 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information, please visit LibriVox.org. This reading by Gordon McKenzie. Walden. By Henry David Thoreau. Chapter 1. Economy. When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only. I lived there two years and two months. At present I am a sojourner in civilized life again. I should not uptrude my affairs so much on the notice of my readers, if very particular inquiries had not been made by my townsmen concerning my motive life, which some would call impertinent, though they do not appear to me at all impertinent, but considering the circumstances very natural and pertinent. Some have asked what I got to eat, if I did not feel lonesome, if I was not afraid, and the like. Others have been curious to learn what portion of my income I devoted to charitable purposes, and some who have large families, how many poor children I maintained. I will therefore ask those of my readers who feel no particular interest in me to pardon me if I undertake to answer some of these questions in this book. In most books the I, or first person, is omitted, in this it will be retained. That in respect to egotism is the main difference. We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking. I should not talk so much about myself, if there were anybody else whom I knew as well. Unfortunately I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience. Moreover I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men's lives. Some such account as he would send to his kindred from a distant land, for if he has lived sincerely it must have been in a distant land to me. Perhaps these pages are more particularly addressed to poor students. As for the rest of my readers, they will accept such portions as apply to them. I trust that none will stretch the seams in putting on the coat, for it may do good service to him whom it fits. I would feign say something, not so much concerning the Chinese and sandwich islanders as you who read these pages, who are said to live in New England. Something about your condition, especially your outward condition or circumstances in this world, in this town, what it is, whether it is necessary that it be as bad as it is, whether it cannot be improved as well as not. I have travelled a good deal in Concorde, and everywhere, in shops and offices and fields, the inhabitants have appeared to me to be doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways. What I have heard of Brahmins, sitting exposed to four fires and looking in the face of the sun, or hanging suspended with their heads downward over flames, or looking at the heavens over their shoulders until it becomes impossible for them to resume their natural position, while from the twist of the neck nothing but liquids can pass into their stomach, or dwelling chained for life at the foot of a tree, or measuring with their bodies like caterpillars, the breadth of vast empires, or standing on one leg on the top of pillars. Even these forms of conscious penance are hardly more incredible and astonishing than the scenes which I daily witness. The twelve labours of Hercules were trifling in comparison with those which my neighbours have undertaken, for they were only twelve and had an end, but I could never see that these men slew or captured any monster or finished any labour. They had no friend Iolus to burn with a hot iron the root of the hydra's head, but as soon as one head is crushed, two spring up. I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools, for these are more easily acquired than got rid of, better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labour in. Who made them serfs of the soil? Why should they eat their sixty acres, when man is condemned to eat only his peck of dirt? Why should they begin digging their graves as soon as they are born? They have got to live a man's life, pushing all these things before them, and get on as well as they can. How many a poor, immortal soul have I met well nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture, and woodlot. The portionless, who struggle with no such unnecessary inherited incumbrances, find it labour enough to subdue and cultivate a few cubic feet of flesh. But men labour under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon plowed into the soil for compost. By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures, which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It is a fool's life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before. It is said that Tusallion and Pyra created men by throwing stones over their heads behind them. Indegenus durum sumus, experiensci laborum, e documenta damus quasimus orogene nati, or as Raleigh rhymes it in his sonorous way. From pence our kind heart heart it is, enduring pain and care, approving that our bodies of a stony nature are. So much for a blind obedience to a blundering oracle, throwing the stones over their heads behind them and not seeing where they fell. Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labours of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them. Their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy and tremble too much for that. Actually, the laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day. He cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men. His labor would be depreciated in the market. He has no time to be anything but a machine. How can he remember well his ignorance, which his growth requires, who has so often to use his knowledge? We should feed and clothe him gratuitously sometimes and recruit him with our cordials before we judge of him. The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another thus tenderly. Some of you we all know are poor, find it hard to live, are sometimes, as it were, gasping for breath. I have no doubt that some of you who read this book are unable to pay for all the dinners which you have actually eaten or for the coats and shoes which are fast-wearing or already worn out and have come to this page to spend borrowed or stolen time robbing your creditors of an hour. It is very evident what mean and sneaking lives many of you live for my sight has been whetted by experience, always on the limits, trying to get into business, trying to get out of debt, a very ancient slo, called by the Latins, eis eliennum, another's brass, for some of their coins were made of brass, still living and dying and buried by this other's brass, always promising to pay, promising to pay tomorrow and dying today insolvent, seeking to curry favor to get custom by how many modes, only not state prison offenses. Lying, flattering, voting, contracting yourself into a nutshell of civility or dilating into an atmosphere of thin and vaporous generosity that you may persuade your neighbor to let you make his shoes or his hat or his coat or his carriage or import his groceries for him, making yourself sick that you may lay up something against a sick day, something to be tucked away in an old chest and a stalking behind the plastering or more safely in the brick bank, no matter where, no matter how much or how little. I sometimes wonder that we can be so frivolous. I may almost say, as to attend to the gross but somewhat foreign form of servitude called negro slavery, there are so many keen and subtle masters that enslave both north and south. It is hard to have a southern overseer. It is worse to have a northern one. But worse of all, when you are the slave driver of yourself. Talk of a divinity in man. Look at the teamster on the highway wending to market by day or night. Does any divinity stir within him, his highest duty to fodder and water his horses? What is his destiny to him compared with the shipping interests? Does not he drive for squire makester? How godlike, how immortal is he? See how he cowers and sneaks, how vaguely all the day he fears not being immortal nor divine, but the slave and prisoner of his own opinion of himself, a fame won by his own deeds. Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines or rather indicates his fate. Self emancipation, even in the West Indian provinces of the fancy and imagination, what Wilberforce is there to bring that about? Think also of the ladies of the land weaving toilet cushions against the last day not to betray too green an interest in their fates, as if you could kill time without injuring eternity. The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things. When we consider what, to use the words of the catechism, is the chief end of man and what are the true necessaries and means of life, it appears as if men had deliberately chosen the common mode of living because they preferred it to any other. Yet they honestly think there is no choice left. But alert and healthy natures remember that the sun rose clear. It is never too late to give up our prejudices. No way of thinking or doing however ancient can be trusted without proof. What everyone echoes or in silence passes by as true today may turn out to be falsehood tomorrow, mere smoke of opinion which some had trusted for a cloud that would sprinkle fertilizing rain on their fields. What old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people and new deeds for new. Old people did not know enough once, perchance, to fetch fresh fuel to keep the fire a-going. New people put a little dry wood under a pot and are whirled round the globe with the speed of birds. In a way to kill old people, as the phrase is. Age is no better, hardly so well qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost. One may almost doubt if the wisest man has learned anything of absolute value by living. Practically the old have no very important advice to give the young. Their own experience has been so partial and their lives have been such miserable failures for private reasons, as they must believe. And it may be that they have some faith left which belies that experience and they are only less young than they were. I have lived some thirty years on this planet and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors. They have told me nothing and probably cannot tell me anything to the purpose. Here is life, an experiment to a great extent untried by me. But it does not avail me that they have tried it. If I have any experience which I think valuable, I am sure to reflect that this my mentors said nothing about. One farmer says to me, you cannot live on vegetable food solely for it furnishes nothing to make bones with. And so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of bones. Walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plough along in spite of every obstacle. Some things are really necessaries of life in some circles. The most helpless and diseased, which in others are luxuries merely and in others still are entirely unknown. The whole ground of human life seems to some to have been gone over by their predecessors, both the heights and the valleys, and all things to have been cared for, according to Evelyn. The wise Solomon prescribed ordinances for the very distances of trees and the Roman praetors have decided how often you may go into your neighbor's land to gather the acorns which fall on it without trespass and what share belongs to that neighbor. Hippocrates has even left directions how we should cut our nails, that is, even with the end of the fingers, neither shorter nor longer. Undoubtedly, the very tedium and ennui which presume to have exhausted the variety and joys of life are as old as Adam. But man's capacities have never been measured, nor are we to judge of what he can do by any precedence. So little has been tried. Whatever have been thy failures hitherto, quote, be not afflicted, my child, for who shall assign to thee what thou hast left undone? End quote. We might try our lives by a thousand simple tests, as, for instance, that the same sun which ripens my beings illumines at once a system of earths like ours. If I had remembered this, it would have prevented some mistakes. This was not the light in which I hold them. The stars are the apexes of what wonderful triangles. What distant and different beings in the various mansions of the universe are contemplating the same one at the same moment? Nature and human life are as various as are several constitutions. Who shall say what prospect life offers to another? Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other's eyes for an instant? We should live in all the ages of the world in an hour, I in all the worlds of the ages. History, poetry, mythology, I know of no reading of another's experience so startling and informing as this would be. The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything it is very likely to be my good behavior. What demon possessed me when I behaved so well? You may say the wisest thing you can, old man, you who have lived seventy years, but not without honor of a kind. I hear an irresistible voice which invites me away from all that. One generation abandons the enterprises of another like stranded vessels. I think that we may safely trust a good deal more than we do. We may wave just so much care of ourselves as we honestly bestow elsewhere. Nature is as well adapted to our weakness as to our strength. The incessant anxiety and strain of some is a well-nigh incurable form of disease. We are made to exaggerate the importance of what work we do, and yet how much is not done by us? Or what if we had been taken sick? How vigilant we are determined not to live by faith if we can avoid it. All the day long in the alert, at night we unwittingly say our prayers and commit ourselves to uncertainties. So thoroughly and sincerely are we compelled to live, reverencing our life, denying the possibility of change. This is the only way, we say, but there are as many ways as there can be drawn radii from one center. All change is a miracle to contemplate. But it is a miracle which is taking place every instant. Confucius said, quote, to know that we know what we know and that we do not know what we do not know. That is true knowledge, end quote. When one man has reduced a fact of the imagination to be a fact to his understanding, I foresee that all men at length establish their lives on that basis. Let us consider for a moment what most of the trouble and anxiety which I have referred to is about and how much it is necessary that we be troubled or at least careful. It would be some advantage to live a primitive and frontier life, though in the midst of an outward civilization if only to learn what are the gross necessaries of life and what methods have been taken to obtain them or even to look over the old day-books of the merchants to see what it was that men most commonly bought at the stores, what they stored, that is. What are the grossest groceries? For the improvements of ages have had but little influence on the essential laws of man's existence, as our skeletons, probably, are not to be distinguished from those of our ancestors. By the words necessary of life, I mean whatever of all that man obtains by his own exertions has been from the first or from long use has become so important to human life that few, if any, whether from savagerness or poverty or philosophy, ever attempt to do without it. To many creatures there is in this sense but one necessary of life, food. To the bison of the prairie it is a few inches of palatable grass with water to drink, unless he seeks the shelter of the forest or the mountain's shadow. None of the brute creation requires more than food and shelter. The necessaries of life for man in this climate may, accurately enough, be distributed under the several heads of food, shelter, clothing, and fuel. For not till we have secured these are we prepared to entertain the true problems of life with freedom and a prospect of success. Man has invented not only houses but clothes and cooked food and possibly from the accidental discovery of the warmth of fire and the consequent use of it, at first a luxury, arose the present necessity to sit by it. We observe cats and dogs acquiring the same second nature. By proper shelter and clothing we legitimately retain our own internal heat. But with an excess of these or of fuel, that is, with an external heat greater than our own internal may not cookery properly be said to begin. Darwin, the naturalist, says of the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego that while his own party, who were well-clothed and sitting close to a fire, were far from too warm, these naked savages, who were farther off, were observed to his great surprise to be streaming with perspiration at undergoing such a roasting. We are told the new hollander goes naked with impunity while the European shivers in his clothes. Is it impossible to combine the hardiness of these savages with the intellectualness of the civilized man? According to Leibig, man's body is a stove and food the fuel which keeps up the internal combustion in the lungs. In cold weather we eat more, in warm less. The animal heat is the result of a slow combustion and disease and death take place when this is too rapid or for want of fuel or from some defect in the draft the fire goes out. Of course the vital heat is not to be confounded with fire but so much for analogy. It appears therefore from the above list that the expression animal life is nearly synonymous with the expression animal heat for while food may be regarded as the fuel which keeps up the fire within us and fuel serves only to prepare that food or to increase the warmth of our bodies by addition from without. Shelter and clothing also serve only to retain the heat thus generated and absorbed. The grand necessity then for our bodies is to keep warm, to keep the vital heat in us. What pains we accordingly take not only with our food and clothing and shelter but with our beds which are our night clothes robbing the nests and breasts of birds to prepare the shelter within a shelter as the mole has its bed of grass and leaves at the end of its burrow. The poor man is wont to complain that this is a cold world. And to cold no less physical than social we refer directly a great part of our ails. The summer in some climates make possible to man a sort of Elysian life Fuel, except to cook his food, is then unnecessary. The sun is his fire and many of the fruits are sufficiently cooked by its rays. While food generally is more various and more easily obtained and clothing and shelter are wholly or half unnecessary. At the present day and in this country as I find by my own experience a few implements, a knife, an axe, a spade, a wheelbarrow, etc. And for the studious, lamplight, stationery and access to a few books rank next to necessaries and can all be obtained at a trifling cost. Yet some, not wise, go to the other side of the globe to barbarous and unhealthy regions and devote themselves to trade for ten or twenty years in order that they may live, that is keep comfortably warm and die in New England at last. The luxuriously rich are not simply kept comfortably warm but unnaturally hot. As I implied before, they are cooked, of course, alamode. End of the first part of Chapter 1 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information and to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org This reading by Gordon McKenzie Walden by Henry David Thoreau Chapter 1 LibriVox Part 2 Most of the luxuries in many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind. With respect to luxuries and comforts the wisest have ever lived a more simple and meager life than the poor. The ancient philosophers, Chinese, Hindu, Persian, and Greek were a class than which none has been poorer in outward riches, none so rich in inward. We know not much about them. It is remarkable that we know so much of them as we do. The same is true of the more modern reformers and benefactors of their race. None can be an impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary poverty. Of a life of luxury, the fruit is luxury whether in agriculture or commerce or literature or art. There are nowadays professors of philosophy but not philosophers. Yet it is admirable to profess because it was once admirable to live. To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts nor even to found a school. But so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life not only theoretically but practically. The success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success not kingly, not manly. They make shift to live merely by conformity practically as their fathers did and are in no sense the progenitors of a noble race of men. But why do men degenerate ever? What makes families run out? What is the nature of the luxury which innervates and destroys nations? Are we sure that there is none of it in our own lives? The philosopher is in advance of his age even in the outward form of his life. He is not fed, sheltered, clothed, warmed, like his contemporaries. How can a man be a philosopher and not maintain his vital heat by better methods than other men? When a man is warmed by the several modes which I have described, what does he want next? Surely not more warmth of the same kind as more and richer food, larger and more splendid houses, finer and more abundant clothing, more numerous, incessant and hotter fires, and the like. When he has obtained those things which are necessary to life, there is another alternative than to obtain the superfluities and that is to adventure on life now, his vacation from humbler toil having commenced. The soil, it appears, is suited to the seed for it has sent its radical downward and it may now send its chute upward, also with confidence. Why has man rooted himself thus firmly in the earth but that he may rise in the same proportion into the heavens above? For the nobler plants are valued for the fruit they bear at last in the air and light far from the ground and are not treated like the humbler escalants which, though they may be biennials and cultivated only till they have perfected their root and often cut down atop for this purpose so that most would not know them in their flowering season. I do not mean to prescribe rules to strong and valiant natures who will mind their own affairs whether in heaven or hell and perchance build more magnificently and spend more lavishly than the richest without ever impoverishing themselves not knowing how they live. If indeed there are any such as has been dreamed nor to those who find their encouragement and inspiration in precisely the present condition of things and cherish it with the fondness and enthusiasm of lovers and, to some extent, I reckon myself in this number. I do not speak to those who are well employed in whatever circumstances and they know whether they are well employed or not. But, mainly, to the mass of men who are discontented and idly complaining of the hardness of their lot or of the times when they might improve them there are some who complain most energetically and inconsolably of any because they are, as they say, doing their duty. I also have in mind that seemingly wealthy but most terribly impoverished class of all who have accumulated dross but know not how to use it or get rid of it and thus have forged their own golden or silver fetters. If I should attempt to tell what I have desired to spend my life in years past it would probably surprise those of my readers who are somewhat acquainted with its actual history. It would certainly astonish those who know nothing about it. I will only hint at some of the enterprises which I have cherished. In any weather, at any hour of the day or night I have been anxious to improve the nick of time and notch it on my stick too to stand on the meeting of two eternities the past and future which is precisely the present moment to tow that line. You will pardon some obscurities for there are more secrets in my trade than in most men's and yet not voluntarily kept but inseparable from its very nature. I would gladly tell all that I know about it and never paint no admittance on my gate. I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse and a turtle dove and am still on their trail. Many are the travelers I have spoken concerning them describing their tracks and what calls they answered to. I have met one or two who had heard the hound and the tramp of the horse and even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them themselves. To anticipate, not the sunrise and the dawn merely but if possible nature herself. How many mornings, summer and winter, before yet any neighbor was stirring about his business have I been about mine? No doubt many of my townsmen have met me returning from this enterprise, farmers starting for Boston in the twilight or wood choppers going to their work. It is true, I never assisted the sun materially in his rising, but doubt not it was of the last importance only to be present at it. So many autumn, days and winter days spent outside the town trying to hear what was in the wind to hear and carry it express. I well nigh sunk all my capital in it and lost my own breath into the bargain running in the face of it. If it had concerned either of the political parties depend upon it it would have appeared in the Gazette with the earliest intelligence. At other times watching from the observatory of some cliff or tree to telegraph any new arrival or waiting at evening on the hilltops that I might catch something though I never caught much and that, manner-wise would dissolve again in the sun. For a long time I was reporter to a journal of no very wide circulation whose editor has never yet seen fit to print the bulk of my contributions and, as is too common with writers, I got only my labor for my pains. However, in this case my pains were their own reward. For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snowstorms and rainstorms and did my duty faithfully, surveyor, if not of highways, then of forest paths and all across lot routes keeping them open and ravines bridged and passable at all seasons where the public hill had testified to their utility. I have looked after the wild stock of the town which give a faithful herdsman a good deal of trouble by leaping fences and I have had an eye to the unfrequented nooks and corners of the farm though I did not always know whether Jonas or Solomon worked in a particular field today that was none of my business. I have watered the red huckleberry, the sand cherry and the nettle tree, the red pine and the black ash, the white grape and the yellow violet which might have withered else in dry seasons. In short, I went on thus for a long time I may say it without boasting faithfully minding my business till it became more and more evident that my townsman would not after all admit me into the list of town officers nor make my place a sin assure with a moderate allowance. My accounts which I can swear to have kept faithfully I have indeed never got audited still less accepted, still less paid and settled however I have not set my heart on that. Not long since a strolling Indian went to sell baskets at the house of a well-known lawyer in my neighborhood. Do you wish to buy any baskets? he asked. No, we do not want any, was the reply. What? exclaimed the Indian as he went out the gate. Do you mean to starve us? Having seen his industrious white neighbors so well off that the lawyer had only to weave arguments and by some magic wealth and standing followed he had said to himself I will go into business I will weave baskets it is a thing which I can do thinking that when he had made the baskets he would have done his part and then it would be the white man's to buy them. He had not discovered that it was necessary for him to make it worth the others while to buy them or at least make him think that it was so or to make something else which it would be worth his while to buy. I too had woven a kind of basket of a delicate texture but I had not made it worth anyone's while to buy them yet not the less in my case did I think it worth my while to weave them and instead of studying how to make it worth men's while to buy my baskets I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them the life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind why should we exaggerate any one kind at the expense of the others? Finding that my fellow citizens were not likely to offer me any room in the courthouse or any curacy or living anywhere else but I must shift for myself I turned my face more exclusively than ever to the woods where I was better known I determined to go into business at once and not wait to acquire the usual capital using such slender means as I had already got but the purpose in going to Walden Pond was not to live cheaply nor to live dearly there but to transact some private business with the fewest obstacles to be hindered from accomplishing which for want of a little common sense a little enterprise and business talent appeared not so sad as foolish I have always endeavored to acquire strict business habits they are indispensable to every man is with the celestial empire then some small counting house on the coast in some Salem harbour will be fixture enough you will export such articles as the country affords purely native products much ice and pine timber and a little granite always in native bottoms these will be good ventures to oversee all the details yourself in person to be at once pilot and captain and owner and underwriter to buy and sell and keep the accounts that are received and write or read every letter sent to superintend the discharge of imports night and day to be upon many parts of the coast almost at the same time often the richest freight will be discharged upon a jersey shore to be your own telegraph unwirably sweeping the horizon speaking all passing vessels bound coast wise to keep up a steady dispatch of commodities for the supply of such a distant and exorbitant market to keep yourself informed of the state of the markets of peace everywhere and anticipate the tendencies of trade and civilization taking advantage of the results of all exploring expeditions using new passages and all improvements in navigation charts to be studied the position of reefs and new lights and boys to be ascertained and ever and ever the logarithmic tables to be corrected for by the error of some calculator the vessel often splits upon a rock that should have reached a friendly pier there is the untold fate of La Prus universal science to be kept pace with studying the lives of all great discoverers and navigators great adventurers and merchants from Hano and the Phoenicians down to our day in fine account of stock to be taken from time to time to know how you stand it is a labor to task the faculties of a man such problems of profit and loss of interest of tear and tread engaging of all kinds in it as demand a universal knowledge I have thought that Walden Pond would be a good place for business not solely on account of the railroad and the ice trade it offers advantages which it may not be good policy to divulge it is a good port and a good foundation no never marshes to be filled though you must everywhere build on piles of your own driving it is said that a flood tide with a westerly wind and ice in the never would sweep St. Petersburg from the face of the earth as this business was to be entered into without the usual capital it may not be easy to conjecture where those means that will still be indispensable to every such undertaking were to be obtained as for clothing to come at once to the practical part of the question perhaps we are led oftener by the love of novelty and a regard for the opinions of men in procuring it then by a true utility let him who has work to do recollect that the object of clothing is first to retain the vital heat and secondly in this state of society to cover nakedness and he may judge how much of any necessary or important work may be accomplished without adding to his wardrobe kings and queens who wear a suit but once though made by some tailor or dressmaker to their majesties cannot know the comfort of wearing a suit that fits they are no better than wooden horses to hang the clean clothes on every day our garments become more assimilated to ourselves receiving the impress of the wearer's character until we hesitate to lay them aside without such delay and medical appliances and some such solemnity even as our bodies no man ever stood the lower in my estimation for having a patch in his clothes yet I am sure that there is greater anxiety commonly to have fashionable or at least clean and unpatched clothes than to have a sound conscience but even if the rent is not mended perhaps the worst vice betrayed is improvidence I sometimes try my acquaintances by such tests as this who could wear a patch or two extra seams only over the knee most behave as if they believed that their prospects for life would be ruined if they should do it it would be easier for them to hobble to town with a broken leg than with a broken pantaloon often if an accident happens to a gentleman's legs they can be mended but if a similar accident happens to the legs of his pantaloons there is no help for it for he considers not what is truly respectable but what is respected we know but few men a great many coats and breeches you standing shiftless by who would not soonest salute the scarecrow passing a cornfield the other day close by a hat and coat on a stake I recognize the owner of the farm he was only a little more weather beaten than when I saw him last I have heard of a dog that barked at every stranger who approached his master's premises with clothes on but as easily quieted by a naked thief it is an interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes could you in such a case tell surely of any company of civilized men which belonged to the most respected class when Madame Pfeiffer in her adventurous travels round the world from east to west had got so near home as Asiatic Russia she says that she felt the necessity of wearing other than a traveling dress when she went to meet the authorities for she was now in a civilized where people are judged by their clothes even in our democratic new England towns the accidental possession of wealth and its manifestation in dress and equipage alone obtain for the possessor almost universal respect but they yield such respect numerous as they are are so far heathen and need to have a missionary sent to them besides clothes introduced sewing a kind of work which you would never have done unless a woman's dress at least is never done a man who has at length found something to do will not need to get a new suit to do it in for him the old will do that has lain dusty in the garret for an indeterminate period old shoes will serve a hero longer than they have served his valet if a hero ever has a valet bare feet are older than shoes only those who go to soirees and legislative balls must have new coats coats to changes often as the man changes in them but if my jacket and trousers, my hat and shoes are fit to worship God in they will do will they not whoever saw his old clothes his old coat actually worn out resolved into its primitive elements so that it was not a deed of charity to bestow it on some poor boy her chance to be bestowed on some poor still or shall we say richer who could do with less I say beware of all enterprises that require new clothes and not rather a new wearer of clothes if there is not a new man how can the new clothes be made to fit if you have any enterprise before you try it in your old clothes all men want not something to do with but something to do or rather something to be perhaps we should never procure a new suit however ragged or dirty the old till we have so conducted so enterprise or sailed in some way that we feel like new men in the old and that to retain it would be like keeping new wine in old bottles our molting season like that of the fowls must be a crisis in our lives the loon retires to solitary ponds to spend it thus also the snake casts its slough and the caterpillar its wormy coat by an internal industry and expansion for clothes are but our outmost cuticle and mortal coil otherwise we shall be found sailing under false colors and be inevitably cashiered at last by our own opinion as well as that of mankind we don garment after garment as if we grew like exogenous plants by addition without our outside and often thin and fanciful clothes are our epidermis our false skin which partakes not of our life and may be stripped off here and there without fatal injury our thicker garments constantly worn are our cellular or cortex but our shirts are our or true bark which cannot be removed without girdling and so destroying the man I believe that all races at some seasons wear something equivalent to the shirt it is desirable that a man be clad so simply that he can lay his hands on himself in the dark and that he live in all respect so compactly and preparedly that if an enemy take the town he can like the old philosopher walk out the gate empty handed without anxiety while one thick garment is for most purposes as good as three thin ones and cheap clothing can be obtained at prices really to suit customers while a thick coat can be bought for five dollars which will last as many years thick pantaloons for two dollars cowhide boots for a dollar and a half a pair a summer hat for a quarter of a dollar and a winter cap for sixty-two and a half cents or a better be made at home at a nominal cost whereas he so poor that clad in such a suit of his own earning there will not be found wise men to do him reverence when I ask for a garment of a particular form Taylor S. tells me gravely they do not make them so now not emphasizing the they at all as if she quoted an authority as impersonal as the fates and I find it difficult to get what I want simply because she cannot believe that I mean what I say that I am so rash when I hear this oracular sentence I am for a moment absorbed in the thought emphasizing to myself each word separately that I may come at the meaning of it and find out by what degree of consanguinity they are related to me and what authority they may have in an affair which affects me so nearly and finally I am inclined to answer her with equal mystery and without any more emphasis of the they quote it is true they did not make them so recently but they do now end quote of what use this measuring of me if she does not understand my character but only the breadth of my shoulders as it were a peg to bang the coat on we worship not the graces nor the parse but fashion she spins and weaves and cuts with full authority the head monkey at Paris puts on a traveller's cap and all the monkeys in America do the same I sometimes despair of getting anything quite simple and honest done in this world by the help of men they would have to be passed through the press first to squeeze their old notions out of them so that they would not so soon get upon their legs again and then there would be someone in the company with a maggot in his head hatched from an egg deposited there nobody knows when for not even fire kills these things and you would have lost your labor nevertheless we will not forget that some Egyptian wheat was handed down to us by a mummy on the whole it cannot be maintained that dressing has in this or any country risen to the dignity of an art at present men make shift to wear what they can get like shipwrecked sailors they put on what they can find on the beach and at a little distance whether of space or time laugh at each other's masquerade every generation laughs at the old fashions but follows religiously the new we are amused at beholding the costume of Henry VIII or Queen Elizabeth as much as if it was that of the king and queen of the cannibal islands all costume of a man is pitiful or grotesque it is only the serious eye peering from and the sincere life passed within it which restrained laughter and consecrate the costume of any people let Harlequin be taken with a fit of the colic and his trappings will have to serve that mood too when the soldier is hit by a cannonball rags are as becoming as purple the childish and savage taste of men and women for new patterns keeps how many shaking and squinting through kaleidoscopes that they may discover the particular figure which this generation requires today the manufacturers have learned that this taste is merely whimsical of two patterns which differ only by a few threads more or less of a particular color the one will be sold readily the other lie on the shelf though it frequently happens that after the lapse of a season the latter the more fashionable comparatively tattooing is not the hideous custom which it is called it is not barbarous merely because the printing is skin deep and unalterable I cannot believe that our factory system is the best mode by which men may get clothing the condition of the operatives is becoming every day more like that of the English and it cannot be wondered at since as far as I have heard or observed the principal object is that mankind may be well and honestly clad but unquestionably that corporations may be enriched in the long run men hit only what they aim at therefore though they should fail immediately they had better aim at something high as for a shelter I will not deny that this is now a necessary of life though there are instances of men having done without it in older periods in colder countries than this Samuel Lang says that quote the laplander in his skin dress and in a skin bag which he puts over his head and shoulders will sleep night after night on the snow in a degree of cold which would extinguish the life of one exposed to it in any woollen clothing end quote he had seen them asleep thus yet he adds quote they are not hardier than end quote but probably the man did not live long on the earth without discovering the convenience which there is in a house the domestic comforts which phrase may have originally signified the satisfactions of the house more than of the family though these must be extremely partial and occasional in those climates where the house is associated in our thoughts with winter or the rainy season chiefly and two thirds of the year except for a parasol is unnecessary in the climate in the summer it was formerly almost solely a covering at night in the Indian Gazettes a wigwam was the symbol of a day's march and a row of them cut her painted on the bark of a tree signified that so many times they had camped man was not made so large-limbed and robust but that he must seek to narrow his world and wall in a space such as fitted him he was at first bare and out of doors but though this was pleasant enough in serene and warm weather by daylight the rainy season and the winter to say nothing of the torrid sun would perhaps have nipped his race in the bud if he had not made haste to clothe himself with the shelter of a house Adam and Eve according to the fable wore the bower before other clothes man wanted a home a place of warmth or comfort first of warmth then the warmth of the affections we may imagine a time when in the infancy of the human race some enterprising mortal crept into a hollow in a rock for shelter every child begins the world again to some extent and loves to stay outdoors even in wet and cold it plays house as well as horse having an instinct for it who does not remember the interest with which when young he looked at shelving rocks or any approach to a cave it was the natural yearning of that portion primitive ancestor which still survived in us from the cave we have advanced to roofs of palm leaves of bark and boughs of linen woven and stretched of grass and straw of boards and shingles of stones and tiles at last we know not what it is to live in the open air and our lives are domestic in more senses than we think from the hearth the field is a great distance it would be well perhaps if we were to spend more of our days and nights without any obstruction between us and the celestial bodies if the poet did not speak so much from under a roof or the saint dwell there so long birds do not sing in caves nor do doves cherish their innocence in dovecotts however if one designs to construct a dwelling house it behooves him to exercise a little Yankee shrewdness lest after all he find himself in a workhouse a labyrinth without a clue a museum an alms house a prison or a splendid mausoleum instead consider first how slight a shelter is absolutely necessary I have seen Penobscot Indians in this town living in tents of thin cotton cloth while the snow was nearly a foot deep around them and I thought that they would be glad to have it deeper to keep out the wind formerly when how to get my living honestly my life for my proper pursuits was a question which vexed me even more than it does now for unfortunately I have become somewhat callous I used to see a large box by the railroad six feet long by three wide in which the laborers locked up their tools at night and it suggested to me that every man who has hard pushed might get such a one for a dollar and having bored a few auger holes in it to admit the air at least get into it when it rained and hook down the lid and so have freedom in his love and in his soul be free this did not appear the worst nor by any means a despicable alternative you could sit up as late as you pleased and whenever you got up go abroad without any landlord or house lord dogging you for rent many a man is harassed to death to pay the rent of a larger and more luxurious box who would not have frozen to death in such a box as this I am far from jesting economy is a subject which admits of being treated with levity but I cannot so be disposed of a comfortable house for a rude and hearty race that lived mostly out of doors was once made here almost entirely of such materials as nature furnished ready to their hands guken, who was superintendent of the Indians subject to the Massachusetts colony writing in 1674 says quote, the best of their houses are covered very neatly tight and warm with barks of trees slipped from their bodies at those seasons when the sap is up and made into great flakes with pressure of weighty timber when they are green the meaner sword are covered with mats which they make of a kind of bull rush and are also indifferently tight and warm but not so good as the former some I have seen 60 or 100 feet long and 30 feet broad I have often lodged a couple of wigwams and found them as warm as the best English houses end quote he adds that they were commonly carpeted and lined within with well wrought embroidered mats and were furnished with various utensils the Indians had advanced so far as to regulate the effect of the wind by a mat suspended over the hole in the roof and moved by a string such a lodge was in the first instance constructed in a day or two at most and taken down and put up in a few hours and every family owned one or its apartment in one end of chapter 1 LibriVox part 2 this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information please visit LibriVox.org this reading by Gordon Mackenzie Walden by Henry David Thoreau chapter 1 Economy LibriVox part 3 in the savage state every family owns a shelter as good as the best and sufficient for its coarser and simpler wants but I think that I speak within bounds when I say that though the birds of the air have their nests and the foxes their holes and the savages their wigwams in modern civilized society not more than one half the families own a shelter in the large towns and cities where civilization especially prevails the number of those who own a shelter is a very small fraction of the whole the rest pay an annual tax for this outside garment of all become indispensable summer and winter which would buy a village of Indian wigwams but now helps to keep them poor as long as they live I do not mean to insist here the advantage of hiring compared with owning but it is evident that the savage owns his shelter because it costs so little while the civilized man hires his commonly because he cannot afford to own it nor can he in the long run any better afford to hire but answers one by merely paying this tax the poor civilized man secures an abode which is a palace of savages an annual rent of from twenty five to a hundred dollars these are the country rates entitles him to the benefit of the improvements of centuries spacious apartments clean paint and paper rumford fireplace back plastering, venetian blinds copper pump, spring lock a commodious seller and many other things but how happens it that he who is said to so commonly a poor civilized man or the savage who has them not is rich as a savage if it is asserted that civilization is a real advance in the condition of man and I think that it is though only the wise improve their advantages it must be shown that it has produced better dwellings without making them more costly and the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it immediately or in the long run an average house in this neighborhood costs perhaps eight hundred dollars and to lay up this sum will take from ten to fifteen years of the laborer's life even if he is not encumbered with a family estimating the pecuniary value of every man's labor at one dollar a day for if some receive more others receive less that he must have spent more than half his life commonly before his wigwam will be earned if we suppose him to pay a rent instead this is but a doubtful choice of evils would the savage have been wise to exchange his wigwam for a palace on these terms it may be guessed that I reduce almost the whole advantage of holding this superfluous property as a fund in store against the future so far as the individual is concerned mainly to the defraying of funeral expenses but perhaps a man is not required to bury himself nevertheless this points to an important distinction between civilized man and the savage and no doubt they have designs on us for our benefit in making the life of a civilized people an institution in which the life of the individual is to a great extent absorbed in order to preserve and perfect that of the race