 This is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to find out how to volunteer Please contact LibriVox.org Walking by Henry David Thoreau LibriVox part one of two Walking I wish to speak a word for nature for absolute freedom and wildness as Contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil To regard man as an inhabitant or a part and parcel of nature rather than a member of society I wish to make an extreme statement if so I may make an emphatic one for there are enough champions of civilization The minister in the school committee and every one of you will take care of that I Have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of walking That is taking walks Who had a genius so to speak for sauntering? Which word is beautifully derived from idle people who roved about the country in the Middle Ages and asked charity under the pretense of going Allah Saint Tere to the holy land till the children exclaimed There goes a Saint Tere a saunterer a holy lander They who never go to the holy land in their walks as they pretend are Indeed mere idlers and vagabonds, but they who do go there are saunters in the good sense such as I mean some however Would derive the word from sans Tere without land or a home Which therefore in the good sense will mean Having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere For this is the secret of successful sauntering He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all But the saunterer in the good sense is no more vagrant than the meandering river Which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea But I prefer the first which Indeed is the most probable derivation For every walk is a sort of crusade Preached by some Peter the hermit in us to go forth and reconquer this holy land from the hands of the infidels It is true We are but faint-hearted crusaders even the walkers nowadays who undertake no persevering never-ending enterprises Our expeditions are but tours and come round again at evening to the old hearth side from which we set out Half the walk is but retracing our steps We should go forth on the shortest walk per chance in the spirit of undying adventure never to return Prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms If you were ready to leave father and mother and brother and sister and wife and child and friends and Never see them again if you have paid your debts and made your will and settled all your affairs And you are a free man Then you are ready for a walk To come down to my own experience my companion and I For I sometimes have a companion Take pleasure in fancying ourselves nights of a new or rather an old order Not equestrians or chevaliers not ridders or riders But walkers a still more ancient and honorable class. I trust the chivalric and heroic spirit which once belonged to the rider now seems to reside in or Perchance to have subsided into the walker Not the night, but the walker errant. He is a sort of fourth estate Outside of church and state and people We have felt that we almost alone hear about practiced this noble art though to tell the truth At least if their own assertions are to be received Most of my townsmen would feign walk sometimes as I do but they cannot No wealth can buy the requisite leisure freedom and independence which are the capital in this profession It comes only by the grace of God it requires a direct dispensation from heaven to become a walker You must be born into the family of the walkers Ambulator Nassiter non fit Some of my townsmen it is true Can remember and have described to me some walks which they took ten years ago in Which they were so blessed as to lose themselves for half an hour in the woods But I know very well that they have confined themselves to the highway ever since Whatever pretensions they may make to belong to this select class No doubt they were elevated for a moment as by the reminiscence of a previous state of existence When even they were foresters and outlaws When he came to Greenwood in a merry morning there he heard the note small of birds Mary saying It is fair gone said Robin That I was last year Me list a little for to shoot at the Donnie deer. I Think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits unless I spend four hours a day at least and it is commonly more than that Sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields absolutely free from all worldly engagements You may safely say a penny for your thoughts or a thousand pounds When sometimes I am reminded that the mechanics and shopkeepers stay in their shops Not only all the four noon, but all the afternoon too sitting with crossed legs. So many of them As if the legs were made to sit upon and not to stand or walk upon I Think that they deserve some credit for not having all committed suicide long ago. I Who cannot stay in my chamber for a single day without acquiring some rust and When sometimes I have stolen fourth for a walk at the 11th hour or four o'clock in the afternoon Too late to redeem the day When the shades of night were already beginning to be mingled with the daylight Have felt as if I had committed some sin to be atoned for I Confess that I am astonished at the power of endurance to say nothing of the moral insensibility Of my neighbors who can find themselves to shops and offices the whole day for weeks and months I and years almost together. I Know not what manner of stuff they are of Sitting there now at three o'clock in the afternoon as if it were three o'clock in the morning Bonaparte may talk of the three o'clock in the morning courage But it is nothing to the courage which can sit down cheerfully at this hour in the afternoon Over against oneself whom you have known all the morning to starve out a garrison to whom you are bound by such strong ties of sympathy I Wonder that about this time or say between four and five o'clock in the afternoon Too late for the morning papers and too early for the evening ones There is not a general explosion heard up and down the street Scattering a legion of antiquated and house-bred notions and whims to the four winds for an airing and So the evil cure itself How womankind who are confined to the house still more than men Stand it. I do not know But I have ground to suspect that most of them do not stand it at all When early in a summer afternoon We have been shaking the dust of the village from the skirts of our garments Making haste past those houses with purely Doric or gothic fronts Which have such an air of repose about them My companion whispers that probably about these times their occupants are all gone to bed Then it is that I appreciate the beauty and the glory of architecture Which itself never turns in But forever stands out and erect Keeping watch over the slumbers No doubt temperament and above all age have a good deal to do with it as A man grows older his ability to sit still and follow indoor occupations increases He grows vest-burtonal in his habits as the evening of life approaches Till at last he comes forth only just before sundown and gets all the walk that he requires in half an hour But the walking of which I speak has nothing in it akin to taking exercise as it is called as The sick take medicine at stated hours as the swinging of dumbbells or chairs But is itself the enterprise and adventure of the day if you would get exercise Go in search of the springs of life Think of a man swinging dumbbells for his health when those springs are bubbling up in far-off pastures unsought by him Moreover you must walk like a camel Which is said to be the only beast which ruminates when walking When a traveler asked Wordsworth servant to show him her master's study she answered Here is his library But his study is out of doors Living much out of doors in the sun and wind Will no doubt produce a certain roughness of character Will cause a thicker cuticle to grow over some of the finer qualities of our nature As on the face and hands Or as severe manual labor robs the hands of some of their delicacy of touch So staying in the house on the other hand May produce a softness and smoothness Not to say thinness of skin Accompanied by an increased sensibility