its
border, and the ice-men have skimmed it once, it is itself
unchanged, the same water which my youthful eyes fell on; all the
change is in me. It has not acquired one permanent wrinkle after
all its ripples. It is perennially young, and I may stand and see a
swallow dip apparently to pick an insect from its surface as of
yore. It struck me again tonight, as if I had not seen it almost
daily for more than twenty years -- Why, here is Walden, the same
woodland lake that I discovered so many years ago; where a forest
was cut down last winter another is springing up by its shore as
lustily as ever; the same thought is welling up to its surface that
was then; it is the same liquid joy and happiness to itself and its
Maker, ay, and it may be to me. It is the work of a brave man
surely, in whom there was no guile! He rounded this water with his
hand, deepened and clarified it in his thought, and in his will
bequeathed it to Concord. I see by its face that it is visited by
the same reflection; and I can almost say, Walden, is it you?
It is no dream of mine,
To ornament a line;
I cannot come nearer to God and Heaven
Than I live to Walden even.
I am its stony shore,
And the breeze that passes o'er;
In the hollow of my hand
Are its water and its sand,
And its deepest resort
Lies high in my thought.
The cars never pause to look at it; yet I fancy that the
engineers and firemen and brakemen, and those passengers who have a
season ticket and see it often, are better men for the sight. The
engineer does not forget at night, or his nature does not, that he
has beheld this vision of serenity and purity once at least during
the day. Though seen but once, it helps to wash out State Street
and the engine's soot. One proposes that it be called "God's Drop."
I have said that Walden has no visible inlet nor outlet, but it
is on the one hand distantly and indirectly related to Flint's Pond,
which is more elevated, by a chain of small ponds coming from that
quarter, and on the other directly and manifestly to Concord River,
which is lower, by a similar chain of ponds through which in some
other geological period it may have flowed, and by a little digging,
which God forbid, it can be made to flow thither again. If by
living thus reserved and austere, like a hermit in the woods, so
long, it has acquired such wonderful purity, who would not regret
that the comparatively impure waters of Flint's Pond should be
mingled with it, or itself should ever go to waste its sweetness in
the ocean wave?
Flint's, or Sandy Pond, in Lincoln, our greatest lake and inland
sea, lies about a mile east of Walden. It is much larger, being
said to contain one hundred and ninety-seven acres, and is more
fertile in fish; but it is comparatively shallow, and not remarkably
pure. A walk through the woods thither was often my recreation. It
was worth the while, if only to feel the wind blow on your cheek
freely, and see the waves run, and remember the life of mariners. I
went a-chestnutting there in the fall, on windy days, when the nuts
were dropping into the water and were washed to my feet; and one
day, as I crept along its sedgy shore, the fresh spray blowing in my
face, I came upon the mouldering wreck of a boat, the sides gone,
and hardly more than the impression of its flat bottom left amid the
rushes; yet its model was sharply defined, as if it were a large
decayed pad, with its veins. It was as impressive a wreck as one
could imagine on the seashore, and had as good a moral. It is by
this time mere vegetable mould and undistinguishable pond shore,
through which rushes and flags have pushed up. I used to admire the
ripple marks on the sandy bottom, at the north end of this pond,
made firm and hard to the feet of the wader by the pressure of the
water, and the rushes which grew in Indian file, in waving lines,
corresponding to these marks, rank behind rank, as if the waves had
planted them. There also I have found, in considerable quantities,
curious balls, composed apparently of fine grass or roots, of
pipewort perhaps, from half an inch to four inches in diameter, and
perfectly spherical. These wash back and forth in shallow water on
a sandy bottom, and are sometimes cast on the shore. They are
either solid grass, or have a little sand in the middle. At first
you would say that they were formed by the action of the waves, like
a pebble; yet the smallest are made of equally coarse materials,
half an inch long, and they are produced only at one season of the
year. Moreover, the waves, I suspect, do not so much construct as
wear down a material which has already acquired consistency. They
preserve their form when dry for an indefinite period.
Flint's Pond! Such is the poverty of our nomenclature. What
right had the unclean and stupid farmer, whose farm abutted on this
sky water, whose shores he has ruthlessly laid bare, to give his
name to it? Some skin-flint, who loved better the reflecting
surface of a dollar, or a bright cent, in which he could see his own
brazen face; who regarded even the wild ducks which settled in it as
trespassers; his fingers grown into crooked and bony talons from the
long habit of grasping harpy-like; -- so it is not named for me. I
go not there to see him nor to hear of him; who never saw it, who
never bathed in it, who never loved it, who never protected it, who
never spoke a good word for it, nor thanked God that He had made it.
Rather let it be named from the fishes that swim in it, the wild
fowl or quadrupeds which frequent it, the wild flowers which grow by
its shores, or some wild man or child the thread of whose history is
interwoven with its own; not from him who could show no title to it
but the deed which a like-minded neighbor or legislature gave him --
him who thought only of its money value; whose presence perchance
cursed all the shores; who exhausted the land around it, and would
fain have exhausted the waters within it; who regretted only that it
was not English hay or cranberry meadow -- there was nothing to
redeem it, forsooth, in his eyes -- and would have drained and sold
it for the mud at its bottom. It did not turn his mill, and it was
no privilege to him to behold it. I respect not his labors, his
farm where everything has its price, who would carry the landscape,
who would carry his God, to market, if he could get anything for
him; who goes to market for his god as it is; on whose farm nothing
grows free, whose fields bear no crops, whose meadows no flowers,
whose trees no fruits, but dollars; who loves not the beauty of his
fruits, whose fruits are not ripe for him till they are turned to
dollars. Give me the poverty that enjoys true wealth. Farmers are
respectable and interesting to me in proportion as they are poor --
poor farmers. A model farm! where the house stands like a fungus in
a muckheap, chambers for men horses, oxen, and swine, cleansed and
uncleansed, all contiguous to one another! Stocked with men! A
great grease-spot, redolent of manures and buttermilk! Under a high
state of cultivation, being manured with the hearts and brains of
men! As if you were to raise your potatoes in the churchyard! Such
is a model farm.