but I wish to show at what a sacrifice this advantage is at present obtained and to suggest that we may possibly so live as to secure all the advantage without suffering any of the disadvantage what mean you by saying that the poor you have always with you or that the fathers have eaten sour grapes in the children's teeth are set on edge as I live sayeth the Lord God does not have occasion any more to use this proverb in Israel behold all souls are mine as the soul of the father soul also the soul of the son is mine the soul that sineth it shall die but I consider my neighbors the farmers of concord who are at least as well off as the other classes I find that for the most part they have been toiling for years that they may become the real owners of their farms which commonly they have inherited with encumbrances or else bought with hired money and we may regard one third of that toil as the cost of their houses but commonly they have not paid for them yet it is true the encumbrances sometimes outweigh the value of the farm so that the farm itself becomes one great encumbrance found to inherit it being well acquainted with it as he says on applying to the assessors I am surprised to learn that they cannot at once name a dozen in the town who own their farms free and clear if you would know the history of these homesteads inquire at the bank where they are mortgaged the man who has actually paid for his farm with labour on it is so rare that every neighbor can point to him I doubt if there are three such men in Concord what has been said of the merchants that a very large majority even 97 in 100 are sure to fail is equally true of the farmers with regard to the merchants however one of them says pertinently that a great part of their failures are not genuine pecuniary failures but merely failures to fulfil their engagements because it is inconvenient that is it is the moral character that breaks down but this puts an infinitely worse face on the matter and suggests besides that probably not even the other three succeed in saving their souls but our perchance bankrupt in a worse sense than they who fail honestly bankruptcy and repudiation are the springboards from which much of our civilisation vaults and turns its summer sets but the savage stands on the unelastic plank of famine yet the middle sex cattle show goes off here with a claw annually as if all the joints of the agricultural machine were suant the farmer is endeavouring to solve the problem of a livelihood by a formula more complicated than the problem itself to get his shoestrings he speculates in herds of cattle with consummate skill he has set his trap with a hair spring to catch comfort and independence and then as he turned away got his own leg into it this is the reason he is poor and for a similar reason we are all poor in respect to a thousand savage comforts though surrounded by luxuries as Chapman sings quote the false society of men for earthly greatness all heavenly comforts rarifies to air and when the farmer has got his house he may not be the richer but the poorer for it and it be the house that has got him as I understand it that was a valid objection urged by mamas against the house which Minerva made that she quote had not made it movable by which means a bad neighbourhood might be avoided end quote and it may still be urged for our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned in a house in them and the bad neighbourhood to be avoided is our own scurvy cells I know one or two families at least in this town who for nearly a generation have been wishing to sell their houses in the outskirts and move into the village but have not been able to accomplish it and only death will set them free granted that the majority are able at last either to own or hire the modern house with all its improvements while civilisation has been improving our houses it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them it has created palaces but it was not so easy to create noblemen and kings and if the civilised man's pursuits are no worthier than the savages if he is employed the greater part of his life in obtaining gross necessaries and comforts merely why should he have a better dwelling than the poor? but how do the poor minority fare perhaps it will be found that just in proportion as some have been placed in outward circumstances above the savage others have been degraded below him the luxury of one class is counterbalanced by the indigence of another on the one side is the palace on the other are the alms house and silent poor the myriads who built the pyramids to be the tombs of the pharaohs were fed on garlic and it may be were not decently varied themselves the mason who finishes the cornice of the palace returns at night per chance to a hut not so good as a wigwam it is a mistake to suppose that in a country where the usual evidences of civilisation exist the condition of a very large body of the inhabitants may not be as degraded as that of savages I refer to the degraded poor not now to the degraded rich to know this I should not need to look farther than to the shanties which everywhere border our railroads that last improvement in civilisation where I see in my daily walks human beings living in sties and all winter with an open door for the sake of light without any visible often imaginable woodpile the forms of both old and young are permanently contracted by the long habit of shrinking from cold and misery and the development of all their limbs and faculties is checked it certainly is fair to look at that class by whose labour the works which distinguish this generation are accomplished such too, to a greater or less extent is the condition of the operatives of every denomination in England which is the great workhouse of the world or I could refer you to Ireland which is marked as one of the white or enlightened spots on the map contrast the physical condition of the Irish with that of the North American Indian or the South Sea Islander or any other savage race before it was degraded by contact with the civilised man yet I have no doubt that that people's rulers are as wise as the average of civilised rulers their condition only proves what squalidness may consist with civilisation I hardly need refer now to the labourers in our southern states who produce the staple exports of this country and are themselves a staple production of the south but to confine myself to those who are said to be in moderate circumstances most men appear never to have considered what a house is and are actually though needlessly poor all their lives because they think that they must have such a one as their neighbours have as if one were to wear any sort of coat which the tailor might cut out for him or gradually leaving off palm leaf hat or cap of woodchuck skin complain of hard times because he could not afford to buy him a crown it is possible to invent a house still more convenient and luxurious than we have which yet all would admit that man could not afford to pay for shall we always study to obtain more of these things and not sometimes to be content with less shall the respectable citizen thus gravely teach by precept and example the necessity of the young man's providing a certain number of superfluous glow shoes and umbrellas and empty guest chambers for empty guests before he dies why should not our furniture be as simple as the Arabs or the Indians when I think of the benefactors of the race when we have apotheosized messengers from heaven bearers of divine gifts to man I do not see in my mind any retinue at their heels any carload of fashionable furniture or what if I were to allow would it not be a singular allowance that our furniture should be more complex than the Arabs in proportion as we are morally and intellectually his superiors at present our houses are cluttered and defiled with it and a good housewife would sweep out the greater part into the dust-hole and not leave her morning's work undone morning work by the blushes of Aurora and the music of Memnon what should be man's morning work in this world I had three pieces of limestone on my desk but I was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still and threw them out the window in disgust how then could I have a furnished house I would rather sit in the open air for no dust gathers on the grass unless where man has broken ground it is the luxurious and dissipated who set the fashions which the herd so diligently follow the traveller who stops at the best houses so called soon discovers this for the publicans presume him to be a sardinopolis and if he resigned himself to their tender mercies he would soon be completely emasculated I think that in the railroad car we are inclined to spend more on luxury than on safety and convenience and it threatens without attaining these to become no better than a modern drawing room with its divans and ottomans and sunshades and a hundred other oriental things which we are taking west with us invented for the ladies of the harem and the effeminate natives of the celestial empire which Jonathan should be ashamed to know the names of I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself than be crowded on a velvet cushion I would rather ride on earth in an ox cart with a free circulation than go to heaven in the fancy car of an excursion train and breathe a malaria all the way the very simplicity and nakedness of man's life in the primitive ages imply this advantage at least that they left him still but a sojourner in nature when he was refreshed with food and sleep he contemplated his journey again he dwelt as it were in a tent in this world and was either threading the valleys or crossing the plains or climbing the mountain tops but lo men have become the tools of their tools the man who independently plucked the fruits when he was hungry he's become a farmer and he who stood under a tree for shelter a housekeeper we now no longer camp as for a night but have settled down on earth and forgotten heaven we have adopted Christianity merely as an improved method of agriculture we have built for this world a family mansion and for the next a family tomb the best works of art are the expression and struggle to free himself from this condition but the effect of our art is merely to make this low state comfortable and that higher state to be forgotten there is actually no place in this village for a work of fine art if any had come down to us to stand for our lives our houses and streets furnish no proper pedestal for it there is not a nail to hang a picture on or a shelf to receive the bust of a hero or a saint when I consider how our houses are built and paid for or not paid for and their internal economy managed and sustained I wonder that the floor does not give way under the visitor while he is admiring the gougas upon the mantelpiece and let him through into the cellar to some solid and honest though earthy foundation I cannot but perceive that this so called rich and refined life is a thing jumped at and I do not get on in the enjoyment of the fine arts which adorn it my attention being wholly occupied with the jump for I remember that the greatest genuine leap due to human muscles alone on record is that of certain wandering Arabs who are said to have cleared 25 feet on level ground without factitious support man is sure to come to earth again beyond that distance the first question which I am tempted to put to the proprietor of such great impropriety is who bolsters you are you one of the 97 fail or the three who succeed answer me these questions and then perhaps I may look at your baubles and find them ornamental the cart before the horse is neither beautiful nor useful before we can adorn our houses with beautiful objects the walls must be stripped and our lives must be stripped and beautiful housekeeping and beautiful living be laid for a foundation now a taste for the beautiful is most cultivated outdoors where there is no house and no housekeeper old Johnson in his wonder-working Providence speaking of the first settlers of this town with whom he was contemporary tells us that they burrow themselves in the earth for their first shelter under some hillside and casting the soil aloft upon timber they make a smoky fire against the earth at the highest side end quote they did not quote provide them houses end quote says he quote till the earth by the Lord's blessing brought forth bread to feed them end quote and the first year's crop was so light that quote they were forced to cut their bread very thin for a long season end quote the secretary of the province of New Netherland, writing in Dutch in 1650 for the information of those who wish to take up land there states more particularly that quote those in New Netherland and especially in New England who have no means to build farmhouses at first according to their wishes dig a square pit in the ground cellar fashion six or seven feet deep as long and as broad as they think proper inside with wood all around the wall and line the wood with the bark of trees or something else to prevent the caving in of the earth floor this cellar with plank and wanes caught it overhead for a ceiling raise a roof of spars clear up and cover the spars with bark or green sods so that they can live dry and warm in these houses with their entire families for two, three and four years it being understood that partitions are run through these cellars which are adapted to the size of the family the wealthy and principal men in New England in the beginning of the colonies commenced their first dwelling houses in this fashion for two reasons firstly in order not to waste time in building and not to want food the next season secondly in order not to discourage poor laboring people whom they brought over in numbers from fatherland in the course of three or four years when the country became adapted to agriculture they built themselves handsome houses spending on them several thousands end quote in this course which our ancestors took there was a show of prudence at least as if their principal were to satisfy the more pressing wants first but are the more pressing wants satisfied now when I think of acquiring for myself one of our luxurious dwellings I am deterred for so to speak the country is not yet adapted to human culture and we are still forced to cut our spiritual bread far thinner than our forefathers did their wheaten not that all architectural ornament is to be neglected even in the rudest periods but let our houses first be lined with beauty may they come in contact with our lives like the tenement of the shellfish and not overlaid with it but alas I have been inside one or two of them and know what they are lined with though we are not so degenerate but that we might possibly live in a cave or a wigwam or wear skins today it certainly is better to accept the advantages that we have so dearly bought which the invention and industry of mankind offer in such a neighbourhood as this boards and shingles, lime and bricks are cheaper and more easily obtained than suitable caves or whole logs or bark in sufficient quantities or even well tempered clay of or flat stones I speak understandingly on this subject for I have made myself acquainted with it both theoretically and practically with a little more wit we might use these materials so as to become richer than the richest now are and make our civilisation a blessing the civilised man is a more experienced and wiser savage but to make haste to my own experiment near the end of March 1845 I borrowed an axe and went down to the woods by Walden Pond nearest to where I intended to build my house and began to cut down some tall airowy white pines still in their youth for timber it is difficult to begin without borrowing but perhaps it is the most generous course thus to permit your fellow man to have an interest in your enterprise the owner of the axe as he released his hold on it said that it was the apple of his eye but I returned it sharper than I received it it was a pleasant hillside where I worked covered with pine woods through which I looked out on the pond and a small open field in the woods where pines and hickories were springing up the ice in the pond was not yet dissolved though there were some open spaces and it was all dark coloured and saturated with water there were some slight flurries of snow during the days that I worked there but for the most part when I came out on to the railroad on my way home its yellow sand heap stretched away gleaming in the hazy atmosphere and the rails shone in the spring sun and I heard the lark and pawee and other birds already come to commence another year with us they were pleasant spring days in which the winter of man's discontent was thawing as well as the earth and the life that had lain torpid began to stretch itself one day when my axe had come off and I had cut a green hickory for a wedge driving it with a stone and had placed the hole to soak in a pond hole in order to swell the wood I saw a striped snake run into the water delay on the bottom apparently without inconvenience as long as I stayed there or more than a quarter of an hour perhaps because he had not yet fairly come out of the torpid state it appeared to me for a likely reason men remain in their present low and primitive condition but if they should feel the influence of the spring of springs arousing them they would of necessity rise to a higher and more ethereal life I had previously seen the snakes in frosty mornings in my path with portions of their bodies still numb and inflexible waiting for the sun to thaw them on the first of April it rained and melted the ice and in the early part of the day which was very foggy I heard a stray goose groping about over the pond and cackling as if lost or like the spirit of the fog so I went on for some days cutting and hewing timber and also studs and rafters all with my narrow axe not having many communicable or scholar like thoughts singing to myself men say they know many things but low they have taken wings the arts and sciences and a thousand appliances the wind that blows is all that anybody knows I hewed the main timbers a six inches square most of the studs on two sides only and the rafters and floor timbers on one side leaving the rest of the bark on so that they were just as straight and much stronger than the sod ones each stick was carefully mortist or tenoned by its stump for I had borrowed other tools by this time my days in the woods were not very long ones yet I usually carried my dinner of bread and butter and read the newspaper in which it was wrapped at noon sitting amid the green pine boughs which I had cut off and to my bread was imparted some of their fragrance for my hands were covered with a thick coat of pitch before I had done I was more the friend than the foe of the pine tree though I had cut down some of them having become better acquainted with it sometimes a rambler in the wood was attracted by the sound of my axe and we chatted pleasantly over the chips which I had made by the middle of April for I made no haste in my work but rather made the most of it my house was framed and ready for the raising I had already bought the shanty of James Collins an Irishman who worked on the Fitchburg Railroad for boards James Collins shanty was considered an uncommonly fine one when I called to see it he was not at home I walked about the outside at first unobserved from within the windows were so deep and high it was of small dimensions with a peaked cottage roof and not much else to be seen the dirt being raised five feet all around as if it were a compost heap the roof was the soundest part though a good deal warped and made brittle by the sun door sill there was none but a perennial passage for the hens under the door-board Mrs. C. came to the door and asked me to view it from the inside the hens were driven in the hens were driven in by my approach it was dark and had a dirt floor for the most part dank, clammy and eggy-ish only hear a board and there a board which would not bear removal she lighted a lamp to show me the inside of the roof and the walls and also that the board floor extended under the bed warning me not to step into the cellar a sort of dust-hole two feet deep in her own words they were good boards over head good boards all around and a good window of two whole squares originally only the cat had passed out that way lately there was a stove, a bed and a place to sit an infant in the house where it was born a silk parasol gilt-framed looking-glass and a patent-new coffee mill nailed to an oak sapling all told the bargain was soon concluded for James had in the meantime returned I to pay four dollars and twenty-five cents tonight he to vacate at five tomorrow morning selling to nobody else meanwhile I to take possession at six it were well he said to be there early and anticipate certain indistinct but wholly unjust claims on the score of ground rent and fuel this he assured me was the only encumbrance at six I passed him and his family on the road one large bundle held their all bed, coffee mill looking-glass, hens all but the cat she took to the woods and became a wild cat and as I learned afterward trod in a trap set for woodchucks and so became a dead cat at last I took down this dwelling the same morning drawing the nails and removed it to the pond side by small cartloads spreading the boards on the grass there to bleach and warp back again in the sun one early thrush gave me a note or two as I drove along the woodland path I was informed treacherously by a young Patrick that neighbor Sealy, an Irishman in the intervals of the carting transferred the still tolerable straight and drivable nails staples and spikes to his pocket and then stood when I came back to pass the time of day freshly up unconcerned with spring thoughts at the devastation there being a dearth of work as he said he was there to represent spectatordom and help make this seemingly insignificant event one with the removal of the gods of Troy I dug my cellar in the side of a hill sloping to the south where a woodchuck had formerly dug his burrow down through sumac and blackberry roots the lowest stain of vegetation six feet square by seven deep to a fine sand where potatoes would not freeze in any winter the sides were left shelving and not stoned but the sun having never shone on them the sand still keeps its place it was but two hours work I took particular pleasure in this breaking of ground for in almost all latitudes men dig into the earth for an equable temperature under the most splendid house in the city is still to be found at the cellar where they store their roots as of old and long after the superstructure has disappeared posterity remark its dent in the earth the house is still but a sort of porch at the entrance of a burrow at length in the beginning of May with the help of some of my acquaintances rather to improve so good an occasion for neighborliness then from any necessity I set up the frame of my house no man was ever more honored in the character of his razors than I they are destined I trust to assist at the raising of loftier structures one day I began to occupy my house on the fourth of July as soon as it was boarded and roofed for the boards were carefully feather edged and lapped so that it was perfectly impervious to rain but before boarding I laid the foundation of a chimney at one end bringing two cartloads of stones up the hill from the pond in my arms I built the chimney after my hoeing in the fall before a fire became necessary for warmth doing my cooking in the meanwhile out of doors on the ground early in the morning which mode I still think is in some respects more convenient and agreeable than the usual one when it stormed before my bread was baked I placed a few boards over the fire and sat under them to watch my loaf and passed some pleasant hours in that way in those days when my hands were much employed I read but little but the least scraps of paper which lay on the ground my holder or tablecloth afforded me as much entertainment in fact answered the same purpose as the Iliad it would be worth the while still more deliberately than I did considering for instance what foundation a door a window, a cellar a garret have in the nature of man and perchance never raising any superstructure until we found a better reason for it than our temporal necessities even there is some of the same fitness in a man's building his own house that there is in a bird's building who knows but if men constructed their dwellings with their own hands and provided food for themselves and families simply and honestly enough the poetic faculty would be universally developed as birds universally sing when they are so engaged but alas we do like cowbirds and cuckoos which lay their eggs in nests which other birds have built with their chattering and unmusical notes shall we forever resign the pleasure of construction to the carpenter what does architecture amount to in the experience of the mass of men I never in all my walks came across a man engaged in so simple and natural an occupation as building his house we belong to the community it is not the tailor alone who is the ninth part of a man it is as much the preacher and the merchant and the farmer where is this division of labor to end and what object does it finally serve no doubt another may also think for me but it is not therefore desirable that he should do so to the exclusion of my thinking for myself true there are architects so called in this country and I have heard of one at least possessed with the idea of making architectural ornaments have a core of truth a necessity and hence a beauty as if it were a revelation to him all very well perhaps from his point of view but only a little better than the common dilettantism a sentimental reformer in architecture he began at the cornice not at the foundation it was only how to put a core of truth within the ornaments that every sugarplum in fact might have an almond or caraway seed in it though I hold that almonds are most wholesome without the sugar and not how the inhabitant the indweller might build truly within and without and let the ornaments take care of themselves what reasonable man ever supposed were something outward and in the skin merely that the tortoise got his spotted shell or the shellfish its mother of pearl tints by such a contract as the inhabitants of broadway their trinity church but a man has no more to do with the style of architecture of his house than a tortoise with that of its shell nor need the soldier be so idle as to try to paint the precise color of his virtue on his standard the enemy will find it out he may turn pale when the trial comes this man seemed to me to lean over the cornice and timidly whisper his half truth to the rude occupants who really knew it better than he what of architectural beauty I now see I know has gradually grown from within outward out of the necessities and character of the indweller who is the only builder out of some unconscious truthfulness and nobleness without ever a thought for the appearance and what additional beauty of this kind is destined to be produced will be preceded by a like unconscious beauty of life the most interesting dwellings in this country as the painter knows are the most unpretending humble log huts and cottages of the poor commonly it is the life of the inhabitants whose shells they are and not any peculiarity in their surfaces merely which make them picturesque and equally interesting will be the citizens suburban box when his life shall be as simple and as agreeable to the imagination and there is as little straining after effect in the style of his dwelling a great proportion of architectural ornaments are literally hollow and a September Gale would strip them off like borrowed plumes without injury to the substantial they can do without architecture who have no olives nor wines in the cellar what if an equal ado were made about the ornaments of style in literature and the architects of our bibles spent as much time about their cornices as the architects of our churches do so are made the bellet and the bazaar and their professors much it concerns a man for soothe how a few sticks are slanted over him or under him and what colors are dogged upon his box it would signify somewhat life in any earnest sense he slanted them and dogged it but the spirit having departed out of the tenant it is of a peace with constructing his own coffin the architecture of the grave and Carpenters but another name for coffin maker one man says in his despair or indifference to life take up a handful of the earth at your feet and paint your house that color is he thinking of his last and narrow house toss up a copper for it as well what an abundance of leisure he must have why do you take up a handful of dirt better paint your house your own complexion let it turn pale or blush for you an enterprise to improve of cottage architecture when you have got my ornaments ready I will wear them before winter I built a chimney and shingled the sides of my house which were already impervious to rain with imperfect and sappy shingles made of the first slice of the log whose edges I was obliged to straighten with a plane I have thus a tight shingled and plastered house ten feet wide by fifteen long sheets with a garret and a closet a large window on each side two trap doors one door at the end and a brick fireplace opposite the exact cost of my house paying the usual price for such materials as I used but not counting the work all of which was done by myself was as follows and I give the details because very few are able to tell exactly what their houses cost and few are still if any the separate cost of the various materials boards eight dollars three cents plus mostly shanty boards refuse shingles for roof sides four dollars laths a dollar twenty five two secondhand windows with glass two dollars forty three cents one thousand old brick four dollars two casks of lime two dollars forty cents that was high hair thirty one cents more than I needed mantle tree iron fifteen cents nails three dollars ninety cents hinges and screws fourteen cents latch ten cents chalk one cent transportation one dollar forty cents I carried a good part on my back in all twenty eight dollars twenty eight dollars and twelve cents plus these are all the materials accepting the timbers stones and sand which I claim to buy squatters right I have also a small woodshed adjoining made chiefly of the stuff which was left after building the house I intend to build me a house which will surpass any on the main street in Concord in grandeur and luxury as soon as it pleases me as much and will cost me no more than my present one I thus found that the student who wishes for a shelter can obtain one for a lifetime at an expense not greater than the rent which he now pays annually if I seem to boast more than is becoming my excuse is that I brag for humanity rather than for myself and my shortcomings and inconsistencies do not affect the truth of my statement notwithstanding much can't and hypocrisy chaff which I find it difficult to separate from my wheat but for which I am as sorry as any man I will breathe freely and stretch myself in this respect it is such a relief to both the moral and physical system and I am resolved that I will not through humility become the devil's attorney I will endeavour to speak a good word for the truth at Cambridge College the mere rent of a student's room which is only a little larger than my own is $30 each year though the corporation had the advantage of building 32 side by side and under one roof and the occupant suffers the inconvenience of many and noisy neighbours and perhaps a residence in the fourth story I cannot but think that if we had more true wisdom in these respects not only less education would be needed because for Seuth more would already have been acquired but the pecuniary expense of getting an education would in a great measure vanish those conveniences which the student requires at Cambridge or elsewhere cost him or somebody else 10 times as great a sacrifice of life as they would with proper management on both sides those things for which the most money is demanded are never the things which the student most wants tuition for instance an important item in the term Bill while for the far more valuable education which he gets by associating with the most cultivated of his contemporaries no charge is made the mode of founding a college is commonly to get up a subscription of dollars and cents and then following blindly the principles of the division of labour to its extreme a principle which should never be followed but with circumspection in a contractor who makes this a subject of speculation and he employs Irishman or other operatives actually to lay the foundations while the students that are to be are said to be fitting themselves for it and for these oversights successive generations have to pay I think that it would be better than this for the students or those who desire to be benefited by it even to lay the foundation themselves the student who secures his coveted leisure and retirement by systematically shirking any labour necessary to man obtains but an innoble and unprofitable leisure defrauding himself of the experience which alone can make leisure fruitful but says one you do not mean that the students should go to work with their hands instead of their heads I do not mean that exactly but I mean something which he might think a good deal like that I mean that they should not play life or study it merely while the community supports them at this expensive game but earnestly live it from beginning to end how could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living me thinks this would exercise their minds as much as mathematics if I wished a boy to know something about the arts and sciences for instance I would not pursue the common course which is merely to send him into the neighborhood of some professor where anything is professed and practiced but the art of life to survey the world through a telescope or a microscope and never with his natural eye to study chemistry and not learn how his bread is made or mechanics and not learn how it is earned to discover new satellites to Neptune and not detect the motes in his eyes or to what vagabond he is a satellite himself or to be devoured by the monsters that swarm all around him while contemplating the monsters in a drop of vinegar which would have advanced the most at the end of a month the boy who had made his own jackknife from the ore which he had dug and smelted reading as much as would be necessary for this or the boy who had attended the lectures on metallurgy at the institute in the meanwhile and had received a Rogers penknife from his father which would be most likely to cut his fingers to my astonishment I was informed on leaving college that I had studied navigation why? if I had taken one turn down the harbor I should have known more about it even the poor student studies and is taught only political economy while that economy of living which is synonymous with philosophy is not even sincerely professed in our colleges the consequence is he is reading Adam Smith Ricardo and say he runs his father in debt irretrievably and Chapter 1 LibriVox Part 3 this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information please visit LibriVox.org this reading by Gordon Mackenzie Walden by Henry David Thoreau Part 4 as with our colleges so with a hundred modern improvements there is an illusion about them there is not always a positive advance the devil goes on exacting compound interest to the last for his early share and numerous succeeding investments in them our inventions are want to be pretty toys which distract our attention from serious things they are but improved means to an unimproved end an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at as railroads lead to Boston or New York we are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas but Maine and Texas it may be have nothing important to communicate either is in such a predicament as the man who was earnest to be introduced to a distinguished deaf woman but when he was presented and one end of her ear trumpet was put into his hand had nothing to say as if the Maine object were to talk fast and not to talk sensibly we are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad flapping American year will be that the princess Adelaide has the whooping cough after all the man of course trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most important messages he is not an evangelist nor does he come round eating locusts and wild honey I doubt if flying children's ever carried a peck of corn to mill one says to me I wonder that you do not lay up a money you love to travel you might take the cars and go to Fitchburg today and see the country but I am wiser than that I have learned that the swiftest road shows a foot I say to my friend suppose we try who will get there first the distance is 30 miles the fair 90 cents that is almost a day's wages I remember when wages were 60 cents a day for laborers on this very road well I start now on foot and get there before night I have traveled at that rate by the week together you will in the meanwhile arrive there sometime tomorrow or possibly this evening if you are lucky enough to get a job in season instead of going to Fitchburg you will be working here the greater part of the day and so if the railroad reached round the world I think that I should keep ahead of you and as for seeing the country and getting experience of that kind I should have to cut your acquaintance altogether such is the universal law which no man can ever outwit and with regard to the railroad even we may say it is as broad as it is long to make a railroad round the world available to all mankind is equivalent to grading the whole surface of the planet men have an indistinct notion that if they keep up this activity of joint stocks and spades long enough all will at length ride somewhere in next to no time and for nothing but though a crowd rushes to the depot and the conductor shouts all aboard when the smoke is blown away and the vapor condensed it will be perceived that a few are riding but the rest are run over and it will be called and will be a melancholy accident no doubt they can ride at last who shall have earned their fare that is if they survive so long but they will probably have lost their elasticity and desire to travel by that time this spending of the best part of one's life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it reminds me of the Englishman who went to India to make a fortune first in order that he might return to England and live the life of a poet he should have gone up Garrett at once what exclaim a million Irishmen starting up from all the shanties in the land is not this railroad which we have built a good thing yes I answer comparatively good that is you might have done worse but I wish as you are brothers of mine that you could have spent your time better than digging in this dirt before I finish my house wishing to earn ten or twelve dollars by some honest and agreeable method in order to meet my unusual expenses I planted about two acres and a half of light and sandy soil near it chiefly with beans but also a small part with potatoes corn peas and turnips the whole lot contains eleven acres mostly growing up to pines and hickories and was sold the preceding season for eight dollars and eight cents an acre one farmer said that it was quote good for nothing but to raise cheaping squirrels on end quote I put no manure whatever on this land not being the owner but merely a squatter and not expecting to cultivate so much again and I did not quite hoe it all at once I got out several cords of stumps and plowing which supplied me with fuel for a long time and left small circles of virgin mold easily distinguishable through the summer by the greater luxuriance of the beans there the dead and for the most part unmerchantable wood behind my house and the driftwood from the pond have supplied the remainder of my fuel I was obliged to hire a team and a man for the plowing though I held the plow myself my farm out goes for the first season were for implements, seed, work, etc $14.72 plus the seed corn was given me this never costs anything to speak of unless you plant more than enough I got 12 bushels of beans and 18 bushels of potatoes beside some peas and sweet corn the yellow corn and turnips were too late to come to anything the whole income from the farm was $23.44 deducting the out goes $14.72 plus there are left $8.71 plus beside produce consumed and on hand at the time this estimate was made of the value of $4.50 the amount on hand much more than balancing a little grass which I did not raise was considered that is considering the importance of a man's soul and of today not withstanding the short time occupied by my experiment nay, partly even because of its transient character I believe that was doing better than any farmer in Concord did that year the next year I did better still for I spated up all the land which I required about a third of an acre and I learned from the experience of both years not being in the least awed by many celebrated works on husbandry young among the rest that if one would live simply and eat only the crop which he raised and raise no more than he ate and not exchange it for an insufficient quantity of more luxurious and expensive things he would need to cultivate only a few rods of ground and that it would be cheaper to spate up that than to use oxen to plow it and to select a fresh spot from time to time than to manure the old and he could do all his necessary farm work that were with his left hand at odd hours in the summer and thus he would not be tied to an ox or horse or cow or pig as at present I desire to speak impartially on this point and as one not interested in the success or failure of the present economical and social arrangements I was more independent than any farmer in Concord for I was not anchored to a house or farm but could follow the bent of my genius which is a very crooked one every moment beside being better off than they already if my house had been burned or my crops had failed I should have been nearly as well off as before I am want to think that men are not so much the keepers of herds as herds are the keepers of men the former are so much the freer men and oxen exchange work but if we consider necessary work only oxen will be seen to have greatly the advantage their farm is so much the larger man does some of his part of the exchange work in his six weeks of haying and it is no boys play certainly no nation that lived simply in all respects that is no nation of philosophers would commit so great a blunder as to use the labour of animals true there never was and is not likely soon to be a nation of philosophers and my certain it is desirable that there should be however I should never have broken a horse or bull and taken him to board for any work he might do for me for fear I should become a horseman or herdsman merely and if society seems to be the gainer by so doing are we certain that what is one man's gain is not another's loss and that the stable boy has equal cause with his master to be satisfied granted that some public works would not have been constructed without this aid and let man share the glory of such with the ox and horse does it follow that he could not have accomplished works yet more worthy of himself in that case when men begin to do not merely unnecessary or artistic but luxurious and idle work with their assistance it is inevitable that a few do all the exchange work with the oxen or in other words become the slaves of the strongest man thus not only works for the animal within him but for a symbol of this he works for the animal without him though we have many substantial houses of brick or stone the prosperity of the farmer is still measured by the degree to which the barn overshadows the house this town is said to have the largest houses for oxen cows and horses hereabouts and it is not behind hand in its public buildings but there are very few halls for free worship or free speech in this county it should not be by their architecture but why not even by their power of abstract thought that nations should seek to commemorate themselves how much more admirable the Bhagavad Gita than all the ruins of the east towers and temples are the luxury of princes a simple and independent mind does not toil at the bidding of any prince genius is not a retainer to any emperor nor is its material silver or gold or marble except to a trifling extent to what end pray is so much stone hammered in Arcadia when I was there I did not see any hammering stone nations are possessed with an insane ambition to perpetuate the memory of themselves by the amount of hammered stone they leave what if equal pains were taken to smooth and polish their manners one piece of good sense would be more memorable than a monument as high as the moon I love better to see stones in place the grandeur of thebes was a vulgar grandeur more sensible as a wrought of stone wall that bounds an honest man's field and a hundred gated thebes that has wandered farther from the true end of life the religion and civilization which are barbaric and heathenish build splendid temples but what you might call Christianity does not most of the stone a nation hammers goes towards its tune only it buries itself alive as for the pyramids there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile and then given his body to the dogs I might possibly invent some excuse for them and him but I have no time for it for the religion and love of art of the builders it is much the same all the world over whether the building be an Egyptian temple or the united states bank it costs more than it comes to the main spring is vanity assisted by the love of garlic and bread and butter Mr. Balcom a promising young architect designs it on the back of his vitruvius hard pencil and ruler and the job is let out to dobson and sons, stone cutters when the 30 centuries begin to look down on it mankind begin to look up at it as for your high towers and monuments there was a crazy fellow once in this town who undertook to dig through to China and he got so far that as he said he heard the Chinese pots and kettles rattle that go out of my way to admire the hole which he made many are concerned about the monuments of the west and the east to know who built them for my part I should like to know who in those days did not build them who were above such trifling but to proceed with my statistics by surveying carpentry and day labor of various other kinds in the village in the meanwhile for I have as many trades as fingers I had earned $13.34 the expense of food for 8 months namely from July 4th to March 1st the time when these estimates were made though I lived there more than 2 years not counting potatoes a little green corn and some peas which I had raised nor considering the value of what was on hand at the last date was rice $1.73 molasses $1.73 cheapest form of the saccharin rye meal $1.04 $3.25 Indian meal $0.99 cheaper than rye pork $0.22 all experiments which failed flour $0.88 costs more than Indian meal and trouble sugar $0.80 lard $0.65 apples $0.25 dried apple $0.22 sweet potatoes $0.10 one pumpkin $0.06 one watermelon $0.02 salt $0.03 yes I did eat $8.74 all told but I should not thus unblushingly publish my guilt if I did not know that most of my readers were equally guilty with myself and that their deeds would look no better in print. The next year I sometimes caught a mess of fish for my dinner and once I went so far as to slaughter a woodchuck which ravaged my bean field affect his transmigration as a tartar would say and devour him partly for experiments sake but though it afforded me a momentary enjoyment I saw that the longest use would not make that a good practice however it might seem to have your woodchucks ready dressed by the village butcher clothing and some incidental expenses within the same dates though little can be inferred from this item amounted to $8.40 minus three quarters oil and some household utensils $2. so that all the pecuniary out goes accepting for washing and mending which for the most part were done out of the house and their bills have not yet been received and these are all and more than all the ways by which money necessarily goes out in this part of the world were house $28.12 plus farm one year $14.72 plus food eight months $8.74 clothing etc. eight months $8.40 minus three quarters oil etc. eight months $2 in all $61.99 minus three quarters I address myself now to those of my readers who have a living to get and to meet this I have for farm produce sold $23.44 earned by day labor $13.34 in all $36.78 subtracted from the sum of the out goes leaves a balance of $25.21 three quarters on the one side this being very nearly the means with which I started and the measure of expenses to be incurred and on the other beside the leisure and independence and health thus secured a comfortable house for me as long as I chose to occupy it these statistics however accidental and therefore uninstructive they may appear as they have a certain completeness have a certain value also nothing was given me of which I have not rendered some account it appears from the above estimate that my food alone cost me in money about $0.27 a week it was for nearly two years after this rye and Indian meal without yeast, potatoes rice a very little salt pork molasses and salt and my drink water it was fit that I should live on rice mainly who love so well the philosophy of India to meet the objections of some inveterate cavalers I may as well state that if I dined out occasionally as I always had done and I trust shall have opportunities to do again it was frequently to the detriment of my domestic arrangements but the dining out being as I have stated a constant element does not in the least affect