to certain impressions Perhaps we should be more susceptible to some influences important to our intellectual and moral growth If the sun had shown and the wind blown on us a little less And no doubt it is a nice matter to proportion rightly the thick and thin skin But me thinks that is a scurf that will fall off fast enough That the natural remedy is to be found in the proportion which night bears to the day The winter to the summer Thought to experience There will be so much more the air and sunshine in our thoughts The callous palms of the laborer are conversant with the finer tissues of self-respect and heroism Whose touch thrills the heart Then the languid fingers of idleness That is mere sentimentality That lies a bed by day and thinks itself white Far from the tan and callous of experience When we walk we naturally go to the fields and woods But what would become of us if we walked only in a garden or a mall? Even some sects of philosophers have felt the necessity of importing the woods to themselves Since they did not go to the woods They planted groves and walks of platinies Where they took subdylus, amylationis, and porticos open to the air Of course it is of no use to direct our steps to the woods If they do not carry us thither I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily Without getting there in spirit In my afternoon walk I would fain forget all my morning occupations and my obligations to society But it sometimes happens that I cannot easily shake off the village The thought of some work will run in my head and I am not where my body is I am out of my senses In my walks I would fain return to my senses What business have I in the woods if I am thinking of something out of the woods? I suspect myself and cannot help a shudder When I find myself so implicated even in what are called good works For this may sometimes happen My vicinity affords many good walks And though for so many years I have walked almost every day And sometimes for several days together I have not yet exhausted them An absolutely new prospect is a great happiness And I can still get this any afternoon Two or three hours walking will carry me to as strange a country as I expect ever to see A single farmhouse, which I had not seen before Is sometimes as good as the dominions of the King Dahomey There is in fact a sort of harmony discoverable between the capabilities of the landscape within a circle of 10 miles radius Or the limits of an afternoon walk And the three score years and 10 of human life It will never become quite familiar to you Nowadays almost all man's improvements so called As the building of houses and the cutting down of the forest and of all large trees Simply to form the landscape and make it more and more tame and cheap A people who would begin by burning the fences and let the forest stand I saw the fences half consumed Their ends lost in the middle of the prairie And some worldly miser with a surveyor looking after his bounds While heaven had taken place around him and he did not see the angels going to and fro But was looking for an old post hole in the midst of paradise I looked again and saw him standing in the middle of a boggy stygian fenn Surrounded by devils and he had found his bounds without a doubt Three little stones where a stake had been driven And looking nearer I saw that the prince of darkness was his surveyor I can easily walk 10, 15, 20 Any number of miles commencing at my own door Without going by any house Without crossing a road except where the fox and the mink do First along by the river and then the brook And then the meadow and the wood side There are square miles in my vicinity which have no inhabitant From many a hill I can see civilization and the abodes of man afar The farmers in their works are scarcely more obvious than woodchucks in their burrows Man and his affairs church and state and school Trade and commerce and manufacturers and agriculture Even politics the most alarming of them all I am pleased to see how little space they occupy in the landscape Politics is but a narrow field and that still narrow or highway yonder leads to it I sometimes direct the traveler thither If you would go to the political world follow the great road Follow that market man keep his dust in your eyes And it will lead you straight to it For it too has its place merely and does not occupy all space I pass from it as from a bean field into the forest and it is forgotten In one half hour I can walk off to some portion of the earth's surface Where a man does not stand from one year's end to another And there consequently politics are not For they are but as the cigar smoke of a man The village is the place to which the roads tend A sort of expansion of the highway as a lake of a river It is the body of which roads are the arms and legs A trivial or quadrivial place The thoroughfare and ordinary of travelers The word is from the Latin villa Which together with via away Or more anciently ved and vela Varo derives from vejo to carry Because the villa is the place to and from which things are carried They who got their living by teeming were said Velaturum Facerre Hence too the Latin word vils and our vile also villan This suggests what kind of degeneracy villagers are liable to They are way worn by the travel that goes by and over them Without traveling themselves Some do not walk at all Others walk in the highways A few walk across lots Roads are made for horses and men of business I do not travel in them much Comparatively because I am not in a hurry to get to any tavern or grocery Or livery stable or depot to which they may lead I am a good horse to travel But not from choice or roadster The landscape painter uses the figures of men to mark a road He would not make that use of my figure I walk out into a nature such as the old prophets and poets Manu, Moses, Homer, Schauser walked in You may name it America But it is not America Neither Americas, Vespuchias, nor Columbus Nor the rest were the discoverers of it There is a truer account of it in mythology than in any history of America so called That I have seen However There are a few old roads that may be trodden with profit As if they led somewhere now that they are nearly discontinued There is the old Marlboro road Which does not go to Marlboro now Me thinks unless that is Marlboro where it carries me I am the bolder to speak of it here Because I presume that there are one or two such roads in every town The old Marlboro road Where they once dug for money But never found any Where sometimes Marshall Miles Singly Files And Elijah Wood I fear for no good No other man Save Alisha Dugan O man of wild habits Partridges and rabbits Who hast no cares Only to set snares Who live stall alone Close to the bone And where life is sweetest Constantly eatest When the spring stirs my blood With the instinct to travel I can get enough gravel On the old Marlboro road Nobody repairs it For nobody wears it It is a living way As the Christians say Not many there be Who enter there in Only the guests of the Irishman Quinn What is it? What is it? But a direction out there And the bare possibility of going somewhere Great guideboards of stone But travelers none Cenotaphs of the towns Named on their crowns It is worth going to see Where you might be What king did the thing I am still wondering Set up how or when By what select men Gorgas or Lee Clark or Darby They're a great endeavor To be something forever Blank tablets of stone Where a traveler might groan And in one sentence Grave all that is known Which another might read In his extreme need I know one or two Lines that would do Literature that might stand All over the land Which a man could remember Till next December And read again in the spring After the thawing If with fancy unfurled You leave your abode You may go round the world By the old Marlboro road At present in this vicinity The best part of the land Is not private property The landscape is not owned And the walker enjoys comparative freedom But possibly the day will come When it will be partitioned off Into so-called pleasure grounds In which a few will take a narrow And exclusive