No, no; if the fairest features of the landscape are to be named
after men, let them be the noblest and worthiest men alone. Let our
lakes receive as true names at least as the Icarian Sea, where
"still the shore" a "brave attempt resounds."
Goose Pond, of small extent, is on my way to Flint's; Fair
Haven, an expansion of Concord River, said to contain some seventy
acres, is a mile southwest; and White Pond, of about forty acres, is
a mile and a half beyond Fair Haven. This is my lake country.
These, with Concord River, are my water privileges; and night and
day, year in year out, they grind such grist as I carry to them.
Since the wood-cutters, and the railroad, and I myself have
profaned Walden, perhaps the most attractive, if not the most
beautiful, of all our lakes, the gem of the woods, is White Pond; --
a poor name from its commonness, whether derived from the remarkable
purity of its waters or the color of its sands. In these as in
other respects, however, it is a lesser twin of Walden. They are so
much alike that you would say they must be connected under ground.
It has the same stony shore, and its waters are of the same hue. As
at Walden, in sultry dog-day weather, looking down through the woods
on some of its bays which are not so deep but that the reflection
from the bottom tinges them, its waters are of a misty bluish-green
or glaucous color. Many years since I used to go there to collect
the sand by cartloads, to make sandpaper with, and I have continued
to visit it ever since. One who frequents it proposes to call it
Virid Lake. Perhaps it might be called Yellow Pine Lake, from the
following circumstance. About fifteen years ago you could see the
top of a pitch pine, of the kind called yellow pine hereabouts,
though it is not a distinct species, projecting above the surface in
deep water, many rods from the shore. It was even supposed by some
that the pond had sunk, and this was one of the primitive forest
that formerly stood there. I find that even so long ago as 1792, in
a "Topographical Description of the Town of Concord," by one
of its
citizens, in the Collections of the Massachusetts Historical
Society, the author, after speaking of Walden and White Ponds, adds,
"In the middle of the latter may be seen, when the water is very
low, a tree which appears as if it grew in the place where it now
stands, although the roots are fifty feet below the surface of the
water; the top of this tree is broken off, and at that place
measures fourteen inches in diameter." In the spring of '49 I
talked with the man who lives nearest the pond in Sudbury, who told
me that it was he who got out this tree ten or fifteen years before.
As near as he could remember, it stood twelve or fifteen rods from
the shore, where the water was thirty or forty feet deep. It was in
the winter, and he had been getting out ice in the forenoon, and had
resolved that in the afternoon, with the aid of his neighbors, he
would take out the old yellow pine. He sawed a channel in the ice
toward the shore, and hauled it over and along and out on to the ice
with oxen; but, before he had gone far in his work, he was surprised
to find that it was wrong end upward, with the stumps of the
branches pointing down, and the small end firmly fastened in the
sandy bottom. It was about a foot in diameter at the big end, and
he had expected to get a good saw-log, but it was so rotten as to be
fit only for fuel, if for that. He had some of it in his shed then.
There were marks of an axe and of woodpeckers on the butt. He
thought that it might have been a dead tree on the shore, but was
finally blown over into the pond, and after the top had become
water-logged, while the butt-end was still dry and light, had
drifted out and sunk wrong end up. His father, eighty years old,
could not remember when it was not there. Several pretty large logs
may still be seen lying on the bottom, where, owing to the
undulation of the surface, they look like huge water snakes in
motion.
This pond has rarely been profaned by a boat, for there is
little in it to tempt a fisherman. Instead of the white lily, which
requires mud, or the common sweet flag, the blue flag (Iris
versicolor) grows thinly in the pure water, rising from the stony
bottom all around the shore, where it is visited by hummingbirds in
June; and the color both of its bluish blades and its flowers and
especially their reflections, is in singular harmony with the
glaucous water.
White Pond and Walden are great crystals on the surface of the
earth, Lakes of Light. If they were permanently congealed, and
small enough to be clutched, they would, perchance, be carried off
by slaves, like precious stones, to adorn the heads of emperors; but
being liquid, and ample, and secured to us and our successors
forever, we disregard them, and run after the diamond of Kohinoor.
They are too pure to have a market value; they contain no muck. How
much more beautiful than our lives, how much more transparent than
our characters, are they! We never learned meanness of them. How
much fairer than the pool before the farmers door, in which his
ducks swim! Hither the clean wild ducks come. Nature has no human
inhabitant who appreciates her. The birds with their plumage and
their notes are in harmony with the flowers, but what youth or
maiden conspires with the wild luxuriant beauty of Nature? She
flourishes most alone, far from the towns where they reside. Talk
of heaven! ye disgrace earth.
Baker Farm
Sometimes I rambled to pine groves, standing like temples, or
like fleets at sea, full-rigged, with wavy boughs, and rippling with
light, so soft and green and shady that the Druids would have
forsaken their oaks to worship in them; or to the cedar wood beyond
Flint's Pond, where the trees, covered with hoary blue berries,
spiring higher and higher, are fit to stand before Valhalla, and the
creeping juniper covers the ground with wreaths full of fruit; or to
swamps where the usnea lichen hangs in festoons from the white
spruce trees, and toadstools, round tables of the swamp gods, cover
the ground, and more beautiful fungi adorn the stumps, like
butterflies or shells, vegetable winkles; where the swamp-pink and
dogwood grow, the red alderberry glows like eyes of imps, the
waxwork grooves and crushes the hardest woods in its folds, and the
wild holly berries make the beholder forget his home with their
beauty, and he is dazzled and tempted by nameless other wild
forbidden fruits, too fair for mortal taste. Instead of calling on
some scholar, I paid many a visit to particular trees, of kinds
which are rare in this neighborhood, standing far away in the middle
of some pasture, or in the depths of a wood or swamp, or on a
hilltop; such as the black birch, of which we have some handsome
specimens two feet in diameter; its cousin, the yellow birch, with
its loose golden vest, perfumed like the first; the beech, which has
so neat a bole and beautifully lichen-painted, perfect in all its
details, of which, excepting scattered specimens, I know but one
small grove of sizable trees left in the township, supposed by some
to have been planted by the pigeons that were once baited with
beechnuts near by; it is worth the while to see the silver grain
sparkle when you split this wood; the bass; the hornbeam; the Celtis
occidentalis, or false elm, of which we have but one well-grown;
some taller mast of a pine, a shingle tree, or a more perfect
hemlock than usual, standing like a pagoda in the midst of the
woods; and many others I could mention. These were the shrines I
visited both summer and winter.