a comparative statement like this I learned from my two years experience that it would cost incredibly little trouble to obtain one's necessary food even in this latitude the man may use as simple a diet as the animals and yet retain health and strength I have made a satisfactory dinner satisfactory on several accounts simply off a dish of purse lane Portulaca Olerasia which I gathered in my cornfield boiled and salted I give the Latin on account of the savouriness of the trivial name and pray what more can a reasonable man desire in peaceful times in ordinary noons than a sufficient number of ears of green sweet corn boiled with the addition of salt even the little variety which I used was a yielding to the demands of appetite and not of health yet men have come to such a past that they frequently starve not for want of necessaries but for want of luxuries and I know a good woman who thinks that her son lost his life because he took to drinking water only the reader will perceive that I am treating the subject rather from an economic than a dietetic point of view and he will not venture to put my abstemiousness to the test unless he has a well stocked larder bread I at first made of pure Indian meal and salt and genuine hoe cakes which I baked before my fire out of doors on a shingle or the end of a stick of timber sawed off in building my house but it was want to get smoked and to have a piney flavor I tried flour also but have at last found a mixture of rye and Indian meal most convenient and agreeable in cold weather it was no little amusement to bake several small loaves of this in succession tending and turning them as carefully as an Egyptian his hatching eggs they were a real fruit which I ripened and they had to my senses a fragrance like that of other noble fruits which I kept in as long as possible by wrapping them in cloths I made a study of the ancient and indispensable art of bread making consulting such authorities as offered going back to the primitive days and first invention of the unleavened kind when from the wildness of nuts and meats men first reached the mildness and refinement of this bread and traveling gradually down in my studies through the accidental souring of the dough which it is supposed taught the leavening process and through the various fermentations thereafter till I came to good sweet wholesome bread the staff of life leaven which some deem the soul of bread the spiritus which fills its cellular tissue which is religiously preserved like the coastal fire some precious bottle full I suppose first brought over in the Mayflower did the business for America and its influence is still rising swelling spreading in serial billows over the land this seed I regularly and faithfully procured from the village till at length one morning I forgot the rules and scalded my yeast by which accident I discovered that even this was not indispensable for my discoveries were not synthetic but analytic process and I have gladly omitted it since though most housewives earnestly assured me that safe and wholesome bread without yeast might not be and elderly people prophesied a steady decay of the vital forces yet I find it not to be an essential ingredient and after going without it for a year I'm still in the land of the living and I am glad to escape the trivialness of carrying a bottle full in my pocket which would sometimes often discharge its contents to my discomforture it is simpler and more respectable to omitted man is an animal who more than any other can adapt himself to all climates and circumstances neither did I put any sal soda or other acid or alkali into my bread it would seem that I made it according to the recipe which Marcus Porcius Cato gave about two centuries before Christ Panem deptisium sic facito manus motarium che bene lavato fernam in mortarium indito aquae palatium adito subiditoc pocre ubi bene subidgeris defingito coquittoc sub testu which I take to mean quote make needed bread thus wash your hands and trough well put the meal into the trough add water gradually and knead it thoroughly when you have kneaded it well mold it and bake it under a cover end quote that is in a baking kettle not a word about leaven but I did not always use this staff of life at one time owing to the emptiness of my purse I saw none of it for more than a month I did not I saw none of it for more than a month every new englander might easily raise all his own breadstuffs in this land of rye and Indian corn and not depend on distant and fluctuating markets for them yet so far are we from simplicity and independence that in concord fresh and sweet meal is rarely sold in the shops and hominy and corn in a still coarser form are hardly used by any for the most part the farmer gives to his cattle and hogs the grain of his own producing and buys flour which is at least no more wholesome at a greater cost at the store I saw that I could easily raise my bushel or two of rye and Indian corn for the former will grow on the poorest land and the latter does not require the best and grind them in a hand mill and so do without rice and pork and if I must have some concentrated I found why experiment that I could make a very good molasses either of pumpkins or beets and I knew that I needed only to set out a few maples to obtain it more easily still and while these were growing I could use various substitutes beside those which I have named for as the forefather saying quote we can make liquor to sweeten our lips of pumpkins and parsnips and walnut tree chips end quote finally as for salt that grossest of groceries to obtain this might be a fit occasion for a visit to the seashore or if I did without it altogether I should probably drink the less water I do not learn that the Indians ever troubled themselves to go after it thus I could avoid all trade and barter so far as my food was concerned and having a shelter already it would only remain to get clothing and fuel the pantaloons which I now wear were woven in a farmer's family thank heaven there is so much virtue still in man for I think the fall from the farmer to the operative as great and memorable as that from the man to the farmer and in a new country fuel is an encumbrance as for a habitat if I were not permitted still to squat I might purchase one acre at the same price for which the land I cultivated was sold and namely eight dollars and eight cents as it was I considered that I enhanced the value of the land by squatting on it there is a certain class of unbelievers who sometimes ask me such questions as if I think that I can live on vegetable food alone and to strike at the root of the matter at once for the root is faith I am accustomed to answer such that I can live on board nails if they cannot understand that they cannot understand much that I have to say from my part I am glad to bear of experiments of this kind being tried as that a young man tried for a fortnight to live on hard raw corn on the ear using his teeth for all mortar the squirrel tribe tried the same and succeeded the human race is interested in these experiments though a few old women who are incapacitated for them or who own their thirds in mills may be alarmed my furniture part of which I made myself and the rest cost me nothing of which I have not rendered an account consisted of a bed a table a desk three chairs a looking glass three inches in diameter a pair of tongs and and irons a kettle a skillet and a frying pan a dipper a washbowl two knives and forks three plates one cup one spoon a jug for oil a jug for molasses and a japan lamp none is so poor that he need to sit on a pumpkin that is shiftlessness there is a plenty of such chairs as I like best in the village garrets to be had for taking them away furniture thank god I can sit and I can stand without the aid of a furniture warehouse what man but a philosopher would not be ashamed to see his furniture packed in a cart and going up country exposed to the light of heaven in the eyes of men a beggarly account of empty boxes that is spaulding's furniture I could never tell from inspecting such a load whether it belonged to a so called rich man or a poor one the owner always seemed poverty stricken indeed the more you have of such things the poorer you are each load looks as if it contained the contents of a dozen shanties and if one shanty is poor this is a dozen times as poor pray for what do we move ever but to get rid of our furniture our exuviae at last to go from this world to another newly furnished and leave this to be burned it is the same as if all these traps were buckled to a man's belt and he could not move over the rough country where our lines are cast without dragging them dragging his trap he was a lucky fox that left his tail in the trap the muskrat will gnaw his third leg off to be free no wonder man has lost his elasticity how often he is at a dead set quote sir if I may be so bold what do you mean by a dead set end quote if you are a seer whenever you meet a man you will see all that he owns I and much that he pretends to disown behind him even to his kitchen furniture and all the trumpery which he saves and will not burn and he will appear to be harnessed to it and making what headway he can I think that the man is at a dead set who has got through a knot hole or gateway where his sledge load of furniture cannot follow him I cannot but feel compassion when I hear some trim compact looking man seemingly free all girded and ready speak of his furniture as whether it is insured or not but what shall I do with my furniture my gay butterfly is entangled in a spider's web then even those who seem for a long while not to have any if you inquire more narrowly you will find have some stored in somebody's barn I look upon England today as an old gentleman who is travelling with a great deal of baggage trumpery which has accumulated from long housekeeping which he has not the courage to burn to trunk little trunk band box and bundle throw away the first three at least it would surpass the powers of a well man nowadays to take up his bed and walk and I should certainly advise a sick one to lay down his bed and run when I have met an immigrant tottering under a bundle which contained his all looking like an enormous when which had grown out of the nape of his neck I have pitied him not because that was his all but because he had all that to carry if I have got to drag my trap I will take care that it be a light one and do not nip me in a vital part but perchance it would be wisest never to put one's paw into it I would observe by the way that it costs me nothing for curtains for I have no gazers to shut out but the sun and moon and I am willing that they should look in the moon will not sour milk nor taint meat of mine nor will the sun injure my furniture or fade my carpet and if he is sometimes too warm a friend I find it still better economy to retreat behind some curtain which nature has provided than to add a single item to the details of my housekeeping a lady once offered me a mat but as I had no room to spare within the house nor time to spare within or without to shake it I declined it preferring to wipe my feet on the sod before my door it is best to avoid the beginnings of evil not long since I was present at the auction of a deacons effects for his life had not been ineffectual quote the evil that men do lives after them end quote as usual a great proportion was trumpery which had begun to accumulate in his father's day among the rest was a dried tapeworm and now after lying half a century in his garret and other dust holes these things were not burned instead of a bonfire or purifying destruction of them there was an auction or increasing of them the neighbors eagerly collected to view them bought them all and carefully transported them to their garrets and dust holes to lie there till their estates are settled when they will start again when a man dies he kicks the dust the customs of some savage nations might per chance be profitably imitated by us for they at least go through the semblance of casting their slough annually they have the idea of the thing whether they have the reality or not would it not be well if we were to celebrate such a busk or feast of first fruits as Bartram describes to have been the custom of the muck class Indians quote when a town celebrates the busk end quote says he quote having previously provided themselves with new cloths, new pots, pans and other household utensils and furniture they collect all their worn out clothes and other despicable things sweep and cleanse their houses, squares and the whole town of their filth which with all the remaining grain and other old provisions they cast together into one common heap and consume it with fire after having taken medicine and fasted for three days all the fire in the town is extinguished during this fast they abstain from the gratification of every appetite whatever, a general amnesty is proclaimed all malefactors may return to their town on the fourth morning the high priest by rubbing dry wood together produces new fire in the public square from whence every habitation in the town is supplied with the new and pure flame they then feast on the new corn and fruits and dance and sing for three days and the four following days they receive visits and rejoice with their friends from neighboring towns where the men are purified and prepared themselves end quote the Mexicans also practiced a similar purification at the end of every 52 years in the belief that it was time for the world to come to an end I have scarcely heard of a truer sacrament that is, as the dictionary defines it quote, outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace end quote, then this and I have no doubt that they were originally inspired directly from heaven to do thus I have no biblical record of the revelation for more than five years I maintained myself thus solely by the labor of my hands and I found that by working about six weeks in a year I could meet all the expenses of living the whole of my winters as well as most of my summers I had free and clear for study I have thoroughly tried schoolkeeping and found that my expenses were in proportion or rather out of proportion to my income for I was obliged to dress and train but not to say think and believe accordingly and I lost my time into the bargain as I did not teach for the good of my fellow men but simply for a livelihood this was a failure I have tried trade but I found that it would take ten years to get underway in that and that then I should probably be on my way to the devil I was actually afraid that I might by that time be doing what is called a good business I was about to see what I could do for a living some sad experience in conforming to the wishes of friends being fresh in my mind to tax my ingenuity I thought often and seriously of picking huckleberries that surely I could do and its small profits might suffice for my greatest skill has been to want but little so little capital it required so little distraction from my wanted moods I foolishly thought while my acquaintances went unhesitatingly into trade or the professions I contemplated this occupation as most like theirs ranging the hills all summer to pick the berries which came in my way and thereafter carelessly dispose of them so to keep the flocks of Admetus I also dreamed that I might gather the wild herbs or carry evergreens to such villagers as love to be reminded of the woods even to the city by hay-cart loads but I have since learned that trade curses everything it handles and though you trade in messages from heaven the whole curse of trade attaches to the business as I preferred some things to others and especially valued my freedom as I could fare hard and yet succeed well I did not wish to spend my time in earning rich carpets or other fine furniture or delicate cookery or or the Gothic style just yet if there are any to whom it is no interruption to acquire these things and who know how to use them when acquired I relinquish to them the pursuit some are industrious and appear to love labour for its own sake or perhaps because it keeps them out of worse mischief to such I have at present nothing to say those who would not know what to do with more leisure than they now enjoy are obliged to work twice as hard as they do work till they pay for themselves and get their free papers for myself I found that the occupation of a day labourer was the most independent of any especially as it required only 30 or 40 days in a year to support one the labourer's day ends with the going down of the sun and he is then free to devote himself to his chosen pursuit independent of his labour but his employer who speculates from month to month on end of the year to the other in short I am convinced both by faith and experience that to maintain oneself on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime if we will live simply and wisely as the pursuits of the simpler nations are still the sports of the more artificial it is not necessary that a man should earn his living by the sweat of his brow unless he sweats easier than I do End of LibriVox Part 4 of Economy It is by a mathematical point only that we are wise as the sailor or the fugitive slave keeps the pole star in his eye but that is sufficient guidance for all our life we may not arrive at our port within a calculable period but we would preserve the true course Undoubtedly in this case what is true for one is true or still for a thousand as a large house is not proportionally more expensive than a small one since one roof may cover one cellar underlie and one wall separate several apartments but for my part I preferred the solitary dwelling moreover it will commonly be cheaper to build the hole yourself than to convince another of the advantage of the common wall and when you have done this the common partition to be much must be a thin one and that other may prove a bad neighbor and also not keep his side in repair the only cooperation which is commonly possible is exceedingly partial and superficial and what little true cooperation there is is as if it were not being a harmony inaudible to men if a man has faith he will cooperate with equal faith everywhere if he has not faith like the rest of the world whatever company he is joined to to cooperate in the highest as well as the lowest sense means to get our living together I heard it proposed lately that two young men should travel together over the world the one without money earning his means as he went before the mast and behind the plow the other carrying a bill of exchange in his pocket it was easy to see that they could not long be companions or cooperate one would not operate at all they would part at the first interesting crisis in their adventures above all as I have implied the man who goes alone can start today but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready and it may be a long time before they get off but all this is very selfish I have heard some of my townsmen say I confess that I have hitherto indulged very little in philanthropic enterprises I have made some sacrifices to a sense of duty and among others have sacrificed this pleasure also there are those who have used all their arts to persuade me to undertake the support of some poor family in the town and if I had nothing to do for the devil finds employment for the idol I might try my hand at some such pastime as that however when I have thought to indulge myself in this respect and lay their heaven under an obligation by maintaining poor persons in all respects as comfortably as I maintain myself and have even ventured so far as to make them the offer they have one and all unhesitatingly preferred to remain poor while my townsmen and women are devoted in so many ways to the good of their fellows I trust that one at least may be spared to other and less humane pursuits you must have a genius for charity as well as for anything else as for doing good that is one of the professions which are full moreover I have tried it fairly and strange as it may seem am satisfied that it does not agree with my constitution probably I should not consciously and deliberately forsake my particular calling to do the good which society demands of me to save the universe from annihilation and I believe that a like but infinitely greater steadfastness elsewhere is all that now preserves it but I would not stand between any man and his genius and to him who does this work which I decline with his whole heart and soul and life I would say persevere even if the world call it doing evil as it is most likely they will I am far from supposing that my case is a peculiar one no doubt many of my readers would make a similar defense at doing something and I will not engage that my neighbors shall pronounce it good I do not hesitate to say that I should be a capital fellow to hire but what that is it is for my employer to find out what good I do in the common sense of that word must be aside from my main path and for the most part wholly unintended men say practically begin where you are and such as you are without aiming mainly to become of more worth and with kindness a forethought go about doing good if I were to preach at all in this strain I should say rather said about being good as if the sun should stop when he had kindled his fires up to the splendor of a moon or a star of the sixth magnitude and go about like Robin Goodfellow peeping in at every cottage window inspiring lunatics and tainting this visible instead of steadily increasing his genial heat and beneficence till he is of such brightness that no mortal can look him in the face and then and in the meanwhile too going about the world in his own orbit doing it good or rather as a truer philosopher has discovered the world going about him getting good when Peyton wishing to prove his heavenly birth by his beneficence had the sun's chariot but one day and drove out beaten track he burned several blocks of houses in the lower streets of heaven and scorched the surface of the earth and dried up every spring and made the great desert of Sahara till at length Jupiter hurled him headlong to the earth with a thunderbolt and the sun through grief at his death did not shine for a year there is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness tainted it is human it is divine if I knew for certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good I should run for my life as from that dry and parching wind of the African deserts called the Samoom which fills the mouth and nose and ears and eyes with dust till you are suffocated for fear that I should get some of his good done to me some of its virus mingled with my blood no in this case I would rather suffer evil the natural way a man is not a good man to me because he will feed me if I should be starving or warm me if I should be freezing or pull me out of a ditch if I should ever fall into one I can find you a Newfoundland dog that will do as much philanthropy is not love for one's fellow man in the broadest sense Howard was no doubt an exceedingly kind and worthy man in his way and has his reward but comparatively speaking there are a hundred howards to us if their philanthropy do not help us in our best estate when we are most worthy to be helped I never heard of a philanthropic meeting in which it was sincerely proposed to do any good to me or the like of me the Jesuits were quite bulked by those Indians who being burned at the stake suggested a new modes of torture to their tormentors being superior to physical suffering it's sometimes chance that they were superior to any consolation which the missionaries could offer and the law to do as you would be done by fell with less persuasiveness on the ears of those who, for their part did not care how they were done by who loved their enemies after a new fashion and came very near freely forgiving them all they did be sure that you give the poor the aid they most need though it be your example which leaves them far behind if you give money spend yourself with it and do not merely abandon it to them we make curious mistakes sometimes often the poor man is not so cold and hungry as he is dirty and ragged and gross it is partly his taste and not merely his misfortune if you give him money he will perhaps buy more rags with it I was want to pity the clumsy Irish laborers who cut ice on the pond in such mean and ragged clothes while I shivered in my more tidy and somewhat more fashionable garments till one bitter cold day one who had slipped into the water came to my house to warm him and I saw him strip off three pairs of pants and two pairs of stockings ere he got down to the skin though they were dirty and ragged enough it is true and that he could afford to refuse the extra garments which I offered him he had so many intra ones this ducking was the very thing he needed then I began to pity myself and I saw that it would be a greater charity to bestow on me a flannel shirt than a whole slop shop on him there are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life in misery which he strives in vain to relieve it is the pious slave breeder devoting the proceeds of every tenth slave to buy a Sunday's liberty for the rest some show their kindness to the poor by employing them in their kitchens would they not be kinder if they employed themselves there you boast of spending a tenth part of your income in charity maybe you should spend the nine tenths so and done with it society recovers only a tenth part of the property then is this owing to the generosity of him in whose possession it is found or to the remissness of the officers of justice philanthropy is almost the only virtue which is sufficiently appreciated by mankind nay it is greatly overrated it is our selfishness which overrates it a robust poor man one sunny day here in concord praised a fellow townsman for his kindness to me because as he said he was kind to the poor meaning himself the kind uncles and aunts of the race are more esteemed than its true spiritual fathers and mothers I once heard a reverend lecturer on England a man of learning and intelligence after enumerating her scientific literary and political worthies Shakespeare, Bacon, Cromwell, Milton Newton and others speak next of her Christian heroes who acquired it of him he elevated to a place far above all the rest as the greatest of the great they were Penn, Howard and Mrs. Fry everyone must feel the falsehood and can't of this the last were not England's best men and women only perhaps her best philanthropists I would not subtract anything from the praise that is due to philanthropy to man justice for all who buy their lives and works are a blessing to mankind I do not value chiefly a man's uprightness and benevolence which are as it were his stem and leaves those plants of whose greenness withered we make herb tea for the sick serve but a humble use and are most employed by quacks I want the flower and fruit of a man the fragrance be wafted over from him to me and some ripeness flavor our intercourse his goodness must not be a partial and transitory act but a constant superfluity which costs him nothing and of which he is unconscious this is a charity that hides a multitude of sins the philanthropist too often surrounds mankind with the remembrance of his own cast off griefs as an atmosphere and calls it sympathy we should impart our courage and not our despair our health and ease and not our disease and take care that this does not spread by contagion from what southern plains comes up the voice of wailing under what latitudes reside the heathen to whom we would send light who is that intemperate and brutal man whom we would redeem if anything ale a man so that he does not perform his functions if he have a pain in his bowels even for that is the seat of sympathy he forthwith sets about reforming the world being a microcosm himself he discovers and it is a true discovery and he is the man to make it that the world has been eating green apples to his eyes in fact the globe itself is a great green apple which there is a danger and it is awful to think of that the children of men will nibble before it is ripe and straight way his drastic philanthropy seeks out the eskimo and the Patagonian and embraces the populace Indian and Chinese villages and thus by a few years of philanthropic activity the powers in the meanwhile using him for their own ends no doubt he cures himself of his dyspepsia the globe acquires a faint blush on one or both of its cheeks as if it were beginning to be ripe life loses its crudity and is once more sweet and wholesome to live I never dreamed of an enormity greater than I have committed I never knew and never shall know a worse man than myself I believe that what so saddens the reformer is not his sympathy with his fellows in distress but though he be the holiest son of God is his private ale let this be righted to him the morning rise over his couch and he will forsake his generous companions without apology my excuse for not lecturing against the use of tobacco is that I never chewed it that is a penalty which reformed tobacco chewers have to pay though there are things enough I have chewed which I could lecture against if you should ever be betrayed into any of these philanthropies do not let your left hand know what your right hand does for it is not worth knowing rescue the drowning and tie your shoestrings take your time and set about some free labor our manners have been corrupted by communication with the saints our hymn books resound with a melodious cursing of God and enduring him forever one would say that even the prophets and redeemers had rather consoled the fears than confirmed the hopes of man there is nowhere recorded a simple and irrepressible satisfaction with the gift of life any memorable praise of God all health and success does me good however far off and withdrawn it may appear all disease and failure helps to make me sad and does me evil however much sympathy it may have with me or I with it if then we would indeed restore mankind by truly Indian botanic magnetic or natural means let us first be as simple and well as nature ourselves dispel the clouds which hang over our own brows and take up a little life into our pores do not stay to be an overseer of the poor but endeavor to become one of the worthies of the world I read in the Gulistan or flower garden of Sheikh Sadi of Shiraz that quote they asked a wise man saying of the many celebrated trees the most high God has created lofty and umbrageous they call none azad or free excepting the cypress which bears no fruit what mystery is there in this he replied each has its appropriate produce and appointing season during the continuance of which it is fresh and blooming and during their absence dry and withered to neither of which states is the cypress exposed being always flourishing and of this nature are the azads or religious independence fix not thy heart on that which is transitory for the dijla or Tigris will continue to flow through Baghdad after the race of caliphs is extinct if thy hand has plenty be liberal as the date tree but if it affords nothing to give away be an azad or free man like the cypress end quote complimental verses of poverty quote to claim a station in the firmament because thy humble cottage or thy tub nurses some lazy or pedantic virtue in the cheap sunshine or by shady springs with roots and pot herbs where thy right hand tearing those humane passions from the mind upon whose stalks fair blooming virtues flourish degradeth nature and benumeth sense turns active men to stone we not require the dull society of your necessitated temperance or that unnatural stupidity that knows nor joy nor sorrow nor your forced falsely exalted passive fortitude above the active this low abject brood that fix their seats in mediocrity become your servile minds but we advance such virtues only as admit excess brave bounteous acts regal magnificence all seeing prudence, magnanimity that knows no bound and that heroic virtue for which antiquity hath left no name but patterns only such as Hercules Achilles, Theseus back to thy loathed cell and when thou seest the new enlightened sphere I know but what those worthy's were end quote T. Karoo end of chapter one economy end of LibriVox part five this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information please visit LibriVox.org this reading by Gordon Mackenzie Walden by Henry David Thoreau chapter two where I lived and what I lived for at a certain season of our lives we are accustomed to consider every spot as the possible site of a house I have thus surveyed the country on every side within a dozen miles of where I live in imagination I have bought all the farms in succession for all work to be bought and I knew their price for each farmer's premises tasted his wild apples discourse on husbandry with him took his farm at his price at any price mortgaging it to him in my mind even put a higher price on it took everything but a deed of it took his word for his deed for I dearly love to talk cultivated it and him too to some extent I trust and withdrew when I had enjoyed it long enough leaving him to carry it on this experience entitled me to be regarded as a sort of real estate broker by my friends wherever I sat there I might live and the landscape radiated from me accordingly what is a house but a seds a seat better if a country seat I discovered many a site for a house not likely to be soon improved which some might have thought too far from the village but to my eyes the village was too far from it well there I might live I said and there I did live for an hour a summer and a winter life saw how I could let the years run off buff it the winter through and see the spring come in the future inhabitants of this region wherever they may place their houses may be sure that they have been anticipated an afternoon suffice to lay out the land into orchard woodlot and pasture and to decide what fine oaks or pines should be left to stand before the door and whence each blasted tree could be seen to the best advantage and then I let it lie fallow per chance for a man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone my imagination carried me so far that I even had the refusal of several farms the refusal was all I wanted but I never got my fingers burned by actual possession the nearest that I came to actual possession was when I bought the hollow well place and had begun to sort my seeds and collected materials with which to make a wheelbarrow to carry it on or off with but before the owner gave me a deed of it his wife every man has such a wife changed her mind and wished to keep it and he offered me ten dollars to release him now to speak the truth I had bought ten cents in the world and it surpassed my arithmetic to tell if I was that man who had ten cents or who had a farm or ten dollars or all together however I let him keep the ten dollars and the farm too for I had carried it far enough or rather to be generous I sold him the farm that I gave for it and as he was not a rich man made him a present of ten dollars and still had my ten cents and seeds and materials for a wheelbarrow left I found thus that I had been a rich man without any damage to my poverty but I retained the landscape and I have since annually carried off what it yielded without a wheelbarrow with respect to landscapes quote I am monarch of all I survey my right there is none to dispute end quote I have frequently seen a poet withdraw having enjoyed the most valuable part of a farm while the crusty farmer suppose that he had got a few wild apples only why the owner does not know it for many years when a poet has put his farm in rhyme the most admirable kind of invisible fence as fairly impounded it milked it skimmed it and got all the cream and left the farmer only the skimmed milk the real attractions of the hollow well farm to me were its complete retirement being about two miles from the village half a mile from the nearest neighbor and separated from the highway by a broad field its bounding on the river which the owner said protected it by its fogs from frosts in the spring though that was nothing to me the gray color and ruinous state of the house and barn and the dilapidated fences which put such an interval between me and the last occupant the hollow and lichen covered apple trees gnawed by rabbits showing what kind of neighbors I should have but above all the recollection I had of it from my earliest voyages up the river when the house was concealed behind a dense grove of red maples through which I heard the house dog bark I was in haste to buy it before the proprietor finished getting out some rocks cutting down the hollow apple trees and grubbing up some young birches which had sprung up in the pasture or in short had made any more of his improvements to enjoy these advantages I was ready to carry it on like Atlas to take the world on my shoulders I never heard what compensation he received for that and do all those things which had no other motive or excuse but that I might pay for it and be unmolested in my possession of it for I knew all the while that it would yield the most abundant crop of the kind I wanted if I could only afford to let it alone but it turned out as I have said all that I could say then with respect to farming on a large scale I have always cultivated a garden was that I had my seeds ready many think that seeds improve with age I have no doubt that time discriminates between the good and the bad and when it lasts I shall plant I shall be less likely to be disappointed but I would say to my fellows once for all as long as possible live free and uncommitted it makes but little difference whether you are committed to a farm or the county jail old Cato whose De De Rustica is my cultivator says and the only translation I have seen makes sheer nonsense of the passage quote when you think of getting a farm turn it thus in your mind not to buy greedily nor spare your pains to look at it and do not think it enough to go round it once the oftener you go there the more it will please you I think I shall not buy greedily but go round and round it as long as I live and be buried in it first that it may please me the more at last the present was my next experiment of this kind which I purpose to describe more at length for convenience putting the experience of two years into one as I have said I do not propose to write an ode to dejection but to brag as lustily shanta clear in the morning standing on his roost if only to wake my neighbors up when first I took up my abode in the woods that is began to spend my nights as well as my days there which by accident was on independence day or the 4th of July 1845 my house was not finished for winter but was merely a defense against the rain without plastering or chimney the walls being of rough weather-stained boards made chinks which made it cool at night the upright white hewn studs and freshly plain door and window casings gave it a clean and airy look especially in the morning when its timbers were saturated with dew so that I fancied that by noon some sweet gum would exude from them to my imagination it retained throughout the day more or less of this ororal character reminding me of a certain house on a mountain which I had visited a year before this was an airy and unplastered cabin fit to entertain a travelling god and where a goddess might trail her garments the winds which passed over my dwelling were such as sweep over the ridges of mountains bearing the broken strains or celestial parts only of terrestrial music the morning wind forever blows the poem of creation interrupted but few are the ears that hear it Olympus is but the outside of the earth everywhere the only house I had been the owner of before if I accept a boat was a tent which I used occasionally when making excursions in the summer and this is still rolled up in my garret but the boat after passing from hand to hand has gone down the stream of time with this more substantial shelter about me I had made some progress toward settling in the world this frame so slightly clad was a sort of crystallization around me and reacted on the builder it was suggestive somewhat as a picture in outlines I did not need to go outdoors to take the air for the atmosphere within had lost none of its freshness so much within doors as behind a door where I sat even in the rainiest weather the Haravansa says quote an abode without birds is like a meat without seasoning such was not my abode for I found myself suddenly neighbor to the birds not by having imprisoned one but having caged myself near them I was not only nearer to some of those which commonly frequent the garden and the orchard but to those smaller and more thrilling songsters of the forest which never or rarely serenade a villager the wood thrush the veery, the scarlet teninger the field sparrow the whipper-will and many others I was seated by the shore of a small pond about a mile and a half south of the village of Concord higher than it in the midst of an extensive wood between that town and Lincoln and about two miles south of that our only field known to fame, Concord Battleground but I was so low in the woods that the opposite shore half a mile off like the rest covered with wood was my most distant horizon for the first week whenever I looked out on the pond it impressed me like a tarn high up on the side of a mountain its bottom far above the surface of other lakes and as the sun arose I saw it throwing off its nightly clothing of mist and here and there by degrees its soft ripples where its smooth reflecting surface was revealed while the mists like ghosts were stealthily withdrawing in every direction into the woods as at the breaking up of some nocturnal conventical the very dew seemed to hang upon the trees later into the day than usual as on the sides of mountains this small lake was of most value as a neighbor in the intervals of a gentle rainstorm in August when both air and water being perfectly still but the sky overcast mid-afternoon had all the serenity of evening and the woodthrush sang around and was heard from floor to shore a lake like this is never smoother than at such a time and the clear portion of the air above it being shallow and darkened by clouds the water full of light and reflections becomes a lower heaven itself so much the more important from a hilltop nearby where the wood had been recently cut off there was a pleasing vista southward across the pond through a wide indentation in the hills which form the shore there where their opposite sides sloping toward each other suggested a stream flowing out in that direction through a wooded valley but stream there was none that way I looked between and over the near green hills to some distant and higher ones in the horizon tinged with blue indeed by standing on tiptoe I could catch a glimpse of some of the peaks of the still bluer and more distant mountain ranges in the northwest those true blue coins from heaven's own mint and also of some portion of the village but in other directions even from this point I could not see over or beyond the woods which surrounded me it is well to have some water in your neighborhood to give buoyancy to and float the earth one value even of the smallest well is that when you look into it you see that earth is not continent but insular this is as important as that it keeps butter cool when I looked across the pond from this peak toward the Sudbury meadows which in time of flood I distinguished elevated perhaps by a mirage in their seething valley like a coin in a basin all the earth beyond the pond appeared like a thin crust insulated and floated even by this small sheet of inverting water and I was reminded that this on which I dwelt was but dry land though the view from my door was still more contracted I did not feel crowded or confined in the least pasture enough for my imagination the low shrub oak plateau to which the opposite shore arose stretched away toward the prairies of the west and the steps of tartary affording ample room for all the roving families of men quote there are none happy in the world but beings who enjoy freely a vast horizon end quote said Damodara you enlarger pastures both place and time were changed and I dwelt nearer to those parts of the universe and to those eras in history which had most attracted me where I lived was as far off as many a region viewed nightly by astronomers we are want to imagine rare and delectable places in some remote and more celestial corner of the system behind the constellation Asiopeia's chair far from noise and disturbance I discovered that my house actually had its sight in such a withdrawn but forever new and unprofamed part of the universe if it were worth the while to settle in those parts near to the Pleiades or the Hyades or to Aldebaran or Altair then I was really there or at an equal outness from the life which I had left behind dwindled and twinkling with his fine array to my nearest neighbor and to be seen only in moonless nights by him such was that part of creation where I had squatted quote there was a shepherd that did live and held his thoughts as high as were the mounts where on his flocks did hourly feed him by end quote what should we think of the shepherd's life if his flocks always wandered to higher pastures than his thoughts every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity and I may say innocence with nature herself I have been as sincere a worshipper of Aurora as the Greeks I got up early and bathed in the pond that was a religious exercise of the best things which I did they say that characters were engraven on the bathing tub of King Ching Thang to this effect quote renew thyself completely each day do it again and again and forever again end quote I can understand that morning brings back the heroic ages affected by the faint hum of a mosquito making its invisible and unimaginable tour through my apartment at earliest dawn when I was sitting with door and windows open as I could be by any trumpet that ever sang of fame it was Homer's Requiem itself an Iliad and Odyssey in the air singing its own wrath and wanderings there was something cosmical about it a standing advertisement till forbidden of the everlasting vigor and fertility of the world the morning which is the most memorable season of the day is the awakening hour then there is least somnolence in us and for an hour at least some part of us awakes which slumbers all the rest of the day and night little is to be expected of that day if it can be called a day to which we are not awakened by our genius but by the mechanical nudgings of some servitor are not awakened by our own newly acquired force and aspirations from within accompanied by the undulations of celestial music instead of factory bells and a fragrance filling the air life then we fell asleep from and thus the darkness bear its fruit and prove itself to be good no less than a light that man who does not believe that each day contains an earlier more sacred and auroral hour than he has yet profaned has despaired of life and is pursuing a descending and darkening way after a partial cessation of his sensuous life the soul of man or its organs rather are reinvigorated each day and his genius tries again what noble life it can make all memorable events I should say transpire in morning time and in a morning atmosphere the Vedas say quote all intelligences awake with the morning quote poetry and art and the fairest and most memorable of the actions of men date from such an hour all poets and heroes like memnon are the children of aurora and emit their music at sunrise to him who's elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun the day is a perpetual morning it matters not what the clocks attitudes and labors of men morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep why is it that men give so poor an account of their day if they have not been slumbering they are not such poor calculators if they had not been overcome with drowsiness they have not performed something the millions are awake enough for physical labor but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life to be awake is to be alive I have never yet met a man who was quite awake how could I have looked him in the face we must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake not by mechanical aids but by an infinite expectation of the dawn which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate life by a conscious endeavor it is something to be able to paint a particular picture or to carve a statue and so to make a few objects beautiful but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look which morally we can do to affect the quality of the day that is the highest of arts every man is tasked to make his life even in its details worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour if we refused or rather used up such poultry information as we get the oracles would distinctly inform us how this might be done End of Chapter 2 LibriVox Part 1 This is a LibriVox recording All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org This reading by Gordon Mackenzie Walden by Henry David Thoreau Chapter 2 Part 2 I went to the woods because I wish to live deliberately to front only the essential facts of life if I could not learn what it had to teach and not when I came to die discover that I had not lived I did not wish to live what was not life living is so dear nor did I wish to practice resignation unless it was quite necessary I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life to live so sturdily and spartan-like as to put to route what was not life to cut a broad swath and shave close to drive life into a corner and reduce it to its lowest terms and if it proved to be mean by then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it and publish its meanness to the world or if it were sublime to know it by experience and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion for most men it appears to me are in a strange uncertainty