pleasure only When fences shall be multiplied And mantraps and other engines invented To confine men to the public road And walking over the surface of God's earth Shall be construed to mean Trespassing on some gentleman's grounds To enjoy a thing exclusively Is commonly to exclude yourself From the true enjoyment of it Let us improve our opportunities Then, before the evil days come What is it that makes it so hard Sometimes to determine whether we will walk I believe that there is a subtle Magnetism in nature Which, if we unconsciously yield to it Will direct us aright It is not indifferent to us Which way we walk There is a right way But we are very liable from heedlessness And stupidity to take the wrong one We would fain take that walk Never yet taken by us through this actual world Which is perfectly symbolical Of the path which we love to travel In the interior and ideal world And sometimes, no doubt We find it difficult to choose our direction Because it does not yet exist distinctly In our idea When I go out of the house for a walk Uncertain as yet whether I will bend my steps And submit myself to my instinct to decide for me I find, strange and whimsical as it may seem That I finally and inevitably settle southwest Toward some particular wood or meadow Or deserted pasture or hill in that direction My needle is slow to settle Varies a few degrees And does not always point due southwest It is true And it has good authority for this variation But it always settles between west and south southwest The future lies that way to me And the earth seems more unexhausted and richer on that side The outline, which would bound my walks Would be not a circle, but a parabola Or rather, like one of those cometary orbits Which have been thought to be non-returning curves In this case, opening westward In which my house occupies the place of the sun I turn round and round, irresolute sometimes For a quarter of an hour Until I decide, for a thousandth time That I will walk into the southwest or west Eastward I go only by force But westward I go free Thither, no business leads me It is hard for me to believe that I shall find fair landscapes Or sufficient wildness and freedom behind the eastern horizon I am not excited by the prospect of a walk thither But I believe that the forest which I see in the western horizon Stretches uninterruptedly toward the setting sun And there are no towns nor cities in it Of enough consequence to disturb me Let me live where I will On this side is the city On that the wilderness And I am ever leaving the city more and more And withdrawing into the wilderness I should not lay so much stress on this fact If I did not believe that something like this Is the prevailing tendency of my countrymen I must walk toward Oregon And not toward Europe And that way the nation is moving And I may say that mankind progresses from east to west Within a few years we have witnessed the phenomenon Of a southeastward migration in the settlement of Australia But this affects us as a retrograde movement And judging from the moral and physical character Of the first generation of Australians Has not yet proved a successful experiment The eastern tartars think that there is nothing west beyond Tibet The world ends there, say they Beyond there is nothing but a shoreless sea It is unmitigated east where they live We go eastward to realize history And study the works of art and literature Retracing the steps of the race We go westward as into the future With a spirit of enterprise and adventure The Atlantic is a lethian stream In our passage over which we have had an opportunity To forget the old world and its institutions If we do not succeed this time There is perhaps one more chance for the race Left before it arrives on the banks of the sticks And that is in the lethia of the pacific Which is three times as wide I know not how significant it is Or how far it is evidence of singularity That an individual should thus consent in his pettiest walk With the general movement of the race But I know that something akin to the migratory Instinct in birds and quadrupeds Which in some instances is known to have affected the squirrel tribe Impelling them to a general and mysterious movement In which they were seen, say some, crossing the broadest rivers Each on its particular chip With its tail raised for a sail And bridging narrower streams with their dead That something like the furor Which affects the domestic cattle in the spring And which is referred to a worm in their tails Affects both nations and individuals Either perennially or from time to time Not a flock of wild geese cackles over our town But it to some extent unsettles the value of real estate here And if I were a broker I should probably take that disturbance into account Then longing folk to gone on pilgrimages And palmers for to seek in strange strongs Every sunset which I witness inspires me With the desire to go to a west as distant and as fair As that into which the sun goes down He appears to migrate westward daily And tempt us to follow him He is the great western pioneer whom the nations follow We dream all night of those mountain ridges in the horizon Though they may be a vapor only Which were last gilded by his rays The island of Atlantis And the islands and gardens of the hispirates A sort of terrestrial paradise Appear to have been the great west of the ancients Inveloped in mystery and poetry Who has not seen an imagination When looking into the sunset sky The gardens of the hispirates And the foundation of all those fables Columbus felt the westward tendency more strongly than any before He obeyed it and found a new world for Castile and Lyon The herd of men in those days Scented fresh pastures from afar And now the sun had stretched out all the hills And now was dropped into the western bay And last he rose And twitched his mantle blue Tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new Where on the globe can there be found an area of equal extent With that occupied by the bulk of our states So fertile and so rich and varied in its productions And at the same time so habitable by the European as this is Michaud who knew but part of them says that The species of large trees are much more numerous in North America than in Europe In the United States there are more than 140 species that exceed 30 feet in height In France there are about 30 that attain this size Later botanists more than confirm his observations Humboldt came to America to realize his youthful dreams of a tropical vegetation And he beheld it in its greatest perfection In the primitive forests of the Amazon The most gigantic wilderness on the earth Which he has so eloquently described The geographer himself a European goes farther Farther than I am ready to follow him yet not When he says As the plant is made for the animal As the vegetable world is made for the animal world America is made for the man of the old world The man of the old world sets out upon his way Leaving the highlands of Asia he descends from station to station towards Europe Each of his steps is marked by a new civilization superior to the proceeding By a greater power of development Arrived at the Atlantic he pauses on the shore Of this unknown ocean The bounds of which he knows not And turns upon his footprints for an instant When he has exhausted the rich soil of Europe and reinvigorated himself Then recommences his adventurous career westward As in the earliest ages So far, Guillaume From this western impulse coming in contact with the barrier of the Atlantic Spraying the commerce and enterprise of modern times The younger Michaud In his Travels West of the Alleghenies In 1802 says that the common inquiry in the newly settled west was From what part of the world have you come As if these vast and fertile regions would naturally be the place of meeting and common country Of all the inhabitants of the globe To use an obsolete Latin word, I might say Ex Oriente Luxe Ex Occidente Frux From the east light From the west fruit Sir Francis Head An English traveler and a Governor General of Canada Tells us that In both the northern and southern