Once it chanced that I stood in the very abutment of a rainbow's
arch, which filled the lower stratum of the atmosphere, tinging the
grass and leaves around, and dazzling me as if I looked through
colored crystal. It was a lake of rainbow light, in which, for a
short while, I lived like a dolphin. If it had lasted longer it
might have tinged my employments and life. As I walked on the
railroad causeway, I used to wonder at the halo of light around my
shadow, and would fain fancy myself one of the elect. One who
visited me declared that the shadows of some Irishmen before him had
no halo about them, that it was only natives that were so
distinguished. Benvenuto Cellini tells us in his memoirs, that,
after a certain terrible dream or vision which he had during his
confinement in the castle of St. Angelo a resplendent light appeared
over the shadow of his head at morning and evening, whether he was
in Italy or France, and it was particularly conspicuous when the
grass was moist with dew. This was probably the same phenomenon to
which I have referred, which is especially observed in the morning,
but also at other times, and even by moonlight. Though a constant
one, it is not commonly noticed, and, in the case of an excitable
imagination like Cellini's, it would be basis enough for
superstition. Beside, he tells us that he showed it to very few.
But are they not indeed distinguished who are conscious that they
are regarded at all?
I set out one afternoon to go a-fishing to Fair Haven, through
the woods, to eke out my scanty fare of vegetables. My way led
through Pleasant Meadow, an adjunct of the Baker Farm, that retreat
of which a poet has since sung, beginning,--
"Thy entry is a pleasant field,
Which some mossy fruit trees yield
Partly to a ruddy brook,
By gliding musquash undertook,
And mercurial trout,
Darting about."
I thought of living there before I went to Walden. I "hooked"
the
apples, leaped the brook, and scared the musquash and the trout. It
was one of those afternoons which seem indefinitely long before one,
in which many events may happen, a large portion of our natural
life, though it was already half spent when I started. By the way
there came up a shower, which compelled me to stand half an hour
under a pine, piling boughs over my head, and wearing my
handkerchief for a shed; and when at length I had made one cast over
the pickerelweed, standing up to my middle in water, I found myself
suddenly in the shadow of a cloud, and the thunder began to rumble
with such emphasis that I could do no more than listen to it. The
gods must be proud, thought I, with such forked flashes to rout a
poor unarmed fisherman. So I made haste for shelter to the nearest
hut, which stood half a mile from any road, but so much the nearer
to the pond, and had long been uninhabited:--
"And here a poet builded,
In the completed years,
For behold a trivial cabin
That to destruction steers."
So the Muse fables. But therein, as I found, dwelt now John Field,
an Irishman, and his wife, and several children, from the
broad-faced boy who assisted his father at his work, and now came
running by his side from the bog to escape the rain, to the
wrinkled, sibyl-like, cone-headed infant that sat upon its father's
knee as in the palaces of nobles, and looked out from its home in
the midst of wet and hunger inquisitively upon the stranger, with
the privilege of infancy, not knowing but it was the last of a noble
line, and the hope and cynosure of the world, instead of John
Field's poor starveling brat. There we sat together under that part
of the roof which leaked the least, while it showered and thundered
without. I had sat there many times of old before the ship was
built that floated his family to America. An honest, hard-working,
but shiftless man plainly was John Field; and his wife, she too was
brave to cook so many successive dinners in the recesses of that
lofty stove; with round greasy face and bare breast, still thinking
to improve her condition one day; with the never absent mop in one
hand, and yet no effects of it visible anywhere. The chickens,
which had also taken shelter here from the rain, stalked about the
room like members of the family, too humanized, methought, to roast
well. They stood and looked in my eye or pecked at my shoe
significantly. Meanwhile my host told me his story, how hard he
worked "bogging" for a neighboring farmer, turning up a meadow
with
a spade or bog hoe at the rate of ten dollars an acre and the use of
the land with manure for one year, and his little broad-faced son
worked cheerfully at his father's side the while, not knowing how
poor a bargain the latter had made. I tried to help him with my
experience, telling him that he was one of my nearest neighbors, and
that I too, who came a-fishing here, and looked like a loafer, was
getting my living like himself; that I lived in a tight, light, and
clean house, which hardly cost more than the annual rent of such a
ruin as his commonly amounts to; and how, if he chose, he might in a
month or two build himself a palace of his own; that I did not use
tea, nor coffee, nor butter, nor milk, nor fresh meat, and so did
not have to work to get them; again, as I did not work hard, I did
not have to eat hard, and it cost me but a trifle for my food; but
as he began with tea, and coffee, and butter, and milk, and beef, he
had to work hard to pay for them, and when he had worked hard he had
to eat hard again to repair the waste of his system -- and so it was
as broad as it was long, indeed it was broader than it was long, for
he was discontented and wasted his life into the bargain; and yet he
had rated it as a gain in coming to America, that here you could get
tea, and coffee, and meat every day. But the only true America is
that country where you are at liberty to pursue such a mode of life
as may enable you to do without these, and where the state does not
endeavor to compel you to sustain the slavery and war and other
superfluous expenses which directly or indirectly result from the
use of such things. For I purposely talked to him as if he were a
philosopher, or desired to be one. I should be glad if all the
meadows on the earth were left in a wild state, if that were the
consequence of men's beginning to redeem themselves. A man will not
need to study history to find out what is best for his own culture.