about it whether it is of the devil or of God and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to quote, glorify God and enjoy him forever end quote still we live meanly like ants though the fable tells us that we were long ago changed into men like these we fight with cranes it is error upon error and clout upon clout and our best virtue has for its occasion a superfluous and evitable wretchedness our life is frittered away by detail an honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes and lump the rest simplicity, simplicity simplicity I say let your affairs be as two or three and not a hundred or a thousand instead of a million count half a dozen and keep your accounts on your thumbnail in the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand and one items to be allowed for that a man has to live he would not found her and go to the bottom and not make his port at all by dead reckoning and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds simplify simplify instead of three meals a day if it be necessary eat but one instead of a hundred dishes five and reduce other things in proportion our life is like a german confederacy made up of petty states with its boundary forever fluctuating so that even a german cannot tell you how it is bounded at any moment the nation itself with all its so called internal improvements which by the way are all external and superficial is just such an unwieldy and overgrown establishment cluttered with furniture and tripped up by its own traps ruined by luxury and heedless expense by want of calculation and a worthy aim as a million households in the land and the only cure for it as for them is in rigid economy a stern and more than spartan simplicity of life and elevation of purpose it lives too fast men think that it is essential that the nation have commerce and export ice and talk through a telegraph and ride thirty miles an hour without a doubt whether they do or not but whether we should live like baboons or like men is a little uncertain if we do not get out sleepers and forge rails and devote days and nights to the work but go to tinkering upon our lives to improve them who will build railroads and if railroads are not built how shall we get to heaven in season but if we stay at home and mind our business who will want railroads we do not ride on the railroad it rides upon us did you ever think what those sleepers are that underlie the railroad each one is a man an Irishman or a Yankee man the rails are laid on them and they are covered with sand and the cars run smoothly over them they are sound sleepers I assure you and every few years a new lot is laid down and run over so that if some have the pleasure of riding on a rail others have the misfortune to be ridden upon and when they run over a man that is walking in his sleep a supernumerary sleeper in the wrong position and wake him up they suddenly stop the cars and make a hue and cry about it as if this were an exception I am glad to know that it takes a gang of men for every five miles to keep the sleepers down and level in their beds as it is for this is a sign that they may sometime get up again why should we live we are determined to be starved before we are hungry men say that a stitch in time saves nine and so they take a thousand stitches today to save nine tomorrow as for work we haven't any of any consequence we have the St. Vitus dance and cannot possibly keep our head still if I should only give a few pulls at the parish bell-rope as for a fire that is without setting the bell there is hardly a man on his farm in the outskirts of Concord notwithstanding that press of engagements which was his excuse so many times this morning nor a boy nor a woman I might almost say but would forsake all and follow that sound not mainly to save property from the flames but if we will confess the truth much more to see it burn since burn it must and we, be it known did not set it on fire or to see it put out and have a hand in it if that is done as handsomely yes even if it were the parish church itself hardly a man takes a half hour's nap after dinner but when he wakes he holds up his head and asks what's the news as if the rest of mankind had stood his sentinels some give directions to be waked every half hour doubtless for no other purpose and then to pay for it they tell what they have dreamed after a night's sleep the news is as indispensable as the breakfast pray tell me anything new that has happened to a man anywhere on this globe and he reads it over his coffee and rolls that a man has had his eyes gouged out this morning on the Wachito river never dreaming the while that he lives in the dark unfathomed mammoth cave of this world and has but the rudiment of an eye himself for my part I could easily do without the post office I think that there are very few important communications made through it to speak critically I never received more than one or two letters in my life I wrote this some years ago that were worth the postage the penny post is commonly an institution through which you seriously offer a man that penny for his thoughts which is so often safely offered in jest and I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper if we read of one man robbed or murdered or killed by accident or one house burned or one vessel wrecked or one steamboat blown up or one cow run over on the western railroad or one mad dog killed or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter we never need read of another one is enough if you are acquainted with the principal what do you care for a myriad instances and applications to a philosopher all news as it is called is gossip and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea yet not a few are greedy after this gossip there was such a rush as I hear the other day one of the offices to learn the foreign news by the last arrival that several large squares of plate glass belonging to the establishment were broken by the pressure news which I seriously think a ready wit might write a twelve month or twelve years beforehand with sufficient accuracy as for Spain for instance if you know how to throw in Don Carlos and the Infanta and on Pedro and Seville and Granada from time to time in the right proportions they may have changed the names a little since I saw the papers and serve up a bullfight when other entertainments fail it will be true to the letter and give us as good an idea of the exact state or ruin of things in Spain as the most succinct and lucid reports under this head in the newspapers and as for England almost the last significant scrap of news from that quarter was the revolution of sixteen forty nine and if you have learned the history of her crops for an average year you never need to tend to that thing again unless your speculations are of a merely pecuniary character if one may judge who rarely looks into the newspapers nothing new does ever happen in foreign parts a French Revolution not accepted what news how much more important to know what that is which was never old quote great dignitary of the state of way sent a man to Gong Tzu to know his news Gong Tzu caused the messenger to be seated near him and questioned him in these terms what is your master doing the messenger answered with respect my master desires to diminish the number of his faults but he cannot come to the end of them the messenger being gone the philosopher remarked what a worthy messenger what a worthy messenger end quote the preacher instead of vexing the ears of drowsy farmers on their day of rest at the end of the week for Sunday is the fit conclusion of an ill spent week and not the fresh and brave beginning of a new one with this one other draggled tale of a sermon should shout with thundering voice pause a vast why so seeming fast deadly slow shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths while reality is fabulous if men would steadily observe realities only and not allow themselves to be deluded life to compare it with such things as we know would be like a fairy tale and the arabian knights entertainments if we respected only what is inevitable and has a right to be music and poetry would resound along the streets when we are unhurried and wise we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality this is always exhilarating and sublime by closing the eyes and slumbering and consenting to be deceived by shows men establish and confirm their daily life of routine and habit everywhere which still is built on purely illusory foundations children who play life discern its true law and relations more clearly than men who fail to live it worthily but who think that they are wiser by experience that is by failure I have read in a hindu book that quote there was a king's son who being expelled in infancy from his native city was brought up by a forester and growing up to maturity in that state imagined himself to belong to the barbarous race with which he lived one of his father's ministers having discovered him and told to him what he was and the misconception of his character was removed and he knew himself to be a prince so soul end quote continues the hindu philosopher quote from the circumstances in which it is placed mistakes its own character until the truth is revealed to it by some holy teacher and then it knows itself to be brahman I perceive that we inhabitants of new england live this mean life that we do because our vision does not penetrate the surface of things we think that that is which appears to be if a man should walk through this town and see only the reality where think you middle dam go to if he should give us an account of the realities he beheld there we should not recognize the place in his description look at a meeting house or a courthouse or a jail or a shop or a dwelling house and say what that thing really is before a true gaze and they would all go to pieces in your account of them men esteem truth remote in the outskirts of the system behind the farthest star before Adam and after the last man in eternity there is indeed something true and sublime but all these times and places and occasions are now and here God himself culminates in the present moment and will never be more divine in the laps of all the ages and we are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and wrenching of the reality that surrounds us the universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions whether we travel fast or slow the track is laid for us let us spend our lives in conceiving then the poet or the artist never yet had so fair and noble a design but some of his posterity at least could accomplish it let us spend one day as deliberately as nature and not be thrown off the track by every nut shell and mosquitoes wing that falls on the rails let us rise early and fast or break fast gently and without perturbation let company come and let company go let the bells ring and the children cry determined to make a day of it why should we knock under and go with the stream let us not be upset and overwhelmed in that terrible rapid and whirlpool called a dinner situated in the meridian shallows whether this danger and you are safe for the rest of the way is downhill and relaxed nerves with morning vigor sail by it looking another way tied to the mast like Ulysses if the engine whistles let it whistle till it is horse for its pains if the bell rings why should we run we will consider what kind of music they are like let us settle the bells and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion and prejudice and tradition and delusion and appearance that alluvian which covers the globe through Paris and London through New York and Boston and Concord through church and state through poetry and philosophy and religion till we come and rocks in place which we can call reality and say this is and no mistake and then begin having a plan de pluie below fresh it and frost and fire a place where you might found a wall or a state or set a lamp post safely or perhaps a gauge not a nihilometer but a realometer that future ages might know how deep a fresh it of shams and appearances had gathered from time to time if you stand right fronting and face to face to a fact you will see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces as if it were a cemeter and feel its sweet edge dividing you through the heart and marrow and so you will happily conclude your mortal career be it life or death we crave only reality if we are really dying let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel cold in the extremities if we are alive let us go about our business time is but the stream I go a fishing in I drink at it but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is its thin current slides away but eternity remains I would drink deeper fish in the sky whose bottom is pebbly with stars I cannot count one I know not the first letter of the alphabet I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born the intellect is a cleaver it discerns and rifts its way into the secret of things I do not wish to be any more busy with my hands than is necessary my head is hands and feet I feel all my best faculties concentrated in it my instinct tells me that my head is an organ for burrowing as some creatures use their snout and for-pause and with it I would mine and burrow my way through these hills I think that the richest vein is somewhere hereabouts so by the divining rod and thin rising vapors I judge and here I will begin to mine end of LibriVox part two end of chapter two this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information please visit LibriVox.org this reading by Gordon McKenzie Walden by Henry David Thoreau chapter three reading with a little more deliberation in the choice of their pursuits all men would perhaps become essentially students and observers for certainly their nature and destiny are interesting to all alike in accumulating property for ourselves or our posterity in founding a family or a state or acquiring fame even we are mortal but in dealing with truth we are immortal and need fear no change nor accident the oldest Egyptian or Hindu philosopher raised a corner of the veil from the statue of the divinity and still the trembling robe remains raised and I gaze upon as fresh a glory as he did since it was I in him that was then so bold and it is he in me that now reviews the vision no dust has settled on that robe no time has elapsed since that divinity was revealed that time which we really improve or which is improvable is neither past present nor future my residence was more favorable not only to thought but to serious reading than a university and though I was beyond the range of the ordinary circulating library I had more than ever come within the influence of those books which circulate round the world whose sentences were first written on bark and are now merely copied from time to time onto linen paper says the poet Mr. Ud being seated to run through the region of the spiritual world I have had this advantage in books to be intoxicated by a single glass of wine I have experienced this pleasure when I have drunk the liquor of the esoteric doctrines I kept Homer's Iliad on my table through the summer though I looked at his page only now and then incessant labor with my hands at first for I had my house to finish and my beans to hoe at the same time made more study impossible yet I sustained myself by the prospect of such reading in future I read one or two shallow books of travel in the intervals of my work till that employment made me ashamed of myself and I asked where it was then that I lived the student may read Homer or Escalus in the Greek without danger of dissipation or luxuriousness for it implies that he in some measure emulate their heroes and consecrate morning hours to their pages the heroic books even if printed in the character of our mother tongue will always be in a language dead degenerate times and we must laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line conjecturing a larger sense than common use permits out of what wisdom and valor and generosity we have the modern cheap and fertile press with all its translations has done little to bring us nearer to the heroic writers of antiquity they seem as solitary and the letter in which they are printed as rare and curious as ever it is worth the expense of youthful days and costly hours if you learn only some words of an ancient language which are raised out of the trivialness of the street to be perpetual suggestions and provocations it is not in vain that the farmer remembers and repeats the few Latin words which he has heard men sometimes speak as if the study of the classics would at length make way for more modern and practical studies but the adventurous student will always study classics in whatever language they may be written and however ancient they may be for what are the classics recorded thoughts of man they are the only oracles which are not decayed and there are such answers to the most modern inquiry in them as Delphi and Dodona never gave we might as well omit to study nature because she is old to read well that is to read true books in a true spirit of noble exercise and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem it requires a training such as the athletes underwent the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written it is not enough to be able to speak the language by which they are written for there is a memorable interval between the spoken and the written language the language heard and the language read the one is commonly transitory a sound, a tongue, a dialect merely almost brutish and we learn it unconsciously like the brutes of our mothers the other is the maturity and experience of that is our mother tongue this is our father tongue a reserved and select expression too significant to be heard by the ear which we must be born again in order to speak the crowds of men who merely spoke the greek and latin tongues in the middle ages were not entitled by the accident of birth to read the works of genius written in those languages for these were not written in that greek or latin which they knew but in the select language of literature they had not learned the nobler dialects of greece and Rome but the very materials on which they were written were waste paper to them and they prized instead a cheap contemporary literature but when the several nations of Europe had acquired distinct though rude written languages of their own sufficient for the purposes of their rising literatures then first learning revived and scholars were enabled to discern from that remoteness the treasures of antiquity what the roman and grecian multitude could not hear after the lapse of ages a few scholars read and a few scholars only are still reading it however much we may admire the orators occasional bursts of eloquence the noblest written words are commonly as far behind or above the fleeting spoken language as the firmament with its stars is behind the clouds there are the stars and they who can may read them the astronomers forever comment on and observe them they are not exhalations like our daily colloquies and vaporous breath what is called eloquence in the forum is commonly found to be rhetoric in the study the orator yields to the inspiration of a transient occasion and speaks to the mob before him to those who can hear him but the writer whose more equitable life is his occasion to be distracted by the event and the crowd of which inspire the orator speaks to the intellect and health of mankind to all in any age who can understand him no wonder that Alexander carried the Iliad with him on his expeditions in a precious casket a written word is the choicest of relics it is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art it is the work of art nearest to life itself it may be translated into every language and not only be read but actually breathed from all human lips not be represented on canvas or in marble only but be carved out of the breath of life itself the symbol of an ancient man's thought becomes a modern man's speech two thousand summers have imparted to the monuments of Grecian literature as to her marvels only a mature golden anatomnal tint for they have carried their own serene and celestial atmosphere into all lands to protect them against the time books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations books the oldest and the best stand naturally and rightfully on the shelves of every cottage they have no cause of their own to plead but while they enlighten his common sense will not refuse them their authors are a natural and irresistible aristocracy in every society and more than kings or emperors exert an influence on mankind when the illiterate and perhaps scornful trader has earned by enterprise and industry his coveted leisure and independence and is admitted to the circles of wealth and fashion he turns inevitably at last to those still higher but yet inaccessible circles of intellect and genius and is sensible only of the imperfection of his culture and the vanity and insufficiency of all his riches and further proves his good sense by the pains which be taken to secure for his children that intellectual culture whose want he so keenly feels and thus it is that he becomes the founder of a family those who have not learned to read the ancient classics in the language in which they were written must have a very imperfect knowledge of the history of the human race for it is remarkable that no transcript of them has ever been made into any modern tongue unless our civilization itself may be regarded as such a transcript Homer has never yet been printed in English nor Escalus nor Virgil even works as refined as solidly done and as beautiful almost as the morning itself for later writers say what we will of their genius have rarely, if ever equaled the elaborate beauty and finish and the life long and heroic literary labors of the ancients they only talk of forgetting them who never knew them it will be soon enough to forget them when we have the learning and the genius which will enable us to attend to and appreciate them that age will be rich indeed when those relics which we call classics and the still older and more than classic but even less known scriptures of the nations shall have still further accumulated when the Vatican shall be filled with Vedas and Zendavestas and Bibles with homers and Dante's and Shakespeare's and all the centuries to come shall have successively deposited their trophies in the forum of the world by such a pile we may hope to scale heaven at last the works of the great poets have never yet been read by mankind for only great poets can read them they have only been read as the multitude read the stars at most astrologically not astronomically most men have learned to read to serve a poultry convenience as they have learned to cipher in order to keep accounts and not be cheated in trade but of reading as a noble intellectual exercise they know little or nothing yet this only is reading in a high sense not that which lulls us as a luxury and suffers the nobler faculties to sleep the while but what we have to stand on tiptoe to read and devote our most alert and wakeful hours to I think that having learned our letters we should read the best that is in literature and not be forever repeating our A, B, A, B's and words of one syllable in the fourth or fifth classes sitting on the lowest foremost form all our lives most men are satisfied if they read or hear read and perchance have been convicted by the wisdom of one good book the Bible and for the rest of their lives vegetate and dissipate their faculties in what is called easy reading there is a work in several volumes in our circulating library entitled little reading which I thought referred to a town of that name which I had not been to there are those who like cormorants and ostriches can digest all sorts of this even after the fullest dinner of meats and vegetables for they suffer nothing to be wasted if others are the machines to provide this provender they are the machines to read it they read the nine thousandth zebulon and sofronia and how they loved as none had ever loved before and neither did the course of their true love run smooth at any rate how it did run and stumble and get up again and go on how some poor unfortunate got up on to a steeple who had better never have gone up as far as the belfry and then having needlessly got him up there the happy novelist rings the bell for all the world to come together and hear how he did get down again for my part I think that they had better metamorphose all such aspiring heroes of universal noveldom into man-weathercocks as they used to put heroes among the constellations and let them swing round there till they are rusty and not come down at all to bother honest men with their pranks the next time the novelist rings the bell I will not stir though the meeting-house burned down the skip of the tiptoe hop a romance of the middle ages by the celebrated author of Tittle Tall Tan to appear in monthly parts a great rush don't all come together all this they read with saucer eyes and erect and primitive curiosity and with unwearyed gizzard whose corrugations even yet need sharpening just as some little four-year-old Bencher his two-cent guilt-covered edition of Cinderella without any improvement that I can see in the pronunciation or accent or emphasis or any more skill in extracting or inserting the moral the result is dullness of sight a stagnation of the vital circulations and a general deliquium and slowing off of all the intellectual faculties this sort of gingerbread is baked daily and more sedulously than pure wheat or rye and Indian in almost every oven and finds a sureer market the best books are not read even by those who are called good readers what does our concord culture amount to there is in this town with a very few exceptions no taste for the best or very good books even in English literature whose words all can read and spell even the college bread and so called liberally educated men here and everywhere have really little or no acquaintance with the English classics and as for the recorded wisdom of mankind the ancient classics and Bibles which are accessible to all who will know of them there are the feeblest efforts anywhere made to become acquainted with them I know a woodchopper of middle age who takes a French paper not for news as he says for he is above that but to keep himself in practice he being a Canadian by birth and when I ask him what he considers the best thing he can do in this world he says besides this to keep up and add to his English this is about as much as the college bread generally do or aspire to do and they take an English paper for the purpose one who has just come from reading perhaps one of the best English books will find how many with whom he can converse about it or suppose he comes from reading a Greek or Latin classic in the original whose praises are familiar even to the so called illiterate he will find nobody at all to speak to but must keep silence about it indeed there is hardly the professor in our colleges who if he has mastered the difficulties of the language has proportionally mastered the difficulties of the wit and poetry of a Greek poet and has any sympathy to impart to the alert and heroic reader and as for the sacred scriptures or bibles of mankind who in this town can tell me even their titles most men do not know that any nation but the Hebrews have had a scripture a man any man will go considerably out of his way to pick up a silver dollar but here are golden words which the wisest men of antiquity have uttered and whose words the wise of every succeeding age have assured us of and yet we learn to read only as far as easy reading the primers and class books and when we leave school the little reading and story books which are for boys and beginners and our reading our conversation and thinking are all on a very low level we're the only of pygmies and mannequins I aspire to be acquainted with wiser men than this our concord soil has produced whose names are hardly known here or shall I hear the name of Plato and never read his book as if Plato were my townsman and I never saw him my next neighbor who spoke or attended to the wisdom of his words but how actually is it his dialogues which contain what was immortal in him lie on the next shelf and yet I never read them we are underbred and low-lived and illiterate and in this respect I confess I can't make any very broad distinction between the illiterateness of my townsman who cannot read at all and the illiterateness of him who has learned to read only what is for children and feeble intellects we should be as good as the worthies of antiquity but partly by first knowing how good they were we are a race of tit men and soar but little higher in our intellectual flights than the columns of the daily paper it is not all books that are as dull as their readers there are probably words addressed to our condition exactly which if we could really hear and understand would be more salutary than the morning or the spring to our lives and possibly put a new aspect on the face of things for us how many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book the book exists for us per chance which will explain our miracles and reveal new ones the at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered these same questions the disturb and puzzle and confound us have in their turn occurred to all the wise men not one has been omitted and each has answered them according to his ability by his words and his life moreover with wisdom we shall learn liberality the solitary hired man on a farm in the outskirts of concord who has had his second birth and peculiar religious experience and is driven as he believes to present gravity and exclusiveness by his faith may think it is not true but Zoroaster thousands of years ago traveled the same road and had the same experience but he being wise knew it to be universal and treated his neighbors accordingly and is even said to have invented and established worship among men let him humbly commune with Zoroaster then and through the liberalizing influence of all the worthys with Jesus Christ himself and let our church go by the board we boast that we belong to the 19th century and are making the most rapid strides of any nation but consider how little this village does for its own culture I do not wish to flatter my townsmen nor to be flattered by them for that will not advance either of us we need to be provoked goaded like oxen as we are into a trot we have a comparatively decent system of common schools schools for infants only but accepting the half starved lyceum in the winter and laterally the puny beginning of a library suggested by the state no school for ourselves we spend more on almost any article of bodily element or ailment than our mental element it is time that we had uncommon schools that we did not leave off our education when we begin to be men and women it is time that villages were universities and their elderly inhabitants the fellows of universities with leisure if they are indeed so well off to pursue liberal studies the rest of their lives shall the world be confined to one Paris or one Oxford forever cannot students be boarded here and get a liberal education under the skies of concord can we not hire some abalard to lecture to us alas what with fortering the cattle and tending the store we are kept from school too long and our education is sadly neglected in this country the village should in some respects take the place of the noblemen of Europe it should be the patron of the fine arts it is rich enough it wants only the magnanimity and refinement it can spend money enough on such things as farmers and traders value but it is thought utopian to propose spending money for things which more intelligent men know to be a far more wealth this town has spent 17 thousand dollars on a townhouse thank fortune or politics but probably it will not spend so much on living wit the true meat to put into that shell in a hundred years the 125 dollars annually subscribed for a lyceum the winter is better spent than any other equal sum raised in the town if we live in the 19th century why should we not enjoy the advantages which the 19th century offers why should our life be in any respect provincial if we will read newspapers why not skip the gossip take the best newspaper in the world at once not be sucking the pap of neutral family papers or browsing olive branches here in new england let the reports of all the learned societies come to us and we will see if they know anything why should we leave it to harper and brothers and company to select our reading as the nobleman of cultivated taste surrounds himself with whatever conduces to his culture genius, learning, wit, books, paintings statuary music philosophical instruments and the like so let the village do not stop short at a pedagogue a parson, a sexton, a parish library and three select men as our pilgrim forefathers got through a cold winter once on a bleak rock with these to act collectively is according to the spirit of our institutions and I am confident that as our circumstances are more flourishing our means are greater than the noblemans new england can hire all the wise men in the world to come and teach her and board them round the road while and not be provincial at all that is the uncommon school we want instead of noble men let us have noble villages of men if it is necessary omit one bridge over the river go round a little there and throw one arch at least over the darker gulf of ignorance which surrounds us end of chapter 3 this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information please visit LibriVox.org this reading by Gordon Mackenzie Walden by Henry David Thoreau chapter 4 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 shut her 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 hold 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 wrapped in a reverie amidst the pines and hickories and sumacs 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 with 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 low 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 purey 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 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 of my furniture out of doors on the grass bed and bedstead making but one budget I 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 uninterrupted it was pleasant to see my whole household effects out on the grass making a little pile like a gypsy's pack and my three-legged table from which I did not remove the books and pen and ink standing amid the pines and hickory 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 bow life ever lasting grows under the table and blackberry vines run round its legs pine cones, chestnut, burs and strawberry leaves are strewn about books as if this was the way these forms came to be transferred to our furniture two 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 ever lasting John's wort and goldenrod shrub, oaks and sand cherry blueberry and ground nut near the end of May the sand cherry adorned the sides of the path with its delicate flowers arranged in umbells cylindrically about its short stems which last in the fall weighed down with good-sized and handsome cherries fell over in wreaths like rays on every side I tasted them out of compliment to nature, though they were scarcely palatable the sumac, rousc labre grew luxuriently about the house pushing up through the embankment which I had made and growing five or six feet 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 my 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 bow 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 went 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 tan TV of wild pigeons flying by two and threes a thwart 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 travelers 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 Air Long ran away and came home again quite down at the hill in Homsick 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 but for one of those fleet railroad shafts and or 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 feign 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 comes the books 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 it and golden and silver wreaths like many a downy cloud which I have seen high in the heavens unfolding its masses to the light as if this travelling demigod this cloud-compeller would air 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 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 watched 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 him 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 encased in ice and snow and he will reach his stall only with the morning star to start once more in 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 unwereed 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 in 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 did 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 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 then by the steady and cheerful valor of the men who inhabit the snow plow 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 with the fog bank of their chilled breath which announces that the cars are coming without long delay not withstanding the veto of a New England northeast snowstorm and I behold the plowmen covered with snow and rhyme their heads peering above the mold board which is turning down other than daisies in the nests of field mice like boulders of the Sierra Nevada and outside place in the universe commerce is unexpectedly confident and serene, alert, adventurous and unwearyed it is very natural in its methods with all 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 odours 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 manila hemp and coconut 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 main 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, thomiston, lime a prime lot which will get far among the hills before it gets slacked these rags and 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 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 but put into a pot and boiled will come out an excellent done fish for a Saturday's dinner next, Spanish hides with the tales still preserving their twist and the angle of elevation they had when the oxen that wore them were rearing 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 tales 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 hog's head 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 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 admiral and hark! here comes the cattle train bearing the cattle of a thousand hills sheep cots, 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 Gale the air is filled with the bleeding of calves and sheep and the hustling of oxen as if a pastoral valley were going by when the old bell-weather 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 he thinks I hear them barking behind the Peterborough hills or panting up at 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 world-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 in 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 favourable 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 veil to veil 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 whipper-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 distinguish not only the clock 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 distance 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 the dawn when other birds are still the screech owls take up the strain like mourning women with their ancient ooloo-loo their dismal scream is truly Ben Johnsonian wise midnight hags it is no honest and blunt twit-to-woo 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 and the infernal groves yet I love to hear their wailing their doleful responses trilled along the wood side 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 feign 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-oh that I never had been born size one on this side of the pond and circles with the restlessness of despair to some new perch on the grey oaks then that I had never been born echoes another on the farther side with tremulous sincerity and born 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 and 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 and indeed for the most part of it suggested only by 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 usnia lichens and small hawks circulate above and the chickadee lisps amid the evergreens and the partridge and rabbits 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 barnyard in the meanwhile all the shore rang with the trump of bullfrogs the sturdy spirits of ancient wine-bibers and wasailers 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 feign keep up the hilarious rules of their old festal tables though their voices have waxed horse and solemnly grave mocking at mirth and the wine has lost its flavour and become only liquor to distend their punches and sweet intoxication never comes to drown the memory of the past but mere saturation and water-loggedness and distention the almost aldermanic with his chin upon a heart-leaf which serves for a napkin to his drooling chaps under this northern shore quaffs a deep draft of the once scorned water and passes round the cup with ejaculation and straightway comes over the water from some distant cove the same password repeated where the next insinuity and girth has gulped down to his mark and when this observance has made the circuit of the shores there ejaculates the master of ceremonies with satisfaction draw 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 tronk 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 a 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 birds if they could be naturalized without being domesticated it would soon become the most famous sound in our woods surpassing the clanger 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 stalk 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 an either 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 and nor children crying to comfort one an old-fashioned man would have lost his senses and 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 whipper-wheel 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 orio 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 sails a young forest growing up under your meadows and wild sumac 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 End of Chapter 4 This is a LibriVox recording All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain For more information please visit LibriVox.org This reading by Gordon McKenzie Walden Chapter 5 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 and 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 whipper-wheel is born on the rippling wind from over the water sympathy with the fluttering alder Doppler 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 in 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 then thrown away even as far off as the railroad half a mile distant or by the lingering odor of a cigar or pipe may 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 hilltops 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 past 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 poutes they plainly fished much more and 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 me hoeing them it is a 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 lowlands it would still be good for the grass on the uplands and being good for the grass it would be good for me sometimes I compare myself with other men it seems as if I were more favored by the gods than they beyond any desserts 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 insufficient 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 humanist was not a person nor a villager that I thought no place could ever be strange to me again morning 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 rainstorms 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 the maid 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 thundershow 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 want to be nearer to folks rainy and sunny 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 disc 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 brighten 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 subtle 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 subtle 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 own 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 of 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 they 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 someone may convey an idea of my situation I am no more lonely than the loon in the pond that laughs so loud or the 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 mulledon or dandelion in a pasture or a beanleaf or a sorrel or a horsefly or a bumblebee I am no more lonely than the millbrook 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 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 golf or whaley and though he is thought to be dead none can show where he is buried an elderly dame too dwells in my neighbourhood invisible to most persons in whose odorous herb garden I love to stroll sometimes gathering symbols and listening to her fables for she has a genius of unequaled 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 has 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 mid-summer 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 mold myself what is the pill which keeps us well serene contented not my or thy great grandfathers but our great grandmother natures universal vegetable botanic medicines by which she has kept herself young always outlived so many old pars in her day and fed her health with their decaying fatness for my penacea instead of one of those quack vials of a mixture dipped from asheron 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 draft 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 seller but drive out the stopples long air that and follow westward the steps of aurora I am no worshipper of hygea who was the daughter of that old herb doctor Esculapius 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 Hebb, cup-bearer to Jupiter who was the daughter of Juno in 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 to the globe and wherever she came it was spring End of chapter 5 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 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 must 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 of speeches 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 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 practiced 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 sympathize with them at least so easy is it though many housekeepers doubted 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 round about 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 Spencer which one of my visitors inscribed on a yellow walnut leaf for a card arrived there the little house they fill nay look for entertainment where none was rest is their feast and all things at their will the noblest mind the best contentment has when Winslow after word 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 brought a partridge we had taken our journey fasting fearing that they would be lightheaded for want of food and also sleep owing to the savages barbarous singing for they used to sing themselves to sleep 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 honour but as far as eating was concerned I do not see how the Indians could have done better they had nothing to eat themselves 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 favourable 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 Pavlagonian man he had so suitable and poetic a name that I am sorry I cannot print it here a Canadian a woodchopper and postmaker who can hold 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 Pythia they say that minutious lives yet son of actor and Pellius lives son of Achus among the mere medunds 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 today 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 somber moral hue over the world seem to have hardly any existence for him he was about twenty-eight years old and had left Canada and his father's house a dozen years before to work in the states and earn money to buy a farm with that last perhaps in his native country he was cast in the courses mold 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 cow-high 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 Yankee's 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 and one day he was a skillful 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 with all 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 bearing 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 in a light 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 gore a pit 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 three score 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 mmm, 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 cyclopedia 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 homemade Vermont gray he said and that was good could he dispense with tea and coffee does this country afford any beverage beside water? he had soaked hemlock leaves in water and drank it and thought that was better than water and 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 why 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 but 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 gory 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 and 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 maneuvering 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 10 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 in the inside of my house and as an excuse for calling asked for a glass of water 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 me thinks 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 alms house and elsewhere came to see me but I endeavored to make them exercise all the wit they had and make their confessions to me peace-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 select men 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 much for him as for another I have always been so, said he from my childhood I never had much mind I was not like other children I am weak in the head it was the Lord's will I suppose and there he was to prove the truth of his words he was a metaphysical puzzle to me I have rarely met a fellow man on such promising ground it was so simple and sincere and so true all that he said 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 hospitality 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 on away slaves with plantation manners who listened from time to time like the fox in the fable as if they heard the hounds looking on their track and looked at me beseechingly as much as to say oh 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 do 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 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 taken up in having 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 much good in my position I 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 defense and you would suppose that they would not go a huckle-burying 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 boars 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-burying 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 English men welcome English men for I had had communication at race end of chapter six this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. for more information please visit LibriVox.org this reading by Gordon Mackenzi meanwhile my beans the length of whose rows added together was seven miles already planted were impatient to be hoh'd 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 rose, my beans, though so many more than I wanted. They attached me to the earth, and so I got strength, like Anteus. 