hemispheres of the New World Nature has not only outlined her works on a larger scale But has painted the whole picture with brighter and more costly colors than she used in delineating and imbutifying the old world The heavens of America appear infinitely higher The sky is bluer The air is fresher The cold is intenser The moon looks larger The stars are brighter The thunder is louder The lightning is vivider The wind is stronger The rain is heavier The mountains are higher The river is longer The forests bigger The plains broader This statement will do at least to set against Buffon's account of this part of the world and its productions Linnaeus said long ago I know not what there is of joyous and smooth in the aspect of American plants And I think that in this country there are no, or at most very few, Africanae bestiee African beasts, as the Romans called them And that in this respect also it is peculiarly fitted for the habitation of man We are told that within three miles of the center of the East Indian city of Singapore Some of the inhabitants are annually carried off by tigers But the traveler can lie down in the woods at night almost anywhere in North America without fear of wild beasts These are encouraging testimonies If the moon looks larger here than in Europe, probably the sun looks larger also If the heavens of America appear infinitely higher and the stars brighter I trust that these facts are symbolical of the height to which the philosophy and poetry and religion of her inhabitants may one day soar At length, perchance, the immaterial heaven will appear as much higher to the American mind and the intimations that star it as much brighter For I believe that climate does thus react on a man, as there is something in the mountain air that feeds the spirit and inspires Will not man grow to greater perfection intellectually as well as physically under these influences? Or is it unimportant how many foggy days there are in his life? I trust that we shall be more imaginative, that our thoughts will be clearer, fresher, and more ethereal as our sky Our understanding more comprehensive and broader, like our planes Our intellect generally on a grander scale, like our thunder and lightning Our rivers and mountains and forests And our hearts shall even correspond in breadth and depth and grandeur to our inland seas Perchance there will appear to the traveler something he knows not what of Leta and Glabra, of joyous and serene, in our very faces Else to what end does the world go on? And why was America discovered? To Americans, I hardly need to say, Westward the Star of Empire takes its way As a true patriot, I should be ashamed to think that Adam in Paradise was more favorably situated on the whole than the back woodsmen in this country Our sympathies in Massachusetts are not confined to New England, though we may be estranged from the South, we sympathize with the West There is the home of the younger sons, as among the Scandinavians they took to the sea for their inheritance It is too late to be studying Hebrew, it is more important to understand even the slang of today Some months ago I went to see a panorama of the Rhine, it was like a dream of the Middle Ages I floated down its historic stream in something more than imagination, under bridges built by the Romans, and repaired by later heroes Past cities and castles whose very names were music to my ears, and each of which was the subject of a legend There were Irenbritstein, and Rolandsek, and Koblenz, which I knew only in history They were ruins that interested me chiefly There seemed to come up from its waters and its vine clad hills and valleys, a hushed music as of crusaders departing for the Holy Land I floated along under the spell of enchantment, as if I had been transported to an heroic age, and breathed an atmosphere of chivalry Soon after I went to see a panorama of the Mississippi, and as I worked my way up the river in the light of today And saw the steamboats wooding up, counted the rising cities, gazed on the fresh ruins of Nauvoo, beheld the Indians moving west across the stream And, as before, I had looked up the Moselle, now looked up the Ohio and the Missouri And heard the legends of Dubuque and of Winona's Cliff, still thinking more of the future than of the past or present I saw that this was a rhinestream of a different kind, that the foundations of castles were yet to be laid, and the famous bridges were yet to be thrown over the river And I felt that this was the heroic age itself, though we know it not, for the hero is commonly the simplest and obscurest of men The west of which I speak is but another name for the wild, and what I have been preparing to say is that in wildness is the preservation of the world Every tree sends its fibers forth in search of the wild The cities import it at any price Men plow and sail for it From the forest and wilderness come the tonics and barks which brace mankind Our ancestors were savages The story of Romulus and Remus being suckled by a wolf is not a meaningless fable The founders of every state which is risen to eminence have drawn their nourishment and vigor from a similar wild source It was because the children of the empire were not suckled by the wolf that they were conquered and displaced by the children of the northern forests who were I believe in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn grows We require an infusion of hemlock, spruce, or arborvitae in our tea There is a difference between eating and drinking for strength and from mere gluttony The Houghton Tots eagerly devour the marrow of the kudu and other antelopes raw, as a matter of course Some of our northern Indians eat raw marrow of the arctic reindeer, as well as various other parts, including the summits of the antlers, as long as they are soft And herein, per chance, they have stolen a march on the cooks of Paris They get what usually goes to feed the fire This is probably better than stall-fed beef and slaughterhouse pork to make a man of Give me a wildness whose glance no civilization can endure, as if we lived on the marrow of kudu's devoured raw There are some inner voles which border the strain of the woodthrush, to which I would migrate, wild lands where no settler is squatted To which, me thinks, I am already acclimated The African hunter coming tells us that the skin of the eland, as well as that of most other antelopes just killed, emits the most delicious perfume of trees and grass I would have every man so much like a wild antelope, so much a part and parcel of nature, that his very person should thus sweetly advertise our senses of his presence And remind us of those parts of nature which he most haunts I feel no disposition to be satirical, when the trappers coat emits the odor of muskwash even It is a sweeter scent to me than that which commonly exhales from the merchants or the scholars' garments When I go into their wardrobes and handle their vestments, I am reminded of no grassy plains and flowery meads which they have frequented, but of dusty merchants' exchanges and libraries, rather A tanned skin is something more than respectable, and perhaps olive is a fitter color than white for a man A denizen of the woods The pale white man, I do not wonder that the African pitied him Darwin the naturalist says A white man bathing by the side of a Tahitian was, like a plant bleached by the gardener's art, compared with a fine, dark green one, growing vigorously in the open fields Then Johnson exclaims How near to good is what is fair, so I would say How near to good is what is wild And part one of Walking by Henry David Thoreau This recording is in the public domain This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to find out how to volunteer, please contact LibriVox.org Walking by Henry David Thoreau Part 2 Life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him One who pressed forward incessantly and never rested from his labors, who grew fast and made infinite demands on life, would always find himself in a new country or wilderness and surrounded by the raw material of life He would be climbing over the prostrate stems of primitive