But alas! the culture of an Irishman is an enterprise to be
undertaken with a sort of moral bog hoe. I told him, that as he
worked so hard at bogging, he required thick boots and stout
clothing, which yet were soon soiled and worn out, but I wore light
shoes and thin clothing, which cost not half so much, though he
might think that I was dressed like a gentleman (which, however, was
not the case), and in an hour or two, without labor, but as a
recreation, I could, if I wished, catch as many fish as I should
want for two days, or earn enough money to support me a week. If he
and his family would live simply, they might all go a-huckleberrying
in the summer for their amusement. John heaved a sigh at this, and
his wife stared with arms a-kimbo, and both appeared to be wondering
if they had capital enough to begin such a course with, or
arithmetic enough to carry it through. It was sailing by dead
reckoning to them, and they saw not clearly how to make their port
so; therefore I suppose they still take life bravely, after their
fashion, face to face, giving it tooth and nail, not having skill to
split its massive columns with any fine entering wedge, and rout it
in detail; -- thinking to deal with it roughly, as one should handle
a thistle. But they fight at an overwhelming disadvantage --
living, John Field, alas! without arithmetic, and failing so.
"Do you ever fish?" I asked. "Oh yes, I catch a mess now
and
then when I am lying by; good perch I catch. -- "What's your bait?"
"I catch shiners with fishworms, and bait the perch with them."
"You'd better go now, John," said his wife, with glistening
and
hopeful face; but John demurred.
The shower was now over, and a rainbow above the eastern woods
promised a fair evening; so I took my departure. When I had got
without I asked for a drink, hoping to get a sight of the well
bottom, to complete my survey of the premises; but there, alas! are
shallows and quicksands, and rope broken withal, and bucket
irrecoverable. Meanwhile the right culinary vessel was selected,
water was seemingly distilled, and after consultation and long delay
passed out to the thirsty one -- not yet suffered to cool, not yet
to settle. Such gruel sustains life here, I thought; so, shutting
my eyes, and excluding the motes by a skilfully directed
undercurrent, I drank to genuine hospitality the heartiest draught I
could. I am not squeamish in such cases when manners are concerned.
As I was leaving the Irishman's roof after the rain, bending my
steps again to the pond, my haste to catch pickerel, wading in
retired meadows, in sloughs and bog-holes, in forlorn and savage
places, appeared for an instant trivial to me who had been sent to
school and college; but as I ran down the hill toward the reddening
west, with the rainbow over my shoulder, and some faint tinkling
sounds borne to my ear through the cleansed air, from I know not
what quarter, my Good Genius seemed to say -- Go fish and hunt far
and wide day by day -- farther and wider -- and rest thee by many
brooks and hearth-sides without misgiving. Remember thy Creator in
the days of thy youth. Rise free from care before the dawn, and
seek adventures. Let the noon find thee by other lakes, and the
night overtake thee everywhere at home. There are no larger fields
than these, no worthier games than may here be played. Grow wild
according to thy nature, like these sedges and brakes, which will
never become English bay. Let the thunder rumble; what if it
threaten ruin to farmers' crops? That is not its errand to thee.
Take shelter under the cloud, while they flee to carts and sheds.
Let not to get a living be thy trade, but thy sport. Enjoy the
land, but own it not. Through want of enterprise and faith men are
where they are, buying and selling, and spending their lives like
serfs.
O Baker Farm!
"Landscape where the richest element
Is a little sunshine innocent." ...
"No one runs to revel
On thy rail-fenced lea." ...
"Debate with no man hast thou,
With questions art never perplexed,
As tame at the first sight as now,
In thy plain russet gabardine dressed." ...
"Come ye who love,
And ye who hate,
Children of the Holy Dove,
And Guy Faux of the state,
And hang conspiracies
From the tough rafters of the trees!"
Men come tamely home at night only from the next field or
street, where their household echoes haunt, and their life pines
because it breathes its own breath over again; their shadows,
morning and evening, reach farther than their daily steps. We
should come home from far, from adventures, and perils, and
discoveries every day, with new experience and character.
Before I had reached the pond some fresh impulse had brought out
John Field, with altered mind, letting go "bogging" ere this
sunset.
But he, poor man, disturbed only a couple of fins while I was
catching a fair string, and he said it was his luck; but when we
changed seats in the boat luck changed seats too. Poor John Field!
-- I trust he does not read this, unless he will improve by it --
thinking to live by some derivative old-country mode in this
primitive new country -- to catch perch with shiners. It is good
bait sometimes, I allow. With his horizon all his own, yet he a
poor man, born to be poor, with his inherited Irish poverty or poor
life, his Adam's grandmother and boggy ways, not to rise in this
world, he nor his posterity, till their wading webbed bog-trotting
feet get talaria to their heels.
Higher Laws
As I came home through the woods with my string of fish,
trailing my pole, it being now quite dark, I caught a glimpse of a
woodchuck stealing across my path, and felt a strange thrill of
savage delight, and was strongly tempted to seize and devour him
raw; not that I was hungry then, except for that wildness which he
represented. Once or twice, however, while I lived at the pond, I
found myself ranging the woods, like a half-starved hound, with a
strange abandonment, seeking some kind of venison which I might
devour, and no morsel could have been too savage for me. The
wildest scenes had become unaccountably familiar. I found in
myself, and still find, an instinct toward a higher, or, as it is
named, spiritual life, as do most men, and another toward a
primitive rank and savage one, and I reverence them both. I love
the wild not less than the good. The wildness and adventure that
are in fishing still recommended it to me. I like sometimes to take
rank hold on life and spend my day more as the animals do. Perhaps
I have owed to this employment and to hunting, when quite young, my
closest acquaintance with Nature. They early introduce us to and
detain us in scenery with which otherwise, at that age, we should
have little acquaintance. Fishermen, hunters, woodchoppers, and
others, spending their lives in the fields and woods, in a peculiar
sense a part of Nature themselves, are often in a more favorable
mood for observing her, in the intervals of their pursuits, than
philosophers or poets even, who approach her with expectation. She
is not afraid to exhibit herself to them. The traveller on the
prairie is naturally a hunter, on the head waters of the Missouri
and Columbia a trapper, and at the Falls of St. Mary a fisherman.