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 sank-foil, blackberries, johnswort, and the like before. Sweet wild fruits and pleasant flowers produce, instead, this pulse. What shall I learn of beans? More 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, leafed 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 a-feet. My enemies are worms, cool days, and most of all wood-jucks. 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 in 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 arrow-heads which I turned up in the hoeing, that an extinct nation had anciently dwelled 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 wood-chuck 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 bare-footed, 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 copes, 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 labour 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 husbandment 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 rains up his grateful doven 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 draught, 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 pot-hash, but in all dels 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 rangs de vache for them. Near at hand, upon the topmost spray of a birch, sings the brown thresher, 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 rose with my hoe, I disturbed the ashes of uncronicaled 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 in the sky and was an accompaniment to my labour which yielded an instant and immeasurable crop. It was no longer beans that I hoeed, nor I that hoeed beans, and I remembered with as much pity as pride, if I remembered at all, my acquaintances who had gone to the city to attend the oratorios. The night hawk circled overhead in the sunny afternoons, for I sometimes made a day of it, like a moat 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 un-fledged pinions of the sea. For 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 sound and carrier haste. But from under a rotten stump my hoe turned up a sluggish portentious and outlandish spotted salamander, a trace of Egypt in 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 Galadays the town fires its great guns, which echo like pop guns to these woods, and some waves 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 scarletina or cankerash, until it length some more favorable puff of wind, making haste over the fields and up the wayland road, brought me information of these trainers. It seemed by the distant hum, as if somebody's bees had swarmed, and that the neighbors, according to Virgil's advice, buy a faint tintonabulum upon the most sonorous of their domestic utensils, were endearing 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 middle-sex 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 tantive 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 organization so ruthlessly, and making such invidious distinctions with his hoe, leveling whole ranks of one species and sedulously cultivating another. That's Roman Wormwood, that's pigweed, that's sorrel, that's pipergrass, have at him, chop him up, turn his roots upward to the sun, don't let him have a fiber in the shade. If you do he'll turn himself to other side up and be as green as a leak 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 thinned the ranks of their enemies, filled 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, in 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 exchange 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 at once, I hoed them unusually well as far as I went, and was paid for it in the end. There being in truth, as Evelyn says, no compost or latation whatsoever comparable to this continual motion, repastination, and turning of the mold 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 the dungings and other sordid temperings being but the vickers succcedaneous to this improvement. Moreover, this being one of those worn out and exhausted lay fields which enjoy their sabbath, had perchance as Sir Kennelm 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 fifty-four cents, plowing, harrowing, and furrowing, seven dollars and fifty cents, too much. Beans for seed, three dollars and twelve cents plus. Potatoes for seed, one dollar and thirty-three cents. Peas for seed, forty cents. Turnip seed, six cents. White line for crow fence, two cents. Horse cultivator and boy, three hours, one dollar. Horse and cart to get crop, seventy-five cents. In all, fourteen dollars, seventy-two cents plus. My income was Patram Familius Vendessum non emassum es aportet, from nine bushels and twelve quarts of beans sold, sixteen dollars, ninety-four cents. Five bushels, large potatoes, two dollars fifty cents. Nine bushels, small potatoes, two dollars and twenty-five cents. Grass, one dollar. Stocks, seventy-five cents. In all, twenty-three dollars, forty-four cents, leaving a pecuniary profit, as I have elsewhere said, of eight dollars seventy-one cents plus. This is the result of my experience in raising beans. Plant the common small white bush bean about the first of June, and rose 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 nearest 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 saleable 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 worm-eaten 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 70th 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 subtle 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 helped 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 plotting 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, no procession, no ceremony, not accepting 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 groveling 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 prophets of agriculture are particularly pious or just. Maximic pious questus, and according to Vero the old Romans called the same earth mother and Ceres and thought that they who cultivated led a pious and useful life and that they alone were left of the race of King Saturn. We are want 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. 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 homeopathic doses, was really as refreshing in its way as the rustle of leaves in 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 button-woods. 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 newsroom, and on one side to support it. As once at Reddingham Companies on State Street, they kept nuts and raisins, or salt and meal in 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 Aetessian 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 worthy's, 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, more else leaning against a barn with their hands in their pockets, like karyatides, 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 cowpaths 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 victuling cellar, some by the fancy, as the dry goods store and the jewelers, 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 eruption 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 for some bright village parlor or lecture room, with a bag of rye or Indian meal upon my shoulder, for my snug harbour 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 in two 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 snowstorm, 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 traveled 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 around, for a man needs only to be turned around 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 cobblers, I was seized and put into jail, because, as I have elsewhere related, I did not pay a tax, too, 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 Fairhaven 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 amused himself with a 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 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. Nor wars did men molest, when only beach and 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. Sometimes having a surfight 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, two 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. Or 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 practicing various kinds of philosophy, had concluded commonly by the time I arrived that he belonged to the ancient sect of Cenobites. 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. 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 sounds, stirring them up as the keeper of a menagerie his wild beasts, until I elicited a growl from every wooded veil and hillside. In warm evenings I frequently sat in the boat playing the flute, and saw the perch which I seemed to have charmed, hovering around me, and the moon travelling over the ribbed bottom, which was strewed with the wrecks of the forest. Formally 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, through the burning brands high into the air like sky rockets, 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 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 to 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 to the shore. Some have referred this to the reflection of the verger, 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 as 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 walled in 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 in parts 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 with all, produces a monstrous effect, making fit studies for a Michelangelo. 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 onto 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 laid 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 helm 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, except 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 bullrush, nor even a lily, yellow or white, but only a few small heart-leaves and potomogetons, and perhaps a water-target or two, all which, however, obey there 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 part, where there is usually a little sediment, probably from the decay of the leaves which have been wafted onto it so many successive falls, and a bright green weed is brought up on anchors even in mid-winter. 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-liked character. Successive nations perchance have drank at, admired, and fathomed it, and passed away, and still its water is green and pollucid 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 coloured them of the hue they now wear, and obtained a patent of heaven, to be the only Walden Pond in the world, and a stiller of celestial dues. 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 Pechance, the first who came to this well, have left some trace of their footsteps. I have been surprised to detect, in circling 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 relivo. 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 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 sandbar 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. What the pond has risen steadily for two years, and now in the summer of fifty-two, 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 watershed 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 occasion 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 weather 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 the 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 sword, 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 more 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 Walde Inn Pond. The pond was my well, ready dug. For four months in the year it 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 sixty-five or seventy degrees as some of the time, owing partly to the sun on the roof, was forty-two degrees, 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 forty-five degrees, or the warmest of any water tried, though it is the coldest that I know of in summer, when besides 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 fishermen safely sat down at eight pounds because he did not see him. Perch and pouts, some of each weighing over two pounds, shiners, chivins or roach, 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 ichtheologists would make new varieties of some of them. There are also a certain race of frogs and tortoises and a few mussels in it, muskrats and mink, leave their traces about it, and occasionally a traveling 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, hirondo bicolor, skim over it, and the peat-weeds, 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 Fairhaven. 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 lampres here, I know not by what fish they could be made. Perhaps they are the nests of the chiven. 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 was 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 apart or a cultivated field of butts 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 selvedge, 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 fluvia-tile trees next to the shore are the slender eyelashes which fringe it, and the wooded hills and cliffs around it 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 shoreline 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 opposing hills, and that the swallows which skim over might perch on it. Indeed, they sometimes dive below this line as if 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, scatter over its whole extent, by their motions in the sun, produce the finest imaginable sparkle on it, or, per chance, a duck plumes itself, or, as I have said, a swallow skims so low as to touch it. It may be that in the 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 fish is dart at, and so dimple it again. It is, like molten glass, cooled, but not congealed, and the few moats 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, Jirenas, 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 is 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 indistinguishable. How peaceful the phenomena of the lake! Again the works of man shine as in the spring. Every leaf and twig in 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 quick silver 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 rainstorm 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 somber 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, per chance, 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 raindrops 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 bushy bow, 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 full 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 waterfowl, and that there were many eagles about it. He came here 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 waterlogged 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 the 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 grapevines had run over the trees next to 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 then so high, that as you look down from the west end it had the appearance of an amphitheater 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 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 sure 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 the 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 Moor of Moor Hill, to meet him at the deep cut and thrust and 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 honour. 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 icemen have skimmed it once, it is itself unchanged. The same water which my youthful eyes fell on. All the change is in me. It has not acquired one permanent wrinkle after all its ripples. It is perennially young, and I may stand and see a swallow dip apparently to pick an insect from its surface as a viewer. It struck me again to-night, as if I had not seen it almost daily for more than twenty years. Why, here is Walden. The same woodland lake that I discovered so many years ago, where a forest was cut down last winter, another is springing up 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. I, 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. Then 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 breakmen 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 held 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's wave? Flint's or Sandy Pond, in Lincoln, our greatest lake in inland sea, lies about a mile east of Walden. It is much larger, being said to contain 197 acres, and is more fertile than 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 cheeks 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 side's 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 waiter, 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 pipe-wart perhaps, from half an inch to four inches in diameter, and perfectly spherical. They 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 scent 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 crook 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 shore, or some wild man or child the thread of whose history is interwoven with its own, not for 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 per chance cursed all the shores, who exhausted the land around it and would feign 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 muck heap. Chambers for men, horses, oxen, and swine, cleansed and uncleansed, all contiguous to one another, stocked with men. A great grease spot, redolent of manures and buttermilk, under a high state of cultivation being manured with the 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. But our lakes receive as true names at least as the Ikarian Sea, where still the shore a brave attempt resounds. Goose pond of small extent is on my way to Flint's. Fair Haven, an expensive 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 woodcutters and the railroad 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. Poor name for 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 underground. 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 glaucus 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 the place measures fourteen inches in diameter. In the spring of 49 I talked with a 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 it 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 onto the ice with oxen. But before he had gone far in his work he was surprised to find that it was wrong and upward, with the stumps of the branches pointing down, and a 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 been waterlogged, 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 glaucus 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 per chance be carried off by slaves, like precious stones to adorn the heads of emperors, but being liquid and ample, and secure to us and our successors forever, we disregard them, and run after the diamond of Kohanor. 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 the meanness of them. How much fairer than the pool before the farmer's door, in which his ducks swim. Hither, the clean, wild ducks come. Nature has no human 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. You disgrace earth. End of chapter nine. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information please visit LibriVox.org. This reading by Gordon McKenzie. Walden. By Henry David Thoreau. Chapter 10. 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 aznea 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 bowl, and beautifully lichen painted, perfect in all its details, of which accepting 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 beech nuts nearby. It is worth a while to see the silver grain sparkle when you split this wood, the bass, the hornbeam, the Celtis oxidentalis, or false elm, of which we have but one well grown, some taller mast of a pine, a shingletree, 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 feign fancy myself one of the elect. One who visited me declared that the shadows of some Irishman before him had no halo about them, that it was only natives that were so distinguished. Benvenuto Salini tells us in his memoirs that, after a certain terrible dream or vision which he had during his convinement 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 Salini'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 fair 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 seemed indefinitely long before one, in which many events may happen, a large portion of our natural life, though it was already half spent when I started. By the way there came up a shower, which compelled me to stand half an hour under a pine, piling boughs over my head and wearing my handkerchief for a shed. And when at length I had made one cast over the pickerel weed, standing up to my middle in water, I found myself suddenly in the shadow of a cloud, and the thunder began to rumble with such emphasis that I could do no more than listen to it. The gods must be proud, thought 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, civil-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 sin assure 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 a 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 me thought 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 labour, 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 huckle-burying in the summer for their amusement. John heaved a sigh at this, and his wife stared with arms akimbo. And both appeared to be wondering if they had capital enough to begin such a course with, or arithmetic enough to carry it through. It was sailing by dead reckoning to them, and they saw not clearly how to make their ports 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'm lying by, good perch I catch. What's your bait? I catch shiners with fish-worms and bait the perch with them. You'd better go now, John, said his wife, with glistening and hopeful face. But John demurred. The shower was now over, and a rainbow above 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, our shadows and quick sands, and rope broken with all, 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 moats by a skillfully directed undercurrent, I drank to genuine hospitality the heartiest draft 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 hear be played. Grow wild according to thy nature, like these sedges and breaks, 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 lee. Debate with no man hast thou. With questions are 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 foul 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 this 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 tellaria to their heels. 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 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 close 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 the philosophers or poets even who approach her with expectation. She is not afraid to exhibit herself to them. The traveler on the prairie is naturally a hunter on the headwaters of the Missouri and Columbia, a trapper, and at the falls of St. Mary a fisherman. He who is only a traveler learns things at second hand and by the haves and is poor authority. We are most interested when science reports that 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 fouling 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 accepting the humane society. Moreover, when at the pond, I wished sometimes to add fish to my fare for variety. I have actually fished for 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 fouling, 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 fouling, 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 been 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 hair 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, whichever 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 to 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 mourning. 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 begin to see where housework commences and wence 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 fair 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 that of larvae. The voracious caterpillar when transformed into a butterfly, and the gluttoness 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 praying on other animals. But this is a miserable way, as anyone 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 amidst 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 caused 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 stardust 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 feign 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 labour's 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 Hindu 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 palette, that some berries which I had eaten on a hillside had fed my genius. The soul, not being mistress of herself, says Cheng Ziu. 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 defileeth a man, but the appetite with which it is eaten. It is neither the quality nor the quantity but the devotion to the sensual savers, when that which is eaten is not avianed 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, musk rats, 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 instance 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 traveling 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 caused 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 fawns and satyrs, the divine allied to beasts, the creatures of appetite, and that to some extent our very life is our disgrace. How happy is he who hath due place assigned to his beasts and disafforested his mind? Can use this horse, goat, wolf, and every beast, and is not ass himself to all the rest? Else man not only is the herd of swine those devils too which did incline them to the 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. 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 and 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 Hindu 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 labour more or less. Having bathed, he sat down to recreate his intellectual man. It was a rather cool evening, and some of his neighbours 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 which he worked in, and suggested work for certain faculties which slumbered in him. They gently did away with the street and the village and the state in which he lived. A voice said to him, Why do you stay here and live this mean, moiling life when a glorious existence is possible for you? Those same stars twinkle over other fields than these. But how to come out of this condition and actually migrate thither? All that he could think of was to practice some new austerity, to let his mind descend into his body and redeem it, and treat himself with ever increasing respect. More information please visit LibriVox.org, this reading by Gordon Mackenzie, Walden by Henry David Thoreau, Chapter 12, Brute Neighbours. Sometimes I had a companion in my fishing who came through the village to my house from the other side of 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 boil the 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 boasts? And oh, the housekeeping. To keep bright the devil's doorknobs 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 sumacs and sweetbriars tremble. Eh? Mr. Poet, is it you? How do you like the world today? Poet. See those clouds. How they hang. That's the greatest thing I have seen today. 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 today that I might go a fishing. That's the true industry for poets. It is the only trade I have learned. Come. That's a long. Hermit. I cannot resist. My brown bread will soon be gone. I will go with you gladly soon. But I am just concluding a serious meditation. I think that I am near the end of it. Leave me alone then for a while. But that we may not be delayed. You shall be digging the bait, meanwhile. Angle worms are rarely to be met with in these parts where the soil was never fattened with manure. The race is nearly extinct. The sport of digging the bait is nearly equal to that of catching the fish, when one's appetite is not too keen. And this you may have all to yourself 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 weaving, 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? Me thinks 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? And was a very hazy day. I will just try these three sentences of Confuci. 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 13 whole ones, besides several which are imperfect or undersized. What they will do for the smaller fry? They do not cover up the hook so much. Those villageworms are quite too large. A shiner may make a meal of one without finding the skewer. Hermit. Well then, let's be off. Shall we to 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 Pilpe and company 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 lunchtime 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 boat peep with it. And when at last I held still a piece of cheese between my thumb and finger, it came and nibbled it sitting in my hand, and afterward cleaned its face and paws, like a fly, and walked away. A Phoebe soon built in my shed and a robin for protection in a pine which grew against the house. In June the Partridge, tetrao ombelus, which is so shy a bird, led her brood past my windows, from the woods in the rear to the front of my house, plucking 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 resembled the dried leaves and twigs that many a traveller has placed his foot in the midst of a brood, and heard the whir of the 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 lain 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 co-evil 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 innocence 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 winnaring 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 sword 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 bow to bow of the soft white pines over my head. Or the red squirrel, coursing down the nearest bow, 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 woodpile, 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 dulem, 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 mere middens covered all the hills and veils in my woodyard, 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 battlefield I ever trod while the battle was raging. Internessine 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 dispatched 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 nearer with rapid pace, till he stood on his guard within half an inch of the combatants. Then watching his opportunity he sprang upon the black warrior, and commenced his operations near the root of his right foreleg, 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 why 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 and 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 Concorde history, at least if in the history of America they 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, Concorde fight. Two killed on the Patriot 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 windowsill 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 foreleg 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 endeavouring 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 windowsill 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 part he 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. And yes, Sylveus, 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 IV, in the presence of Nicholas Pistorienus, 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 Christiane, 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 boss fit only to course a mud turtle in a victuling 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 kerr 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 treated 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 Gervilla family. Once I was surprised to see a cat walking along the stony shore of the pond, for they rarely wander so far from the home. The surprise was mutual. Nevertheless, the most domestic cat, which is 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 burying, 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 farmhouses in Lincoln near the pond, Mr. Jillian Bakers. When I called to see her in June, 1842, she was gone hunting in the woods as was her want. I am not sure whether it was a male or female, and so used 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 flattered 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 Martin 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, Columbus glacialus came, as usual, to molt 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 damn sportsmen are on the alert in gigs and on foot, two by two and three by three with patent rifles and conical balls and spyglasses. 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 dives 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 spyglasses and make the woods resound with their discharges. The waves generously rise and dash angrily, taking sides with all waterfowl, and our sportsmen must beat a retreat to town and shop and unfinished jobs. But they were too often successful. When I went to get a pail of water early in the morning I frequently saw this stately bird sailing out of my cove within a few rods. If I endeavored to overtake him in a boat in order to see how he would maneuver he would dive and be completely lost, so that I did not discover him again, sometimes till the latter part of the day. But I was more than a match for him on the surface. He commonly went off in a rain. As I was paddling along the North Shore one very calm October afternoon. For such days especially they settle on to the lakes, like the milkweed down, having looked in vain over the pond for a loon, suddenly one, sailing out from the shore toward the middle, a few rods in front of me, set up his wild laugh and betrayed himself. I pursued with a paddle, and he dived, but when he came up I was nearer than before. He dived again, but I 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 maneuvered so cunningly that I could not get within half a dozen rods of him. Each time when he came to the surface, turning his head this way and that, he coolly surveyed the water and the land, and apparently chose his course so that he might come up where there was the widest expanse of water and at the greatest distance from the boat. It was surprising how quickly he made up his mind and put his resolve into execution. He led me at once to the widest part of the pond and could not be driven from it. While he was thinking one thing in his brain I was endeavouring 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 unwearable that when he had swum farthest he would immediately plunge again, nevertheless, and then no wit could divine wear 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 underwater 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 endeavour 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 waterfowl. But occasionally when he had bulked 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 has 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 sportsmen, tricks which they will have less need to practice in Louisiana bayous. When compelled to rise, they would sometimes circle round and round and over the pond at a considerable height, from which they could easily see to other ponds in the river, like black moats 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. End of Chapter 12 Housewarming In October I went agraping to the river Meadows and loaded myself with clusters more precious for their beauty and fragrance than for food. There too I admired, though I did not gather the cranberries, small waxen gems, pendants of the Meadow grass, pearly and red, which the farmer plucks with an ugly rake, leaving the smooth Meadow in a snarl, heedlessly measuring them by the bushel and the dollar only, and sells the spoils of the Meads to Boston and New York, destined to be jammed to satisfy the tastes of lovers of nature there. So butchers rake the tongues of bison out of the prairie grass, regardless of the torn and drooping plant. The barberry's brilliant fruit will likewise food for my eyes merely. But I collected a small store of wild apples for coddling, which the proprietor and travellers had overlooked. When chestnuts were ripe I laid up half a bushel for winter. It was very exciting at that season to roam the then boundless chestnut woods of Lincoln. They now sleep their long sleep under the railroad, with a bag on my shoulder and a stick to open burrs with in my hand, for I did not always wait for the frost. Amid the rustling of leaves and the loud reproofs of the red squirrels and the jays, whose half-consumed nuts I sometimes stole, for the burrs which they had selected were sure to contain sound ones. Occasionally I climbed and shook the trees. They grew also behind my house, and one large tree which almost overshadowed it, was, when in flower, a bouquet which scented the whole neighborhood, but the squirrels and the jays got most of its fruit. The last coming in flocks early in the morning, and picking the nuts out of the burrs before they fell, I relinquished these trees to them, and visited the more distant woods composed wholly of chestnut. Many other substitutes might, perhaps, be found. Digging one day for fishworms I discovered the ground nut, apios tuberosa, on its string, the potato of the aborigines, a sort of fabulous fruit, which I had begun to doubt if I had ever dug and eaten in childhood, as I had told, and had not dreamed it. I had often seen its crumpled red velvety blossom supported by the stems of other plants, without knowing it to be the same. Cultivation has well nigh exterminated it. It has a Swedish taste, much like that of a frost-bitten potato, and I found it better boiled than roasted. This tuber seemed like a faint promise of nature to rear her own children and feed them simply here at some future period. In these days of fatted cattle and waving grain fields, this humble root, which was once the totem of an Indian tribe, is quite forgotten, or known only by its flowering vine. But let wild nature reign here once more, and the tender and luxurious English grains will probably disappear before a myriad of foes, and without the care of man the crow may carry back even the last seed of corn to the great cornfield of the Indian's god in the southwest once he is said to have brought it. But the now almost exterminated groundnut will perhaps revive and flourish in spite of frosts and wildness, prove itself indigenous, and resume its ancient importance and dignity as the diet of the hunter tribe. Some Indian ceres or manureva must have been the inventor and bestower of it, and when the reign of poetry commences here, its leaves and string of nuts may be represented on our works of art. Already by the first of September I had seen two or three small maples turned scarlet across the pond, beneath where the white stems of three aspens diverged at the point of a promontory next the water. Ah, many a tale their color told, and gradually from week to week the character of each tree came out, and it admired itself reflected in the smooth mirror of the lake. Each morning the manager of this gallery substituted some new picture distinguished by more brilliant or harmonious coloring for the old upon the walls. The wasps came by thousands to my lodge in October, as to winter quarters, and settled on my windows within, and on the walls overhead, sometimes deterring visitors from entering. Each morning when they were numbed with cold I swept some of them out, but I did not trouble myself to get rid of them. I even felt complimented by their regarding my house as a desirable shelter. They never molested me seriously, though they bedded with me, and they gradually disappeared into what crevices I do not know, avoiding winter and unspeakable cold. Like the wasps, before I finally went into winter quarters in November, I used to resort to the northeast side of Walden, which the sun, reflected from the pitch pine woods in the stony shore, made the fireside of the pond. It is so much pleasanter and wholesomer to be warmed by the sun while you can be, than by an artificial fire. I thus warmed myself by the still-glowing embers, which the summer, like a departed hunter, had left. When I came to build my chimney, I studied masonry, my bricks being second-hand ones, required to be cleaned with a trowel, so that I learned more than usual of the qualities of bricks and trowels. The mortar on them was fifty years old, and was said to be still-growing harder. But this is one of those sayings which men love to repeat whether they are true or not. Such sayings themselves grow harder and adhere more firmly with age, and it would take many blows with a trowel to clean an old wise-acre of them. Many of the villages of Mesopotamia are built of second-hand bricks of a very good quality, obtained from the ruins of Babylon, and the cement on them is older and probably harder still. However, that may be, I was struck by the peculiar toughness of the steel which bore so many violent blows without being worn out. As my bricks had been in a chimney before, though I did not read the name of Nebuchadnezzar on them, I picked out as many fireplace bricks as I could find to save work and waste, and I filled the spaces between the bricks about the fireplace with stones from the pond shore, and also made my mortar with the white sand from the same place. I lingered most about the fireplace as the most vital part of the house. Indeed, I worked so deliberately that though I commenced at the ground in the morning, a course of bricks raised a few inches above the floor served for my pillow at night, yet I did not get a stiff neck for it that I remember. My stiff neck is of older date. I took a poet to board for a fortnight about those times which caused me to be put to it for room. He brought his own knife, though I had two, and we used to scour them by thrusting them into the earth. He shared with me the labours of cooking. I was pleased to see my work rising so square and solid by degrees, and reflected that, if it proceeded slowly, it was calculated to endure a long time. The chimney is to some extent an independent structure, standing on the ground and rising through the house to the heavens. Even after the house is burned, it still stands sometimes, and its importance and independence are apparent. This was toward the end of summer. It was now November. The north wind had already begun to cool the pond, though it took many weeks of steady blowing to accomplish it. It is so deep. When I began to have a fire at evening before I plastered my house, the chimney carried smoke particularly well, because of the numerous chinks between the boards. Yet I passed some cheerful evenings in that cool and airy apartment, surrounded by the rough brown boards full of knots, and rafters with the bark on high overhead. My house never pleased my eye so much after it was plastered, though I was obliged to confess that it was more comfortable. Should not every apartment in which man dwells be lofty enough to create some obscurity overhead, where flickering shadows may play at evening about the rafters. These forms are more agreeable to the fancy and imagination than fresco paintings or other, the most expensive furniture. I now first began to inhabit my house, I may say, when I began to use it for warmth as well as shelter. I had got a couple of old fire dogs to keep the wood from the hearth, and it did me good to see the soot form on the back of the chimney which I had built, and I poked the fire with more right and more satisfaction than usual. My dwelling was small, and I could hardly entertain an echo in it, but it seemed larger for being a single apartment and remote from neighbors. All the attractions of a house were concentrated in one room. It was kitchen, chamber, parlor, and keeping-room, and whatever satisfaction parent or child, master or servant derive from living in a house, I enjoyed it all. Cato says, the master of a family, Patrim Familius, must have in his rustic villa, Salem Oliarium, Venarium, Dolia Molta, Uti Lubiat, Keretatum Expecter, Eirei, Evertiuti, Egloriai Erit. That is, an oil and wine seller, many casks, so that it may be pleasant to expect hard times. It will be for his advantage and virtue and glory. I had in my cellar a firkin of potatoes, about two quarts of peas, with a weevil in them, and on my shelf a little rice, a jug of molasses, and a fry and Indian meal, a peck each. I sometimes dream of a larger and more populous house, standing in a golden age, of enduring materials and without gingerbread work, which shall still consist of only one room, a vast, rude, substantial, primitive hall, without sealing or plastering, with bare rafters and purlins supporting a sort of lower heaven over one's head, useful to keep off rain and snow, where the king and queen posts stand out to receive your homage, when you have done reverence to the pro- straight Saturn of an older dynasty on stepping over the sill. A cavernous house, wherein you must reach up a torch upon a pole to see the roof, where some may live in the fireplace, some in the recess of a window, and some on settles, some at one end of the hall, some at another, and some aloft on rafters, with the spiders if they choose. A house which you have got into when you have opened the outside door, and the ceremony is over, where the weary traveler may wash and eat and converse and sleep without further journey. Such a shelter as you would be glad to reach in a tempestuous night, containing all the essentials of a house, and nothing for housekeeping, where you can see all the treasures of the house at one view, and everything hangs upon its peg that a man should use, at once kitchen, pantry, parlor, chamber, store, house, and garret. Where you can see so necessary a thing, as a barrel or a ladder, so convenient a thing as a cupboard, and hear the pot boil and pay your respects to the fire that cooks your dinner, and the oven that bakes your bread, and the necessary furniture and utensils are the chief ornaments, where the washing is not put out, nor the fire, nor the mistress, and perhaps you are sometimes requested to move from off the trapped door when the cook would descend into the cellar, and so learn whether the ground is solid or hollow beneath you without stamping. A house whose inside is as open and manifest as a bird's nest, and you cannot go in at the front door and out at the back without seeing some of its inhabitants. Where to be a guest is to be presented with the freedom of the house, and not to be carefully excluded from seven eighths of it, shut up in a particular cell and told to make yourself at home there, in solitary confinement. Nowadays the host does not admit you to his hearth, but has got the mason to build one for yourself, somewhere in his alley, and hospitality is the art of keeping you at the greatest distance. There is as much secrecy about the cooking as if he had a design to poison you. I'm aware that I have been on many a man's premises, and might have been legally ordered off, but I am not aware that I have been in many men's houses. I might visit in my old clothes a king and queen who lived simply in such a house as I have described if I were going their way, but backing out of a modern palace will be all that I shall desire to learn, if ever I am caught in one. It would seem as if the very language of our parlours would lose all its nerve and degenerate into paliver holy. Our lives pass at such remoteness from its symbols and its metaphors and tropes are necessarily so far fetched through slides and dumb waiters as it were. In other words, the parlour is so far from the kitchen and workshop. The dinner