forest trees Hope in the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps When, formerly, I have analyzed my partiality for some farm which I had contemplated purchasing, I have frequently found that I was attracted solely by a few square rods of impermeable and unfathomable bog A natural sink in one corner of it. That was the jewel which dazzled me. I derive more of my subsistence from the swamps which surround my native town than from the cultivated gardens in the village There are no richer parterres to my eyes than the dense beds of dwarf Andromeda, Cassandra Caliculata, which cover these tender places on the earth's surface Botany cannot go farther than tell me the names of the shrubs which grow there The High Blueberry, Panicled Andromeda, Lambkill, Azalea, and Radora, all standing in the quaking sphagnum I often think that I should like to have my house, front on this mass of dull red bushes, omitting other flower pots and borders, transplanted spruce and trim box, even graveled walks, to have this fertile spot under my windows Not a few imported barrelfuls of soil, only to cover the sand which was thrown out and digging the cellar Why not put my house, my parlor, behind this plot, instead of behind that meager assemblage of curiosities, that poor apology for a nature and art which I call my front yard It is an effort to clear up and make a decent appearance when the carpenter and mason have departed, though done as much for the passerby as the dweller within The most tasteful front yard fence was never an agreeable object of study to me The most elaborate ornaments, acorn tops or whatnot, soon wearied and disgusted me Bring your sills up to the very edge of the swamp, then, though it may not be the best place for a dry cellar So that there be no access on that side to citizens Front yards are not made to walk in, but at most through, and you could go in the back way Yes, though you may think me perverse, if it were proposed to me to dwell in the neighborhood of the most beautiful garden that ever human art contrived or else a dismal swamp, I would certainly decide for the swamp How vain, then, have been all your labors, citizens, for me My spirits infallibly rise in proportion to the outward dreariness Give me the ocean, the desert, or the wilderness In the desert, pure air and solitude compensate for want of moisture and fertility The traveler Burton says of it, your morale improves, you become frank and cordial, hospitable and single-minded In the desert, spiritist liquors excite only disgust There is a keen enjoyment in a mere animal existence They who have been traveling long on the steps of the tartary say, on reentering cultivated lands, the agitation, perplexity, and turmoil of civilization oppressed and suffocated us The air seemed to fail us, and we felt every moment as if about to die of asphyxia When I would recreate myself, I seek the darkest wood, the thickest and most interminable and, to the citizen, most dismal swamp I enter a swamp as a sacred place, a sanctum sanctorum There is the strength, the marrow of nature, the wild wood covers the virgin mold, and the same soil is good for men and for trees A man's health requires as many acres of meadow to his prospect as his farm does loads of muck There are the strong meats on which he feeds A town is saved, not more by the righteous men in it than by the woods and swamps that surround it A township where one primitive forest waves above while another primitive forest rots below Such a town is fitted to raise not only corn and potatoes, but poets and philosophers for the coming ages In such a soil grew Homer and Confucius and the rest And out of such a wilderness comes the reformer, eating locusts and wild honey To preserve wild animals implies generally the creation of a forest for them to dwell in or resort to So it is with man, a hundred years ago they sold bark in our streets peeled from our own woods In the very aspect of those primitive and rugged trees there was, me thinks, a tanning principal Which hardened and consolidated the fibers of men's thoughts Ah, already I shudder for these comparatively degenerate days of my native village When you cannot collect a load of bark of good thickness and we no longer produce tar and turpentine The civilized nations, Greece, Rome, England have been sustained by the primitive forests which anciently rotted where they stand They survive as long as the soil is not exhausted Alas for human culture little is to be expected of a nation When the vegetable mold is exhausted and it is compelled to make manure of the bones of its fathers There the poet sustains himself merely by his own superfluous fat and the philosopher comes down on his marrow bones It is said to be the task of the American to work the virgin soil And that agriculture here already assumes proportions unknown everywhere else I think that the farmer displaces the Indian even because he redeems the meadow And so makes himself stronger and in some respects more natural I was surveying for a man the other day a single straight line 132 rods long Through a swamp at whose entrance might have been written the words which Dante read over the entrance to the infernal regions Leave all hope, ye that enter, that is, of ever getting out again Where at one time I saw my employer actually up to his neck and swimming for his life in his property Though it was still winter He had another similar swamp which I could not survey at all because it was completely underwater And nevertheless with regard to a third swamp which I did survey from a distance He remarked to me true to his instincts that he would not part with it for any consideration on account of the mud which it contained And that man intends to put a girdling ditch round the hole in the course of 40 months And so redeem it by the magic of his spade I refer to him only as the type of a class The weapons with which we have gained our most important victories Which should be handed down as heirlooms from father to son are not the sword and the lance But the bushwhack, the turfcutter, the spade, and the boghoe Rusted with the blood of many a meadow and begrimed with the dust of many a hard fought field The very winds blew the Indians cornfield into the meadow and pointed out the way which he had not the skill to follow He had no better implement with which to entrench himself in the land than a clamshell But the farmer is armed with the plow and spade In literature it is only the wild that attracts us Dullness is but another name for tameness It is the uncivilized free and wild thinking and hamlet and the Iliad And all the scriptures and mythologies not learned in the schools that delights us As the wild duck is more swift and beautiful than the tame, so is the wild, the mallard thought Which mid-falling dues wings its way above the fens A truly good book is something as natural and as unexpectedly and unaccountably fair and perfect As a wildflower discovered on the prairies of the west or in the jungles of the east Genius is a light which makes the darkness visible like the lightning's flash Which perchance shatters the temple of knowledge itself and not a taper lighted at the hearthstone of the race Which pales before the light of common day English literature from the days of the minstrels to the lake poets Spencer and Spenser and Milton and even Shakespeare included Breathes no quite fresh and, in this sense, wild strain It is an essentially tame and civilized literature reflecting Greece and Rome Her wilderness is a greenwood, her wild man a robin hood There is plenty of genial love of nature but not so much of nature herself Her chronicles inform us when her wild animals, but not when the wild man in her, became extinct The science of Humboldt is one thing, poetry is another thing The poet today, notwithstanding all the discoveries of science and the accumulated learning of mankind, enjoys no advantage over Homer Where is the literature which gives expression to nature? He would be a poet who could impress the winds and streams into his service To speak for him, who nailed words to their primitive senses As farmers drive