He who is only a traveller learns things at second-hand and by the
halves, and is poor authority. We are most interested when science
reports what those men already know practically or instinctively,
for that alone is a true humanity, or account of human experience.
They mistake who assert that the Yankee has few amusements,
because he has not so many public holidays, and men and boys do not
play so many games as they do in England, for here the more
primitive but solitary amusements of hunting, fishing, and the like
have not yet given place to the former. Almost every New England
boy among my contemporaries shouldered a fowling-piece between the
ages of ten and fourteen; and his hunting and fishing grounds were
not limited, like the preserves of an English nobleman, but were
more boundless even than those of a savage. No wonder, then, that
he did not oftener stay to play on the common. But already a change
is taking place, owing, not to an increased humanity, but to an
increased scarcity of game, for perhaps the hunter is the greatest
friend of the animals hunted, not excepting the Humane Society.
Moreover, when at the pond, I wished sometimes to add fish to my
fare for variety. I have actually fished from the same kind of
necessity that the first fishers did. Whatever humanity I might
conjure up against it was all factitious, and concerned my
philosophy more than my feelings. I speak of fishing only now, for
I had long felt differently about fowling, and sold my gun before I
went to the woods. Not that I am less humane than others, but I did
not perceive that my feelings were much affected. I did not pity
the fishes nor the worms. This was habit. As for fowling, during
the last years that I carried a gun my excuse was that I was
studying ornithology, and sought only new or rare birds. But I
confess that I am now inclined to think that there is a finer way of
studying ornithology than this. It requires so much closer
attention to the habits of the birds, that, if for that reason only,
I have been willing to omit the gun. Yet notwithstanding the
objection on the score of humanity, I am compelled to doubt if
equally valuable sports are ever substituted for these; and when
some of my friends have asked me anxiously about their boys, whether
they should let them hunt, I have answered, yes -- remembering that
it was one of the best parts of my education -- make them hunters,
though sportsmen only at first, if possible, mighty hunters at last,
so that they shall not find game large enough for them in this or
any vegetable wilderness -- hunters as well as fishers of men. Thus
far I am of the opinion of Chaucer's nun, who
"yave not of the text a pulled hen
That saith that hunters ben not holy men."
There is a period in the history of the individual, as of the race,
when the hunters are the "best men," as the Algonquins called
them.
We cannot but pity the boy who has never fired a gun; he is no more
humane, while his education has been sadly neglected. This was my
answer with respect to those youths who were bent on this pursuit,
trusting that they would soon outgrow it. No humane being, past the
thoughtless age of boyhood, will wantonly murder any creature which
holds its life by the same tenure that he does. The hare in its
extremity cries like a child. I warn you, mothers, that my
sympathies do not always make the usual philanthropic distinctions.
Such is oftenest the young man's introduction to the forest, and
the most original part of himself. He goes thither at first as a
hunter and fisher, until at last, if he has the seeds of a better
life in him, he distinguishes his proper objects, as a poet or
naturalist it may be, and leaves the gun and fish-pole behind. The
mass of men are still and always young in this respect. In some
countries a hunting parson is no uncommon sight. Such a one might
make a good shepherd's dog, but is far from being the Good Shepherd.
I have been surprised to consider that the only obvious employment,
except wood-chopping, ice-cutting, or the like business, which ever
to my knowledge detained at Walden Pond for a whole half-day any of
my fellow-citizens, whether fathers or children of the town, with
just one exception, was fishing. Commonly they did not think that
they were lucky, or well paid for their time, unless they got a long
string of fish, though they had the opportunity of seeing the pond
all the while. They might go there a thousand times before the
sediment of fishing would sink to the bottom and leave their purpose
pure; but no doubt such a clarifying process would be going on all
the while. The Governor and his Council faintly remember the pond,
for they went a-fishing there when they were boys; but now they are
too old and dignified to go a-fishing, and so they know it no more
forever. Yet even they expect to go to heaven at last. If the
legislature regards it, it is chiefly to regulate the number of
hooks to be used there; but they know nothing about the hook of
hooks with which to angle for the pond itself, impaling the
legislature for a bait. Thus, even in civilized communities, the
embryo man passes through the hunter stage of development.
I have found repeatedly, of late years, that I cannot fish
without falling a little in self-respect. I have tried it again and
again. I have skill at it, and, like many of my fellows, a certain
instinct for it, which revives from time to time, but always when I
have done I feel that it would have been better if I had not fished.
I think that I do not mistake. It is a faint intimation, yet so are
the first streaks of morning. There is unquestionably this instinct
in me which belongs to the lower orders of creation; yet with every
year I am less a fisherman, though without more humanity or even
wisdom; at present I am no fisherman at all. But I see that if I
were to live in a wilderness I should again be tempted to become a
fisher and hunter in earnest. Beside, there is something
essentially unclean about this diet and all flesh, and I began to
see where housework commences, and whence the endeavor, which costs
so much, to wear a tidy and respectable appearance each day, to keep
the house sweet and free from all ill odors and sights. Having been
my own butcher and scullion and cook, as well as the gentleman for
whom the dishes were served up, I can speak from an unusually
complete experience. The practical objection to animal food in my
case was its uncleanness; and besides, when I had caught and cleaned
and cooked and eaten my fish, they seemed not to have fed me
essentially. It was insignificant and unnecessary, and cost more
than it came to. A little bread or a few potatoes would have done
as well, with less trouble and filth. Like many of my
contemporaries, I had rarely for many years used animal food, or
tea, or coffee, etc.; not so much because of any ill effects which I
had traced to them, as because they were not agreeable to my
imagination. The repugnance to animal food is not the effect of
experience, but is an instinct. It appeared more 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 significant
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.