even is only the parable of a dinner commonly, as if only the savage dwelt near enough to nature and truth to borrow a trope from them. How can the scholar, who dwells away in the north-west territory or the isle of man, tell what is parliamentary in the kitchen? However, only one or two of my guests were ever bold enough to stay and eat a hasty pudding with me, but when they saw that crisis approaching they beat a hasty retreat rather, as if it would shake the house to its foundations. Nevertheless, it stood through a great many hasty puddings. I did not plaster till it was freezing weather. I brought over some whiter and cleaner sand for this purpose from the opposite shore of the pond in a boat, a sort of conveyance which would have tempted me to go much farther if necessary. My house had in the meanwhile been shingled down to the ground on every side. In lazing I was pleased to be able to send home each nail with a single blow of the hammer, and it was my ambition to transfer the plaster from the board to the wall neatly and rapidly. I remembered the story of a conceited fellow who, in fine clothes, was wont to lounge about the village once, giving advice to workmen. Venturing one day to substitute deeds for words, he turned up his cuffs, seized a plasterer's board and, having loaded his trowel without mishap, with a complacent look toward the lazing overhead, made a bold gesture thitherward, and straightway to his complete discomforture received the whole contents in his ruffled bosom. I admired a new the economy and convenience of plastering, which so effectually shuts out the cold and takes a handsome finish, and I learned the various casualties to which the plasterer is liable. I was surprised to see how thirsty the bricks were which drank up all the moisture in my plaster before I had smoothed it, how many pailfuls of water it takes to christen a new hearth. I had, the previous winter, made a small quantity of lime by burning the shells of the Union Fluvietilis, which our river affords, for the sake of the experiment, so that I knew where my materials came from. I might have got good limestone within a mile or two and burned it myself if I had cared to do so. The pond had, in the meanwhile, skimmed over in the shadiest and shallowest coves, some days or even weeks before the general freezing. The first ice is especially interesting and perfect. Being hard, dark, and transparent, and affords the best opportunity that ever offers for examining the bottom where it is shallow, for you can lie at your length on ice only an inch thick like a skater insect on the surface of the water, and study the bottom at your leisure only two or three inches distant, like a picture behind a glass, and the water is necessarily always smooth then. There are many furrows in the sand where some creature has travelled about and doubled on its tracks. And, for wrecks, it is strewn with the cases of catus worms made of minute grains of white quartz. Perhaps these have creased it, for you find some of their cases in the furrows, though they are deep and broad for them to make. But the ice itself is the object of most interest, though you must improve the earliest opportunity to study it. If you examine it closely, the morning after it freezes, you find that the greater part of the bubbles, which at first appeared to be within it, are against its under surface, and that more are continually rising from the bottom, while the ice is as yet comparatively solid and dark, that is, you see the water through it. These bubbles are from an eightieth to an eighth of an inch in diameter, very clear and beautiful, and you see your face reflected in them through the ice. There may be thirty or forty of them to a square inch. There are also already within the ice narrow oblong perpendicular bubbles about half an inch long, sharp cones with the apex upward, or oftener if the ice is quite fresh, minute spherical bubbles, one directly above another like a string of beads. But these within the ice are not so numerous nor obvious as those beneath. I sometimes used to cast on stones to try the strength of the ice, and those which broke through carried in air with them, which form very large and conspicuous white bubbles beneath. One day, when I came to the same place forty-eight hours afterward, I found that those large bubbles were still perfect, though an inch more of ice had formed as I could see distinctly by the seam in the edge of a cake. But as the last two days had been very warm, like an Indian summer, the ice was now transparent, showing the dark green color of the water and the bottom, but opaque and whitish or gray, and though twice as thick was hardly stronger than before. For the air bubbles had greatly expanded under this heat and run together and lost their regularity, they were no longer one directly over another, but often like silvery coins poured from a bag, one overlapping another, or in thin flakes as if occupying slight cleavages. The beauty of the ice was gone, and it was too late to study the bottom. Being curious to know what position my great bubbles occupied with regard to the new ice, I broke out a cake containing a middling-sized one and turned it bottom upward. The new ice had formed around and under the bubble, so that it was included between the two ices. It was wholly in the lower ice, but close against the upper and was flatish or, perhaps slightly lenticular, with a rounded edge a quarter of an inch deep by four inches in diameter. And I was surprised to find that directly under the bubble the ice was melted with a great regularity in the form of a saucer reversed, to the height of five-eighths of an inch in the middle, leaving a thin partition there between the water and the bubble, hardly an eighth of an inch thick, and in many places the small bubbles in this partition had burst out downward, and probably there was no ice at all under the largest bubbles, which were a foot in diameter. I inferred that the infinite number of minute bubbles which I had first seen against the under surface of the ice were now frozen in likewise, and that each, in its degree, had operated like a burning glass on the ice beneath, to melt and rot it. These are the little air guns which contribute to make the ice crack and whoop. At length the winter set in good earnest, just as I had finished plastering, and the wind began to howl around the house, as if it had not had permission to do so till then. Night after night the geese came lumbering in the dark, with a clanger and a whistling of wings, even after the ground was covered with snow, some to a light in Walden, and some flying low over the woods toward Fair Haven, bound for Mexico. Several times when returning from the village at ten or eleven o'clock at night I heard the tread of a flock of geese, or else ducks, on the dry leaves in the woods, by a pond-hole behind my dwelling, where they had come up to feed, and the faint honk or quack of their leader as they hurried off. In 1845 Walden froze entirely over for the first time on the night of the twenty-second of December. Flint's and other shallower ponds, and the river having been frozen ten days or more. In forty-six the sixteenth, in forty-nine about the thirty-first, and in fifty about the twenty-seventh of December, in fifty-two the fifth of January, in fifty-three the thirty-first of December. The snow had already covered the ground since the twenty-fifth of November, and surrounded me suddenly with the scenery of winter. I withdrew yet farther into my shell, and endeavored to keep a bright fire both within my house and within my breast. My employment out of doors now was to collect the dead wood in the forest, bringing it in my hands or on my shoulders, or sometimes trailing a dead pine tree under each arm to my shed. An old forest fence which had seen its bas-days was a great hall for me. I sacrificed it to Vulcan, for it was past serving the god Terminus. How much more interesting an event is that man's supper who has just been forth in the snow to hunt. Nay, you might say, steal the fuel to cook it with. His bread and meat are sweet. There are enough faggots and waste wood of all kinds in the forest, of most of our towns to support many fires, but which at present warm none, and some think hinder the growth of the young wood. There was also the driftwood of the pond. In the course of the summer I had discovered a raft of pitch pine logs with the bark on, pinned together by the Irish when the railroad was built. This I hauled up partly on the shore. After soaking two years, and then lying high six months, it was perfectly sound, though waterlogged past drying. I amused myself one winter day with sliding this piecemeal across the pond, nearly half a mile, skating behind with one end of a log fifteen feet long on my shoulder and the other on the ice. Or I tied several logs together with a birch wive. And then with a longer birch or alder which had a book at the end, dragged them across. Though completely waterlogged and almost as heavy as lead, they not only burned long, but made a very hot fire. Nay, I thought that they burned better for the soaking, as if the pitch, being confined by the water, burned longer as in a lamp. Gilpin, in his account of the forest borderers of England, says that the encroachments of trespassers and the houses and fences thus raised on the borders of the forest were considered as great nuisances by the old forest law and were severely punished under the name of pure prestures, as tending at terrorem ferrarum at nocumentum foreste et cetera, to the frightening of the game and the detriment of the forest. But I was interested in the preservation of the venison and the vert more than the hunters or woodchoppers, and as much as though I had been the Lord Warden myself. And if any part was burned, though I burned it myself by accident, I grieved with a grief that lasted longer and was more inconsolable than that of the proprietors. Nay, I grieved when it was cut down by the proprietors themselves. My wood that our farmers, when they cut down a forest, felt some of that awe which the old Romans did when they came to thin, or let in the light to, a consecrated grove. Lusum con lucere. That is, would believe that it is sacred to some god. The Roman made an expiatory offering and prayed, whatever god or goddess thou art to whom this grove is sacred, be propitious to me, my family and children, et cetera. It is remarkable what a value is still put upon wood, even in this age and in this new country, a value more permanent and universal than that of gold. After all our discoveries and inventions, no man will go buy a pile of wood. It is as precious to us as it was to our Saxon and Norman ancestors. If they made their bows of it, we make our gun stocks of it. Michaud, more than thirty years ago, says that the price of wood for fuel in New York and Philadelphia nearly equals, and sometimes exceeds, that of the best wood in Paris, though this immense capital annually requires more than three hundred thousand cords and is surrounded to the distance of three hundred miles by cultivated plains. In this town, the price of wood rises almost steadily, and the only question is how much higher it is to be this year than it was the last. Mechanics and tradesmen who come in person to the forest on no other errand are sure to attend the wood auction and even pay a high price for the privilege of gleaning after the woodchopper. It is now many years that men have resorted to the forest for fuel and the material of the arts. The New Englander and the New Hollander, the Parisian and the Kelt, the Farmer and Robinhood, Goody Blake and Harry Gill. In most parts of the world, the prince and the peasant, the scholar and the savage equally require still a few sticks from the forest to warm them and cook their food. Neither could I do without them. Every man looks at his woodpile with a kind of affection. I love to have mine before my window, and the more chips the better to remind me of my pleasing work. I had an old axe which nobody claimed, with which by spells in winter days and on the sunny side of the house I played about the stumps which I had got out of my beam-field. As my driver prophesied when I was plowing, they warmed me twice, once while I was splitting them, and again when they were on the fire, so that no fuel could give out more heat. As for the axe, I was advised to get the village blacksmith to jump it. But I jumped him, and putting a hickory health from the woods into it made it do. If it was dull, it was at least hung true. A few pieces of fat pine were a great treasure. It is interesting to remember how much of this food for fire is still concealed in the bowels of the earth. In previous years I had often gone prospecting over some bare hillside, where a pitch pine wood had formerly stood, and got out the fat pine roots. They are almost indestructible. Stumps thirty or forty years old at least will still be sound at the core. Though the sap wood has all become vegetable mold, as appears by the scales of the thick bark forming a ring level with the earth four or five inches distant from the heart. With axe and shovel you explore this mine, and follow the meroey store yellow as beef tallow, or as if you had struck on a vein of gold deep into the earth. But commonly I kindled my fire with the dry leaves of the forest, which I had stored up in my shed before the snow came. Green hickory, finely split, makes the woodchoppers kindlings, when he has a camp in the woods. Once in a while I got a little of this. When the villagers were lighting their fires beyond the horizon, I too gave notice to the various wild inhabitants of Walden Vale by a smoky streamer from my chimney that I was awake. Light winged smoke, Ikarian bird, melting thy pinions in thy upward flight, lark without a song, and messenger of dawn, circling above the hamlets as thy nest, or else departing dream, and shadowy form of midnight vision gathering up thy skirts, by night star veiling and by day darkening the light and blotting out the sun. Go thou, my incense, upward from this hearth, and ask the gods to pardon this clear flame. Hard green wood just cut, though I used but little of that, answered my purpose better than any other. I sometimes left a good fire when I went to take a walk in a winter afternoon, and when I returned three or four hours afterward it would be still alive and glowing. My house was not empty though I was gone. It was as if I had left a cheerful housekeeper behind. It was I and fire that lived there, and commonly my housekeeper proved trustworthy. One day, however, as I was splitting wood, I thought that I would just look in at the window and see if the house was not on fire. It was the old time I remember to having been particularly anxious on this score. So I looked and saw that a spark had caught my bed, and I went in and extinguished it when it had burned a place as big as my hand. But my house occupied so sunny and sheltered a position, and its roof was so low that I could afford to let the fire go out in the middle of almost any winter day. The moles nested in my cellar, nibbling every third potato, and making a snug bed even there of some hair left after plastering and of brown paper, for even the wildest animals loved comfort and warmth as well as man, and they survived the winter only because they are so careful to secure them. Some of my friends spoke as if I was coming to the woods on purpose to freeze myself. The animal merely makes a bed, which he warms with his body in a sheltered place. But man, having discovered fire, boxes up some air in a spacious apartment and warms that, instead of robbing himself, makes that his bed, in which he can move without divesting of more cumbers clothing, maintain a kind of summer in the midst of winter, and by means of windows, even admit the light, and with a lamp, lengthen out the day. Thus he goes a step or two beyond instinct, and saves a little time for the fine arts. Though when I had been exposed to the rudest blasts a long time, my whole body began to grow torpid. When I reached the genial atmosphere of my house, I soon recovered my faculties and prolonged my life. But the most luxuriously housed has little to boast of in this respect, nor need we trouble ourselves to speculate how the human race may be at last destroyed. It would be easy to cut their threads at any time with a little sharper blast from the north. We go on dating from cold Fridays and great snows, but a little colder Friday, or greater snow, would put a period to man's existence on the globe. The next winter I used a small cooking stove for economy, since I did not own the forest, but it did not keep fire so well as the open fireplace. Cooking was then, for the most part, no longer a poetic but merely a chemic process. It will soon be forgotten in these days of stoves that we used to roast potatoes in the ashes after the Indian fashion. The stove not only took up room and scented the house, but it concealed the fire and I felt as if I had lost a companion. You can always see a face in the fire. The labourer looking into it at evening purifies his thoughts of the dross and earthiness which they have accumulated during the day. But I could no longer sit and look into the fire, and the pertinent words of a poet recurred to me with new force. Never bright flame may be denied to me thy dear life imaging close sympathy. What but my hopes shot upward air so bright? What but my fortunes sunk so low in night? Why art thou banished from our hearth and hall, thou who art welcomed and beloved by all? Was thy existence then too fanciful for our life's common light, who are so dull? Did thy bright gleam mysterious converse hold with our congenial souls, secrets too bold? Well, we are safe and strong, for now we sit beside a hearth where no dim shadows flicked, where nothing cheers nor saddens but a fire, warm's feet in hands, nor does too more aspire. By whose compact utilitarian heap the present may sit down and go to sleep, nor fear the ghosts who from the dim past walked, and with us by the unequal light of the old wood fire talked. End of Chapter 13. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information please visit LibriVox.org. This reading by Gordon Mackenzie. Walden by Henry David Thoreau. Chapter 14. Former inhabitants and winter visitors. I weathered some merry snowstorms and spent some cheerful winter evenings by my fireside, while the snow whirled wildly without, and even the hooting of the owl was hushed. For many weeks I met no one in my walks but those who came occasionally to cut wood and sled it to the village. The elements however abetted me in making a path through the deepest snow in the woods, for when I had once gone through the wind blew the oak leaves into my tracks, where they lodged, and by absorbing the rays of the sun melted the snow, and so not only made a bed for my feet, but in the night their dark line was my guide. For human society I was obliged to conjure up the former occupants of these woods. Within the memory of many of my townsmen, the road near which my house stands resounded with the laugh and gossip of inhabitants, and the woods which border it were notched and dotted here and there, with their little gardens and dwellings, though it was then much more shut in by the forest than now. In some places within my own remembrance the pines would scrape both sides of a shez at once, and women and children who were compelled to go this way to Lincoln alone and on foot did it with fear and often ran a good deal of the distance. Though mainly but a humble route to neighboring villages, or for the woodsmen's team, it once amused the traveler more than now by its variety, and lingered longer in his memory. Where now firm open fields stretch from the village to the woods, it then ran through a maple swamp on a foundation of logs, the remnants of which doubtless still underlie the present dusty highway, from the Stratton, now the Aum's house farm, to Brister's Hill. East of my bean field across the road lived Cato Ingraham, slave of Duncan Ingraham Esquire, gentlemen of Concord Village, who built his slave a house, and gave him permission to live in Walden Woods. Cato, but not Utisensis, but Concordiensis. Some say that he was a guinea negro. There are a few who remember his little patch among the walnuts, which he let grow up till he should be old and need them. But a younger and whiter speculator got them at last. He too, however, occupies an equally narrow house at present. Cato's half-obliterated cellar-hole still remains, though known to few, being concealed from the traveler by a fringe of pines. It is now filled with the smooth sumac, rus glabra, and one of the earliest species of goldenrod, soledago stricta, grows there luxuriously. Here by the very corner of my field still nearer to town, Zilpha, a colored woman, had her little house where she spun linen for the townsfolk, making the Walden Woods ring with her shrill singing, for she had a loud and notable voice. At length in the War of 1812 her dwelling was set on fire by English soldiers, prisoners on parole when she was away, and her cat and dog and hens were all burned up together. She led a hard life, and somewhat inhumane. One old frequenter of these woods remembers that as he passed her house one noon, he heard her muttering to herself over her gurgling pot. Ye are all bones, bones. I have seen bricks amid the oak copes there. Down the road on the right hand, on Brister's hill, lived Brister Freeman, a handy negro, slave of Squire Cummings once. There where grow still the apple trees which Brister planted and tended, large old trees now, but their fruit still wild and cider-ish to my taste. Not long since I read his epitaph in the old Lincoln Bering Ground, a little on one side near the unmarked graves of some British Grenadiers who fell in the retreat from Concord, where he has styled Scipio Brister. Scipio Africanus he had some title to be called a man of color, as if he were discolored. It also told me, with staring emphasis when he died, which was but an indirect way of informing me that he ever lived. With him dwelt Fenda, his hospitable wife, who told fortunes, yet pleasantly, large, round, and black, blacker than any of the children of night. Such a dusky orb as never rose on Concord before or since. Farther down the hill on the left, on the old road in the woods, are marks of some homestead of the Stratton family, whose orchard once covered all the slope of Brister's hill, but was long since killed out by pitch pines, accepting a few stumps, whose old roots furnish still the wild stalks of many a thrifty village tree. Nearer yet to town you come to Breeds location, on the other side of the way, just on the edge of the wood, ground famous for the pranks of a demon not distinctly named in old mythology, who has acted a prominent and astounding part in our New England life and deserves as much as any mythological character to have his biography written one day, who first comes in the guise of a friend or hired man, and then robs and murders the whole family, New England rum. But history must not yet tell the tragedies enacted here. Let time intervene in some measure to assage and lend an azure tint to them. Here the most indistinct and dubious tradition says that once a tavern stood, the well the same which tempered the traveller's beverage and refreshed his steed. Here then men saluted one another and heard and told the news and went their ways again. Breeds hut was standing only a dozen years ago, though it had long been unoccupied. It was about the size of mine. It was set on fire by mischievous boys one election night if I do not mistake. I lived on the edge of the village then and had just lost myself over Davenance Gondebert, that winter that I labored with a lethargy, which by the way I never knew whether to regard as a family complaint, having an uncle who goes to sleep shaving himself, and is obliged to sprout potatoes in a cellar Sundays in order to keep awake and keep the Sabbath, or as the consequence of my attempt to read Chalmers' collection of English poetry without skipping. It fairly overcame my nervy. I had just sunk my head on this when the bells rung fire and in hot haste the engines rolled that way, led by a straggling troupe of men and boys, and I among the foremost, for I had leaped the brook. We thought it was far south over the woods, we who had run to fires before. Barn, shop, or dwelling-house were all together. It's baker's barn, cried one. It is the Codman place, affirmed another, and then fresh sparks went up above the wood as if the roof fell in, we all shouted, Concord to the rescue! Wagons shot past with furious speed and crushing loads, bearing perchance among the rest, the agent of the insurance company, who was bound to go, however far, and ever and anon the engine bell tinkled behind, more slow and sure and rearmost of all, as it was afterward whispered, came they who set the fire and gave the alarm. Thus we kept on like true idealists, rejecting the evidence of our senses. Until at a turn in the road we heard the crackling, and actually felt the heat of the fire from over the wall, and realized, alas, that we were there. The very nearness of the fire but cooled our ardor, at first we thought to throw a frog pond onto it, but concluded to let it burn. It was so far gone and so worthless. So we stood round our engine, jostled one another. Expressed our sentiments through speaking trumpets or in lower tone referred to the great conflagrations which the world has witnessed, including Baskham's shop, and between ourselves we thought that were we there in season with our tub, and a full frog pond by, we could turn that threatened last and universal one into another flood. We finally retreated without doing any mischief. Returned to sleep and gondoburt. But as for gondoburt I would accept that passage in the preface about wit being the soul's powder. But most of mankind are strangers to wit, as Indians are to powder. It chanced that I walked that way across the fields the following night, about the same hour and hearing a low moaning at this spot, I drew near in the dark and discovered the only survivor of the family that I know, the air of both its virtues and its vices, who alone was interested in this burning, lying on his stomach and looking over the cellar wall at the still smoldering cinders beneath, muttering to himself as is his want. He had been working far off in the river meadows all day, and had improved the first moments that he could call his own to visit the home of his fathers and his youth. He gazed into the cellar from all sides and points of view by turns, always lying down to it, as if there was some treasure which he remembered concealed between the stones, where there was absolutely nothing but a heap of bricks and ashes. The house being gone he looked at what there was left. He was soothed by the sympathy which my mere presence implied, and showed me, as well as the darkness permitted, where the well was covered up which, thank heaven, could never be burned. And he groped long about the wall to find the well sweep which his father had cut and mounted, feeling for the iron hook or staple by which a burden had been fastened to the heavy end, all that he could now cling to, to convince me that it was no common rider. I felt it, and still remarked almost daily in my walks, for by it hangs the history of a family. Once more on the left, where our scene the well and lilac bushes by the wall, in the now open field, lived nothing and logros, but to return toward Lincoln. Farther in the woods than any of these, where the road approaches nearest to the pond, Wyman the Potter squatted, and furnished his townsmen with earthenware, and left descendants to succeed him. Neither were they rich and worldly goods, holding the land by sufferance while they lived, and there often the sheriff came in vain to collect the taxes, and attached a chip, for Form's sake, as I have read in his accounts, there being nothing else that he could lay his hands on. One day in Midsummer, when I was hoeing, a man who was carrying a load of pottery to market stopped his horse against my field and inquired concerning Wyman the Younger. He had long ago bought a potter's wheel of him and wished to know what had become of him. I had read of the potter's clay and wheel in scripture, but it had never occurred to me that the pots we use were not such as had come down unbroken from those days, or grown on trees like gourds somewhere, and I was pleased to hear that so fictile an art was ever practiced in my neighborhood. The last inhabitant of these woods before me was an Irishman, Hugh Coyle, if I have spelled his name with Coyle enough, who occupied Wyman's tenement. Colonel Coyle, he was called. Rumor said that he had been a soldier at Waterloo. If he had lived, I should have made him fight his battles over again. His trade here was that of a ditcher. Napoleon went to St. Helena. Coyle came to Walden Woods. All I know of him is tragic. He was a man of manners, like one who had seen the world and was capable of more civil speech than you could well attend to. He wore a great coat in mid-summer, being affected with the trembling delirium, and his face was the color of Carmine. He died in the road, at the foot of Bristers Hill, shortly after I came to the woods, so that I have not remembered him as a neighbor. Before his house was pulled down, when his comrades avoided it as an unlucky castle, I visited it. There lay his old clothes, curled up by use, as if they were himself upon his raised plank bed. His pipe lay broken on the hearth, instead of a bowl broken at the fountain. The last could never have been the symbol of his death, for he confessed to me that, though he had heard of Bristers Spring, he had never seen it. And soiled cards, kings of diamonds, spades and hearts, were scattered over the floor. One black chicken, which the administrator could not catch, black as night and as silent, not even croaking, awaited Reynard, still went to roost in the next apartment. In the rear there was the dim outline of a garden, which had been planted but had never received its first hoeing, owing to those terrible shaking fits, though it was now harvest time. It was overrun with Roman wormwood and beggar ticks, which last stuck to my clothes for all fruit. The skin of a woodchuck was freshly stretched upon the back of the house, a trophy of his last waterloo. But no warm cap or mittens would he want more. Now only a dent in the earth marks the sight of these dwellings, with berry-de-cellar stones and strawberries, raspberries, thimbleberries, hazel bushes and sumacs, growing in the sunny sward there. Some pitch pine or gnarled oak occupies what was the chimney nook, and a sweet-scented black birch, perhaps, waves where the door stone was. Sometimes the well dent is visible, where once a spring oozed, now dry and tearless grass. Or it was covered deep, not to be discovered till some late day, with a flat stone under the sod, when the last of the race departed. What a sorrowful act must that be? The covering up of wells, coincident with the opening of wells of tears. These cellar dents, like deserted fox burrows, old holes, are all that is left where once were the stir and bustle of human life, and fate, free will, foreknowledge, absolute, in some form and dialect, or other, were by turns discussed. But all I can learn of their conclusions amount to just this, that Cato and Brister pulled wool, which is about as edifying as the history of more famous schools of philosophy, still grows the vivacious lilac, a generation after the door and lintel and the sill are gone, unfolding its sweet-scented flowers each spring, to be plucked by the musing traveller, planted and tended once by children's hands in front yard plots, now standing by wall sides in retired pastures, and giving place to new rising forests. The last of that stirp, sole survivor of that family. Little did the dusky children think that the puny slip with its two eyes only, which they stuck in the ground in the shadow of the house and daily watered, would root itself so, and outlive them, and house itself in the rear that shaded it, and grown man's garden and orchard, and tell their story faintly to the lone wanderer a half-century after they had grown up and died, blossoming as fair and smelling as sweet as in that first spring. I mark its still tender, civil, cheerful lilac colors. But this small village, germ of something more, why did it fail, while concord keeps its ground? Were there no natural advantages, no water privileges, forsooth? Why, the deep Walden pond and cool brister spring, privilege to drink long and healthy draughts at these, all unimproved by these men, but to dilute their glass. They were universally a thirsty race. Might not the basket, stable broom, mat-making, corn, parching, linen-spinning, and pottery business have thrived here, making the wilderness to blossom like the rose, and a numerous posterity have inherited the land of their fathers? The sterile soil would at least have been proof against a low land degeneracy. Alas, how little does the memory of these human inhabitants enhance the beauty of the landscape. Again, perhaps, nature will try, with me for a first settler, and my house raised last spring to be the oldest in the hamlet. I am not aware that any man has ever built on the spot which I occupy. Deliver me from a city built on the site of a more ancient city whose materials are ruins, whose gardens, cemeteries. The soil is blanched and accursed there, and before that becomes necessary the earth itself will be destroyed. With some reminiscences I repealed the woods and lulled myself to sleep. At this season I seldom had a visitor, when the snow lay deepest, no wanderer ventured near my house for a week or fortnight at a time. But there I lived, as snug as a meadow mouse, or as cattle and poultry which are said to have survived for a long time buried in drifts, even without food. Or like that early settler's family in the town of Sutton, in this state, whose cottage was completely covered by the great snow of 1717, when he was absent, and an Indian founded only by the hole which the chimney's breath made in the drift, and so relieved the family. But no friendly Indian concerned himself about me, nor needed he, for the master of the house was at home. The great snow, how cheerful it is to hear of. When the farmers could not get to the woods and swamps with their teams, and were obliged to cut down the shade trees before their houses, and when the crust was harder, cut off the trees in the swamps, ten feet from the ground, as it appeared the next spring. In the deepest snows, the path which I used from the highway to my house, about half a mile long, might have been represented by a meandering dotted line with wide intervals between the dots. For a week of even weather I took exactly the same number of steps, and of the same length coming and going, stepping deliberately and with the precision of a pair of dividers in my own deep tracks. To such routine the winter reduces us, yet often they were filled with Heaven's own blue. But no weather interfered fatally with my walks or rather my going abroad, for I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech tree, or a yellow birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines. When the ice and snow causing their limbs to droop, and so sharpening their tops, had changed the pines into fir trees, wading to the tops of the highest hills when the snow was nearly two feet deep on a level, and shaking down another snow storm on my head at every step, or sometimes creeping and floundering thither on my hands and knees when the hunters had gone into winter quarters. One afternoon I amused myself by watching a barred owl, Strix Neburosa, sitting on one of the lower dead limbs of a white pine, close to the trunk, in broad daylight, I standing within a rod of him. He could hear me when I moved, and crunched the snow with my feet, but could not plainly see me. When I made most noise he would stretch out his neck and erect his neck feathers, and open his eyes wide. But their lids soon fell again, and he began to nod. I, too, felt a slumberous influence after watching him half an hour, as he sat thus with his eyes half open, like a cat, winged brother of the cat. There was only a narrow slit left between their lids, by which be preserved a peninsular relation to me, thus with half shut eyes looking out from the land of dreams, and endeavouring to realise me, vague object or moat that interrupts his visions. At length on some louder noise or my nearer approach he would grow uneasy and sluggishly turn about on his perch as if impatient at having his dreams disturbed. And when he launched himself off, and flapped through the pines, spreading his wings to unexpected breadth, I could not hear the slightest sound from them. Thus guided amid the pine boughs, rather by a delicate sense of their neighbourhood than by sight, feeling his twilight way, as it were, with his sensitive pinions, he found a new perch where he might in peace await the dawning of his day. As I walked over the long causeway made for the railroad through the meadows, I encountered many a blustering nipping wind, for nowhere has it freer play, and when the frost had smitten me on one cheek, heathen as I was, I turned it to the other also. Nor was it much better by the carriage road from Bristers Hill, for I came to town still like a friendly Indian when the contents of the broad open fields were all piled up between the walls of the Walden Road, and half an hour sufficed to obliterate the tracks of the last traveller. And when I returned new drifts would have formed, through which I floundered, where the busy north-west wind had been depositing the powdery snow round a sharp angle in the road, and not a rabbit's track, nor even the fine print the small type of a meadow-mouse was to be seen. Yet I rarely failed to find, even in mid-winter, some warm and springly swamp, where the grass and the skunk cabbage still put forth their perennial verger, and some hardier bird occasionally awaited the return of spring. Sometimes notwithstanding the snow, when I returned from my walk at evening, I crossed the deep tracks of a wood chopper leading from my door, and found his pile of whittlings on the hearth, and my house filled with the odor of his pipe. Or on a Sunday afternoon, if I chanced to be at home, I heard the crunching of the snow made by the step of a long-headed farmer, whom from far through the woods sought my house, to have a social crack. One of the few of his vocation who are men of their farms, who donned a frock instead of a professor's gown, and is as ready to extract the moral out of church or state as to haul a load of manure from his barnyard. We talked of rude and simple times, when men sat about large fires and cold bracing weather with clear heads, and when other dessert failed, we tried our teeth on many a nut which wise swirls have long since abandoned, for those which have the thickest shells are commonly empty. The one who came from farthest to my lodge, through deepest snows and most dismal tempests, was a poet, a farmer, a hunter, a soldier, a reporter, even a philosopher may be daunted, but nothing can deter a poet, for he is actuated by pure love. Who can predict his comings and goings? His business calls him out at all hours, even when doctors sleep. We made that small house ring with boisterous mirth, and resound with the murmur of much sober talk, making amends then to walled and veil for the long silences. Broadway was still and deserted in comparison. At suitable intervals there were regular salutes of laughter, which might have been referred indifferently to the last uttered or the forthcoming jest. We made many a brand new theory of life over a thin dish of gruel, which combined the advantages of conviviality with the clear headedness which philosophy requires. I should not forget that during my last winter at the pond there was another welcome visitor, who at one time came through the village, through snow and rain and darkness, till he saw my lamp through the trees, and shared with me some long winter evenings. One of the last of the philosophers, Connecticut gave him to the world. He peddled first her wares, afterwards, as he declares, his brains. These he peddles still, prompting God and disgracing man, bearing for fruit his brain only, like the nut its kernel. I think that he must be the man of the most faith of any alive. His words and attitude always suppose a better state of things than other men are acquainted with, and he will be the last man to be disappointed as the ages revolve. He has no venture in the present. But though comparatively disregarded now, when his day comes laws unsuspected by most will take effect, and masters of families and rulers will come to him for advice. How blind that cannot see serenity. A true friend of man, almost the only friend of human progress, an old mortality, say rather an immortality, with unwearyed patience and faith making plain the image engraven in men's bodies, the God of whom they are but defaced and leaning monuments. With his hospitable intellect he embraces children, beggars, insane, and scholars, and entertains the thought of all, adding to it commonly some breadth and elegance. I think that he should keep a caravan seri on the world's highway where philosophers of all nations might put up, and on his sign should be printed entertainment for man, but not for his beast. Enter ye that have leisure and a quiet mind, who earnestly seek the right road. He is perhaps the sanest man, and has the fewest crutches of any I chance to know, the same yesterday and tomorrow. Of your we had sauntered and talked, and effectually put the world behind us, for he was pledged to know institution in it, freeborn in genus. Whichever way we turned, it seemed that the heavens and the earth had met together, since he enhanced the beauty of the landscape. A blue-robed man, whose fittest roof is the overarching sky which reflects his serenity. I do not see how he can ever die. Nature cannot spare him. Having each some shingles of thought well dried, we sat and whittled them, trying our knives and admiring the clear yellowish grain of the pumpkin pine. We waited so gently and reverently, or we pulled together so smoothly, that the fishes of thought were not scared from the stream, nor feared any angler on the bank, but came and went grandly like the clouds which float through the western sky and the mother-o'-pearl flocks which sometimes form and dissolve there. There we worked, revising mythology, rounding a fable here and there, and building castles in the air, for which earth offered no worthy foundation. Great looker, great expector, to converse with whom was a New England Knight's entertainment. Ah, such discourse we had, Hermit and philosopher, and the old settler I have spoken of. We three. It expanded and racked my little house. I should not dare to say how many pounds weight there was above the atmospheric pressure on every circular inch. It opened its seams so that they had to be cocked with much dullness thereafter to stop the consequent leak. But I had enough of that kind of oakum already picked. There was one other with whom I had solid seasons, long to be remembered at his house in the village, and who looked in upon me from time to time, but I had no more for society there. There, too, as everywhere, I sometimes expected the visitor who never comes. The Vishnu Purana says, the householder is to remain at eventide in his courtyard as long as it takes to milk a cow, or longer if he pleases, to await the arrival of a guest. I often performed this duty of hospitality, waited long enough to milk a whole herd of cows, but did not see the man approaching from the town. When the ponds were firmly frozen, they afforded not only new and shorter routes to many points, but new views from their surfaces of the familiar landscape around them. When I crossed Flint's pond after it was covered with snow, though I had often paddled about and skated over it, it was so unexpectedly wide and so strange that I could think of nothing but Baffins Bay. The Lincoln Hills rose up around me at the extremity of a snowy plain, in which I did not remember to have stood before. And the fishermen, at an indeterminable distance over the ice, moving slowly about with their wolfish dogs, passed for sealers or Eskimo, or in misty weather loomed like fabulous creatures, and I did not know whether they were giants or pygmies. I took this course when I went to lecture in Lincoln in the evening, traveling in no road and passing no house between my own hut and the lecture room. In Goose Pond, which lay in my way, a colony of muskrats dwelt and raised their cabins high above the ice, though none could be seen abroad when I crossed it. Walden, being like the rest usually bare of snow, or with only shallow and interrupted drifts on it, was my yard where I could walk freely when the snow was nearly two feet deep on a level elsewhere, and the villagers were confined to their streets. There, far from the village street, and except at very long intervals from the jingle of sleigh bells, I slid then skated, as in a vast moose yard well trodden, overhung by oak woods and solemn pines bent down with snow or bristling with icicles. For sounds in winter nights, and often in winter days, I heard the forlorn but melodious note of a hooting owl indefinitely far, such a sound as the frozen earth would yield if struck with a suitable plectrum, the very lingua vernacular of Walden Wood, and quite familiar to me at last, though I never saw the bird while it was making it. I seldom opened my door in a winter evening without hearing it. Sounded sonorously, and the first three syllables accented as somewhat like how dare do, or sometimes who-who only. One night, in the beginning of winter, before the pond froze over, about nine o'clock, I was startled by the loud honking of a goose, and stepped to the door, heard the sound of their wings like a tempest in the woods as they flew low over my house. They passed over the pond toward Fair Haven, seemingly deterred from settling by my light, their Commodore honking all the while with a regular beat. Suddenly, an unmistakable cat owl, from very near me, with the most harsh and tremendous voice I ever heard from any inhabitant of the woods, responded at regular intervals to the goose, as if determined to expose and disgrace this intruder from Hudson's Bay by exhibiting a greater compass and volume of voice in a native, and boo-hoo him out of Concord Horizon. What do you mean by alarming the citadel at this time of night consecrated to me? Do you think I am ever caught napping at such an hour, and that I have not got lungs and a larynx as well as yourself? Woo-hoo, woo-hoo, woo-hoo! It was one of the most thrilling discords I ever heard. And yet, if you had a discriminating ear, there were in it the elements of a Concord such as these planes never saw nor heard. I also heard the whooping of the ice in the pond, my great bedfellow in that part of Concord, as if it were restless in its bed and would faint turn over, were troubled with flatulency and had dreams, or I was waked by the cracking of the ground by the frost, as if someone had driven a team against my door, and in the morning would find a crack in the earth a quarter of a mile long and a third of an inch wide. Sometimes I heard the foxes as they ranged over the snow crust in moonlight nights, in search of a partridge or other game, barking raggedly and demoniacly like forced dogs, as if laboring with some anxiety, or seeking expression, struggling for light, and to be dogs outright and run freely in the streets. For if we take the ages into our account, may there not be a civilization going on among brutes as well as men? They seemed to me to be rudimental burrowing men, still standing on their defense, awaiting their transformation. Sometimes one came near to my window attracted by my light, barked a vulpine curse at me, and then retreated. Usually the red squirrel, Serious Hudsonius, waked me in the dawn, coursing over the roof and up and down the sides of the house, as if sent out of the woods for this purpose. In the course of the winter I threw out half a bushel of ears of sweet corn which had not got ripe, onto the snow crust by my door and was amused by watching the motions of the various animals which were baited by it. In the twilight and the night the rabbits came regularly and made a hearty meal. All day long the red squirrels came and went and afforded me much entertainment by their maneuvers. One would approach at first warily through the shrub oaks, running over the snow crust by fits and starts like a leaf blown by the wind. Now a few paces this way, with wonderful speed and waste of energy, making inconceivable haste with his trotters, as if it were for a wager. And now as many paces that way, but never getting on more than half a rod at a time, and then suddenly pausing with a ludicrous expression and a gratuitous summer set, as if all the eyes in the universe were eyed on him. For all the motions of a squirrel, even in the most solitary recesses of the forest, implies spectators as much as those of a dancing girl. Wasting more time in delay and circumspection than would have sufficed to walk the whole distance. I never saw one walk. And then suddenly, before you could say Jack Robinson, he would be in the top of a young pitch-pine winding up his clock and chiding all imaginary spectators, soliloquizing and talking to all the universe at the same time, for no reason that I could ever detect. Or he himself was aware of, I suspect. At length he would reach the corn, and selecting a suitable ear, frisk about in the same uncertain, trigonometrical way, to the topmost stick of my woodpile before my window, where he looked me in the face, and there sit for hours. Supplying himself with a new ear from