down stakes in the spring, which the frost has heaved Who derived his words as often as he used them, transplanted them to his page with earth adhering to their roots Whose words were so true and fresh and natural that they would appear to expand like the buds at the approach of spring Though they lay half-smothered between two musty leaves in a library I, to bloom and bear fruit there, after their kind, annually, for the faithful reader, in sympathy with surrounding nature I do not know of any poetry to quote, which adequately expresses this yearning for the wild Approached from this side, the best poetry is tame I do not know where to find, in any literature, ancient or modern, any account which contents me of that nature which even I am acquainted You will perceive that I demand something which no Augustan nor Elizabethan age, which no culture, in short, can give Mythology comes nearer to it than anything How much more fertile a nature, at least, has Grecian mythology in its root than English literature Mythology is the crop which the old world bore before its soil was exhausted Before the fancy and imagination were affected with blight, and which it still bears, wherever its pristine vigor is unabated All other literatures endure only as the elms which overshadow our houses But this is like the great dragon tree of the Western Isles, as old as mankind And whether that does or not will endure as long, for the decay of other literatures makes the soil in which it thrives The West is preparing to add its fables to those of the East The valleys of the Ganges, the Nile, and the Rhine, having yielded their crop, it remains to be seen what the valleys of the Amazon, the Plot, the Orinoco, the St. Lawrence And the Mississippi will produce Per chance when, in the course of ages, American liberty has become a fiction of the past, as it is to some extent a fiction of the present The poets of the world will be inspired by American mythology The wildest dreams of wild men, even, are not the less true Though they may not recommend themselves to the sense, which is most common among Englishmen and Americans today It is not every truth that recommends itself to the common sense Nature has a place for the wild climates, as well as for the cabbage Some expressions of truth are reminiscent, others merely sensible, as the phrase is, others prophetic Some forms of disease, even, may prophecy forms of health The geologist has discovered that the figures of serpents, griffins, flying dragons, and other fanciful embellishments of heraldry Have their prototypes in the forms of fossil species, which were extinct before man was created And hence, indicate a faint and shadowy knowledge of a previous state of organic existence The Hindus dreamed that the earth rested on an elephant, and the elephant on a tortoise, and the tortoise on a serpent And though it may be an unimportant coincidence, it will not be out of place here to state that a fossil tortoise has lately been discovered in Asia, large enough to support an elephant I confess that I am partial to these wild fancies, which transcend the order of time and development They are the sublimest recreation of the intellect The partridge loves peas, but not those that go with her into the pot In short, all good things are wild and free There is something in a strain of music, whether produced by an instrument or by the human voice Take the sound of a bugle in a summer night, for instance Which by its wildness to speak without satire, reminds me of the cries emitted by wild beasts in their native forests It is so much of their wildness as I can understand Give me for my friends and neighbors wild men, not tame ones The wildness of the savages but a faint symbol of the awful ferrity with which good men and lovers meet I love even to see the domestic animals reassert their native rights Any evidence that they have not wholly lost their original wild habits and vigor As when my neighbor's cow breaks out of her pasture early in the spring and boldly swims the river A cold, gray tide, 25 or 30 rods wide, swollen by the melted snow It is the buffalo crossing the Mississippi This exploit confers some dignity on the herd in my eyes, already dignified The seeds of instinct are preserved under the thick hides of cattle and horses The seeds in the bowels of the earth, an indefinite period Any sportiveness in cattle is unexpected I saw one day a herd of a dozen bullocks and cows running about and frisking an unwieldy sport Like huge rats, even like kittens They shook their heads, raised their tails, and rushed up and down a hill And I perceived by their horns, as well as by their activity, their relation to the deer tribe But alas, a sudden loud woe would have dampened their ardor at once, reduced them from venison to beef And stiffened their sides and sinews like the locomotive Who but the evil one has cried, woe to mankind Indeed, the life of cattle, like that of many men, is but a sort of locomotiveness They move aside at a time, and man, by his machinery, is meeting the horse in the ox halfway Whatever part the whip has touched is thenceforth palsied Who would ever think of a sight of any of the supple cat tribe, as we speak of a sight of beef I rejoice that horses and steers have to be broken before they can be made the slaves of men And that men themselves have some wild oats still left to sow before they become submissive members of society Undoubtedly, all men are not equally fit subjects for civilization And because the majority, like dogs and sheep, are tame by inherited disposition This is no reason why the others should have their natures broken that they may be reduced to the same level Men are in the main alike, but they were made several in order that they might be various If a low use is to be served, one man will do nearly or quite as well as another If a high one, individual excellence is to be regarded Any man can stop a hole to keep the wind away, but no other man could serve so rarer use as the author of this illustration did Confucius says, the skins of the tiger and the leopard, when they are tanned, are as the skins of the dog and the sheep tanned But it is not the part of a true culture to tame tigers any more than it is to make sheep ferocious And tanning their skins for shoes is not the best use to which they can be put When looking over a list of men's names in a foreign language, as of military officers, or of authors who have written on a particular subject I am reminded once more that there is nothing in a name The name Men's Chekhov, for instance, has nothing in it to my ears more human than a whisker, and it may belong to a rat As the names of the Poles and Russians are to us, so are ours to them It is as if they had been named by the child's rigamarole Irie, fiery, a cheery, van-tittle-toltan I see in my mind a herd of wild creatures swarming over the earth, and to each, the herdsman has affixed some barbarous sound in his own dialect The names of men are, of course, as cheap and meaningless, as bows and tray The name of dogs Me thinks it would be some advantage to philosophy if men were named merely in the gross, as they are known It would be necessary only to know the genus, and perhaps the race or variety, to know the individual We are not prepared to believe that every private soldier in a Roman army had a name of his own Because we have not supposed that he had a character of his own At present our only true names are nicknames I knew a boy who, from his peculiar energy, was called Buster by his playmates And this rightly supplanted his Christian name Some travelers tell us that an Indian had no name given him at first, but earned it And his name was his fame, and among some tribes he acquired a new name with every new exploit It is pitiful when a man bears a name for convenience merely, who has earned neither name nor fame I will not allow mere names to make distinctions for me, but still see men in herds for all them A familiar name cannot make a man less strange to me It may be given to a savage who retains in secret his own wild title earned in the woods We have a wild savage in us, and a savage