It is hard to provide and cook so simple and clean a diet as
will not offend the imagination; but this, I think, is to be fed
when we feed the body; they should both sit down at the same table.
Yet perhaps this may be done. The fruits eaten 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 carnivorous animal? True, he can and does live, in a
great measure, by preying on other animals; but this is a miserable
way -- as any one who will go to snaring rabbits, or slaughtering
lambs, may learn -- and he will be regarded as a benefactor of his
race who shall teach man to confine himself to a more innocent and
wholesome diet. Whatever my own practice may be, I have no doubt
that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual
improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage
tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact
with the more civilized.
If one listens to the faintest but constant suggestions of his
genius, which are certainly true, he sees not to what extremes, or
even insanity, it may lead him; and yet that way, as he grows more
resolute and faithful, his road lies. The faintest assured
objection which one healthy man feels will at length prevail over
the arguments and customs of mankind. No man ever followed his
genius till it misled him. Though the result were bodily weakness,
yet perhaps no one can say that the consequences were to be
regretted, for these were a life in conformity to higher principles.
If the day and the night are such that you 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 communicated 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 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 regarding 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 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 mill-pond, she
to her preserve-pot. The wonder is how they, how you and I, can
live this slimy, beastly life, eating and drinking.
Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an
instant's truce between virtue and vice. Goodness 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 goodness is
all the assessment that we pay. Though the youth at last grows
indifferent, the laws of the universe are not indifferent, but are
forever on the side of the most sensitive. Listen to every zephyr
for some reproof, for it is surely there, and he is unfortunate who
does not hear it. We cannot touch a string or move a stop but the
charming moral transfixes us. Many an irksome noise, go a long way
off, is heard as music, a proud, sweet satire on the meanness of our
lives.
We are conscious of an animal in us, which awakens in 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 attained to purity?
If I knew so wise a man as could teach me purity I would go to seek
him forthwith. "A command over our passions, and over the external
senses of the body, and good acts, are declared by the Ved to be
indispensable in the mind's approximation to God." Yet the spirit
can for the time pervade and control every member and function of
the body, and transmute what in form is the grossest sensuality
into purity and devotion. The generative energy, which, when we are
loose, dissipates and makes us unclean, when we are continent
invigorates and 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
impurity casts us down. He is blessed who is assured that the
animal is dying out in him day by day, and the divine being
established. 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 disafforested his mind!
. . . . . . .
Can use this horse, goat, wolf, and ev'ry beast,
And is not ass himself to all the rest!
Else man not only is the herd of swine,
But he's those devils too which did incline
Them to a headlong rage, and made them worse."
All sensuality is one, though it takes many forms; all purity is
one. It is the same whether a man eat, or drink, or cohabit, or
sleep sensually. They are but one appetite, and we only need to see
a person do any one of these things to know how great a sensualist
he is. The impure can neither stand nor sit with purity. When the
reptile is attacked at one mouth of his 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 not know
it. We have heard of this virtue, but we know not what it is. We
speak conformably to the rumor which we have heard. From exertion
come wisdom and purity; from sloth ignorance and sensuality. In the
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 without being fatigued. If you
would avoid uncleanness, and all the sins, work earnestly, though it
be at cleaning a stable. Nature is hard to be overcome, but she
must be overcome. What avails it that you are Christian, if you are
not purer than the heathen, if you deny yourself no more, if you are
not more religious? I know of many systems of religion esteemed
heathenish whose precepts fill the reader 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
offensive it may be to modern taste. He teaches how to eat, drink,
cohabit, void excrement and urine, and the like, elevating what is
mean, and does not falsely excuse himself by calling these things
trifles.
Every man is the builder of a temple, called his body, to the
god he worships, after a style purely his own, nor can he get off by
hammering marble instead. We are all sculptors and painters, and
our material is our own flesh and blood and bones. Any nobleness
begins at once to refine a man's features, any meanness or
sensuality to imbrute them.
John Farmer sat at his door one September evening, after a hard
day's work, his mind still running on his labor more or less.
Having bathed, he sat down to re-create his intellectual man. It
was a rather cool evening, and some of his neighbors were
apprehending a frost. He had not attended to the train of his
thoughts long when he heard some one playing on a flute, and that
sound harmonized with his mood. Still he thought of his work; but
the burden of his thought was, that though this kept running 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 migrate 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.
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 morning calls and dinner-parties! Only a
woodpecker tapping. Oh, they swarm; the sun is too warm there; they
are born too far into life for me. I have water from the spring,
and a loaf of brown bread on the shelf. -- Hark! I hear a rustling
of the leaves. Is it some ill-fed village hound yielding to the
instinct of the chase? or the lost pig which is said to be in these
woods, whose tracks I saw after the rain? It comes on apace; my
sumachs and sweetbriers tremble. -- 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-fishing. 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. Angleworms are rarely to be met with in
these parts, where the soil was never fattened with manure; the race
is nearly extinct. The sport of digging the bait is nearly equal to
that of catching the fish, when one's appetite is not too keen; and
this you may have all to yourself today. I would advise you to set
in the spade down yonder among the ground-nuts, where you see the
johnswort waving. I think that I may warrant you one worm to every
three sods you turn up, if you look well in among the roots of the
grass, as if you were weeding. Or, if you choose to go farther, it
will not be unwise, for I have found the increase of fair bait to be
very nearly as the squares of the distances.
Hermit alone. Let me see; where was I? Methinks I was nearly
in this frame of mind; the world lay about at this angle. Shall I
go to heaven or a-fishing? If I should soon bring this meditation
to an end, would another so sweet occasion be likely to offer? I
was as near being resolved into the essence of 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 Confutsee; 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, beside several which are imperfect or
undersized; but they will do for the smaller fry; they do not cover
up the hook so much. Those village worms are quite too large; a
shiner may make a meal off one without finding the skewer.