time to time, nibbling at first voraciously and throwing the half-naked cobs about, till at length he grew more dainty still and played with his food, tasting only the inside of the kernel and the ear, which was held balanced over the stick by one paw, slipping from his careless grasp and fell to the ground, when he would look over at it with a ludicrous expression of uncertainty, as if suspecting that it had life with a mind not made up whether to get it again or a new one or be off. Now thinking of corn, then listening to hear what was in the wind. So the little impudent fellow would waste many a year in a forenoon, till at last seizing some longer and plumper one, considerably bigger than himself, and skillfully balancing it, he would set out with it to the woods, like a tiger with a buffalo, by the same zigzag course and frequent pauses, scratching along with it as if it were too heavy for him and falling all the while, making its fall a diagonal between a perpendicular and horizontal, being determined to put it through at any rate. A singularly frivolous and whimsical fellow, and so he would get off with it to where he lived, perhaps carry it to the top of a pine tree, forty or fifty rods distant, and I would afterwards find the cobs strewn about the woods in various directions. At length the jays arrive, whose discordant screams were heard long before, as they were warily making their approach an eighth of a mile off, and in a stealthy and sneaking manner they flit from tree to tree, nearer and nearer, and pick up the kernels which the squirrels have dropped, then sitting on a pitch pine bough, they attempt to swallow in their haste a kernel which is too big for their throats and chokes them, and after great labour they disgorge it, and spend an hour in the endeavour to crack it by repeated blows with their bills. They were manifestly thieves, and I had not much respect for them, but the squirrels, though at first shy, went to work as if they were taking what was their own. Meanwhile also came the chickadees in flocks, which, picking up the crumbs the squirrels had dropped, flew to the nearest twig, and placing them under their claws, hammered away at them with their little bills, as if it were an insect in the bark, till they were sufficiently reduced for their slender throats. A little flock of these titmice came daily to pick a dinner out of my woodpile, or the crumbs at my door, with faint flitting, lisping notes, like the tinkling of icicles in the grass, or else with sprightly day, day, day, or more rarely in spring-like days a wiry, summery, feeby from the wood side. They were so familiar that at length one alighted on an armful of wood which I was carrying in and pecked at the sticks without fear. I once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance than I should have been by any epaulet I could have worn. The squirrels also grew at last to be quite familiar, and occasionally stepped upon my shoe, when that was the nearest way. When the ground was not yet quite covered, and again near the end of winter, when the snow was melted on my south hillside and about my woodpile, the partridges came out of the woods morning and evening to feed there. Whichever side you walk in the woods the partridge bursts away on whoring wings, jarring the snow from the dry leaves and twigs on high, which comes sifting down in the sunbeams like golden dust, for this brave bird is not to be scared by winter. It is frequently covered up by drifts, and it is said, sometimes plunges from on wing into the soft snow where it remains concealed for a day or two. I used to start them in the open land also, where they had come out of the woods at sunset to bud the wild apple trees. They will come regularly every evening to particular trees, where the cunning sportsmen lies and wait for them, and the distant orchards next to the woods suffer thus not a little. I am glad that the partridge gets fed at any rate. It is nature's own bird which lives on buds and diet drink. In dark winter mornings, or in short winter afternoons, I sometimes heard a pack of hounds threading all the woods with hounding cry and yelp, unable to resist the instinct of the chase, and the note of the hunting horn at intervals, proving that man was in the rear. The woods ring again, and yet no fox bursts forth on to the open level of the pond, nor following pack pursuing their actaeon. And perhaps at evening I see the hunters returning with a single brush trailing from their sleigh for a trophy, seeking their inn. They tell me that if the fox would remain in the bosom of the frozen earth he would be safe. Or if B would run in a straight line away, no foxhound could overtake him. But having left his pursuers far behind he stops to rest, and listen till they come up, and when he runs he circles round to his old haunts where the hunters await him. Sometimes, however, he will run upon a wall many rods, and then leap off far to one side, and he appears to know that water will not retain his scent. A hunter told me that he once saw a fox pursued by hounds burst out onto Walden when the ice was covered with shallow puddles, run partway across, and then return to the same shore. Air long the hounds arrived, but here they lost the scent. Sometimes a pack hunting by themselves would pass my door, and circle round my house and yellp and hound without regarding me, as if afflicted by a species of madness, so that nothing could divert them from the pursuit. Thus they circle until they fall upon the recent trail of a fox, for a wise hound will forsake everything else for this. One day a man came to my hut from Lexington to inquire after his hound that made a large track, and had been hunting for a week by himself. But I fear that he was not the wiser for all I told him, for every time I attempted to answer his questions he interrupted me by asking, What do you do here? He had lost a dog, but found a man. One old hunter, who has a dry tongue, who used to come to bathe in Walden once every year when the water was warmest, and at such times looked in upon me, told me that many years ago he took his gun one afternoon and went out for a cruise in Walden Wood, and as he walked the Wayland Road he heard the cry of hounds approaching, and ere long a fox leaped the wall into the road and as quick as thought leaped the other wall out of the road and his swift bullet had not touched him. Some way behind came an old hound and her three pups in full pursuit, hunting on their own accord, and disappeared again in the woods. Late in the afternoon, as he was resting in the thick woods south of Walden, he heard the voice of the hounds far over toward Fair Haven, still pursuing the fox, and on they came, their hounding cry which made all the woods ring, sounding nearer and nearer, now from Well Meadow, now from the Baker Farm. For a long time he stood still and listened to their music, so sweet to a hunter's ear, when suddenly the fox appeared, threading the solemn aisles with an easy coursing pace, whose sound was concealed by a sympathetic rustle of the leaves, swift and still, keeping the round, leaving his pursuers far behind, and leaping upon a rock amid the woods he sat erect and listening, with his back to the hunter. For a moment, compassion restrained the latter's arm, but that was a short-lived mood, and as quick as thought can follow thought his peace was leveled and whang! The fox, rolling over the rock, lay dead on the ground. The hunter still kept his place and listened to the hounds. Still on they came, and now the near woods resounded through all their aisles with their demoniac cry. At length the old hound burst into view with muzzle to the ground, and snapping the air as if possessed, and ran directly to the rock. But spying the dead fox, she suddenly ceased her hounding as if struck dumb with amazement, and walked round and round him in silence. And one by one her pups arrived, and like their mother, were sobered into silence by the mystery. Then the hunter came forward and stood in their midst, and the mystery was solved. They waited in silence while he skinned the fox, then followed the brush awhile, and at length turned off into the woods again. That evening a western squire came to the Concord Hunter's cottage to inquire for his hounds, and told how for a week they had been hunting on their own account from western woods. The Concord Hunter told him what he knew and offered him the skin, but the other declined it and departed. He did not find his hounds that night, but the next day learned that they had crossed the river and put up at a farmhouse for the night. Whence, having been well fed, they took their departure early in the morning. The hunter who told me this could remember one Sam Nothing, who used to hunt bears on fairhaven ledges, and exchange their skins for rum in Concord Village. Who told him even that he had seen a moose there. Nothing had a famous foxhound named Burgoyne. He pronounced it Bugine, which my informant used to borrow. In the vast book of an old trader of this town, who was also a captain, town clerk and representative, I find the following entry. January 18, 1742, 43. John Melvin, credited by one Gray Fox. 0, 2, 3. They are not now found here, and in his ledger, February 7, 1743, Hezekiah Stratton has credit by one half a cat skin. 0, 1, 4 plus. Of course, a wild cat, for Stratton was a sergeant in the old French war, and would not have got credit for hunting less noble game. Credit is given for deer skins also, and they were daily sold. One man still preserves the horns of the last deer that was killed in this vicinity, and another has told me the particulars of the hunt in which his uncle was engaged. The hunters were formerly a numerous and merry crew here. I remember well one gaunt Nimrod who would catch up a leaf by the roadside and play a strain on it, wilder and more melodious, if my memory serves me, than any hunting-horn. At midnight, when there was a moon, I sometimes met with hounds in my path prowling about the woods, which would skulk out of my way, as if afraid, and stand silent amid the bushes till I had passed. Squirrels and wild mice disputed for my store of nuts. There were scores of pitch pines around my house, from one to four inches in diameter, which had been gnawed by mice the previous winter, a Norwegian winter for them for the snow lay long and deep, and they were obliged to mix a large proportion of pine bark with their other diet. These trees were alive and apparently flourishing at mid-summer, and many of them had grown a foot, though completely girdled, but after another winter such were without exception dead. It is remarkable that a single mouse should thus be allowed a whole pine tree for its dinner, gnawing round instead of up and down it, but perhaps it is necessary in order to thin these trees, which are want to grow up densely. The hares, Lepus Americanus, were very familiar. One had her form under my house all winter, separated from me only by the flooring, and she startled me each morning by her hasty departure when I began to stir, striking her head against the floor timbers in her hurry. They used to come round my door at dusk to nibble the potato pairings which I had thrown out, and were so nearly the color of the ground that they could hardly be distinguished when still. Sometimes in the twilight I alternately lost and recovered sight of one, sitting motionless under my window. When I opened my door in the evening off they would go with a squeak in a bounce. Near at hand they only excited my pity. One evening one sat by my door two paces from me at first, trembling with fear, yet unwilling to move. A poor wee thing, lean and bony, with ragged ears and sharp nose, scant tail and slender paws. It looked as if nature no longer contained the breed of nobler bloods, but stood on her last toes. Its large eyes appeared young and unhealthy, almost dropsicle. I took a step, and low, away its scud with an elastic spring over the snow-crust, straightening its body and its limbs into graceful length, and soon put the forest between me and itself. The wild, free venison, asserting its vigor and the dignity of nature. Not without reason was its slenderness. Such, then, was its nature. Lepis, levipis, light foot, me thinks. What is a country without rabbits and partridges? They are among the most simple and indigenous animal products, ancient and venerable families known to antiquity as to modern times, of the very hue and substance of nature, nearest allied to leaves and to the ground, and to one another. It is either winged or it is legged. It is hardly as if you had seen a wild creature when a rabbit or a partridge bursts away, only a natural one, as much to be expected as rustling leaves. The partridge and the rabbit are still sure to thrive like true natives of the soil, whatever revolutions occur. If the forest is cut off, the sprouts and bushes which spring up before them concealment, and they become more numerous than ever, that must be a poor country indeed that does not support a hare. Our woods team with them both, and around every swamp may be seen the partridge or rabbit-walk, beset with twiggy fences and horse-hair snares which some cowboy tens. CHAPTER XVI. After a still night I awoke with the impression that some question had been put to me, which I had been endeavouring in vain to answer in my sleep, as what, how, when, where? But there was dawning nature, in whom all creatures live, looking in at my broad windows, with serene and satisfied face and no question on her lips. I awoke to an answered question, to nature and daylight, the snow lying deep on the earth dotted with young pines, and the very slope of the hill on which my house is placed seemed to say forward. Nature puts no question and answers, none which we mortals ask. She has long ago taken her resolution. O Prince, our eyes contemplate with admiration and transmit to the soul the wonderful and varied spectacle of this universe. The night veils without doubt a part of this glorious creation, but day comes to reveal to us this great work, which extends from earth even into the plains of the ether. Then to my morning work. First I take an ax and pail and go in search of water, if that be not a dream. After a cold and snowy night it needed a divining rod to find it. Every winter the liquid and trembling surface of the pond, which was so sensitive to every breath and reflected every light and shadow, becomes solid to the depth of a foot or a foot and a half, so that it will support the heaviest teams and perchance the snow covers it to an equal depth, and it is not to be distinguished from any level field. Like the marmots in the surrounding hills, it closes its eyelids and becomes dormant for three months or more. Standing on the snow-covered plain as if in a pasture amid the hills, I cut my way first through a foot of snow and then a foot of ice and open a window under my feet, where, kneeling to drink, I look down into the quiet parlor of the fishes, pervaded by a softening light as through a window of ground glass, with its bright sanded floor the same as in summer. There a perennial, waveless serenity reigns as in the amber twilight sky, corresponding to the cool and even temperament of the inhabitants. Heaven is under our feet, as well as over our heads. Early in the morning, while all things are crisp with frost, men come with fishing reels in slender lunch and let down their fine lines through the snowy field to take pickerel and perch, wild men who instinctively follow other fashions and trust other authorities than their townsmen, and by their goings and comings stitch towns together in parts where else they would be ripped. They sit and eat their luncheon in stout fear knots on the dry oak leaves on the shore, as wise and localore as the citizen is in artificial. They never consulted with books and know and can tell much less than they have done. The things which they practice are said not yet to be known. Here is one fishing for pickerel with grown perch for bait. You look into his pail with wonder as into a summer pond, as if he kept summer locked up at home or new where she had retreated. How prey did he get these in mid-winter? Oh, he got worms out of rotten logs since the ground froze, and so he caught them. His life itself passes deeper in nature than the studies of the naturalist penetrate. Himself a subject for the naturalist. The latter raises the moss and bark gently with his knife in search of insects. The former lays open logs to their core with his axe, and moss and bark fly far and wide. He gets his living by barking trees. Such a man has some right to fish, and I love to see nature carried out in him. The perch swallows the grubworm, the pickerel swallows the perch, and the fisherman swallows the pickerel, and so all the chinks in the scale of being are filled. When I strolled around the pond in misty weather, I was sometimes amused by the primitive mode which some rooter fisherman had adopted. He would perhaps have placed alder branches over the narrow holes in the ice, which were four or five rods apart and equal distance from the shore, and having fastened the end of the line to a stick to prevent it being pulled through, have passed the slack line over a twig of the alder, a foot or more above the ice, and tied a dry oak leaf to it, which being pulled down, would show when he had a bite. These alders loomed through the mist at regular intervals as you walked halfway around the pond. Ah, the pickerel of Walden! When I see them lying on the ice or in the well which the fisherman cuts in the ice, making a little hole to admit the water, I am always surprised by their rare beauty, as if they were fabulous fishes. They are so foreign to the streets, even to the woods, foreign as Arabia to our concord life. They possess a quite dazzling and transcendent beauty, which separates them by a wide interval from the cadaverous cod and haddock whose fame is trumpeted in our streets. They are not green like the pines, nor gray like the stones, nor blue like the sky, but they have, to my eyes, if possible, yet rarer colors, like flowers and precious stones, as if they were the pearls, the animalized nuclei or crystals of the Walden water. They, of course, are Walden all over and all through, are themselves small Waldens in the animal kingdom, Waldenses. It is surprising that they are caught here, that in this deep and capacious spring far beneath the rattling teams and shezzes and tinkling slays that travel the Walden road, this great gold and emerald fish swims. I never chanced to see its kind in any market. It would be the sinissure of all eyes there. Easily, with a few convulsive quirks, they give up their watery ghosts, like a mortal translated before his time to the thin air of heaven. As I was desirous to recover the long lost bottom of Walden pond, I surveyed it carefully before the ice broke up, early in 46, with compass and chain and sounding line. There have been many stories told about the bottom, or rather no bottom of this pond, which certainly had no foundation for themselves. It is remarkable how long men will believe in the bottomlessness of a pond without taking the trouble to sound it. I have visited two such bottomless ponds in one walk in this neighborhood. Many have believed that Walden reached quite through to the other side of the globe. Some who have lain flat on the ice for a long time, looking down through the elusive medium, perchance with watery eyes into the bargain, and driven to hasty conclusions by the fear of catching cold in their breasts, have seen vast holes into which a load of hay might be driven, if there were anybody to drive it, the undoubted source of the sticks and entrance to the infernal regions from these parts. Others have gone down from the village with a fifty-six and a wagon load of inch rope, but yet have failed to find any bottom. For, while the fifty-six was resting, by the way, they were paying out the rope in the vein attempt to fathom their truly immeasurable capacity for marvellousness. But I can assure my readers that Walden has a reasonably tight bottom, at a not unreasonable, though at an unusual depth. I fathomed it easily with a cod line and a stone, weighing about a pound and a half, and could tell accurately when the stone left the bottom by having to pull so much harder before the water got underneath to help me. The greatest depth was exactly one hundred and two feet, to which may be added the five feet which it has risen since, making one hundred and seven. This is a remarkable depth for so small an area, yet not an inch of it can be spared by the imagination. What if all ponds were shallow? Would it not react on the minds of men? I am thankful that this pond was made deep and pure for a symbol. While men believe in the infinite, some ponds will be thought to be bottomless. A factory owner hearing what depth I had found thought that it could not be true for judging from his acquaintance with dams, sand would not lie at so steep an angle, but the deepest ponds are not so deep in proportion to their area, as most suppose, and if drained would not leave very remarkable valleys. They are not like cups between the hills. For this one, which is so unusually deep for its area, appears in a vertical section, through its center not deeper than a shallow plate. Most ponds emptied would leave a meadow no more hollow than we frequently see. William Gilpin, who is so admirable in all that relates to landscapes and usually so correct, standing at the head of Lock Fine in Scotland, which he describes as a bay of salt water sixty or seventy fathoms deep, four miles in breadth, and about fifty miles long surrounded by mountains, observes, if we could have seen it immediately after the diluvian crash, or whatever convulsion of nature occasioned it, before the water scushed in, what a horrid chasm must it have appeared. So high as heaved the tumid hills, so low down, sunk a hollow bottom broad and deep, capacious bed of waters. But if, using the shortest diameter of Lock Fine, we apply these proportions to Walden, which as we have seen appears already in a vertical section only like a shallow plate, it will appear four times as shallow, so much for the increased horrors of the chasm of Lock Fine when emptied. No doubt many a smiling valley with its stretching cornfields occupies exactly such a horrid chasm from which the waters have receded, though it requires the insight and the far sight of the geologist to convince the unsuspecting inhabitant of this fact. Often an inquisitive eye may detect the shores of a primitive lake in the low horizon hills, and no subsequent elevation of the plain have been necessary to conceal their history, but it is easiest as they who work on the highways know to find the hollows by the puddles after a shower. The amount of it is the imagination give it the least license dives deeper and soars higher than nature goes, so probably the depth of the ocean will be found to be very inconsiderable compared with its breadth. As I sounded through the ice I could determine the shape of the bottom with greater accuracy than is possible in surveying harbors which do not freeze over, and I was surprised at its general regularity. In the deepest part there are several acres more level than almost any field which is exposed to the sun, wind, and plough. In one instance on a line arbitrarily chosen the depth did not vary more than one foot in thirty rods, and generally near the middle I could calculate the variation for each one hundred feet in any direction beforehand within three or four inches. Some are accustomed to speak of the deep and dangerous holes even in quiet sandy ponds like this, but the effect of water under these circumstances is to level all inequalities. The regularity of the bottom and its conformity to the shores and the range of the neighboring hills were so perfect that a distant promontory betrayed itself in the soundings quite across the pond and its direction could be determined by observing the opposite shore. Cape becomes bar and plain shoal and valley and gorge, deep water, and channel. When I had mapped to the pond by the scale of ten rods to an inch and put down the soundings more than a hundred in all I observed this remarkable coincidence. Having noticed that the number indicating the greatest depth was apparently in the center of the map I laid a rule on the map lengthwise and then breadthwise and found, to my surprise, that the line of greatest length intersected the line of greatest breadth exactly at the point of greatest depth. Notwithstanding that the middle is so nearly level, the outline of the pond far from regular and the extreme length and breadth were got by measuring into the coves. And I said to myself, who knows, but this hint would conduct to the deepest part of the ocean as well as of a pond or puddle. Is not this the rule also for the height of mountains regarded as the opposite of valleys? We know that a hill is not highest at its narrowest part. Of five coves, three, or all which had been sounded, were observed to have a bar quite across their mouths and deeper water within, so that the bay tended to be an expansion of water within the land not only horizontally but vertically, and to form a basin or independent pond, the direction of the two capes showing the course of the bar. Every harbor on the sea coast also has its bar at its entrance. In proportion, as the mouth of the cove was wider compared with its length, the water over the bar was deeper compared with that in the basin. Given then the length and breadth of the cove and the character of the surrounding shore, and you have almost elements enough to make out a formula for all cases. In order to see how nearly I could guess with this experience, at the deepest point in a pond, by observing the outlines of a surface and the character of its shores alone, I made a plan of white pond, which contains about forty-one acres, and, like this, has no island in it nor any visible inlet or outlet. And as the line of greatest breadth fell very near the line of least breadth, where two opposite capes approached each other and two opposite bays receded, I ventured to mark a point a short distance from the latter line, but still on the line of greatest length as the deepest. The deepest part was found to be within one hundred feet of this, still farther in the direction to which I had inclined, and was only one foot deeper, namely sixty feet. Of course a stream running through or an island in the pond would make the problem much more complicated. If we knew all the laws of nature, we should need only one fact or the description of one actual phenomenon to infer all the particular results at that point. Now we know only a few laws, and our result is vitiated, not of course by any confusion or irregularity in nature, but by our ignorance of essential elements in the calculation. Our notions of law and harmony are commonly confined to those instances which we detect, but the harmony which results from a far greater number of seemingly conflicting but really concurring laws, which we have not detected, is still more wonderful. The particular laws are as our points of view. As to the traveler, a mountain outline varies with each step, and it has an infinite number of profiles, though absolutely but one form. Even when cleft or bored through, it is not comprehended in its entireness. What I have observed of the pond is no less true in ethics. It is the law of average. Such a rule of the two diameters not only guides us toward the sun in the system and the heart in man, but draws lines through the length and breadth of the aggregate of a man's particular daily behaviors and waves of life into his coves and inlets and where they intersect will be the height or depth of his character. Perhaps we need only to know how his shore's trend and his adjacent country or circumstances to infer his depth and concealed bottom. If he is surrounded by mountainous circumstances and a chilean shore whose peaks overshadow and are reflected in his bosom, they suggest a corresponding depth in him, but a low and smooth shore proves him shallow on that side. In our bodies a bold projecting brow falls off to and indicates a corresponding depth of thought. Also there is a bar across the entrance of our every cove. or particular inclination. Each is our harbor for a season in which we are detained and partially landlocked. These inclinations are not whimsical usually, but their form, size, and direction are determined by the promontories of the shore. The ancient axes of elevation. When this bar is gradually increased by storms, tides, or currents, where there is a subsidence of the waters so that it reaches to the surface, that which was at first but an inclination in the shore in which a thought was harbored, becomes an individual lake cut off from the ocean, wherein the thought secures its own conditions, changes perhaps from salt to fresh, becomes a sweet sea, dead sea, or a marsh, at the advent of each individual into this life. May we not suppose that such a bar has risen to the surface somewhere? It is true, we are such poor navigators that our thoughts for the most part stand off and on upon a harbourless coast, are conversant only with the bites of the bays of Posey, or steer for the public ports of entry, and go into the dry docks of science, where they merely refit for this world, and no natural currents concur to individualize them. As for the inlet or outlet of Walden, I have not discovered any but rain, and snow, and evaporation, though perhaps with a thermometer and a line, such places may be found, for where the water flows into the pond it will probably be coldest in summer, and warmest in winter. When the ice men were at work here in forty-six, forty-seven, the cakes sent to the shore were one day rejected by those who were stacking them up there, not being thick enough to lie side by side with the rest, and the cutters thus discovered that the ice over a small space was two or three inches thinner than elsewhere, which made them think that there was an inlet there. They also showed me in another place what they thought was a leech hole through which the pond leaked out under a hill into a neighbouring meadow, pushing me out on a cake of ice to see it. It was a small cavity under ten feet of water, but I think that I can warrant the pond not to need soldering till they find a worse leak than that. One has suggested that if such a leech hole should be found, its connection with the meadow if any existed might be proved by conveying some coloured powder or sawdust to the mouth of the hole, and then putting a strainer over the spring in the meadow which would catch some of the particles carried through by the current. While I was surveying the ice which was sixteen inches thick, undulated under a slight wind like water, it is well known that a level cannot be used on ice. At one rod from the shore its greatest fluctuation, when observed by means of a level on land directed toward a graduated staff on the ice, was three quarters of an inch, though the ice appeared firmly attached to the shore. It was probably greater in the middle. Who knows but if our instruments were delicate enough we might not detect an undulation in the crust of the earth. When two legs of my level were on the shore and the third on the ice and the sights were directed over the latter, a rise or fall of the ice of an almost infinitesimal amount made a difference of several feet on a tree across the pond. When I began to cut holes for sounding there were three or four inches of water on the ice under a deep snow which had sunk it thus far, but the water began immediately to run into these holes, and continued to run for two days in deep streams which wore away the ice on every side and contributed essentially, if not mainly, to dry the surface of the pond, for as the water ran in it raised and floated the ice. This was somewhat like cutting a hole in the bottom of a ship to let the water out. When such holes freeze and a rain succeeds and finally a new freezing forms a fresh smooth ice overall it is beautifully mottled internally by dark figures, shaped somewhat like a spider's web. What you may call ice rosettes produced by the channels worn by the water flowing from all sides to a center. Sometimes also, when the ice was covered with shallow puddles, I saw a double shadow of myself, one standing on the head of the other, one on the ice, the other on the trees or hillside, while yet it is cold January and snow and ice are thick and solid. The prudent landlord comes from the village to get ice to cool his summer drink. Impressively, even pathetically wise to foresee the heat and thirst of July now in January, wearing a thick coat and mittens, when so many things are not provided for, it may be that he lays up no treasures in this world which will cool his summer drink in the next. He cuts and saws the solid pool, unroofs the house of the fishes and carts off their very element and air held fast by chains and stakes like corded wood through the favoring winter air to wintry cellars to underlie the summer there. It looks like solidified azure, as far off it is drawn through the streets. These ice-cutters are a merry race, full of jest and sport, and when I went among them they were want to invite me to saw pit fashion with them, eye-standing underneath. In the winter of 46-47 there came a hundred men of hyperborean extraction swooping down on to our pond one morning with many carloads of ungainly-looking farming tools, sleds, plows, drill burrows, turf-knifes, spades, saws, rakes, and each man was armed with a double-pointed pike-staff, such as is not described in the New England farmer or the cultivator. I did not know whether they had come to sow a crop of winter rye, or some other kind of grain recently introduced from Iceland. As I saw no manure I judged that they meant to skim the land, as I had done, thinking the soil was deep and headling fallow long enough. They said that a gentleman farmer who was behind the scenes wanted to double his money, which as I understood amounted to half a million already, but in order to cover each one of his dollars with another he took off the only coat I the skin itself of Walden pond in the midst of a hard winter. They went to work at once, plowing, burrowing, rolling, furrowing in admirable order, as if they were bent on making this a model farm. But when I was looking sharp to see what kind of seed they dropped into the furrow, a gang of fellows by my side suddenly began to hook up the virgin mold itself with a peculiar jerk, clean down to the sand or rather the water, for it was a very springy soil. Indeed, all the terra firmer there was, and hauled away on sleds, and then I guessed that they must be cutting peat in a bog. So they came and went every day with a peculiar shriek from the locomotive, from and to some point of the polar regions as it seemed to me, like a flock of arctic snowbirds. But sometimes Squaw Walden had her revenge, and a hired man walking behind his team slipped through a crack in the ground down to ward Tartarus, and he who was so brave before suddenly became but the ninth part of a man. Almost gave up his animal heat, and was glad to take refuge in my house, and acknowledged that there was some virtue in a stove, or sometimes the frozen soil took a piece of steel out of a plowshare or a plow got set in the furrow and had to be cut out. To speak literally, a hundred Irishmen with Yankee overseers came from Cambridge every day to get out the ice. They divided it into cakes by methods too well known to require description, and these being sledded to the shore were rapidly hauled off onto an ice-platform, and raised by grappling irons and block and tackle, worked by horses onto a stack, as surely as so many barrels of flour, and there placed evenly side by side and row upon row, as if they formed a solid base of an obelisk designed to pierce the clouds. They told me that in a good day they could get out a thousand tons, which was the yield of about one acre. Deep ruts and cradle-holes were worn in the ice, as on terra firma, by the passage of the sleds over the same track, and the horses invariably ate their oats out of cakes of ice, hollowed out like buckets. They stacked up the cakes thus in the open air in a pile thirty-five feet high on one side and six or seven rods square, putting hay between the outside layers to exclude the air. For when the wind, though never so cold, finds a passage through, it will wear large cavities, leaving slight supports or studs only here and there, and finally topple it down. At first it looked like a vast blue fort or Valhalla, but when they began to tuck the course of Meadow Hay into the crevices, and this became covered with rhyme and icicles, it looked like a venerable moss-grown and hoary ruin built of azure-tinted marble, the abode of winter, that old man we see in the almanac, his shanty, as if he had a design to estimate with us. They calculated that not twenty-five percent of this would reach its destination, and that two or three percent would be wasted in the cars. However, a still greater part of this heap had a different destiny from what was intended, for either because the ice was found not to keep so well as was expected, containing more air than usual, more for some other reason it never got to market. This heap made in the winter of forty-six, forty-seven, and estimated to contain ten thousand tons, was finally covered with hay and boards, and though it was unroofed the following July and a part of it carried off, the rest remained exposed to the sun. It stood over that summer and the next winter, and was not quite melted till September of eighteen-forty-eight. Thus the pond recovered the greater part. Like the water, the walled in ice, seen near at hand, has a green tint, but at a distance is beautifully blue, and you can easily tell it from the white ice of the river or the merely greenish ice of some ponds, quarter of a mile off. Sometimes one of these great cakes slips from the iceman sled into the village street, and lies there for a week like a great emerald, an object of interest to all passers. I have noticed that a portion of Walden which in the state of water was green will often, when frozen, appear from the same point of view, blue. So the hollows about this pond will, sometimes in the winter, be filled with the greenish water somewhat like its own, but the next day will be frozen blue. Perhaps the blue color of water and ice is due to the light and air they contain, and the most transparent is the bluest. Ice is an interesting subject for contemplation. They told me that they had some ice houses at fresh pond five years old, which was as good as ever. Why is it that a bucket of water soon becomes putrid? But frozen remains sweet for ever. It is commonly said that this is the difference between the affections and the intellect. Thus for sixteen days I saw from my window a hundred men at work like busy husband men, with teams and horses and apparently all the implements of farming. Such a picture as we see on the first page of the almanac, and as often as I looked out I was reminded of the fable of the lark and the reapers, or the parable of the sower and the like, and now they are all gone. And in thirty days more, probably, I shall look from the same window on the pure sea-green walled in water there, reflecting the clouds and the trees, and sending up its evaporations in solitude, and no traces will appear that a man has ever stood there. Perhaps I shall hear a solitary loon laugh as he dives and plumes himself, or shall see a lonely fisher in his boat, like a floating leaf, beholding his form reflected in the waves, where lately a hundred men securely labored. Thus it appears that the sweltering inhabitants of Charleston, and New Orleans of Madras and Bombay and Calcutta, drink at my well. In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagat Gita, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial. And I doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of existence. So remote is its sublimity from our conceptions. I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo, there I meet the servant of the Brahmin, priest of Brahma and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges, reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water jug. I meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and our buckets, as it were, grate together in the same well. The pure, walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges. With favouring winds it is wafted past the site of the fabulous islands of Atlantis and the Hesperides, makes the Perplus of Hano, and floating by Ternate and Tidore, in the mouth of the Persian Gulf, melts in the tropic gales of the Indian seas, and is landed in ports of which Alexander only heard the names. O.R.G. This reading by Gordon McKenzie. Walden by Henry David Thoreau. CHAPTER XVII. SPRING. The opening of large tracts by the ice-cutters commonly causes a pond to break up earlier, for the water agitated by the wind, even in cold weather, wears away the surrounding ice. But such was not the effect on Walden that year, for she had soon got a thick new garment to take the place of the old. This pond never breaks up so soon as the others in this neighbourhood. On account both of its greater depth, and its having no stream passing through it to melt or wear away the ice, I never knew it to open in the course of a winter, not accepting that of 52-53 which gave the pond so severe a trial. It commonly opens about the first of April, a week or ten days later than Flint's pond and Fairhaven, beginning to melt on the north side and in the shallower parts where it began to freeze. It indicates better than any water hereabouts the absolute progress of the season, being least affected by transient changes of temperature. A severe cold of a few days duration in March may very much retard the opening of the former ponds, while the temperature of Walden increases almost uninterruptedly. A thermometer thrust into the middle of Walden on the 6th of March, 1847, stood at 32 degrees or freezing point, near the shore at 33 degrees, in the middle of Flint's pond the same day at 32 plus degrees, at a dozen rods from the shore in shallow water under ice a foot thick at 36 degrees. This difference of three and a half degrees between the temperature of the deep water and the shallow in the latter pond and the fact that a great proportion of it is comparatively shallow show why it should break up so much sooner than Walden. The ice in the shallowest part was at this time several inches thinner than in the middle. In midwinter the middle had been the warmest and the ice thinnest there. So also every one who has waited about the shores of the pond in summer must have perceived how much warmer the water is close to the shore, where only three or four inches deep, then a little distance out, and on the surface where it is deep, then near the bottom. In spring the sun not only exerts an influence through the increased temperature of the air and earth, but its heat passes through ice a foot or more thick and is reflected from the bottom in shallow water, and so also warms the water and melts the underside of the ice at the same time that it is melting it more directly above, making it uneven and causing the air bubbles which it contains to extend themselves upward and downward until it is comparatively honeycombed, and at last disappears suddenly in a single spring rain. Ice has its grain as well as wood, and when a cake begins to rot or comb, that is, assume the appearance of honeycomb, whatever may be its position, the air cells are at right angles with what was the water surface. Where there is a rock or a log rising near to the surface the ice over it is much thinner and is frequently quite dissolved by this reflected heat. And I have been told that in the experiment at Cambridge to freeze water in a shallow wooden pond through the cold air circulating underneath, and so had access to both sides, the reflection of the sun from the bottom more than counterbalanced this advantage. When a warm rain in the middle of the winter melts off the snow ice from Walden, and leaves a hard, dark, or transparent ice on the middle, there will be a strip of rotten, though thicker, white ice, a rod or more wide, about the shores created by this reflected heat. Also as I have said, the bubbles themselves within the ice operate as burning glasses to melt the ice beneath. The phenomena of the year take place every day in a pond on a small scale. Every morning, generally speaking, the shallow water is being warmed more rapidly than the deep, though it may not be made so warm after all, and every evening it is being cooled more rapidly until the morning. The day is an epitome of the year. The night is the winter. The morning and evening are the spring and fall, and the noon is the summer. The cracking and booming of the ice indicate a change of temperature. One pleasant morning after a cold night, February 24th, 1850, having gone to Flint's pond to spend the day, I noticed with surprised that when I struck the ice with the head of my axe, it resounded like a gong for many rods around, or as if I had struck on a tight drum-head. The pond began to boom about an hour after sunrise when it felt the influence of the sun's rays slanted upon it from over the hills. It stretched itself and yawned like a waking man with a gradually increasing tumult, which was kept up three or four hours. It took a short siesta at noon and boomed once more toward night as the sun was withdrawing its influence. In the right stage of the weather a pond fires its evening gun with great regularity, but in the middle of the day, being full of cracks and the air also being less elastic, it had completely lost its resonance, and probably fishes and muskrats could not then have been stunned by a blow on it. The fishermen say that the thundering of the pond scares the fishes and prevents their biting. The pond does not thunder every evening, and I cannot tell surely when to expect its thundering, but though I may perceive no difference in the weather, it does. Who would have suspected so large and cold and thick skinned a thing to be so sensitive? Yet it has its law, to which it thunders obedience when it should, as surely as the buds expand in the spring. The earth is all alive and covered with papillae. The largest pond is as sensitive to atmospheric changes as the globule of mercury in its tube. One attraction in coming to the woods to live was that I should have leisure and opportunity to see the spring come in. The ice in the pond at length begins to be honeycombed, and I can set my heel in it as I walk. Fogs and rains and warmer suns are gradually melting the snow. The days have grown sensibly longer, and I see how I shall get through the winter without adding to my woodpile, for large fires are no longer necessary. I am on the alert for the first signs of spring, to hear the chance note of some arriving bird, or the striped squirrel's chirp. For his stores must be now nearly exhausted, or see the woodchuck venture out of his winter quarters. On the thirteenth of March after I had heard the bluebird, Song Sparrow and Red Wing, the ice was still nearly a foot thick. As the weather grew warmer it was not sensibly worn away by the water, nor broken up and floated off as in rivers, but though it was completely melted for half a rod and width about the shore, the middle was merely honeycombed and saturated with water, so that you could put your foot through it when six inches thick. But by the next day evening, perhaps, after a warm rain followed by fog, it would have wholly disappeared, all gone off with the fog, spirited away. One year I went across the middle only five days before it disappeared entirely. In 1845 Walden was first comparatively open on the first of April. In 46 the 25th of March. In 47 the 8th of April. In 51 the 28th of March. In 52 the 18th of April. In 53 the 23rd of March. In 54 about the 7th of April. Every incident connected with the breaking up of the rivers and ponds and the settling of the weather is particularly interesting to us who live in a climate of so great extremes. When the warmer days come, they who dwell near the river hear the ice crack at night with a startling whoop as loud as artillery, as if its icy fetters were rent from end to end, and within a few days see it rapidly going out. So the alligator comes out of the mud with quakings of the earth. One old man who has been a close observer of nature, and seems as thoroughly wise in regard to all her operations as if she had been put upon the stalks when he was a boy, he had helped to lay her keel, who has come to his growth and can hardly acquire more of natural lore if he should live to the age of Methuselah, told me, and I was surprised to hear him express wonder at any of nature's operations for I thought that there were no secrets between them, that one spring day he took his gun and boat, and thought that he would have a little sport with the ducks. There was ice still on the Meadows, but it was all gone out of the river, and he dropped down without obstruction from Sudbury, where he lived, to Fairhaven Pond, which he found unexpectedly, covered for the most part with a firm field of ice. It was a warm day, and he was surprised to see so great a body of ice remaining. Not seeing any ducks, he hid his boat on the north or backside of an island in the pond and then concealed himself in the bushes on the south side to awake them. The ice was melted for three or four rods from the shore, and there was a smooth and warm sheet of water, with a muddy bottom, such as the duck's love, within, and he thought it likely, that some would be along pretty soon. After he had lained still there about an hour, he heard a low and seemingly very distant sound, but singularly grand and impressive, unlike anything he had ever heard. Gradually swelling