name is perchance somewhere recorded as ours I see that my neighbor, who bears the familiar epithet William, or Edwin, takes it off with his jacket It does not adhere to him when asleep or in anger, or as by any passion or inspiration I seem to hear pronounced by some of his kin at such a time his original wild name in some jaw-breaking or else melodious tongue Here is this vast, savage, hovering mother of ours, nature, lying all around with such beauty and such affection for her children as the leopard And yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man A sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit In society, in the best institutions of men, it is easy to detect a certain percussity When we should still be growing children, we are already little men Give me a culture which imports much muck from the meadows, and deepens the soil Not that which trusts to heating manures, and improved implements and modes of culture only Many a poor, sore-eyed student that I have heard of would grow faster, both intellectually and physically If instead of sitting up so very late, he honestly slumbered a fool's allowance There may be an excess even of informing light Nipchi, a Frenchman, discovered actinism, that power in the sun's rays which produces a chemical effect That granite rocks, and stone structures, and statues of metal are all alike destructively acted upon during the hours of sunshine And, but for provisions of nature no less wonderful would soon perish under the delicate touch of the most subtle of the agencies of the universe But he observed that those bodies which underwent this change during the daylight possessed the power of restoring themselves to their original conditions during the hours of night when this excitement was no longer influencing them Hence, it has been inferred that the hours of darkness are as necessary to the inorganic creation as we know night and sleep are to the organic kingdom Not even does the moon shine every night, but gives place to darkness I would not have every man, nor every part of a man cultivated, any more than I would have every acre of earth cultivated Part will be tillage, but the greater part will be meadow and forest Not only serving an immediate use, but preparing a mold against a distant future by the annual decay of the vegetation which it supports There are other letters for the child to learn than those which Cadmus invented The Spaniards have a good term to express this wild and dusky knowledge Grammatica Parda Tawny Grammar A kind of mother wit derived from that same leopard to which I have referred We have heard of a society for the diffusion of useful knowledge It is said that knowledge is power and the like Me thinks there is equal need of a society for the diffusion of useful ignorance What we will call beautiful knowledge A knowledge useful in a higher sense For what is most of our boasted so-called knowledge, but a conceit that we know something Which robs us of the advantage of our actual ignorance What we call knowledge is often our positive ignorance Ignorance, our negative knowledge By long years of patient industry and reading of the newspapers For what are the libraries of science but files of newspapers A man accumulates a myriad facts, lays them up in his memory And then, when in some spring of his life he saunters abroad into the great fields of thought He, as it were, goes to grass like a horse and leaves all his harness behind in the stable I would say to the society for the diffusion of useful knowledge, sometimes, go to grass You have eaten hay long enough The spring has come with its green crop The very cows are driven to their country pastures before the end of May Though I have heard of one unnatural farmer who kept his cow in the barn and fed her on hay all the year round So frequently, the society for the diffusion of useful knowledge treats its cattle A man's ignorance, sometimes, is not only useful but beautiful While his knowledge, so-called, is oftentimes worse than useless, besides being ugly Which is the best man to deal with He who knows nothing about a subject and what is extremely rare knows that he knows nothing Or he who really knows something about it but thinks that he knows all My desire for knowledge is intermittent But my desire to bathe my head in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant The highest that we can attain to is not knowledge but sympathy with intelligence I do not know that this higher knowledge amounts to anything more definite than a novel and grand surprise on a sudden revelation of the insufficiency of all that we called knowledge before A discovery that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy It is the lighting up of the mist by the sun Man cannot know in any higher sense than this any more than he can look serenely and with impunity in the face of the sun You will not perceive that as perceiving a particular thing, say the Chaldean oracles There is something servile in the habit of seeking after a law which we may obey We may study the laws of matter at and for our convenience, but a successful life knows no law It is an unfortunate discovery certainly, that of a law which binds us where we did not know before that we were bound Live free, child of the mist, and with respect to knowledge we are all children of the mist The man who takes the liberty to live is superior to all the laws by virtue of his relation to the lawmaker That is active duty, says the Vishnu Purana, which is not for our bondage That is knowledge which is for our liberation, all other duty is good only unto weariness, all other knowledge is only the cleverness of an artist It is remarkable how few events or crises are in our histories How little exercise we have been in our minds, how few experiences we have had I would fain be assured that I am growing a pace and rankly, though my very growth disturbed this dull equanimity Though it be with struggle through long, dark, muggy nights or seasons of gloom It would be well if all our lives were a divine tragedy even, instead of this trivial comedy or farce Dante, Bunyan, and others appear to have been exercised in their minds more than we They were subjected to a kind of culture such as our district schools and colleges do not contemplate Even Muhammad, though many may scream at his name, had a good deal more to live for, I, and to die for Than they have commonly, when, at rare intervals, some thought visits one as perchance he is walking on a railroad Then indeed the cars go by without his hearing them But soon, by some inexorable law, our life goes by and the cars return Gentle breeze, that wander is done seen, and bend is the thistles round lawyer of storms Traveler of the windy glens, why hast thou left my ear so soon? While almost all men feel an attraction drawing them to society, fewer are attracted strongly to nature In their reaction to nature, men appear to me, for the most part, notwithstanding their arts, lower than the animals It is not often a beautiful relation, as in the case of animals How little appreciation of the beauty of the landscape there is among us We have to be told that the Greeks called the world beauty or order But we do not see clearly why they did so, and we esteem it at best only a curious, philological fact For my part, I feel that with regard to nature, I live a sort of border life On the confines of a world into which I make occasional and transient forays only And my patriotism and allegiance to the state into whose territories I seem to retreat are those of a moss trooper Unto a life which I call natural, I would gladly follow even a will of the wisp through bogs and slews unimaginable But no moon nor firefly has shown me the causeway to it Nature is a personality so vast and universal that we have never seen one of her features The walker in the familiar fields which stretch around my native town sometimes finds himself in another land that is described by their owner's deeds As it were some faraway field on the confines of the actual concord where her jurisdiction ceases And the idea which the word concord suggests ceases to be suggested These