Hermit. Well, then, let's be off. Shall we to the Concord?
There's good sport there if the water be not too high.
Why do precisely these objects which we behold make a world?
Why has man just these species of animals for his neighbors; as if
nothing but a mouse could have filled this crevice? I suspect that
Pilpay & Co. have put animals to their best use, for they are all
beasts of burden, in a sense, made to carry some portion of our
thoughts.
The mice which haunted my house were not the common ones, which
are said to have been introduced into the country, but a wild native
kind not found in the village. I sent one to a distinguished
naturalist, and it interested him much. When I was building, one of
these had its nest underneath the house, and before I had laid the
second floor, and swept out the shavings, would come out regularly
at lunch time and pick up the 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 bopeep 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 protection in a
pine which grew against the house. In June the partridge (Tetrao
umbellus), which is so shy a bird, led her brood past my windows,
from the woods in the rear to the front of my house, clucking and
calling to them like a hen, and in all her behavior proving herself
the hen of the woods. The young suddenly disperse on your approach,
at a signal from the mother, as if a whirlwind had swept them away,
and they so exactly resemble the dried leaves and twigs that many a
traveler has placed his foot in the midst of a brood, and heard the
whir of the old bird as she flew off, and her anxious calls and
mewing, or seen her trail her wings to attract his attention,
without suspecting their neighborhood. The parent will sometimes
roll and spin round before you in such a dishabille, that you
cannot, for a few moments, detect what kind of creature it is. The
young squat still and flat, often running their heads under a leaf,
and mind only their mother's directions given from a 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 infancy, 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 another
such a gem. The traveller does not often look into such a limpid
well. The ignorant or reckless sportsman often shoots the parent at
such a time, and leaves these innocents to fall a prey to some
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 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 woodcock led her
brood, to probe the mud for worms, flying but a foot above them down
the bank, while they ran in a troop beneath; but at last, spying me,
she would leave her young and circle round and round me, nearer and
nearer till within four or five feet, pretending broken wings and
legs, to attract my attention, and get off her young, who would
already have 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 spot in the woods
that all its inhabitants may exhibit themselves to you by turns.
I was witness to events of a less peaceful character. One day
when I went out to my wood-pile, or rather my pile of stumps, I
observed two large ants, the one red, the other much larger, nearly
half an inch long, and black, fiercely contending with one another.
Having once got hold they never let go, but struggled and wrestled
and rolled on the chips incessantly. Looking 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 frequently two
red ones to one black. The legions of these Myrmidons covered all
the hills and vales in my wood-yard, and the ground was already
strewn with the dead and dying, both red and black. It was the only
battle which I have ever witnessed, the only battle-field I ever
trod while the battle was raging; internecine war; the red
republicans on the one hand, and the black imperialists on the
other. On every side they were engaged in deadly combat, yet
without any noise that I could hear, and human soldiers never fought
so resolutely. I watched a couple that were fast locked in each
other's embraces, in a little sunny valley amid the chips, now at
noonday prepared to fight till the sun went down, or life went out.
The smaller red champion had fastened himself like a vice to his
adversary's front, and through all the tumblings on that field never
for an instant ceased to gnaw at one of his feelers near the root,
having already caused the other to go by the board; while the
stronger black one dashed him from side to side, and, as I saw on
looking nearer, had already divested him of several of his members.
They fought with more pertinacity than bulldogs. 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 hillside 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 be
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 attraction 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 Concord history, at
least, if in the history of America, that will bear a moment's
comparison with this, whether for the numbers engaged in it, or for
the patriotism and heroism displayed. For numbers and for carnage
it was an Austerlitz or Dresden. 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 thousands
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 important and
memorable to those whom it concerns as those of the battle of Bunker
Hill, at least.
I took up the chip on which the three I have particularly
described were struggling, carried it into my house, and placed it
under a tumbler on my window-sill, in order to see the issue.
Holding a microscope to the first-mentioned red ant, I saw that,
though he was assiduously gnawing at the near fore leg of his enemy,
having severed his remaining feeler, his own breast was all torn
away, exposing what vitals he had there to the jaws of the black
warrior, whose breastplate was apparently too thick for him to
pierce; and the dark carbuncles of the sufferer's eyes shone with
ferocity such as war only could excite. They struggled half an hour
longer under the tumbler, and when I looked again the black soldier
had severed the heads of his foes from their bodies, and the still
living heads were hanging on either side of him like ghastly
trophies at his saddle-bow, still apparently as firmly fastened as
ever, and he was endeavoring with feeble struggles, being without
feelers and with only the remnant of a leg, and I know not how many
other wounds, to divest himself of them; which at length, after half
an hour more, he accomplished. I raised the glass, and he went off
over the window-sill in that crippled state. Whether he finally
survived that combat, and spent the remainder of his days in some
Hotel des Invalides, I do not know; but I thought that his industry
would not be worth much thereafter. I never learned which party was
victorious, nor the cause of the war; but I felt for the rest of
that day as if I had had my feelings excited and harrowed by
witnessing the struggle, the ferocity and carnage, of a human battle
before my door.
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.
"AEneas Sylvius," say they, "after giving a very circumstantial
account of one contested with great obstinacy by a great and small
species on the trunk of a pear tree," adds that "this action
was
fought in the pontificate of Eugenius the Fourth, in the presence of
Nicholas Pistoriensis, an eminent lawyer, who related the whole,
history of the battle with the greatest fidelity." A similar
engagement between great and small ants is recorded by Olaus Magnus,
in which the small ones, being victorious, are said to have buried
the bodies of their own soldiers, but left those of their giant
enemies a prey to the birds. This event happened previous to the
expulsion of the tyrant Christiern the Second from Sweden." The
battle which I witnessed took place in the Presidency of Polk, five
years before the passage of Webster's Fugitive-Slave Bill.