and increasing as if it would have a universal and memorable ending, a sullen rush and roar which seemed to him all at once like the sound of a vast body of fowl coming into settle there, and seizing his gun he started up and hastened, excited. But he found to his surprise that the whole body of the ice had started, while he lay there, and drifted into the shore, and the sound he had heard was made by its edge grating on the shore, at first gently nibbled and crumbled off, but at length heaving up and scattering its wrecks along the island to a considerable height before it came to a stand still. At length the sun's rays have attained to the right angle, and warm winds blow up mist and rain and melt the snow banks, and the sun dispersing the mist smiles on a checkered landscape of russet and white smoking with incense, through which the traveller picks his way from islet to islet, cheered by the music of a thousand tinkling reels and rivulets whose veins are filled with the blood of winter, which they are bearing off. Few phenomena gave me more delight to observe the forms which thawing sand and clay assume in flowing down the sides of a deep cut on the railroad, through which I passed on my way to the village. A phenomenon not very common on so large a scale, though the number of freshly exposed banks of the right material must have been greatly multiplied since railroads were invented. The material was sand of every degree of fineness, and of rich colors commonly mixed with a little clay. When the frost comes out in the spring, and even in a thawing day in the winter, the sand begins to flow down the slopes like lava, sometimes bursting out through the snow and overflowing it where no sand was to be seen before. Innumerable little streams overlap and interlace one with another, exhibiting a sort of hybrid product which obeys halfway the law of currents and halfway that of vegetation. As it flows it takes the form of sappy leaves or vines, making heaps of pulpy sprays of foot or more in depth, and resembling, as you look down on them, the lecineated, lobed, and imbrogated phalluses of some lichens. Or you are reminded of coral, of leopards' paws or birds' feats, of brains or lungs or bowels and excrements of all kinds. It is a truly grotesque vegetation, whose form and color we see imitated in bronze, a sort of architectural foliage more ancient and typical than acanthus, chicory, ivy, vine, or any vegetable leaves, destined perhaps under some circumstances to become a puzzle to future geologists. The whole cut impressed me as if it were a cave with its stalactites laid open to the light. The various shades of the sand are singularly rich and agreeable, embracing the different iron colors, brown, gray, yellowish, and reddish. When the flowing mass reaches the drain at the foot of the bank, it spreads out flatter into strands, the separate streams losing their semi-cylindrical form, and gradually becoming more flat and broad, running together as they are more moist till they form an almost flat sand, still variously beautifully shaded, but in which you can trace the original forms of vegetation, till at length, in the water itself they are converted into banks, like those formed off the mouths of rivers, and the forms of vegetation are lost and the ripple marks on the bottom. The whole bank, which is from twenty to forty feet high, is sometimes overlaid with a mass of this kind of foliage, or sandy rupture for a quarter of a mile on one or both sides, the produce of one spring day. What makes this sand foliage remarkable is its springing into existence thus suddenly. When I see on the one side the inert bank, for the sun acts on one side first, and on the other this luxuriant foliage and the creation of an hour, I am affected as if in a peculiar sense I stood in the laboratory of the artist who made the world and me. Had come to where he was still at work, sporting on this bank and with excess of energy strewing his fresh designs about, I feel as if I were nearer to the vitals of the globe, for this sandy overflow is something such a foliacious mass as the vitals of the animal body. You find thus in the very sands an anticipation of the vegetable leaf. No wonder that the earth expresses itself outwardly in leaves, it so labors the idea inwardly. The atoms have already learned this law and are pregnant by it. The overhanging leaf sees here its prototype. Internally, whether in the globe or animal body, it is a moist thick lobe, a word especially applicable to the liver and lungs and the leaves of fat, geni, labour, lapsis, to flow or slip downward a lapsing, gyus, globus, lobe, globe, also lap, flap and other words. Externally a dry thin leaf, even as the f and v are oppressed and dried b, the radicals of lobe are lb, the soft mass of the b, single lobed or b double lobed, with the liquid l behind it pressing it forward. In globe, glb, the guttural g adds to the meaning the capacity of the throat. The feathers and wings of birds are still drier and thinner leaves, thus also you pass from the lumpish grub in the earth to the airy and fluttering butterfly. The very globe continually transcends and translates itself and becomes winged in its orbit. Even ice begins with delicate crystal leaves as if it had flowed into molds which the fronds of water plants have impressed on the watery mirror. The whole tree itself is but one leaf, and rivers are still vaster leaves whose pulp is intervening earth, and towns and cities are the ova of insects in their axils. When the sun withdraws and the sand ceases to flow, but in the morning the streams will start once more and branch and branch again into a myriad of others. You here see perchance how blood vessels are formed. If you look closely you observe that first their pushes forward from the thawing mass a stream of softened sand with a drop-like point. Like the ball of the finger, feeling its way slowly and blindly downward until it lasts with more heat and moisture as the sun gets higher, the most fluid portion in its effort to obey the law to which the most inert also yields separates from the latter and forms for itself a meandering channel or artery within that in which is seen a little silvery stream glancing like lightning from one stage of pulpy leaves or branches to another, and ever and anon swallowed up in the sand. It is wonderful how rapidly yet perfectly the sand organizes itself as it flows. Using the best material its mass affords to form the sharp edges of its channel. Such are the sources of rivers in the silicious manner which the water deposits is perhaps the bony system, and in the still, finer soil and organic matter the fleshy fiber or cellular tissue. What is man but a mass of thawing clay? The ball of the human finger is but a drop congealed. The fingers and toes flow to their extent from the thawing mass of the body. Who knows what the human body would expand and flow out to under a more genial heaven. Is not the hand a spreading palm leaf with its lobes and veins? The ear may be regarded fancifully as a lichen umbilicaria on the side of the head with its lobe or drop. The lip, labium from the labour. Laps or lapses from the sides of the cavernous mouth. The nose is a manifest congealed drop or stalactite. The chin is a still larger drop, the confluent dripping of the face. The cheeks are a slide from the brows into the valleys of the face. Opposed and diffused by the cheek bones. Each rounded lobe of the vegetable leaf, too, is a thick and now loitering drop, larger or smaller. The lobes are the fingers of the leaf and as many lobes as it has in so many directions it tends to flow and more heat or other genial influences would have caused it to flow yet farther. Thus it seemed that this one hillside illustrated the principle of all the operations of nature. The maker of this earth but patented a leaf. What champolion will decipher this hieroglyphic for us that we may turn over a new leaf at last? This phenomenon is more exhilarating to me than the luxuriance and fertility of vineyards. True, it is somewhat excrementious in its character and there is no end to the heaps of liver, lights, and bowels as if the globe were turned wrongside outward. But this suggests at least that nature has some bowels and there again is mother of humanity. This is the frost coming out of the ground. This is spring. It precedes the green and flowery spring as mythology precedes regular poetry. I know of nothing more purgative of winter fumes and indigestions. Fresh curls spring from the baldest brow. There is nothing inorganic. These foliacious heaps lie along the bank like the slag of a furnace showing that nature is in full blast within. The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree which precede flowers and fruit. Not a fossil earth but a living earth. Compared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic, its throes will heave our exuvier from their graves. You may melt your metals and cast them into the most beautiful molds you can. They will ever excite me like the forms which this molten earth flows out into. And not only it, but the institutions upon it are plastic like clay in the hands of the potter. Air long not only on these banks but on every hill and plain and in every hollow. The frost comes out of the ground like a dormant quadruped from its burrow and seeks the sea with music or migrates to other climbs in clouds. Thaw with his gentle persuasion is more powerful than Thor with his hammer. The one melts, the other but breaks in pieces. When the ground was partially bare of snow and a few warm days had dried its surface somewhat, it was pleasant to compare the first tender signs of the infant year just peeping forth with the stately beauty of the withered vegetation which had withstood the winter. Life everlasting, golden rods, pinweeds and graceful wild grasses, more obvious and interesting frequently than in summer even, as if their beauty was not ripe till then. Even cotton grass, cat-tails, moulins, John's wart, hard hack, meadow-sweet and other strong stemmed plants, those unexhausted granaries which entertained the earliest birds, decent weeds at least which widowed nature wears. I am particularly attracted by the arching and sheaf-like top of the wool-grass. It brings back the summer to our winter memories and is among the forms which art loves to copy and which in the vegetable kingdom have the same relation to types already in the mind of man that astronomy has. It is an antique style older than Greek or Egyptian. Many of the phenomena of winter are suggestive of an inexpressible tenderness and fragile delicacy. We are accustomed to hear this king described as a rude and boisterous tyrant, but with the gentleness of a lover he adorns the tresses of summer. At the approach of spring the red squirrels got under my house, two at a time, directly under my feet as I sat reading or writing and capped up the queerest chuckling and chirripping and vocal pirouetting and gurgling sounds that ever were heard, and when I stamped they only chirripped the louder, as if past all fear and respect in their mad pranks, defying humanity to stop them. No you don't, chirri, chirri. They were wholly deaf to my arguments or failed to perceive their force and fell into a strain of invective that was irresistible. The first sparrow of spring, the year beginning with younger hope than ever. The faint silvery warblings heard over the partially bare and moist fields from the bluebird, the song sparrow and the red wing, as if the last flakes of winter tinkled as they fell. What at such a time are history's chronologies, traditions, and all written revelations? The brooks sing carols and glies to the spring. The marsh hawk, sailing low over the meadow, is already seeking the first slimy life that awakes. The sinking sound of melting snow is heard in all dels, and the ice dissolves apace in the ponds. The grass flames up on the hillsides like a spring fire. A primitus oritur herba embribus primoribus evocata, as if the earth sent forth an inward heat to greet the returning sun. Not yellow, but green is the color of its flame. The symbol of perpetual youth, the grass blade, like a long green ribbon, streams from the sod into the summer, checked indeed by the frost, but a non-pushing on again, lifting its spear of last year's hay with the fresh life below. It grows as steadily as the rill oozes out of the ground. It is almost identical with that, for in the growing days of June, when the rills are dry, the grass blades are their channels. And from year to year the herds drink at this perennial green stream, and the mower draws from it, betimes their winter supply. So our human life, but dies down to its root, and still puts forth its green blade to eternity. Walden is melting apace. There is a canal two rods wide along the northerly and westerly sides, and wide are still at the east end. A great field of ice has cracked off from the main body. I hear a song sparrow singing from the bushes on the shore. Olit, olit, olit, chip-chip-chip-chichar. He too is helping to crack it. How handsome the great sweeping curves in the edge of the ice, answering somewhat to those of the shore, but more regular. It is unusually hard owing to the recent severe but transient cold, and all watered or waved like a palace floor. But the wind slides eastward over its opaque surface in vain, till it reaches the living surface beyond. It is glorious to behold this ribbon of water sparkling in the sun, the bare face of the pond full of glee and youth, as if it spoke the joy of the fishes within it, and of the sands on its shore, a silvery sheen as from the scales of a luchiscus, as it were all one active fish. Such is the contrast between winter and spring. Walden was dead, and is alive again. But this spring is broke up more steadily, as I have said. The change from storm and winter to serene and mild weather, from dark and sluggish hours to bright and elastic ones, is a memorable crisis which all things proclaim. It is seemingly instantaneous at last. Suddenly an influx of light filled my house, though the evening was at hand, and the clouds of winter still overhung it, and the eaves were dripping with sleety rain. I looked out the window and, low, where yesterday was cold gray ice there, lay the transparent pond, already calm and full of hopes as in a summer evening, reflecting a summer evening sky in its bosom, though none was visible overhead, as if it had intelligence with some remote horizon. I heard a robin in the distance, the first I had heard for many a thousand years, me thought. The same sweet and powerful song as of yore. Oh, the evening robin, at the end of a New England summer day. If I could ever find the twig he sits upon, I mean he, I mean the twig. This, at last, is not the turdus migratorius. The pitch pines and shrub oaks about my house, which had so long drooped, suddenly resumed their several characters, looked brighter, greener, and more erect and alive, as if effectually cleansed and restored by the rain. I knew that it would not rain any more. You may tell by looking at any twig of the forest. I, at your very woodpile, whether its winter is past or not. As it grew darker, I was startled by the honking of geese, flying low over the woods like weary travelers getting in late from southern lakes, and indulging at last in unrestrained complaint and mutual consolation. Standing at my door, I could hear the rush of their wings. When, driving toward my house, they suddenly spied my light, and with hushed clamor wheeled and settled in the pond. So I came in and shut the door, and passed my first spring night in the woods. In the morning I watched the geese from the door through the mist, sailing in the middle of the pond fifty rods off, so large and tumultuous that Walden appeared like an artificial pond for their amusement. But when I stood on the shore they had once rose up with a great flapping of wings at the signal of their commander. And when they had got into rank circled about over my head, twenty-nine of them, and then steered straight to Canada, with a regular honk from the leader at intervals, trusting to break their fast in muddier pools. A plump of ducks rose at the same time, and took the route to the north in the wake of their noisier cousins. For a week I heard the circling, groping, clanger of some solitary goose in the foggy mornings, seeking its companion, and still peepling the woods with the sound of a larger life than they could sustain. In April the pigeons were seen again flying express, in small flocks, and in due time I heard the martins twittering over my clearing, though it had not seemed that the township contained so many that it could afford me any, and I fancied that they were peculiarly of the ancient race that dwelt in hollow trees ere white men came. In almost all climbs the tortoise and the frog are among the precursors and heralds of this season, and birds fly with song and glancing plumage, and plants spring and bloom, and winds blow to correct this slight oscillation of the poles and preserve the equilibrium of nature. As every season seems best to us in its turn, so the coming of spring is like the creation of cosmos out of chaos, and the realization of the golden age. The east wind withdrew to Aurora and the Nabathian kingdom, and the Persian and the ridges placed under the morning rays. Man was born, whether the artificer of things, the origin of a better world, made him from the divine seed, or the earth, being recent and lately sundered from the high ether, retained some seeds of cognate heaven. A single gentle rain makes the grass many shades greener, so our prospects brighten on the influx of better thoughts. We should be blessed if we lived in the present always, and took advantage of every accident that befell us, like the grass which confesses the influence of the slightest dew that falls on it, and did not spend our time in atoning for the neglect of past opportunities, which we call doing our duty. We loiter in winter while it is already spring. In a pleasant spring morning all men's sins are forgiven. Such a day is a truce to vice. While such a sun holds out to burn, the vilest sinner may return. Through our own recovered innocence, we discern the innocence of our neighbors. You may have known your neighbor yesterday for a thief, a drunkard, or a sensualist, and merely pitied or despised him and despaired of the world. But the sun shines bright and warm this first spring morning, recreating the world, and you meet him at some serene work, and see how it is exhausted and debauched veins, expand with still joy, and bless the new day, feel the spring influence with the innocence of infancy, and all his faults are forgotten. There is not only an atmosphere of good will about him, but even a savor of holiness groping for expression, blindly and ineffectually perhaps, like a newborn instinct, and for a short hour the south hillside echoes to no vulgar jest. You see some innocent fair shoots preparing to burst from his gnarled rind and try another year's life, tender and fresh as the youngest plant. Even he has entered into the joy of his Lord. Why the jailer does not leave open his prison doors, why the judge does not dismiss his case, why the preacher does not dismiss his congregation? It is because they do not obey the hint which God gives them, nor accept the pardon which he freely offers to all. A return to goodness produced each day in the tranquil and beneficent breath of the morning causes that in respect to the love of virtue and the hatred of vice, one approaches a little the primitive nature of man. As the sprouts of the forest which has been felled, in like manner the evil which one does in the interval of a day prevents the germs of virtues which began to spring up again from developing themselves and destroys them. After the germs of virtue have thus been prevented many times from developing themselves, then the beneficent breath of evening does not suffice to preserve them. As soon as the breath of evening does not suffice longer to preserve them, then the nature of man does not differ much from that of the brute. Men seeing the nature of this man like that of a brute think that he has never possessed the innate faculty of reason. Are those the true and natural sentiments of man? The golden age was first created which without any avenger spontaneously without law cherished fidelity and rectitude. Punishment and fear were not, nor were threatening words read on suspended brass, nor did the suppliant crowd fear the words of their judge, but were safe without an avenger. Not yet the pine felled on its mountains, had descended to the liquid waves that it might see a foreign world, and mortals knew no shores but their own. There was eternal spring, and placid zephyrs with warm blasts soothed the flowers born without seed. On the 29th of April as I was fishing from the bank of the river near the nine-acre corner bridge, standing on the quaking grass and willow roots, where the muskrats lurk, I heard a singular rattling sound, somewhat like that of the sticks which boys play with their fingers. When looking up I observed a very slight and graceful hawk, like a night hawk, alternately soaring like a ripple and tumbling a rod or two over and over, showing the underside of its wings which gleamed like a satin ribbon in the sun, or like the pearly inside of a shell. This sight reminded me of falconry and what nobleness and poetry are associated with that sport. The Merlin it seemed to me it might be called, but I care not for its name. It was the most ethereal flight I had ever witnessed. It did not simply flutter like a butterfly nor soar like the larger hawks, but it sported with proud reliance in the fields of air, mounting again and again with its strange chuckle. It repeated its free and beautiful fall, turning over and over like a kite, and then recovering from its lofty tumbling as if it had never set its foot on terra firma. It appeared to have no companion in the universe, sporting there alone. And to need none, but the morning and the ether with which it played, it was not lonely, but made all the earth lonely beneath it. Where was the parent which hatched it, its kindred and its father in the heavens? The tenant of the air. It seemed related to the earth, but by an egg hatched sometime in the crevice of a crag. Or was its native nest made in the angle of a cloud, woven of the rainbows, trimmings, and the sunset sky, and lined with some soft midsummer haze caught up from earth? It's airy, now some cliffy cloud. Beside this I got a rare mess of golden and silver and bright cupris fishes which looked like a string of jewels. Ah, I have penetrated to those meadows on the morning of many a first spring day, jumping from hummock to hummock, from willow root to willow root, when the wild river valley and the woods were bathed in so pure and bright a light as would have waked the dead if they had been slumbering in their graves, as some suppose. There needs no stronger proof of immortality. All things must live in such a light. O death, where was thy sting? O grave, where was thy victory then? Our village life would stagnate if it were not for the unexplored forests and meadows which surround it. We need the tonic of wildness to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow hen lurk and hear the booming of the snipe, to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground. At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and titanic features, the sea coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thundercloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need to witness our own limits transgressed and some life pasturing freely where we never wander. We are cheered when we observe the vulture feeding on the carrion which disgusts and disheartens us, and deriving health and strength from the repast. There was a dead horse in the hollow by the path to my house, which compelled me sometimes to go out of my way, especially in the night when the air was heavy, but the assurance it gave me of the strong appetite and inviolable health of nature was my compensation for this. I love to see that nature is so rife with life, that myriads can be afforded to be sacrificed and suffered to prey on one another, that tender organizations can be so serenely squashed out of existence like pulp, tadpoles which herons gobble up, and tortoises and toads run over in the road, and that sometimes it has rained flesh and blood. With a liability to accident, we must see how little account is to be made of it. The impression made on a wise man is that of universal innocence. Poison is not poisonous after all, nor are any wounds fatal. Compassion is a very untenable ground. It must be expeditious. Its pleadings will not bear to be stereotyped. Early in May, the oaks, hickories, maples, and other trees, just putting out amidst the pine woods around the pond, imparted a brightness like sunshine to the landscape, especially in cloudy days, as if the sun were breaking through mists and shining faintly on the hillsides as here and there. On the third or fourth of May I saw a loon in the pond, and during the first week of the month I heard the whipper-will. The brown thrasher, the veery, the wood-pee-wee, the chawink, and other birds. I had heard the wood-thrush long before. The feeby had already come once more and looked in at my door and window to see if my house was cavern-like enough for her, sustaining herself on humming-wings with clinched talons, as if she held by the air, which she surveyed the premises. The sulfur-like pollen of the pitch-pine soon covered the ground, and the stones and rotten wood along the shore, so that you could have collected a barrel full. This is the sulfur showers we bear of. Even in Calidas' drama of Sacontala, we read of rills dyed yellow with the golden dust of the lotus, and so the seasons went rolling on into summer, as one rambles into higher and higher grass. Thus was my first year's life and the woods completed, and the second year was similar to it. I finally left Walden, September 6th, 1847, end of Chapter 17. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information, please visit LibriVox.org. This reading by Gordon McKenzie. Walden. By Henry David Thurow. Conclusion. To the sick, the doctors wisely recommend a change of air and scenery. Thank heaven, here is not all the world. The buckeye does not grow in New England, and the mockingbird is rarely heard here. The wild goose is more of a cosmopolite than we. He breaks his fast in Canada, takes a luncheon in the Ohio, and plumes himself for the night in a southern bayou. Even the bison, to some extent, keeps pace with the seasons, cropping the pastures of the Colorado only till the greener and sweeter grass awaits him by the Yellowstone. Yet we think that if rail fences are pulled down and stone walls piled up on our farms, bounds are henceforth set to our lives, and our fates decided. If you are chosen, town clerk, forsooth, you cannot go to Tierra del Fuego this summer, but you may go to the land of infernal fire nevertheless. The universe is wider than our views of it. Yet we should oftener look over the tafferel of our craft, like curious passengers, and not make the voyage like stupid sailors picking oakum. The other side of the globe is but the home of our correspondent. Our voyaging is only great circle sailing, and the doctors prescribe for diseases of the skin merely. One hastens to Southern Africa to chase the giraffe. But surely that is not the game he would be after. How long, pray, would a man hunt giraffes, if he could? Snipes and woodcocks also may afford rare sport, but I trust it would be nobler game to shoot one's self. Direct your eye inward, and you'll find a thousand regions in your mind yet undiscovered. Travel them, and be expert in home cosmography. What does Africa? What does the West stand for? Is not our own interior white on the chart? Black, though it may prove, like the coast when discovered. Is it the source of the Nile or the Niger or the Mississippi or a Northwest passage around this continent that we would find? Are these the problems which most concern mankind? Is Franklin the only man who is lost, that his wife should be so earnest to find him? Does Mr. Grinnell know where he himself is? Be rather the mongo park, the Lewis and Clark and Frobisher of your own streams and oceans. Explore your own higher latitudes with shiploads of preserved meats to support you, if they be necessary, and pile the empty cans sky-high for a sign. Were preserved meats invented to preserve meat merely? Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought. Every man is the lord of a realm beside which the earthly empire of the czar, a humic, left by the ice. Yet some can be patriotic who have no self-respect and sacrifice the greater to the less. They love the soil which makes their graves, but have no sympathy with the spirit which may still animate their clay. Patriotism is a maggot in their heads. What was the meaning of that South Sea exploring expedition with all its parade and expense, but an indirect recognition of the fact that there are continents and seas in the moral world to which every man is an isthmus or an inlet? Yet unexplored by him, but that it is easier to sail many thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals in a government ship with five hundred men and boys to assist one than it is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one's being alone. Let them wander and scrutinize the outlandish Australians. I have more of God, they more of the road. It is not worth the while to go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar. Yet do this even till you can do better, and you may perhaps find some Simes Hole by which to get at the inside at last. England and France, Spain and Portugal, Gold Coast and Slave Coast, all front on this private sea. But no bark from them has ventured out of sight of land, though it is without doubt the direct way to India. If you would learn to speak all tongues and conform to the customs of all nations, if you would travel farther than all travellers, be naturalized in all climbs and cause the sphinx to dash her head against a stone, even obey the precept of the old philosopher and explore thyself. Herein are demanded the eye and the nerve. Only the defeated and deserters go to the wars, cowards that run away and enlist. Start now on that farthest western way, which does not pause at the Mississippi or the Pacific nor conduct toward a worn-out China or Japan but leads on direct. A tangent to this sphere, summer and winter day and night, sun down, moon down, and at last earth down too. It is said that Mirabeau took to highway robbery to ascertain what degree of resolution was necessary in order to place oneself in formal opposition to the most sacred laws of society. He declared that a soldier who fights in the ranks does not require half so much courage as a footpad, that honour and religion have never stood in the way of a well-considered and a firm resolve. This was manly as the world goes, and yet it was idle, if not desperate. A saner man would have found himself often enough in formal opposition to what are deemed the most sacred laws of society through obedience to yet more sacred laws, and so have tested his resolution without going out of his way. It is not for a man to put himself in such an attitude to society but to maintain himself in whatever attitude he find himself through obedience to the laws of his being, which will never be one of opposition to a just government if he should chance to meet with such. I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live and could not spare any more time for that one. It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route and make a beaten track for ourselves. I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond side, and though it is five or six years since I trod it, it is still quite distinct. It is true, I fear, that others may have fallen into it, and so help to keep it open. The surface of the earth is soft and impressable by the feet of men, and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty then must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity. I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now. I learned this at least by my experiment, that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams and endeavours to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary, new universal and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him, or the old laws be expanded and interpreted in his favour in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the licence of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty, poverty, nor weakness, weakness. If you have built castles in the air your work need not be lost. That is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them. It is a ridiculous demand which England and America make that you shall speak so that they can understand you. Neither men nor toadstools grow so, as if that were important, and there were not enough to understand you without them. As if nature could support but one order of understandings could not sustain birds as well as quadrupeds, flying as well as creeping things, and hush and woe, which bright can understand, were the best English. As if there were safety in stupidity alone. I fear chiefly lest my expression may not be extravagant enough. May not wander far enough beyond the narrow limits of my daily experience, so as to be adequate to the truth of which I have been convinced. Extravagance. It depends on how you are yarded. The migrating buffalo which seeks new pastures in another latitude is not extravagant, like the cow which kicks over the pale leaps the cow-yard fence and runs after her calf in milking-time. I desire to speak somewhere without bounds, like a man in a waking moment to men in their waking moments. For I am convinced that I cannot exaggerate enough even to lay the foundation of a true expression. Who that has heard a strain of music feared then lest he should speak extravagantly any more for ever, in view of the future or possible. We should live quite laxly and undefined in front, our outlines dim and misty on that side, as our shadows reveal an insensible perspiration toward the sun. The volatile truth of our words should continually betray the inadequacy of the residual statement. Their truth is instantly translated. Its literal monument alone remains. The words which express our faith and piety are not definite, yet they are significant and fragrant, like frankincense to superior natures. Why level downward to our dullest perception always, and praise that as common sense? The commonest sense is the sense of men, a sleep which they express by snoring. Sometimes we are inclined to class those who are once and a half witted, with a half witted, because we appreciate only a third part of their wit. Some would find fault with a morning red, if they ever got up early enough. They pretend, as I hear, that the verses of Kabir have four different senses, illusion, spirit, intellect, and the exoteric doctrine of the Vedas. But in this part of the world, it is considered a ground for complaint of a man's writings admit of more than one interpretation, while England endeavors to cure the potato rot. Will not any endeavor to cure the brain rot, which prevails so much more widely and fatally? I do not suppose that I have attained to obscurity, but I should be proud if no more fatal fault were found with my pages on this score than was found with a Walden ice. Southern customers objected to its blue color, which is the evidence of its purity, as if it were muddy, and preferred the Cambridge ice, which is white, but tastes of weeds. The purity men love is like the mists which envelop the earth, and not like the azure ether beyond. Some are dinning in our ears that we Americans, and moderns, generally, are intellectual dwarves compared with the ancients, or even the Elizabethan men. But what is that to the purpose? A living dog is better than a dead lion. Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies, and not be the biggest pygmy that he can? Let every one mind his own business, and endeavor to be what he was made. Why should we be in such a desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away. It is not important that he should mature as soon as an apple-tree or an oak. Shall he turn his spring into summer? If the condition of things which we were made for is not yet, what were any reality which we can substitute? We will not be shipwrecked on a vain reality. Shall we with pains erect a heaven of blue glass over ourselves, though when it is done we shall be sure to gaze still at the true ethereal heaven far above as if the former were not? There was an artist in the city of Koru who was disposed to strive after perfection. One day it came into his mind to make a staff. Having considered then in an imperfect work time is an ingredient. But in a perfect work time does not enter, he said to himself, it shall be perfect in all respects, though I should do nothing else in my life. He proceeded instantly to the forest for wood, being resolved that it should not be made of unsuitable material, and as he searched for and rejected stick after stick, his friends gradually deserted him, for they grew old in their works and died. But he grew not older by a moment. His singleness of purpose and resolution and his elevated piety endowed him without his knowledge with perennial youth. As he made no compromise with time, time kept out of his way, and only sighed at a distance because he could not overcome him. Before he had found a stock in all respects suitable, the city of Koru was a hoary ruin, and he sat on one of its mountains to peel the stick. Before he had given it the proper shape, the dynasty of the Kandahars was at an end, and with the point of the stick he wrote the name of the last of that race in the sand, and then resumed his work. By the time he had smoothed and polished the staff, Kalpa was no longer the pole star, and ere he had put on the ferrule and the head adorned with precious stones, Brahma had awoke and slumbered many times. But why do I stay to mention these things? When the finishing stroke was put to his work, it suddenly expanded before the eyes of the astonished artist into the fairest of all the creations of Brahma. He had made a new system in making a staff, a world with full and fair proportions, in which, though the old cities and dynasties had passed away, fairer and more glorious ones had taken their place, and now he saw by the heap of shavings still fresh at his feet that for him and his work the former lapse of time had been an illusion, and that no more time had elapsed than is required for a single scintillation of the brain of Brahma to fall on and inflame the tinder of a mortal brain. The material was pure, and his art was pure. How could the result be other than wonderful? No face which we give to a matter will steed us so well at last, as the truth. This alone wears well. For the most part we are not where we are. But in a false position, through an infinity of our natures, we suppose a case and put ourselves into it, and hence are in two cases at the same time, and it is doubly difficult to get out. In same moments we regard only the facts, the case that is. Say what you have to say, not what you ought. Any truth is better than make believe. Tom Hyde at the tinker standing on the gallows was asked if he had anything to say. Tell the tailors, said he, to remember to make a knot in their thread before they take the first stitch. His companion's prayer is forgotten. However mean your life is, meet it, and live it. Do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant thrilling glorious hours, even in a poor house. The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the alms house as brightly as from the rich man's abode. The snow melts before its door, as early in the spring. I do not see but a quiet mind may live as contentedly there, and have as cheering thoughts as in a palace. The town's poor seem to me often to live the most independent lives of any. Maybe they are simply great enough to receive without misgiving. Most think that they are above being supported by the town. But it oftener happens that they are not above supporting themselves by dishonest means, which should be more disreputable. Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Turn the old, return to them. Things do not change, we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. God will see that you do not want society. If I were confined to a corner of a garret all my days like a spider, the world would be just as large to me while I had my thoughts about me. The philosopher said, from an army of three divisions one can take away its general, and put it in disorder. From the man, the most abject and vulgar, one cannot take away his thought. Do not seek so anxiously to be developed, to subject yourself to many influences to be played on. It is all dissipation. Humility like darkness reveals the heavenly lights. The shadows of poverty and meanness gather around us, and low creation widens to our view. We are often reminded that if there were bestowed on us the wealth of creases, our aims must still be the same, and our means essentially the same. Moreover, if you are restricted in your range by poverty, if you cannot buy books and newspapers, for instance, you are but confined to the most significant and vital experiences. You are compelled to deal with the material which yields the most sugar and the most starch. It is life near the bone where it is sweetest. You are defended from being a trifler, no man loses ever on a lower level by magnanimity on a higher. Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only. Money is not required to buy one necessary of the soul. I live in the angle of a leaden wall into whose composition was poured a little alloy of bell metal, often in the repose of my midday. There reaches my ears a confused tintinabulum from without. It is the noise of my contemporaries. My neighbours tell me of their adventures with famous gentlemen and ladies, what notabilities they met at the dinner table. But I am no more interested in such things than in the content of the Daily Times. The interests in the conversation are about costume and manners, chiefly. But a goose is a goose still. Dress it as you will. They tell me of California and Texas of England and the Indies of the honourable Mr. Blank of Georgia or of Massachusetts. All transient and fleeting phenomena, till I am ready to leap from their courtyard like the Mamalook Bay. I delight to come to my bearings. Not walk in procession with pomp and parade in a conspicuous place. But to walk even with the builder of the universe, if I may. Not to live in this restless, nervous, bustling, trivial nineteenth century. But stand or sit thoughtfully while it goes by. What are men celebrating? They are all on a committee of arrangements, and hourly expect a speech from somebody. God is only the president of the day, and Webster is his orator. I love to weigh, to settle, to gravitate toward that which most strongly and rightfully attracts me. Not hang by the beam of the scale and try to weigh less? Not suppose a case, but take the case that is. To travel the only path I can, and that on which no power can resist me. It affords me no satisfaction to commerce, to spring an arch before I have got a solid foundation. Let us not play at kitly benders. There is a solid bottom, everywhere. We read that the traveller asked the boy if the swamp before him had a hard bottom. The boy replied that it had. But presently the traveller's horse sank in up to the girths, and he observed to the boy, I thought you said this bog had a hard bottom. So it has, answered the latter, but you have not got halfway to it yet. So it is with the bogs and quicksands of society. But he is an old boy that knows it. Only what is thought, said or done, at a certain rare coincidence is good. I would not be one of those who will foolishly drive a nail into mere lathe and plastering. Such a deed would keep me awake nights. Give me a hammer, and let me feel for the furring. Do not depend on the putty. Drive a nail home, and clinch it so faithfully, that you can wake up in the night and think of your work with satisfaction. A work at which you would not be ashamed to invoke the muse. So will help you, God. And so only. Every nail driven should be as another rivet in the machine of the universe. You carrying on the work, rather than love, than money, than fame. Give me truth. I sat at a table where rich food and wine in abundance and obsequious attendance. But sincerity and truth were not. And I went away hungry from the inhospitable board. The hospitality was as cold as the ices. I thought that there was no need of ice to freeze them. They talked to me of the age of the wine and the fame of the vintage. But I thought of an older, a newer, and purer wine, of a more glorious vintage which they had not got, and could not buy. The style, the house and grounds, and entertainment. Pass for nothing with me. I called on the king. But he made me wait in his hall, and conducted like a man incapacitated for hospitality. There was a man in my neighborhood who lived in a hollow tree. His manners were truly regal. I should have done better had I called on him. How long shall we sit in our porticoes, practicing idle and musty virtues, which any work would make impertinent? As if one were to begin the day with long suffering, and hire a man to hoe his potatoes, and in the afternoon go forth to practice Christian meekness and charity with goodness a forethought. Consider the China, pride and stagnant self-complacency of mankind. This generation inclines a little to congratulate itself on being the last of an illustrious line, and in Boston and London and Paris and Rome, thinking of its long descent, it speaks of its progress in art and science and literature with satisfaction. There are the records of the philosophical societies, and the public eulogies of great men. It is the good Adam, contemplating his own virtue. Yes, we have done great deeds, and sung divine songs which shall never die. That is, as long as we can remember them. The learned societies and great men of Assyria. Where are they? What youthful philosophers and experimentalists we are. There is not one of my readers who has yet lived a whole human life. These may be but the spring months in the life of the race. If we have had the seven years itch, we have not seen the seventeen-year locust yet in Concord. We are acquainted with a mere pellicle of the globe on which we live. Most have not delved six feet beneath the surface, nor leaped as many above it. We know not where we are. Beside, we are sound asleep nearly half our time. Yet we esteem ourselves wise, and have an established order on the surface. Truly we are deep thinkers, we are ambitious spirits. As I stand over the insect crawling amid the pine needles on the forest floor, and endeavouring to conceal itself from my sight, and ask myself why it will cherish those humble thoughts, and bide its head from me who might perhaps be its benefactor, and impart to its race some cheering information, I am reminded of the greater benefactor and intelligence that stands over me, the human insect. There is an incessant influx of novelty into the world, and yet we tolerate incredible dullness. I need only suggest what kind of sermons are still listened to in the most enlightened countries. There are such words as joy and sorrow, but they are only the burden of a psalm, sung with a nasal twang, while we believe in the ordinary and mean. We think that we can change our clothes only. It is said that the British Empire is very large and respectable, and the United States are a first-rate power. We do not believe that a tide rises and falls behind every man which can float the British Empire like a chip, if he should ever harbour it in his mind. Who knows what sort of seventeen-year locust will next come out of the ground. The government of the world I live in was not framed like that of Britain in after-dinner conversations over the wine. The life in us is like the water in the river. It may rise this year higher than man has ever known it, and flood of the parched uplands. Even this may be the eventful year which will drown out all our muskrats. It was not always dry land where we dwell. I see far inland the banks which the stream anciently washed before science began to record its freshets. Every one has heard the story which has gone the rounds of New England of a strong and beautiful bug which came out of the dry leaf of an old table of apple-tree wood which had stood in a farmer's kitchen for sixty years, first in Connecticut and afterward in Massachusetts, from an egg deposited in the living tree many years earlier still, as appeared by counting the annual layers beyond it, which was heard gnawing out for several weeks, hatched perchance by the heat of an urn. Who does not feel his faith in a resurrection and immortality strengthened by hearing of this? Who knows what beautiful and winged life whose egg has been buried for ages under many concentric layers of woodenness in the dead, dry life of society, deposited at first in the alburnum of the green and living tree, which has been gradually converted into the semblance of its well-seasoned tomb, heard perchance gnawing out now for years by the astonished family of man as they sat round the festive board. May unexpectedly come forth from amidst society's most trivial and hand-selled furniture to enjoy its perfect summer life at last. I do not say that John or Jonathan will realize all this, but such is the character of that morrow which mere lapse of time can never make to dawn. The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star. End of conclusion. End of Walden. This book read by Gordon Mackenzie, finished July the 7th, 2006.