farms which I have myself surveyed, these bounds which I have set up Appear dimly still as through a mist but they have no chemistry to fix them They fade from the surface of the glass and the picture which the painter painted stands out dimly from beneath The world with which we are commonly acquainted leaves no trace and it will have no anniversary I took a walk on Spalding's farm the other afternoon I saw the setting sun lighting up the opposite side of a stately pine wood Its golden rays straggled into the aisles of the wood as into some noble hall I was impressed as if some ancient and altogether admirable and shining family had settled there in that part of the land called concord Unknown to me to whom the sun was servant who had not gone into society in the village who had not been called on I saw their park their pleasure ground beyond through the wood in Spalding's cranberry meadow The pines furnished them with gables as they grew their house was not obvious to vision the trees grew through it I do not know whether I heard the sounds of a suppressed hilarity or not They seem to recline on the sunbeams they have sons and daughters they are quite well The farmer's cart path which leads directly through their hall does not in the least put them out As the muddy bottom of a pool is sometimes seen through the reflected skies They never heard of Spalding and do not know that he is their neighbor Notwithstanding I heard him whistle as he drove his team through the house Nothing can equal the serenity of their lives their coat of arms is simply a lichen I saw it painted on the pines and oaks their attics were in the tops of the trees They are of no politics there was no noise of labor I did not perceive that they were weaving or spinning Yet I did detect when the wind lulled and hearing was done away the finest imaginable sweet musical hum As of a distant hive in May which perchance was the sound of their thinking They had no idle thoughts and no one without could see their work For their industry was not as in knots and excrescences imbade But I find it difficult to remember them they fade irrevocably out of my mind Even now while I speak and endeavor to recall them and recollect myself It is only after a long and serious effort to recollect my best thoughts That I become again aware of their cohabitancy If it were not for such families as this I think I should move out of Concord We are accustomed to say in New England that few and fewer pigeons visit us every year Our forests furnish no mast for them So it would seem few and fewer thoughts visit each growing man from year to year For the grove in our minds is laid waste Soul defeat unnecessary fires of ambition or sent to mill And there is scarcely a twig left for them to perch on They no longer build nor breed with us In some more genial season, perchance, a faint shadow flits across the landscape of the mind Cast by the wings of some thought in its vernal or autumnal migration But, looking up, we are unable to detect the substance of the thought itself Our winged thoughts are turned to poultry They no longer soar and they attain only to a Shanghai and Cochin-China grandeur Those great thoughts, those great men you hear of We hug the earth, how rarely we mount Me thinks we might elevate ourselves a little more We might climb a tree at least I found my account in climbing a tree once It was a tall white pine on the top of a hill And though I got well-pitched, I was well-paid for it For I discovered new mountains in the horizon which I had never seen before So much more of the earth and the heavens I might have walked about the foot of the tree for three score years and ten And yet I certainly should never have seen them But above all, I discovered around me It was near the end of June On the ends of the topmost branches only A few minute and delicate red cone-like blossoms The fertile flower of the white pine looking heavenward I carried straightway to the village the topmost spire And showed it to stranger jurymen who walked the streets For it was court week And to farmers and lumber dealers and wood shoppers and hunters And not one had ever seen the like before But they wondered as at a star dropped down Tell of ancient architects finishing their works on the tops of columns As perfectly as on the lower and more visible parts Nature has from the first expanded the minute blossoms of the forest Only towards the heavens Above men's heads and unobserved by them We see only the flowers that are under our feet in the meadows The pines have developed their delicate blossoms On the highest twigs of the wood every summer for ages As well as over the heads of nature's red children As of her white ones Yet scarcely a farmer or hunter in the land has ever seen them Above all, we cannot afford not to live in the present He is blessed over all mortals who loses no moment of the passing life And remembering the past Unless our philosophy hears the cock crow in every barnyard within our horizon It is belated That sound commonly reminds us we are growing rusty and antique In our employments and habits of thought His philosophy comes down to a more recent time than ours There is something suggested by it that is a newer testament The Gospel according to this moment He has not fallen astern He has got up early and kept up early And to be where he is is to be in season In the foremost rank of time It is an expression of the health and soundness of nature A brag for all the world Healthiness as of a spring burst forth A new fountain of the muses to celebrate this last instant of time Where he lives no fugitive slave laws are passed Who has not betrayed his master many times since he last heard that note The merit of this bird's strain is in its freedom from all plaintiveness The singer can easily move us to tears or to laughter But where is he who can excite us a pure morning joy When in doleful dumps Breaking the awful stillness of our wooden sidewalk on a Sunday Or perchance, a watcher in the house of morning I hear a cockerel crow far near I think to myself There is one of us, well, at any rate And with a sudden gush return to my senses We had a remarkable sunset one day last November I was walking in a meadow, the source of a small brook When the sun at last, just before setting After a cold, gray day Reached a clear stratum in the horizon And the softest, brightest morning sunlight fell on the dry grass And on the stems of the trees in the opposite horizon And on the leaves of the shrub oaks on the hillside While our shadows stretched long over the meadow eastward As if we were only motes in its beams It was such a light as we would not have imagined a moment before And the air was so warm and serene that nothing was wanting To make a paradise of that meadow When we reflected that this was not a solitary phenomenon Never to happen again But that it would happen forever and ever An infinite number of evenings And cheer and reassure the latest child that walked there It was more glorious still The sun sets on some retired meadow where no house is visible With all the glory and splendor that it lavishes on cities And perchance as it is never set before Where there is but a solitary marsh hawk to have its wings gilded by it Where only a muskwash looks out from his cabin And there is some little black vain brook in the midst of the marsh Just beginning to meander, winding slowly round a decaying stump We walked in so pure and bright a light Gilding the withered grass and leaves so softly and serenely bright I thought I had never bathed in such a golden flood Without a ripple or a murmur to it The west side of every wood and rising ground Gleamed like the boundary of Elysium And the sun on our backs seemed like a gentle herdsman driving us home at evening So we sauntered toward the Holy Land Till one day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever he has done Shall perchance shine into our minds and hearts And light up our whole lives with a great awakening light As warm and serene and golden as on a bankside and autumn End Part 2 of Walking by Henry David Thoreau This recording is in the public domain