Many a village Bose, fit only to course a mud-turtle in a
victualling cellar, sported his heavy quarters in the woods, without
the knowledge of his master, and ineffectually smelled at old fox
burrows and woodchucks' holes; led perchance by some slight cur
which nimbly threaded the wood, and might still inspire a natural
terror in its denizens; -- now far behind his guide, barking like a
canine bull toward some small squirrel which had treed itself for
scrutiny, then, cantering off, bending the bushes with his weight,
imagining that he is on the track of some stray member of the
jerbilla family. Once I was surprised to see a cat walking along
the stony shore of the pond, for they rarely wander so far from
home. The surprise was mutual. Nevertheless the most domestic 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-hunting in the woods, as was her wont (I
am not sure whether it was a male or female, and so use the more
common pronoun), but her mistress told me that she came into the
neighborhood a little more than a year before, in April, and was
finally taken into their house; that she was of a dark brownish-gray
color, with a white spot on her throat, and white feet, and had a
large bushy tail like a fox; that in the winter the fur grew thick
and flatted out along her sides, forming stripes ten or twelve
inches long by two and a half wide, and under her chin like a muff,
the upper side loose, the under matted like felt, and in the spring
these appendages dropped off. They gave me a pair of her "wings,"
which I keep still. There is no appearance of a membrane about
them. Some thought it was part flying squirrel or some other wild
animal, which is not impossible, for, according to naturalists,
prolific hybrids have been produced by the union of the marten and
domestic 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 (Colymbus glacialis) came, as usual, to
moult and bathe in the pond, making the woods ring with his wild
laughter before I had risen. At rumor of his arrival all the
Mill-dam sportsmen are on the alert, in gigs and on foot, two by two
and three by three, with patent rifles and conical balls and
spy-glasses. They come rustling through the woods like autumn
leaves, at least ten men to one loon. Some station themselves on
this side of the pond, some on that, for the poor bird cannot be
omnipresent; if he dive here he must come up there. But now the
kind October wind rises, rustling the leaves and rippling the
surface of the water, so that no loon can be heard or seen, though
his foes sweep the pond with spy-glasses, and make the woods resound
with their discharges. The waves generously rise and dash angrily,
taking sides with all water-fowl, and our sportsmen must beat a
retreat to town and shop and unfinished jobs. But they were too
often successful. When I went to get a pail of water early in the
morning I frequently saw this stately bird sailing out of my cove
within a few rods. If I endeavored to overtake him in a boat, in
order to see how he would manoeuvre, he would dive and be completely
lost, so that I did not discover him again, sometimes, till the
latter part of the day. But I was more than a match for him on the
surface. He commonly went off in a rain.
As I was paddling along the north shore one very calm October
afternoon, for such days especially they settle on to the lakes,
like the milkweed down, having looked in vain over the pond for a
loon, suddenly one, sailing out from the shore toward the middle a
few rods in front of me, set up his wild laugh and betrayed himself.
I pursued with a paddle and he dived, but when he came up I was
nearer than before. He dived again, but I 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 manoeuvred 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 cooly surveyed the water and
the land, and apparently chose his course so that he might come up
where there was the widest expanse of water and at the greatest
distance from the boat. It was surprising how quickly he made up
his mind and put his resolve into execution. He led me at once to
the widest part of the pond, and could not be driven from it. While
he was thinking one thing in his brain, I was endeavoring to divine
his thought in mine. It was a pretty game, played on the smooth
surface of the pond, a man against a loon. Suddenly your
adversary's checker disappears beneath the board, and the problem is
to place yours nearest to where his will appear again. Sometimes he
would come up unexpectedly on the opposite side of me, having
apparently passed directly under the boat. So long-winded was he
and so unweariable, that when he had swum farthest he would
immediately plunge again, nevertheless; and then no wit could divine
where in the deep pond, beneath the smooth surface, he might be
speeding his way like a fish, for he had time and ability to visit
the bottom of the pond in its deepest part. It is said that loons
have been caught in the New York lakes eighty feet beneath the
surface, with hooks set for trout -- though Walden is deeper than
that. How surprised must the fishes be to see this ungainly visitor
from another sphere speeding his way amid their schools! Yet he
appeared to know his course as surely under water as on the surface,
and swam much faster there. Once or twice I saw a ripple where he
approached the surface, just put his head out to 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 endeavor to calculate
where he would rise; for again and again, when I was straining my
eyes over the surface one way, I would suddenly be startled by his
unearthly laugh behind me. But why, after displaying so much
cunning, did he invariably betray himself the moment he came up by
that loud laugh? Did not his white breast enough betray him? He
was indeed a silly loon, I thought. I could commonly hear the
splash of the water when he came up, and so also detected him. But
after an hour he seemed as fresh as ever, dived as willingly, and
swam yet farther than at first. It was surprising to see how
serenely he sailed off with unruffled breast when he came to the
surface, doing all the work with his webbed feet beneath. His usual
note was this demoniac laughter, yet somewhat like that of a
water-fowl; but occasionally, when he had balked me most
successfully and come up a long way off, he uttered a long-drawn
unearthly howl, probably more like that of a wolf than any bird; as
when a beast puts his muzzle to the ground and deliberately howls.
This was his looning -- perhaps the wildest sound that is ever heard
here, making the woods ring far and wide. I concluded that he
laughed in derision of my efforts, confident of his own resources.
Though the sky was by this time overcast, the pond was so smooth
that I could see where he broke the surface when I did not hear him.
His white breast, the stillness of the air, and the 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 filled the whole air with misty
rain, and I was impressed as if it were the prayer of the loon
answered, and his god was angry with me; and so I left him
disappearing far away on the tumultuous surface.
For hours, in fall days, I watched the ducks cunningly tack and
veer and hold the middle of the pond, far from the sportsman; tricks
which they will have less need to practise 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 beside safety they got
by sailing in the middle of Walden I do not know, unless they love
its water for the same reason that I do.